The century of modern missions

1792: a Baptist pastor's pamphlet

In 1792 William Carey (1761–1834), a Baptist pastor in the English Midlands, published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. He argued that the Lord's command, "go and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19), still binds the church, and he called for Christians to send workers overseas. That October Baptist ministers meeting at Kettering formed a missionary society, and in 1793 Carey sailed for India with his family. His argument and his labours in India are told in the Theology course's Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea; this lesson follows the people of the century after him.

Other societies followed: the London Missionary Society, founded in 1795 by Christians of several denominations; the Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799 by evangelicals of the Church of England; the British and Foreign Bible Society of 1804; and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, formed by Congregationalists in 1810. Nor was this only a Protestant story. Among Catholics, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, begun in 1822 by Pauline Jaricot, a laywoman of Lyon, supported missions everywhere with prayer and small gifts. Among the Eastern Orthodox, the Russian priest Innocent put the language of the Aleut people of Alaska into writing and translated a Gospel into it, and Nicholas went to Japan in 1861 and laid the foundations of the Orthodox Church of Japan.

Learning the languages, translating the Bible

Robert Morrison (1782–1834) of the London Missionary Society reached Canton in 1807, the first Protestant missionary in China. The Qing empire forbade Christian preaching and forbade Chinese to teach their language to foreigners, so he stayed by working as a translator for the British East India Company. With his colleague William Milne he finished translating the whole Bible into Chinese in 1819, and he compiled a Chinese and English dictionary. In twenty-seven years he baptized only a handful of Chinese, but his Bible and dictionary opened the way for those who came after.

The Americans Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) and Ann Judson (1789–1826) set out in 1812 as Congregationalist missionaries. Studying the Bible on the voyage, they became Baptists and were baptized in Calcutta, and American Baptists formed a missionary society to support them. They reached Burma, today's Myanmar, in 1813, and only after six years baptized their first Burmese believer. When war broke out between Britain and Burma in 1824, Adoniram was imprisoned as a suspected spy for nearly a year and a half, while Ann carried food to the prison and pleaded with officials for his release. Ann died of fever in 1826, the year the war ended, and Adoniram finished his translation of the Bible into Burmese in 1834.

The Englishman Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) first went to China in 1854 and from the next year wore Chinese dress and a queue. Home in England through illness, in 1865 he published China's Spiritual Need and Claims, counting the hundreds of millions in China who had never heard the gospel and calling for workers to go to them, and that year he founded the China Inland Mission. The next year he sailed with a party of colleagues, and the mission sent single women inland too. Other missionaries mocked them for giving up Western clothes, but they meant to live among the Chinese as the Chinese lived. Paul had told the Athenians:

From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.

Acts 17:26-27

Wesley sees in these words that Paul, though a Jew, "looked on all mankind as his brethren" Wesley. The long labour of learning another people's tongue grew from that brotherhood.

Churches led by their own people

Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809–1891) was a Yoruba, from what is now Nigeria. At about twelve he was captured by slave raiders and sold, but a British naval ship stopped the Portuguese slave ship that carried him, and he was set free in Sierra Leone. There he went to a Church Missionary Society school and was baptized; ordained, he returned to the Yoruba country, and in 1846 he found again the mother from whom he had been sold away. He led the translation of the Bible into Yoruba, and in 1864, in Canterbury Cathedral, he became the first African bishop of the Anglican Communion. Henry Venn, the society's secretary, who championed him, held that once a church could support, govern and spread itself, the missionaries should step aside.

Crowther's last years were darkened. In the late 1880s young European missionaries new to the field attacked his African clergy and undermined his authority, and when he died in 1891 his place went to a European bishop. Many historians see here the racial prejudice that ran through the missions of the age. Even so, the churches of Africa, Asia and the Pacific were built mostly by their own evangelists and catechists. In Buganda, today's Uganda, young Catholic and Anglican believers were put to death together at the king's command in 1886; the Catholic Church declared twenty-two of them saints in 1964, and Anglicans remember them too.

The shadow of empire, and today

This was also the century of Europe's empires in Asia and Africa, and missionaries often sailed on the empire's ships and lived under its protection. In China, Britain's war to protect the opium trade ended in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, which opened the ports, and the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858 included a clause protecting missionaries and Chinese Christians. Some missionaries served as interpreters in those negotiations. To many Chinese the gospel looked like a Western religion that came with gunboats and opium, and missionaries who saw only darkness in the culture around them deepened the wound.

Yet the missionaries of the same century gave up a great deal. Many who went to West Africa died of fever within a few years, and many, like Ann Judson, were buried in the lands they served, or buried their wives and children there. They wrote down unwritten languages, compiled dictionaries and grammars and translated the Bible, and those who came to read Scripture in their own tongue went on to lead their own churches. What moved the missionaries was Paul's question: "how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach?" (Romans 10:14). John saw the multitude that labour would gather:

After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 7:9

Matthew Henry writes of this scene, "the Gentiles converted later follow, and ascribe their salvation to God and the Redeemer, with triumph" Matthew Henry. Today, historians say, most of the world's Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, and the Korean church, which once received missionaries, now sends them. This century tells us to learn the language of those we go to and serve them as brothers and sisters, not to mix the gospel with the power of strong nations, and to know when to step back so that their church can stand on its own. The next lesson, Abolition and social reform, tells of Christians of the same age on both sides of the slave trade and slavery.

Practice