- Mission (Christianity)
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For other uses, see Mission (disambiguation).
Christian missionary activities often involve sending individuals and groups (called "missionaries"), to foreign countries and to places in their own homeland. This has frequently involved not only evangelization (in order to expand Christianity through the conversion of new members), but also humanitarian work, especially among the poor and disadvantaged. Missionaries have the authority to preach the Christian faith (and sometimes to administer sacraments), and provide humanitarian work to improve economic development, literacy, education, health care, and orphanages. Christian doctrines (such as the "Doctrine of Love" professed by many missions) permit the provision of aid without requiring religious conversion.
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History of Christian missions
The earliest examples of Christian missionary activity are those recorded in writings that would eventually come to form the New Testament. Early writings include the letters of Apostle Paul, written in the course of his missionary activity in Asia Minor and Greece. His activities were preceded by an expansion of Christianity from the first followers of Jesus in Jerusalem throughout Syro-Palestine. This is described in a literarily stylised form in the much later Acts of the Apostles.
The earliest Christian mission, then, was active within Judaism. Whether a Jewish proselytism existed or not that would have served as a model for the early Christians is unclear. Soon, the expansion of the Christian mission beyond Judaism to those who were not Jewish became a contested issue. The Apostle Paul was an early proponent of this expansion, and contextualized the Christian message for the Greek and Roman cultures, permitting it to reach beyond its Hebrew and Jewish context.
In Late Antiquity, much missionary activity was carried out by members of religious orders. Monasteries followed disciplines and supported missions, libraries, and practical research, all of which were perceived as works to reduce human misery and suffering, thus enhancing the reputation of God. For example, Nestorian communities evangelized much of North Africa. Cistercians evangelized much of Northern Europe, as well as developing most of European agriculture's classic techniques.
In the 16th century the proselytization of Asia was linked to the Portuguese colonial policy. With the Papal bull Romanus Pontifex the patronage for the propagation of the Christian faith in Asia was given to the Portuguese, who were rewarded with the right of conquest. The Portuguese trade with Asia was profitable and as Jesuits came to India around 1540, the colonial government in Goa supported the mission with incentives for baptized Christians.[1] Later, Jesuits were sent to China and further countries in Asia. With the decline of the Portuguese power other colonial powers and Christian organisations gain influence.
After the Reformation, for nearly a hundred years, occupied by their struggle with the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant churches were not missionary-sending churches. But in the centuries that followed, the Protestant churches began sending missionaries in increasing numbers, spreading the proclamation of the Christian message to previously unreached people. In North America, missionaries to the native Americans included Jonathan Edwards, the well known preacher of the Great Awakening, who in his later years retired from the very public life of his early career. He became a missionary to the Housatonic Native Americans and a staunch advocate for them against cultural imperialism.
As European culture has been established in the midst of indigenous peoples, the cultural distance between Christians of differing cultures has been difficult to overcome. One early solution was the creation of segregated "praying towns" of Christian natives. This pattern of grudging acceptance of converts was repeated in Hawaii later when missionaries from that same New England culture went there. In Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Catholic missionaries selected and learned among the languages of the Amerindians and devised writing systems for them. Then they preached to them in those languages (Quechua, Guarani, Nahuatl) instead of Spanish, to keep Indians away from "sinful" whites. An extreme case were the Guarani Reductions, a theocratic semi-independent region established by the Jesuits.
From 1732 onwards the Moravian Church began sending out missionaries.
Around 1780, an indigent Baptist cobbler named William Carey began reading about James Cook's Polynesian journeys. His interest grew to a furious sort of "backwards homesickness", inspiring him to obtain Baptist orders, and eventually write his famous 1792 pamphlet, "An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of Heathen." Far from a dry book of theology, Carey's work used the best available geographic and ethnographic data to map and count the number of people who had never heard the Gospel. It formed a movement that has grown with increasing speed from his day to the present.
Carey's example was followed by a number of missions to seaside and port cities. The China Inland Mission (later the Overseas Missionary Fellowship) is one of the more famous.
Thomas Coke, the first bishop of the American Methodists, has been called "the Father of Methodist Missions". After spending time in the young American republic strengthening the infant Methodist Church alongside Episcopal colleague Francis Asbury, the British-born Coke left for mission work. During his time in America, Coke worked vigorously to increase Methodist support of Christian missions and raising up mission workers. Coke died while on a mission trip to India, but his legacy among Methodists - his passion for missions - continues.
Missionary preaching in China using The Wordless Book
The next wave of missions, starting in the early 1850s, was to inland areas, led by Hudson Taylor with his China Inland Mission. Taylor was later supported by Henry Grattan Guinness who founded Cliff College which exists today for the purpose of training and equipping local and global mission.
The new wave of missions inspired by Taylor and Guinness have collectively been called "faith missions" and owe much to the ideas and example of Anthony Norris Groves. Taylor was a thorough-going nativist, offending the missionaries of his era by wearing Chinese clothing and speaking Chinese at home. His books, speaking, and examples led to the formation of numerous inland missions, and the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), which from 1850 to about 1950 sent nearly 10,000 missionaries to inland areas, often at great personal sacrifice. Many early SVM missionaries to areas with endemic tropical diseases left with their belongings packed in a coffin, aware that 80% of them would die within two years.
In 1910, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference was held in Scotland. Presided over by active SVM leader (and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient) John R. Mott, an American Methodist layperson, the conference reviewed the state of evangelism, Bible translation, mobilization of church support, and the training of indigenous leadership. Looking to the future, conferees worked on strategies for worldwide evangelism and cooperation. The conference not only established greater ecumenical cooperation in missions, but also essentially launched the modern ecumenical movement.
The next wave of missions was started by two missionaries, Cameron Townsend and Donald McGavran, around 1935. These men realized that although earlier missionaries had reached geographic areas, there were numerous ethnographic groups that were isolated by language, or class from the groups that missionaries had reached. Cameron formed Wycliffe Bible Translators to translate the Bible into native languages. McGavran concentrated on finding bridges to cross the class and cultural barriers in places like India, which has upwards of 4,600 peoples, separated by a combination of language, culture, and caste. Despite democratic reforms, caste and class differences are still fundamental in many cultures.
An equally important dimension of missions strategy is the indigenous method of nationals reaching their own people. In Asia this wave of missions was pioneered by men like Dr G. D. James of Singapore, Rev Theodore Williams of India and Dr David Cho of Korea. The "two thirds missions movement" as it is referred to, is today a major force in missions.
Most modern missionaries and missionary societies have repudiated cultural imperialism, and elected to focus on spreading the gospel and translating the Bible. Sometimes, missionaries have been vital in preserving and documenting the culture of the peoples among whom they live.
Often, missionaries provide welfare and health services, as a good deed or to make friends with the locals. Thousands of schools, orphanages, and hospitals have been established by missions. One of the quietest, yet most far-reaching services provided by missionaries started with the Each one, teach one literacy program begun by Dr. Frank Laubach in the Philippines in 1935. The program has since spread around the world and brought literacy to the least enabled members of many societies.
The word "mission" was historically often applied to the building, the "mission station" in which the missionary lives or works. In some colonies, these mission stations became a focus of settlement of displaced or formerly nomadic people. Particularly in rural Australia, missions have become localities or ghettoes on the edges of towns which are home to many Indigenous Australians. The word may be seen as derogatory when used in this context.
Modern missionary methods and doctrines among conservative Protestants
The Lausanne Congress of 1974, birthed a movement that supports evangelical mission among non-Christians and nominal Christians. It regards "mission" as that which is designed "to form a viable indigenous church-planting and world changing movement." This definition is motivated by a theologically imperative theme of the Bible to make God known, as outlined in the Great Commission. The definition is claimed to summarize the acts of Jesus' ministry, which is taken as a model motivation for all ministries.
This Christian missionary movement seeks to implement churches after the pattern of the first century Apostles. The process of forming disciples is necessarily social. "Church" should be understood in the widest sense, as a body of believers of Christ rather than simply a building. In this view, even those who are already culturally Christian must be "evangelized".
Church planting by cross-cultural missionaries leads to the establishment of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating communities of believers. This is the famous "three-self" formula formulated by Henry Venn of the London Church Missionary Society in the 19th century. Cross-cultural missionaries are persons who accept church-planting duties to evangelize people outside their culture, as Christ commanded in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).
The objective of these missionaries is to give an understandable presentation of their beliefs with the hope that people will choose to following the teaching of Jesus Christ and live their lives as His disciples. As a matter of strategy, many evangelical Christians around the world now focus on what they call the "10/40 window", a band of countries between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude and reaching from western Africa through Asia. Christian missions strategist Luis Bush pinpointed the need for a major focus of evangelism in the "10/40 Window", a phrase he coined in his presentation at the missionary conference Lausanne 1989 in Manila. Sometimes referred to as the "Resistant Belt", it is an area that includes 35% of the world's land mass, 90% of the world's poorest peoples and 95% of those who have yet to hear anything about Christianity.
Modern pioneering missionary doctrines now focus on inserting a culturally adapted seed of Christian doctrines into a self-selected, self-motivated group of indigenous believers, without removing them from their culture in any way.
Modern mission techniques are sufficiently refined that within ten to fifteen years, most indigenous churches are locally pastored, managed, taught, self-supporting and evangelizing. The process can be substantially faster if a preexisting translation of the Bible and higher pastoral education are already available, perhaps left-over from earlier, less effective missions.
A key approach is to let indigenous cultural groups decide to adopt Christian doctrines and benefits, when (as in most cultures) such major decisions are normally made by groups. In this way, opinion leaders in the groups can persuade much or most of the groups to convert. When combined with training in discipleship, church planting and other modern missionary doctrine, the result is an accelerating, self-propelled conversion of large portions of the culture.
A typical modern mission is a co-operative effort by many different ministries, often including several coordinating ministries, such as the Faith2Share network, often with separate funding sources. One typical effort proceeded as follows:
- A missionary radio group recruits, trains and broadcasts in the main dialect of the target culture's language. Broadcast content is carefully adapted to avoid syncretism yet help the Christian Gospel seem like a native, normal part of the target culture. Broadcast content often includes news, music, entertainment and education in the language, as well as purely Christian items.
- Broadcasts might advertise programs, inexpensive radios (possibly spring-wound), and a literature ministry that sells a Christian mail-order correspondence course at nominal costs. The literature ministry is key, and is normally a separate organization from the radio ministry. Modern literature missions are shifting to web-based content where it makes sense (as in Western Europe and Japan).
- When a person or group completes a correspondence course, they are invited to contact a church-planting missionary group from (if possible) a related cultural group. The church-planting ministry is usually a different ministry from either the literature or radio ministries. The church-planting ministry usually requires its missionaries to be fluent in the target language, and trained in modern church-planting techniques.
- The missionary then leads the group to start a church. Churches planted by these groups are usually a group that meets in a house. The object is the minimum organization that can perform the required character development and spiritual growth. Buildings, complex ministries and other expensive items are mentioned, but deprecated until the group naturally achieves the size and budget to afford them. The crucial training is how to become a Christian (by faith in Jesus Christ) and then how to set up a church (meet to study the Bible, and perform communion and worship), usually in that order.
- A new generation of churches is created, and the growth begins to accelerate geometrically. Frequently, daughter churches are created only a few months after a church's creation. In the fastest-growing Christian movements, the pastoral education is "pipelined", flowing in a just-in-time fashion from the central churches to daughter churches. That is, planting of churches does not wait for the complete training of pastors.
The most crucial part of church planting is selection and training of leadership. Classically, leadership training required an expensive stay at a seminary, a Bible college. Modern church planters deprecate this because it substantially slows the growth of the church without much immediate benefit. Modern mission doctrines replace the seminary with programmed curricula or (even less expensive) books of discussion questions, and access to real theological books. The materials are usually made available in a major trading language in which most native leaders are likely to be fluent. In some cases, the materials can be adapted for oral use.
It turns out that new pastors' practical needs for theology are well addressed by a combination of practical procedures for church planting, discussion in small groups, and motivated Bible-based study from diverse theological texts. As a culture's church's wealth increases, it will naturally form classic seminaries on its own.
Another related mission is Bible translation. The above-mentioned literature has to be translated. Missionaries actively experiment with advanced linguistic techniques to speed translation and literacy. Bible translation not only speeds a church's growth by aiding self-training, but it also assures that Christian information becomes a permanent part of the native culture and literature. Some ministries also use modern recording techniques to reach groups with audio that could not be soon reached with literature.
Criticism and Controversies
Objections to missionary work among isolated indigenous populations which aims to Westernize them have been raised by indigenous rights groups organizations, such as Friends of Peoples Close to Nature and Survival International.
See also
Notes
References
- Positive or neutral
- Discovering Missions by Gailey and Culbertson ISBN 083412257X
- Introducing World Missions by Moreau, Corwin and McGree ISBN 0801026482
- Missions by Van Rheenen ISBN 0310208092
- Operation World by Johnstone ISBN 1850783578
- Sievernich, Michael: Christian Mission, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: May 23, 2011.
- Perspectives on the World Christian Movement edited by Winter and Hawthorne ISBN 0878082891
- Critical
- Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide by George E. Tinker ISBN 9780800625764
- The Missionaries: God Against the Indians by Norman Lewis ISBN 0140131752
- The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe ISBN 0964487349
- Are Hindus more sinned against than sinning? accessible from: http://voxindica.blogspot.com/2008/10/are-hindus-more-sinned-against-or.html
External links
- Faith2Share, missions network
- Gospel for Asia, "reaching the most unreached"
- Crusade Watch, criticism of missions
- Mislinks, missions directory
- Missionary Organizations, missionary organizations directory
- Missiology.org, resources on missions (Christian) education.
- Christian Missions In Asia, offering an Asian perspective on principles and practices of Christian missions in Asia.
- LFM. Social sciences & missions (academic journal)
Categories:- Christian missions
- Missional Christianity
- Christian evangelicalism
- Christian interfaith and secular relations
- Conversion to Christianity
- Christian terms
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