Christopher Eipper

Who was Christopher Eipper?

Christoph Eipper was a pioneering missionary and Presbyterian minister in Australia. Christoph Eipper was born to Georg Christoph Eipper and Sophie Juliane Schaettler. He was the sixth of seven children, two of which were from his father's previous marriage to Elisabetha Dorothea Ohnmaiss. He studied at the institutions of the Basle Missionary Society, Switzerland, in 1832-36, and of the Church Missionary Society at Islington in 1836. However, despite having received financial support from the Church Missionary Society on condition of accepting Church of England ordination, he and his German colleague Gottlieb Schreiner, father of the novelist Olive Schreiner, refused episcopal ordination because they would not submit to vows of unlimited obedience to a bishop, although they were prepared to receive Lutheran ordination. They consequently ceased their connexion with the Basle Committee. Eipper, together with Schreiner, applied in March 1837 to Rev. John Dunmore Lang for appointment as missionaries to the Aboriginals at Moreton Bay. Schreiner decided to go to South Africa, but Eipper was accepted, together with a party of missionaries under the pastoral care of Rev. Carl Wilhelm Schmidt.