Is There a Better Way? Part I

The story is familiar but bears repeating. After the Reformation hit in 1517, old theology and renewed interest in the Bible, as well as faithfulness to God’s Word, swept Europe. This massive cross-cultural and international movement caused a profound change in many societies, causing a long list of religious wars that racked Europe until the 1650s and the end of the English Civil War period. Until then, Protestants had been fighting for their lives, barely surviving against the forces of the Catholic Church, Hapsburg Empire, and Catholic/despotic monarchies. In such an environment, it is easy to see why Protestants did not have a sense of mission to the world when it seemed as if the very existence of true worship, God’s word, and a faithful church hung in the balance.

As peace continued to give a chance for the church to thrive and the Great Awakening took hold in the British Empire, churches, especially the independent churches, began to realize that not only could they survive without direct government support, but they could produce the resources necessary to reach beyond their borders. The need of the world for the Gospel was never more apparent as the age of exploration and colonialism made the average Christian in church realize that millions were dying without Jesus. In this environment, a legend was ready to be born, and in a way, only God could do it; he used a simple Baptist shoemaker to transform the world. William Carey and his little book An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens changed the way the Protestant world viewed missions, changed the church, and then changed the world!

Just by entering the mission efforts, Protestant nations increased the work of missions all around the world. When modern Protestant missions got started, there were less than 40 million Protestants in Europe and probably no more than 300,000 Protestants in America.

If we look more specifically at the denomination that started the Modern Missions movement, Baptists, there were less than 68,000 Baptists in America in 1800 when William Carey went to India. There were 9,000 Baptists in Wales and perhaps a bit more than 24,000 Baptists in England. Just looking at the last two centuries of the Missions movement, Baptists went from somewhere short of 100,000 members to 170,000,000 worldwide, which does not seem too bad.  Just to put it in perspective, there were about 9,000,000 people in England and Wales in 1800, and there were 5,308,483 (including nearly 900,000 enslaved) in the United States of America. In both cases, the church had a lot of work to do around them, even as they launched the modern missions movement.  Baptists in both the United Kingdom and the United States were less than 1% of the population and yet began the modern mission movement that increased their numbers by more than 1700 times in a little more than two centuries.

How did the Protestant church as a whole do during the time of the modern missions movement? As we showed above, there were 40,000,000 or so Protestants, maybe less, in Europe and maybe around 300,000 active Protestants in the United States. After the last 2 and quarter centuries of the modern missions movement, there are somewhere between 800,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 Protestants worldwide. Not too bad. Even if we stick to historic Protestant churches, there are 300,00,000 to 500,000,000 Protestants in the world today.

I am telling this story of the modern missions movement not to give it too much credit. The missions movement did not bring about all this growth. The missions movement should be about planting churches and churches; her members and their lives and ministry are what spread the gospel through the generations. In fact, if churches just would self-create across the globe, there would be no need for cross-cultural missions at all.  However, I do claim that the modern missions movement is more than just cross-cultural missions and that cross-cultural missions are vital to the health of the modern missions movement as a whole and that movement contributed greatly to the spread of the Gospel around the world over the last 225 years.

Some of you may think why do I need to make this case at all? Is it not obvious that the missions movement over the last two centuries has been a force in global evangelism and we see its effects all around us as billions come to faith? Well, it is not obvious to everyone anymore. There are some who think cross-cultural missions are incompatible with ministry to our local communities, and some think that there are alternatives to our “inefficient” and “ineffective” cross-cultural efforts and that better more “efficient” alternatives like raising large families for centuries or just funding locals to make their own churches and ministries in other counties would be more effective than cross-cultural missions as conceived in the modern era.  Some think that we can just be attractive by focusing on a kind of “evangelism of beauty.” We can just attract people to Jesus even if they are separated from us by oceans, culture, and language.  I will also look at those who see cross-cultural missions as evil, a racist left-over of a colonial period in our past that we should leave behind forever and even repent of for our own good. People have long taken up this argument on the Left, but more recently, it has been taken up by people on the Right as well. I will consider each of these alternatives in turn in the following months and compare them to the modern missions movement and cross-cultural missions in particular. I will end the series by explaining how we can do modern missions even better and what we have learned over the last 200 years about carrying out missions.

I will leave you then with the definition of what I will be defending. How do I define something like the modern missions movement? Missions is when the sent ones of the local church set aside some of their own number to accomplish a specific mission for the church that requires special training and special provision of resources from the church for the mission to be accomplished.

I believe this is what William Carey argued for and what we have been doing in cross-cultural mission work for over two hundred years. My defense will not exclude government-sponsored missions, but I will not focus on those efforts since, for Protestants, most of the mission work has been undertaken by local churches individually or in cooperation and has been independent and, at times, hostile to government policies.