THE EMMAUS WALK PRESENTS:
"The Macedonian Call--Again"
Excerpt from "To All Peoples," by Robert L. Niklaus
Churches of the Middle East and Europe share at least one similarity in their respective religious heritages: the need to recover biblical truths their spiritual forefathers believed so fervently that they redirected the course of humanity.
Each in its own era and region embraced the Gospel and grew strong in faith.
Each pursued the Great Commission and dispatched missionaries to the outer reaches of its known world.
Each allowed love to cool and faith to fragment to the point that the Macedonian Call once heard from Europe and answered from the Middle E#ast has become their common cry: "Come over and help us."
DECLINE OF JERUSALEM
Jerusalem was the starting p;oint of the original Christian missionary movement. The Book of Acts records that many Jewish pilgrims heard the Gospel for the first time in the Holy city of Pentecost. They carried the Good News back home to their ciommunities and synagogues.
Eusebuius Pamphilus (2560-339), one of the Early Church fathers and church historian, listed the nmissionary activities of several apostles.
"But the holy apostles and disciples of our Saviour, being scattered over the whole world," he wrote, "Thomas, according to tradition, received Parthia as his allotted region; Andrew received Scythia, and John, Asia, wwere, after continuing for sdome time, he died at Ephesus. Peter appears to have preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia and Asia, to the Jews that were scattered abroad."
Those who remained in the Holy City wanted it to become the religious capital for Jesus' followers, as it already was for Judaism.
"Jerusalem was to them the centre of the world; this was where the Lord had died and risen; this was where he would shortly descend again from heaven to proclaim his sovereignty and to acciomplish what was still unfulfilled in the purposes of God."
Those Jewish believers would have continued in Jerusalem keeping the Mosaic Law, attending temple prayers and services, formalizing a message distinctly Jewish and proclaiming a suffering Messiah. They did not foresee the danger that "Jerusalem might have become the Mecca of the Christian world; and the Jordan River might have become to Christians what the Ganges River is to Hindus."
A series of events--and nonevents--freed the infant movement from Jerusalem's confining boundaries. Christ did nto quickly return to set up His kingdom. Movement of the new religion was outward from Jerusalem, not inward toward it.
Three individuals played a key role in the decline of Jerusalem as the center of Christianity: Stephen, Paul and Peter.
Stephen was martyred, igniting a persecution that scattered most of the believers. Saul of Tarsus, converted on the road to Damascus, became Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles. Peter, senior member of the Jerusalem church, was the recipient of a vision lthat undeniably opened the door of salvation to Gentiles on an equal basis with Jews.
The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 by Roman legions ended the city's future as a geographical centger for the followers of Christ. The congregation disbanded and its members scattered before Roman legions surrounded the city. Christendom was set free "to become what its Founder intended it to be--spiritual and not temporal, universal and not provincial."
RISE OF ANTIOCH
As would happen repeated throughout church history, the center of Christianity moved closer tot he area of most response. In the first century, that meant moving northward from Jerusalem to Antioch.
Founded in 300 B.C., by the time of Christ Antioch had become one of the three most important cities of the Roman Empire [this was a city God had blessed, obviously, for this kind of growth was unheard of, for most other cities of magnitude and renown had existed
many centuries longer, yet this "new city" flourished so greatly, it
grew in just a few centuries to nearly head the list of Rome's premier cities. Perhaps in time it
might even overtake Alexandria and Rome itself--except for the Emperor Constantine's
removal of the Roman capital to Constantinople in the 4th century. This city then was
blessed to serve as the chief promoter of the Gospel to the Gentile world. Again, God raised up Alexander the Great,
also in the 300s B.C., who spread the Greek language and culture from Greece to India,
enabling the Gospel and the Greek New Testament scriptures later to travel the same immense territories and take root.--Ed.]
Only twenty miles from the Mediterranean Sea on a fertile plain of what isnow Syria, Antioch served as a crossroads for some of the main trade routes between east and west, north and south.
The domination of Greek culture and stability of Roman administration made Antioch a safe place for the fledgling movement to grow rapidly. The Gospel naturally flowed along the caravan routes radiating from the city. [Now we scarcely credit the eastward flowing, and overemphasize the westward flowing.
The eastward flowing from Antioch to India and possibly China and Japan is scarcely
known today--but it was a great movement for many centuries. Why is the emphasis and focus on
the westward expansion of the Christian faith? Is it not because of Paul, who wrote so much,
that we naturally read his writings and see only the workings of the Christian faith among the Western Gentiles--but this is to miss at least half the story of what happened in the first century.--Ed.]
The Apostle Paul started on his three epochal missionary tours from Antioch. His travels lasted less than fifteen years, but covered the four most populous provinces under Roman rule. His work laid the foundation for the spiritual conquest of history's most enduring empire.
Paul, however, was not alone in achieving this. Although he is considered the greatest missionary in chuch history, his efforts were supported, and in sheer numbers even surpassed, by a host of unnamed laypeople. They
knew nothing of missionary organization or strategy, but they freely shared the experience of their faith.
Historian Will Durant notes, "Nearly every convert, with the ardor of a revolutionary, made himself an office of propaganda." Stephen Neill adds: "The church of the first Christian generation wasd a genuinely missionary church...The church could count on the anonymous and unchronicled witness of all the faithful."
CONTESTED EXPANSION
The total number of Christians rose to approximately one million by A.D. 100, with churches located as far west as Rome and Spain [and quite possibly Lutetia (Paris) and Britain--Ed.].
The total number of Christians rose to approximately one million by A.D. 100, with churches located as far west as Rome and Spain. A century later, Christian communities were still small scattered, but they had spread throughout the empire a universality remarkable for the times.
J. Herbert Kane estimates that by A.D. 250, the believers in Rome numbered 50,000, supported 100 clergy and cared for 1,500 poor people. Fifty years later, Antioch’s population of one-half million was between 20 and 50 percent Christian.
About the same time, perhaps as many as five million of the Roman Empire’s fifty million people called themselves Christian, though the distribution was uneven. Up to one-half the population in some parts of Asia Minor were considered followers of Christ, while in Greece the born-again population was almost nil [pretty much the situation today too—Ed.]
P)liny the Younger (61-113), ruler of Bithynia, complained Trajan. “The contagion of this superstitution has spread not only in the cities but in villag
S and rural districts….The temples have been almost deserted and the social rites neglected.”
The missionary zeal of the church aroused alarm and resentment among Roman rulers who normally exercised a religious policy of “live and let live.” They viewed this new religion as a threat to the empire as it spread everywhere and taught that people should worship o9nly God, not Caesar. Christianity
Therefore became the only religion in the Roman Empire to suffer violent opposition as an official policy over a long period of time [this seems to be the case with the Muslim
Countries, the “Empire of Islam,” too, as Islam is a state religion and a Christian is perforce an enemy of the Muslim state religion and marked as such in law and in
Society—Ed.}
The church suffered numerous periods of persecution, beginning with Nero in A.D. 64. Like the last convulsive thrashings of a mortally wounded beast, the final ten-year tribulation mounted by Diocletian was the most sustained and cruel. When it ended in A.D. 303, over 1,500 Christian had been martyred, thousands had lost their homes and passions and many churches had either been destroyed or confiscated.
Persecution, however, only served to strengthen the church and give it added visibility.
“It was severe enough to at least serve a partial deterrent to light-hearted adoption of the faith,” according to historian Kenneth Scott Latourette. “It gave tone to the morale of the church and strengthened the sense of solidarity against paganism. Yet it was not severe enough seriously to threaten the existence of Christianity or even greatly to weaken the Christian community. [certainly there is the modern parallel, that to adopt Christian faith in Muslim lands cannot be done light-heartedly either, as there is persecution and
quite possibly even death for any Muslim who takes Christ as Savior and is baptized.—Ed.}.
HOLLOW TRIUMPH
When Constantine fought his way to the throne in A.D. 306, the role of Christianity in the Roman Empire suddenly and drastically changed. Believing he had been aided by the Christian’s God in his struggle for power, the emperor ended persecution of the church
More secure on his throne by the year 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting toleration of religions in general and restitution in particular for Christians who had suffered losses under Diocletian [which Constantine had viewed first-hand, as he had in his younger years resided in Diocletian’s imperial palace in Nicomedia—Ed.].
The edict began an unaccustomed era of peace, prosperity and popularity for the church.
Constantine himself converted to Christianity ten years later, thus making it the preferred religion of Rome. The whole realm opened to missionary work, pagans stampeded intot he church, and becoming Christian was fashionable, even profitable. Christian clergy, for example, were exempted from paying taxes [don’t we have tax-exempt Churches and Christian ministries in America, and in Britain and the Scandinavian countries, you
Find the tax-supported state Christian church, certainly a continuation of Constantine’s imperial policy toward the Christian church, and a very bad idea in its effects upon the faith.—Ed.].
The Christian Sunday became a legal holiday. Constantine erected and enlarged churches, authorizing bishops to call upon civil authorities for help in building churches.
“It seems likely,” believes Neill, “that the number of Christians in the empire at least quadrupled in the century that followed the Edict of Milan.”
Constantine’s generous policy, unfortunately, did as much harm as the ten preceding periods of persecution.
John Caldwell Thiessen points out that once Christianity became popular, it declined in vitality. Great numbers of unconverted pagans brought their practices into the church. Simplicity of worship gave way to elaborate ceremonies. True missionary activity declined, while conquered peoples were forcibly converted.
The group that seemed most resistant to the Gospel was the Jewish community. Though lay missionaries persisted in witness to the Jews over a long period of time, they encountered the same frustrations experienced by the Apostle Paul, who was rebuffed when he went to the synagogues first in his missionary travels. Even the shrinking number of Jewish believers failed to win a following among their own people, and the Jewish Church eventually disappeared.
“Jewish Christendom waned and dwindled and finally died away in heresy.” Centuries would pass before the Jewish church would
be reborn in the land of its birth though the witness of Gentile believers.
Judaism suffered a fate no less tragic, though not terminal. As the Jews continued to reject the Gospel, the impatience of Christians soured into frustration, then to anger and finally hatred. The church that had so recently paid dearly for its faith under the Caesars now instituted persecution as an accepted weapon of coercion in an attempt to convert the followers of Judaism [we might question whether this “Christian church” was Christian, or not a heresy that later formulated the Jew-persecuting Catholic religion—Ed.].
“Such an injustice as that done by the Gentile church to Judaism is almost unprecedented in the annals of history,” judged Adolf Harnack. “The daughter first robbed her mother and then repudiated her.”
Everything considered—the lowered level of spirituality in the church [which you see
Evidence today, along with a growth in the Catholic church and in mainline Protestant denominations of Replacement Theology which is igniting again the fires of anti-Semitism under the guise of being merely anti-Israel or anti-Zionism in support of “Palestianian rights”—Ed.] and its heightened aggressiveness [“divestiture,” or attacking Israel’s right to its Covenanted lands and boycotting businesses that do business with Israeli companies—Ed.] against those of differing persuasions—the Edict of Milan became something of a hollow triumph for Christendom.
VOCATIONAL SHIFT
For the first several hundred years, missionary work in both the East and the West surged forward on the shoulders and in the hearts of lay Christians who took the Gospel wherever they went. They did a remarkable job, says Latourette: “Never in the history of the race had so complete a religious revolution been wrought in so short a time among so large a proportion of the population.”
From about A.D. 500, however, the initiative in missions shifted from laypeople to career workers to career workers. Latourette notes that between the fifth and nineteenth centuries,” a practically continuous flow of missionaries poured into non-Christian regions…The professional missionary seems to have been much more prominent in these ten centuries than in the first few hundred years of the expansion of the faith.”
CELTIC CATALYST
Ireland was the last major area to be evangelized during the first five hundred years of the church. But, like the Apostle Paul, it “labored more abundantly than they all,” and quickly forged to the fore.
The most important event in Irish Christianity actually began when a sparsely educated but warmhearted boy named Patrick was snatched from his home in Scotland and carried off to Ireland as a slave. During the next six years of herding sheep, he learned to live close to the Great Shepherd. After escaping from captivity in Ireland, he received a vision similar to the Apostle Paul’s Macedonian Call and returned to Ireland to evangelize his former masters.
During Patrick’s thirty-five years of ministry in the fifth century, he baptized thousands of converts, established hundreds of converts, established hundreds of churches and ordained clergy to lead them. Contrary to widely publicized claims, Patrick was not a Roman Catholic missionary sent to Ireland by the pope.
He was, in the words of V. Raymond Edman,” a Bible-reading, Bible-believing, and Bible-preaching missionary” who formed Irish Christianity into a powerful force for the Lord.
Kane calls the Irish church of the sixth and seventh centuries “one of the greatest missionary churches of all time.” From its well-ordered monasteries monks spread out to evangelize not only the Celts of Ireland but also the Picts of Scotland, the Angles and Saxons of England, the Frisians of Holland. They pressed on to Germany, Switzerland and even northern Italy.
Other dedicated men covered astonishing distances in their missionary crusades. Columba (521-597), an Irishman, tramped through Scotland. Columbanus (543-615) and twelve other Irishmen penetrated Switzerland. Boniface (680-755), an Englishman, did remarkable work in Germany, while a compatriot, Willibrord (657-739), took on Holland and Denmark.
MISSIONS BY FORCE
Some missionary methods, however, might seem strange to a twentieth-century supporter of missions. Hungary was “christianized” by German colonists, Poland through the pious wives of some rulers. Russia was won through pageantry. And old Russian account, part truth and part legend, records how Vladimir sent representatives to investigate the religions of neighboring countries in order to adopt the religion most sublime. His ambassadors scrutinized Judaism, Islam and Western Christianity and found them all wanting.
When the delegation reached Constantinople and observed the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, they were ecstatic. They wrote the czar in glowing terms: “We do not know whether we were in heaven or on earth. It would be impossible to find on earth any splendour greater, and it is vain tt we attempt to describe it…Never shall we be able to forget so great a beauty.”
Vladimir sent for Orthodox missionaries to convert his people, a task requiring the better part of 500 years and done mostly by Greek clergy.
One of the common methods used to expand the church during the Dark Ages was to convert people by force of arms. Baptism was then imposed as a sign of surrender. In fact, Olaf Tryggvason used the war cry “baptism or battle” in his efforts to bring Norway into Christendom. Those who refused to join the church were either killed or exiled [this can explain the spiritual deadness of the formal religion of Christianity, the State Church of Norway that is
Lutheran, to which most Norwegians subscribe membership but at which they seldom participate or attend (other than major Church festivals at Christmas or Easter; I recall my early years in a Lutheran church founded by Norwegian immigrants, and the church was packed at Christmas and Easter with a lot of people who never showed up the rest of the year between those two events.—Ed.).
The ugliest of these militant methods of expanding the church found expression in the crusades of the Middle Ages.
The primary aim of the four large and several smaller Crusades between 1095 and 1272 was territorial, not spiritual. The knights of Europe vowed to regain the Holy Sepulchre and all lands occupied by Muslim armies.
These crusaders of the Prince of Peace [sic] considered Muslims simply “unbelievers who had no right to exist, with whom no faith need be kept, and who might be slaughtered without ruth or pity to the glory of the Christian God.”
The Jewish population of Palestine fared no better [actually, the Crusaders began slaughtering Jews where they started out in Europe and then proceeded, killing Jews, all the way to the Holy Land, forgetting that Jesus is a Jew—Ed.]. When the crusaders liberated Jerusalem, they were not content with killing the entire Muslim garrison. They massacred some seventy thousand Muslim civilians, herded the city’s surviving Jews into a synagogue, and then burned them alive.
The crusaders then filed into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and had a thanksgiving service, praising God for His help in achieving victory.
For Western Christians, the Crusades happened long ago, only to be remembered and romanticized in novels and noble knights. But “to every Muslim in the Mediterranean lands,” writes Bell, “the Crusades are an event of yesterday, and the wounds are ready at any moment to break out afresh.”
Similar deep resentments run through the Orthodox communities. “Even today,” noted one missionary in 1984, “the Eastern hierarchies, far from applauding either Roman Catholic or Protestant missionary efforts, are more inclined to regard them as comparable to the Crusades of earlier centuries.”
MONKS AND FRIARS
Rulers who decreed the mass conversion of their subjects in the Middle Ages left the task of baptism and instruction to the church. The ones charged with the responsibility of christianizing the masses were not the pioneering full-time missionaries of an earlier era. Those had been replaced by monks who, for about five hundred years, provided the church with its foreign workers.
The idea of monastic missions contradicts the usual perception of monasteries as cloistered havens for introverts fleeing society in search of salvation through solitude and meditation.
"Some monks almost inevitably became missionaries," explains Latourette. "The monastic movement attracted those who were not content with the superficial religion which went by the name of Christianity, but were resolved to give themselves entirely to the faith."
"What more natural than that some of them should be caught by that desire to propagate the faith?" he reasons.
The initiative of missions passed from monasteries to religious orders in the early 1200s. For the next two centuries, two great orders of friars, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, carried the banner of Rome to the outer perimeters of civilization. Their emergence as missionary societies coincided with--and depended upon--the two maritime powers of the Iberian Peninsula: Spain and Portugal.
Franciscan and Dominican priests marched with Spanish conquistadores in the New World, sailed with Portuguese explorers down the coastline of Africa, accompanied Italian merchants to the Far East.
A declaration by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain expressed the close ties between mission and monarchy: "Nothing do we desire more than the publication and the amplification of the Evangelic Law, and the conversion of the Indians to our Holy Catholic Faith."
When the Reformation dawned over Europe in 1517, Roman Catholic missionaries were already operating worldwide, while the Reformers were otherwise preoccupied.
Several factors contributed to the lack of missionary vision during the early Reformation years. One reason was survival itself: Luther, Calvin and other such leaders were too busy fighting for their lives and the survival of their movements to give much thought to faraway places. Unfortunately, they were also too busy fighting among themselves [this perverse trait of missionaries and
Christian workers has not been lost on native populations of many countries, who cannot understand how Christians can divide so much off from each other and then oppose one another, though claiming to know and serve the same Jesus Christ; this confusion goes on to this present day, does it not?
Here in America, with the majority unsaved, the denominations hold
tenaciously to their respective chosen turfs and scarcely join with other Christians
for evangelism and the propagation of the Gospel to the mass of
unsaved Americans. You see some joining in the Billy Graham crusades, but
eventually it dies down after the crusade has gone its way elsewhere--Ed.]
Another factor contributing to missions myopia was theology. Many Protestant leaders actually believed the Great Commission was intended only for the original apostles [now wouldn't that have surprised the apostles, if they had heard it? Imagine, the whole work of world-wide evangelism, from there time onward, depended upon them in their brief times on earth! What could
people be thinking of when they devise theologies that post-date
evangelism to the apostles? They placed an impossible burden on
them, which the Lord never did.--Ed.].
Calvin himself wrote, "We are taught that the kingdom of Christ is neither to be advanced nor maintained by the industry of men, but this is the work of
God alone." [Interesting statement, for it throws the ball Christ gave his
disciples back to God's court! It seems so spiritual, but it absolves
Christians of all responsibility and duty given by Christ in His Great Commission at the Ascension to his disciples. Christ Himself must have scratched his head in heaven over this dogmatic pronouncement of Calvin's!--Ed.]
So while Protestants dug their foxholes deeper and consolidated their position in Europe, papal emissaries spread out to conquer the rest of the worl. Kane and others estimate thatduring this period,Rome won more converts worldwide than it lost to European Protestantism [and any evangelical should know, this could not have been God's will, but it happened, due to the
evangelical or Protestant church's default and foxhole digging--Ed.]
Missionary vision among Protestants did not become a major factor until England and Holland emerged as great maritime powers and vigorously expanded their trade routes. This fact may also help explain theglaring unconcern in early years of the
Reformation. Luther's Germany was land oriented and Calvin's Switzerland landlocked, while Catholic Spain and Portugal dominated the high seas. [No wonder the Middle East and much of Asia and Africa remained locked into Islam until the present day, for the Protestant Church with the Gospel remained snugly and smugly
at home, sitting on their blessed assurances!--Ed.]
EARLY PROTESTANT PIONEERS
Though early Protestant missions paralleled national developments, their dynamics grew out of biblical teaching and spiritual experience.
These qualities were rooted in the Pietist Movement sparked by Philip Spener, a German Lutheran pastor in the latter 1600s. He maintained that "there can be no missionary vision without evangelistic zeal...no evangelistic zeal with personal piety...no personal piety without a genuine conversion experience."
Spener helped develop Halle University in Prussia as the great educational center of Pietism and missionary enterprise. His successor at Halle, August Franke, became one of the outstanding missionary statesmen of the eighteenth century.
Danish King Frederick IV, who sensed a spiritual responsibility for the colonists and native people of a crown colony on the east coast of India, visited Franke at Halle. Out of their discussion grew the Danish-Halle Mission in 1705, a cooperative ffort in which Halle provided the personnel and Denmark the funds, at least initially.
Pietism also launched one fo the most remarkabke missionary movements in church history: the Moravian Brethren. Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinsendorf (1700-1760), godson to Spener and student under Franke at Halle, early became an ardent Pietist when still a youth: "I have one passion; it's He and he alone."
Zinzendorf gave shelter on his Saxony estate to some Waldensian and Moravian refugees, survivors of a religious brotherhood nearly wiped out by Jesuits during the Counter Revolution (sic) [I believe Counter Reformation is
better.--Ed.]. Taking the name Herrnhut (the Lord's Watch), the Moravian Cnhurch grew to a worldwide missionary movement under Zinzendorf's leadership.
Though despised as ignorant people by the cultured society of their day, the Moravians set for themselves a high standard of commitment to Christ. When one man was asked if he would go to Labrador, for example, he promptly responded, "Yes, tomorrow, if I am only given a pair of shoes."
"Within twenty years of the commencement of their missionary work in 1732, the Moravian Brethren had started more missions than Anglicans and Protestants had started during the two preceding centuries.
Thiessen makes the astonishing observation that "a survey of the fields entered by the Moravians shows there is scarcely a country where they have not at least attempted to gain a foothold." Even as recently as 1930, the proportion of missionaries to communicant members [in the Moravian Brotherhood--Ed.] was one in twelve!
BUILDUP AND BREAKTHROUGH
The real breakthrough in Protestant missionary endeavor, however, was yet to come. Various factors were lining up to provide a catpult for a remarkable century of missionary activity originating in Europe.
Scientists and inventors harnessed power through the steam engine and brought the world closer to home through steamships. Businessmen and financiers founded trading companies that made insular Europeans world conscious. Entrepreneurs sparked an industrial revolution that demanded raw materials from faraway places. Explorers sailed the seven seas in search of new resources and untapped markets. Politicians and statesmen spearheaded the expansionist mood under national colors.
The inquisitive mood of Europe, including England, quickly turned acquisitive [follow that fatal adverb! "inquisitive" to "acquisitive"! Wasn't Eve "inquisitive" about the Forbidden Tree in the Garden before her fall?
She then turned "acquisitive" under Satan's deception and prodding to become
"like God" herself. This is a lesson for us. Keep rein on our
own inquisitive natures, if we have them! Children are naturally inquisitive, they "are into everything." That is mostly good, but it can turn to bad when they
crawl into cold storage units to play there and accidently shut the door, or reach to touch a hot stove or a pan with dinner sizzling in it on top
the stove, or play with matches, etc.--you get the point. Inquisitivity is not bad in itself, but with our fallen natures that can't see
consequences too well, it can lead us into the
wrong turns and blind alleys--Ed.]
"Exploration was followed by exploitation," wryly comments Neill. "The white man came to trade, but he stayed to rule."
The Christian community, as often happens, reflected the national mood od expansion and began singing Isacc Watts' great hymn, "Jesus Shall Reign Where'er the Sun". The Pietist Movement in Germany and the Evangelical Awakening in England aroused Protestants from their cramped, self-centered world.
An often overlooked catalyst of the eighteenth-century surge of missionary activity was a widespread prayer movement. It began with the publication in 1723 of a treatise on missions by Robert Millar. In his book he promoted intercessory prayer as a powerful means of converting the heathen world. The idea caught on, and within twenty years prayer groups were meeting throughout the British Isles.
Christians in the American colonies were invited to join in a seven-year "Concert of prayer" beginning in 1746. America's most famous preacher, Jonathan Edwards, wrote a pamphlet to promote the movement. Forty years passed before Edwards' powerful call to prayer reached England, but when it did, the Baptists were moved to set aside every Monday for missionary intercession.
"THE GREAT CENTURY"
William Carey is known as "the father of modern missions" and rightly so, even though he built on the work of earlier pioneers like Philip Spener, August Franke and Nicolaus Zinsendorf.
A British shoemaker by trade and Baptist preacher by calling, Carry was obsessed with the spiritual need of unevanglicalized peoples. He prepared himself for a missionary career by educating himself with books while he mended and made shoes. He was also a linguist, teaching himself Latin, Gree, Hebrew, Italian, French and Dutch. He denied being brilliant, just a plodder. Some plodder!
Garey's ministerial colleagues rebuked him for his missionary aspirations [imagine that, Christian ministers rebuking a man for wanting to
go into mission work with the Gospel! They probably told him he wasn't
fit, he was only a cobbler making shoes, he was aiming beyond his
calling in life and would be a miserable failure, a disgrace to
Christianity, etc.--but how wrong these carpers were! He became
one of the greatest missionaries that ever existed.--Ed.], but being a plodder, he persisted. In 1792, he published an eighty-seven page book that some consider the most convincing missionary appeal ever written.
But Carey did more than merely read and write about missions. He packed his reluctant wife and four excited children on board ship in 1793 and sailed for India, where he spent the next forty years in continuous ministry.
Carey's book and subsequent reports from India helped stir into existence a whole series of missionary societies in both the Old and New Worlds. The list reads like an honor roll: London Missionary Society (1795), Scottish and Glasgow Missionary Societies (1796), Netherlands Missionary Society (1797), Church Missionary Society (1799), British and Foreign Bible Society (1804)[which
gave a Bible to a ancestor of mine, for his work in spreading
the
Word of God, along with an inscription stating so. My grandmother had it in her possession, we are told, and I am now searching for it among the
relationship.--Ed.], American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), American Baptist Missionary Union (1814), and American Bible Society (1816).
Neill evaluates Carey's work as "a turning point: it marks the entry of the English-speaking world on a large scale into the missionary enterprise--and it has been the English-speaking world which has provided four-fifths of the non-Roman missionaries from the days of Carey until the present time."
To a lesser extent, parallel events were taking place on the continent. The first Swiss missioin, the Basel Evangelical Mission Society of Switzerland, organized in 1815 and supplied personnel to the Anglican Church Missionary Society before initiating its own work in 1834, the year Carey died.
During the nineteenth century, at least fourteen other European missionary societies organized in Germany, France, Holland, and the three Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
By the end of "The Great Century," as Latourette terms the period between 1815 and 1914, every Christian nation in the world was represented on the mission field. He described the period in terms similar to the days of the Early Church: "Never before in a period of equal length had Christianity or any other religion penetrated for the first time as large an area as it had in the nineteenth century."
Even Palestine felt the embrace of "The Great Century." One of the early nineteenth-centry missions indirectly inspired by Carey was the London Jews' Society, founded in 1820 by Anglicans. Their missionary to Palestine, a Jewish Christian named Joseph Wolff, began the first permanent Protestant witness in Jerusalem swince the Crusades. [did the former London shoemaker, Carey, not spark all these great
forward movements into new ground?! He was a tremendous
catalyst for the whole Christian world to spread the Gospel into
unreached populations! We must not underestimate
people ever, no matter how insignificant they may appear, not after
seeing what Carey accomplished, a lowly "plodder" with a vision--Ed.].
A second Anglican mission supported by the Church Missionary Society directed its ministry primarily to the Arab population [probably the most neglected
and numerous people group on Earth, far as missions was concerned--Ed.}, while a third Anglican group sponsored work throughout the Holy Land. These and later missions concentrated their efforts on reaching the people through hospitals and schools.
The few Palestinians who responded to the Gospel were mostly Arabs. Jewish believers were extremely rare, considered traitors by their own people, and treated as if they were dead.
AGENCIES, WOMEN AND ROME
The expansion of Protestant missions in the 1800s assumes even greater significance because it was volunteer agencies, not denominations, that spearheaded the movement.
Ecclesiastical structure has seldom been enthusiastic about missions. Neill observes, "In many cases the Protestant chuches as such were unable or unwilling themseles tot ake up the cause of missions. This was left to the voluntary gifts of interested Christians."
Ralph D. Winter points out that for almost three hundred years after Luther, the protestant movement had no effective missions program. "Speaking specifically, then, it is notorios ...that the churches as churches have never in history cut a very impressive prophetic role, either at home or abroad."
Individuals organized the English Baptist Missionary Society that supported Carey in India, not the denomination. The church's attitude was reflected in one minister's rebuke directed at Carey: "When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine.[and most certainly without that minister's!--Ed.]"
The structure and attitude surrounding that first English mission became a long-term pattern in mission/denomination relations.
The rebuke aimed atd Carey seems also to have reflected the historical attitude of most missions with regard to single women missionaries. A few great missionary leaders such as Willbrord enlisted women in their cause, but not until the mid-1800s did either Protestant or Roman Catholic agencies begin to send unmarried women overseas on a permanent and continuing basis.
Whent he first proposal was made, strong opposition arose from every direction. Anglican Bishop Daniel Wilson of Calcutta voiced the pessimism of many when he remarked that such young women "would be married off within the year and would be the source of endless troubles."[And we must cite the Buntain family, which had operated a hospital in Calcutta, serving tens of thousands of patients for at least two generations, and today the missionary widow of Missionary Buntain and her missionary daughter carry on this tremendous work of compassion and love through the hospital and also gospel outreaches into the outlying villages and towns; then there is the order established by Mother Teresa, still flourishing, almost totally staffed by young, unmarried women devoted to ministry and service of the poorest and the dying in Calcutta's slums with the compassion and mercy of Christ.-- Ed.].
This expected result did not materialize, but a totally different one did: Single women contributed greatly to missionary successes of "The Great Century." By the 20th century, single and married women would greatly outnumber men on the mission field.
Even Adoniram Judson, America's first foreign missionary, showed lukewarm support for single women missionaries. When he learned that Mrs. Charlotte H. White, a widow being sent to India, was married in 1816 while still en route, he sighed with relief.
"Mrs. White very fortunately disposed of herself in Bengal," he confied in private correspondence. "Fortunately, I say; for I know not how we would have disposed of her in this place. We do not apprehend that the mission of single femals to such a country as Burmah, is at all advisable."
The first dingle woman sent overseas from Americva was Mrs. Betsey Stockton. The ANNUAL REPORT, 1824 of the American Board of Commissioiners for Foreign Missions referred to her as, "Betsey Stockton, colored woman, Domestic Assistant."
Although born a slave in Princeton, New Jersey, about 1798, she had for many years worked in the household of the president of Princeton College. While there, she read avidly and widely with the help of his library. Described as "qualified to teach school and take charge of domestic concerns," she conducted a "well-run school" in Hawaii.
By 1815, when Protestants began their century of expansion, the Roman Catholic Church was just beginning to recover from rough times. The Society of Jesus, with its 2,000 Jesuit missionaries, had been disbanded becaue of its excdessive political activities. The papacy itself had been battered by Napoleon. French Catholicism, one of Rome's prime supporters of missions, had been virtually paralyzed by the French Revolution.
Rome gradually recovered from these wounds and moved slowly toward a more centralized church. As often happens after a period of suffering, the church also experienced a renewal of inner vitality that expressed itself this time in the emergence of new ministry groups.
The hundred years after 1815 saw more new orders and congregations organize than in the previous century of the Catholic Church's history. Among the new orders were missionary societies such as the Salesians of Dom Bosco, the Scheut Fathers and the White Fathers--as well as over one hundred new congregations of celibate women whose rise to prominence paralleled that of Protestant single women missionaries.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOUNDS
Events in the first half of the twentieth century inflicted crippling wounds from which Protestant missions in Europe have never fully recovered.
The most serious wound was theological. The first World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in 1910, spent little time discussing theology because nearly all the participants agreed on fundamentals concerning Christ, the Bible and the church's role in missions. But by the second conference, held in Jerusalem just eighteen years later, theological liberalism had so completely permeated mainstream protestant missions that Christ and His Word were dem,oted to the rank of partners in dialogue with other religions [Ugh!--Ed.].
Missionary activities of major European denominations dramatically decreased as uncertainty increased over the credibility of the Gospel. Churches unsure of their beliefs were not inclined to pay the high costs of promoted those uncertain beliefs overseas.
The second major blow to European-based Protestant missions was inflicted by two global conflicts in three decades. Virtually anyt vision and support that survived the First World War succumbed during the Second. More than 3,000 church buildings were completel;y destroyed or heavily damaged. Countless hospitals, orphanages, schools and other church-related institutions disappeared, never to be rebuilt.
With its churches prostrated, its Christian message discredited and its economy ruined, the continent was left "economically impoverished and without a shred of virtue."
Missions--indeed, Christianity itself,--retreated to a minor role as the shattered nations of Europe struggled to renew their societies and rebuild their economies. Then the short-term push for material recovery became the unending obsession of materialism and its contempt for religion.
David B. Barnett estimates that the self-professed Christian population of Europe dropped from 90 percent in 1900 to 66 percent in 1989. But such statistics hardly represent the spiritual decline of a continent even European church leaders concede is no longer Christian.
POST-CHRISTIAN EUROPE
Bishop Hans Lilje of the Evangelical Church of Germany, says outright: "The era when Europe was a Christian continent lies behind us." Swiss theologian Dr. Rene Pache acknowledges that "Europe needs missionaries."
Only 13 percent of France's population attends mass on Sunday [and what if that 13 percent does attend mass--what does it gain spiritually?--Ed.]. In Scandinavia [which should be renamed Unbeliefnavia or Secularnavia or even Pagannavia--Ed.], a mere 3 to 4 percent attends Sunday morning worship. In Italy's large cities, the ratio is down to two in a hundred. Britain's overall church attendance dclines 2 percent annualy, sanding at 11 percent of the people int he mid-1980s.
Lesslie Newbigin explains why the church is declining. It has lost the destinctive message of the Gospel. "It would be hard to deny that contemporary British (and most of western) Christianity is an advanced case of syncretism," he reasons [note, that Roman's pagan religions were syncretistic, and this is a chief characteristic of the New Age Religion that is spread globally in this emerging, increasingly European Union-dominated, neo-pagan revival of the old Roman religions and imperial power--Ed.]. "The church has lived so long as a permitted and even privileged minority, accepting relegation to the private sphere in a culture whose public life is controlled by a totally diffeent vision of reality, that it has almost lost the power to address a radical challenge to that vision and therefore to modern civilization as a whole."
Barrett estimates that the defection of Europeans and North Americans to other religions or nonreligion reaches 2,774,000 persons annually. Churches are losing an average of 6,000 members and 7,6000 attendees per day. At this rate, he concludes, the massive gains of Third World churches are offset by greater losses in Europe and North America [the AOG recently finds that even with large losses of membership through closures of churches in its rapidly growing denomination, it is coming to 136 new churches opening each day--but, I am forced to consider, if the Assemblies of GGod (AOG) is a healthy and "growing evangelical church body," what of the ones that aren't? Mainline Protestant church bodies are hemorrhaging beyond control, so that, overall, the American evangelical churches might well be in a steep decline despite the AOG's comparatively good growth rate. As I read the glowing report of growth in the latest Evangel of the AOG, I could not help but do a little arithmetic and wonder how 136 new congregations are anything to be enthused about when there are such big losses occurring most everywhere else you can look in America--Ed.].
"Inexorably," Barrett observes, "the center of gravity of committed Christianity continues its century long shift from the Western world's capitals--to Third World cities."
Some European countries, however, remain a significant source of missionary activity. In the United Kingdom, 5,319 Protestants and 1,158 Roman Catholic missionaries served overseas in 1984. Most Roman Catholic overseas personnel and approximately 10 percent of Protestant missionaries, are sent and supported by European churches.
In fact, European nations still lead the United States on a ratio basis in reference to missionaries. The United States sending ratio in 1970 was one missionary to every 4,800 people. Switzerland did twice as much (1 to 2,400). Even Sweden, with only 5 to 6 percent of the populatioin attending church weekly, did better (1 to 4,600). Ireland, with one missionary for every 328 Irishmen, had the best record. [Isn't this amazing, this little shepherd boy of a nation, Ireland, can excel the giants, such as the United States, in its ratio!--Ed.]
Statistics, however, cannot dispel the acute spiritual need of Europe. Alan Walker, director of evangelism for the Methodist World Council, states the need clearly: "World evangelism must grapple with the spiritual crisis of the West. The Western world is now the toughest mission field on earth...If churches which have been declining for years were to find answers within themselves, they would surely by now have appeared.
"Now the West needs to experience by cross-cultural exchange the vitality and joy of Christians from developing countries. Now the missionary age is moving in reverse, and the rest of the world must reach out to help the West."
For European Christians, no less than for their beleaguered brothers and sisters in nations of the Middle East, the cry is clear: "Come over and help us!"
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