Theologians like to base missions on biblical texts, especially the so-called ‘Great Commission’ given by the risen Christ to his disciples (Mark 16: 5): ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.’ That command is given an eschatological dimension in Matthew 24: 14, when Jesus on the Mount of Olives prophesies about the end of the world and the Last Judgement: ‘this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come’. It is also commonplace to cite St Paul as the exemplar of evangelization, a man who virtually invented the notion of conversion, and whose method was to preach in one place until a new church was formed, leaving the recent converts to govern and sustain themselves. Scripture notwithstanding, Christian missions have varied markedly from century to century. The missions depicted in this volume differed in many respects from those prominent in earlier times.
The schism in Western Christianity provoked by the Protestant Reformation ensured that Britain played no part in the sixteenth-century efflorescence of Catholic missions. Although some features of the Spanish and Portuguese missionary experience prefigured later Protestant missions—the encounter with other cultures, the struggle to attract converts, and tensions with state-sanctioned land seizures and forced labour—there were also very significant differences. The Portuguese and Spanish Empires took for granted that Christendom should be coterminous with the boundaries of Christian kingdoms, so Christianity was a state-sponsored enterprise. When the Pope made his celebrated division of the world between those powers in 1498, he also granted them the right of Padroado, which made religion a Crown monopoly. Not only did this give monarchs the sole right to appoint bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities, it also enabled them to employ coercion in converting infidels and heathen to their religion at home and abroad. Portuguese expansion brought the Inquisition to India in 1560. No mission ever enjoyed such advantages under the British Crown, even though the monarch was the constitutional head of the Church of England. Although long barred from holding public offices, Catholics and Dissenters were free to practise their religion. Little or nothing of the special status enjoyed at home by the established churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland was extended to overseas colonies. Deliberate policy opposed the multiplication of state-supported Anglican bishops in the colonies.
The word ‘mission’ held different meanings for different churches at different periods. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge were founded in the eighteenth century principally for the purpose of supplying the needs of British Christians in North America—not for the conversion of native peoples. The Roman Catholic Church long continued to regard the clergy it sent to Protestant Britain and those sent from Ireland to serve the needs of Irish in other parts of the Empire as missionaries. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society similarly referred to the evangelists it sent to Ireland as missionaries. In the twentieth century Pentecostals, Adventists, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses mounted missions aimed at converting the already Christian populations of the settlement colonies to membership of their sects. Attempts to recall the English urban working class to practising Christianity were called Home Missions. However, when most British people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spoke of missions, they meant enterprises devoted to conversion of people who were not Christian: Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, and people of no recognized faith—the heathen.
The launch of missions to Pacific Islands by the London Missionary Society in the 1790s marked the first occasion in modern British history when ministers of religion went to work in alien societies on terms set by other people. Far from enjoying royal patronage, missionaries had to struggle for the right to preach in territories held by the East India Company before an act of Parliament specifically sanctioned them in 1813. Missions’ primary reliance on private funding helps explain the often tense relations between imperial officials and missionaries. Britain’s policy of religious toleration and the voluntary character of missionary enterprise prevented any single denomination from predominating in the Empire. In this volume the most striking feature of missions is diversity. Not only did a variety of approaches to missions coexist at any one point, the missionary enterprise as a whole went through remarkable changes over time. Missions at the dawn of the nineteenth century differed markedly from missions at the turn of the twentieth century. When British societies sponsoring missions to non-Christian lands began to proliferate in the 1790s, they faced indifference if not outright opposition from entrenched powers in Church and State. The vocal championing of liberty of thought by dissenting denominations made them suspect in a nation at war with the French Revolution. Apart from some continental Europeans working for British missionary societies, most of the home-grown agents were drawn from the lower ranks of society: stonemasons, carpenters, and printers with little formal education. The English class system put most European missionaries at the bottom of the totem pole of prestige in British colonies. Until well into the nineteenth century the Church of England had no procedures for appointing bishops outside British territory and distrusted mission organizations without an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Calvinist theology of the established Church of Scotland had difficulty coming to terms with projects for converting the heathen in a world where God had already predestined some for salvation and others for damnation. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1796 declared the preaching of the Gospel ‘among barbarians and heathen natives to be highly preposterous in so far as it anticipates, nay even reverses, the order of Nature’. Many of the agents of the new missionary societies in Europe and America held radical theological views based on their readings of the book of Revelation. Unlike the philosophers of the Enlightenment, they did not look forward to endless vistas of secular progress. The political upheavals and wars raging around them seemed to presage the last days of sinful humanity and the imminent return of Christ. Almost all early nineteenth-century missionaries condemned non-Christian societies as sinks of iniquity. As Bishop Heber’s popular missionary hymn put it, European evangelists were venturing into beautiful but godless lands, ‘where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’. This attitude gradually disappeared in many denominations. Even before the Victorian age concluded, some missionaries were preaching that European Christianity could be enriched by contact with other cultures. According to ‘fulfilment theology’, God had granted special insights to Hindus, Africans, and other peoples that would give new dimensions to European worship, just as their acceptance of Christ would fulfil their progress towards salvation.
Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to specify a single factor that can explain the explosion of Christian missions in the period 1780-1900. One is the idea that millennial expectations excited the flurry of activity. Some historians stress the effects of pre-millennialism and post-millennialism. Pre-millennialists believed that the world was living through a dark thousand-year reign of Satan, after which Christ would return to reign on earth during a golden age lasting a further thousand years prior to the Last Judgement. Post-millennialists believed that the golden age had already dawned but that Christ would not be returning until it had run its course. Particular missions can be cited as examples of each persuasion. The German Pastor Louis Harms founded a mission in his little village of Hermannsburg, near Hanover, that sent missionaries to the heart of Africa and Australia. Believing that the reign of Satan had already begun, Harms was looking for isolated refuges where pure Christianity might survive the darkness. Operations of the London Missionary Society, on the other hand, expressed an optimistic faith in progress linked to post-millennial expectations that the golden age had arrived. Millenarians who ignored the thousand-year periods mentioned in the book of Revelation sometimes argued that missions could accelerate the Second Coming by simply fulfilling Christ’s prophecy that the end would come when the gospel had been preached to all the world— regardless of whether anyone believed it. The British philanthropist Robert Arthington funded missions because he ‘believed it was only necessary for the evangelist to pass through all these tracts of country (as yet untouched by the Truth) distributing Gospels, and preaching the Word, in order that Christ might come and restore all things’. The trouble with millenarianism of any variety as a catch-all explanation for modern missions is that some mission theorists never mentioned the millennium and missions continued to flourish even after millennialism was a spent force in Europe (though it still flourishes in many parts of the Third World). (pp. 47-56) Post- millennial beliefs so closely resemble secular doctrines of progress springing from the European Enlightenment that the difference hardly seems to matter. However, attempts to explain the new era of missions by reference to Enlightenment alone run up against many examples of evangelical organizations that deliberately set their face against the French Revolution and all its works. Eugene de Mazenod founded the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Marseille to defend the restored Catholic monarchical order against the forces of godless atheism. Catholic missions in general evidenced the strength of Ultramontane forces in the Church. In place of the Padroado arrangements, which put missionary orders in the hands of Spanish and Portuguese monarchs, there was now direct control by the Pope through the propaganda fide.
Not only is it difficult to point to any one cause of missionary enthusiasm, but different causes predominated at different times. Nationalism, barely evident in the late eighteenth-century missionary movement, had become a driving force one hundred years later. At the international missionary conference of 1900 in New York’s Carnegie Hall, delegates spontaneously burst into the American patriotic hymn ‘My Country ’tis of Thee’ following an address by President McKinley. Struggling Trappist missionaries in South Africa were suddenly overwhelmed with offers of funding in the 1880s as German nationalism invigorated Bavarian Catholics. The revival of Spanish and Portuguese nationalism resulted in massive support for Catholic missions in African colonies that had previously been neglected backwaters. However, every advance for nationalism was balanced by a step forward for an international ecumenical movement. Today’s World Council of Churches can trace its pedigree directly back to the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910. King George V congratulated the gathering for ‘its bearing upon the cementing of international friendship, the cause of peace, and the well-being of mankind’, while William Jennings Bryan, who had been a candidate for the presidency of the United States in 1896, made several addresses. By the end of the twentieth century such fervent messages of support from monarchs and politicians were practically unknown in the West, even as Pentecostal evangelists permeated the globe with messages supremely indifferent to national borders. It seems likely that future scholars, like the authors of this volume, will shy away from mono-causal explanations of the modern missionary movement.