Christian historian Woodrow Walton continues his investigation into the origins of the modern movements that inspired Christians to go and share the mission and message of Jesus throughout the world.

George Müller

When studying how living out the gospel changed the social fabric of the early nineteenth century England, Europe, and North America, several figures must be considered. How their charitable work thrust the gospel into the societies of both England and the young United States of America should not be forgotten or underestimated.

The first of these was George Ferdinand Muller [also spelled Müller or Mueller], who was born in Kroppenstedt, Kingdom of Prussia (now Saxony-Anhalt Germany) and later moved to England. In 1829, Muller offered to work with Jews in England through the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. He gained his fame as a man who cared for 10,024 orphans during his life time and provided educational opportunities for them. He not only preached the gospel but also established 117 schools which offered Christian education to more than 120,000 children. In England, he associated himself with the Pilgrim Brethren Church. He and his wife, Mary Groves, had four children, two of which were stillborn.

The New Orphan Houses in the Ashley Down district of Bristol, England.
Image: The George Müller Charitable Trust/Wikimedia Commons

Muller, after early bouts of illness, and the death of his wife, in 1871 married again. His second wife was Susannah Grace Sanger. Together, beginning in 1871, they began a 17–year period of missionary travel that took them to the United States of America, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Palestine, the Straits of Malacca, and New Zealand. When in the U.S.A., he was welcomed by the President of the United States of America. He died at the age of 93 on March 1898 and has been honored throughout the world ever since as the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England and the care of 10,024 orphans over the years, and as man who never asked for support for his work but when support was given by churches and individuals, he kept account of it and wrote “Thank You” letters to every donor. His example defies any estimate.

This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Simultaneous to the years of Muller’s life was the ministry of Frances Willard, the founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which challenged the liquor industry in the countryside and urban areas of both the frontier and growing cities. Willard was not only a stalwart defender of women’s rights but also one of the earliest of Christians to see the mission of God within the socio-cultural context and thus living out the ministry of Jesus as spelled out in the tenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At the same time the Society of Friends and many of the Mennonites and Moravians were binding the wounds of soldiers and were given exemption from military service and recognized as peace churches, an exemption which exists into the present.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839 –1898).
Image: Gamaliel Bradford (1919) Houghton Mifflin Company/Wikimedia Commons

Simultaneously in this era the Congregationalists, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Methodist churches established schools for Native Americans. After a childhood of abuse and impoverishment, William Apess [originally spelled Apes] served as a soldier in the United States army during the War of 1812, became a Christian and entered into the ministry of the Methodist Church. He rose to fame as a preacher and as a lecturer giving protest of the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest, published in 1829, was the first published by a Native American writer. In 2014, Philip F. Gura, with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote a biography of William Apess. This writer owns a copy of Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot. During the years of both his ministry and his series of lectures, he gained support from churches outside of the Methodists and public recognition. Slowly but surely, co-operation among churches of Arminian and Reformed backgrounds brought them together in different areas of Christian ministry and mission outreach.

The Pietists had great impact within the colonies from the time of the Great Awakening and into the Second Great Awakening. In time, their influence was to lead to the formation of the Free Methodist Church, the Evangelical Free Church, and others who broke from synodical and presbyterian polities common among the Lutherans and Reformed Churches. It is against this background that Alexander Campbell during the Second Great Awakening welcomed any one of any Christian persuasion to participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. We are all “disciples of Christ,” he proclaimed. Barton Warren Stone, the “New Light Presbyterian” felt much the same but simply used the term “Christian” no matter a person be Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Lutheran, Moravian, Quaker, or Mennonite. The Anglican Church in America dropped the term “Anglican” from it vocabulary and re-named itself “Episcopal.” The Methodists in America under the leadership of Francis Asbury and others shortened their identity from “Methodist Episcopal” to simply “Methodist.”

In 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was formed. However, there were many precursors of such public charity, many from the earlier years of the Christian faith. Basil of Caesarea initiated the first hospital for the sick and feeble. In the Middle Ages, the Beguines, a laywoman’s ministry initiated in the pre-Reformation era, reached out to the neglected, the homeless, the lame, and the poor, and wrote devotional and theological works which made for conflict with some of the “professional” clergy. But of great significance to the Reformation era and the years of the global expansion of the gospel was the initiation of Sunday Schools by Hannah Ball in High Wycombe of England in the late 18^th century but carried further by Robert Raikes in 1780.

Robert Raikes the Younger (1736 –1811) promoted the Sunday school movement, raising awareness of a need for public education before state-run schools existed.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The start of the Sunday Schools began with a school for boys in the slums. Raikes had been involved with boys incarcerated at the count Poor Law which was part of the jails at the time. Raikes believed that vice would be better dealt with school as a preventive and held on Sundays as the boys were frequently enlisted to work in factories the other six days. The best available teachers were among the laity of the churches. The basic textbook was the Bible. The originally intended curriculum began with learning to read the Bible and then progressed to the catechism of the Anglican church. The first Sunday School class started in July of 1780 in the home of a Mrs. Meredith with boys and then extended to girls. By 1782 several other Sunday Schools opened around Gloucester, England.

On November 3, 1783, Raikes published an account of the Sunday Schools in the newspaper he started. Later news of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine and by 1784, a further account of the spread of the Sunday Schools appeared in a letter to the Arminian Magazine.

Children laboring in a cotton spinning factory in 1835.
Image: illustration from The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Little by little, Jesus’ great commission was being realized as a missionary mandate that was greater than proclamation and fulfilled the whole missionary made enunciated by Jesus and recorded in Matthew 25:35-40; 28:18-19; Luke 10:2-9; 18-20; and Acts 1:8, and universalized in Mark 16-18. The missionary mandate included healing the sick, discipleship, and entering the domain of the “serpent” to release the imprisoned, the afflicted, the haunted, the down-trodden,” and penetrate the darkness of the world with the light of a greater kingdom not of this world but of the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

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Lisa Sharon Harper is a follower of Jesus calling all followers of Jesus to love every person the same and seek their flourishing. PneumaReview.com speaks with her about her story and how God is inviting each of us to participate with him in making his Gospel of Peace real in our communities today.

PneumaReview.com: Please share with us some of your story. Where are you from? What Christian traditions do you most identify with? What have you been involved with for which you are most grateful to God?

Lisa Sharon Harper: To know me you must know my ancestors. God laid the foundations of who I am through them.

As a teenager, my mother was a member of the Philadelphia chapter of S.N.C.C. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) in the mid-1960s. Her job was to connect Stokely Carmichael and others, such as James Farmer, with churches to speak in when they came through town. Her branch of our family tree reaches through the great northern migration, to enslaved and indentured family members in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina as far back as 1650. Great grandfathers and uncles fought in every war this nation has ever seen; from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War to World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And one branch of the family, the Fortens of Philadelphia, served as primary financial backers of the abolitionist movement and helped build and lead the very first women’s equality gathering in Philadelphia in

My father was a member of C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality) in New York City. He attended the meeting where Freedom Summer participants were introduced: They were about to head to Mississippi to help register black Mississippians to vote. My father was considering joining Freedom Summer, but realized he needed to stay back and work for the summer. He met Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner at that meeting. My father’s father emigrated to the U.S. as a child joining his family in the South Bronx in New York City. They had arrived in waves over a period of years, directly following the United States’ annexation of the island. The earlier generation hailed from St. Kitts/Nevis where they were likely enslaved in extremely poor and brutal conditions. My great grandfather and his brother island-hopped looking for work throughout the turn of the century. His brother found work in Panama, building the canal.

My father’s mother was the daughter of an itinerate preacher who preached in all fifty states, according to family lore. She told me her father was college educated in British Guyana at the turn of the 20^th century. Most of her family, in fact, were college educated business people, she said. While the question of how black men were college educated businessmen in British Guyana at the turn of the century remains unclear. The Census revealed one clue: that my great grandfather was born in Holland and lived in a Dutch quarter of a French section of British Guiana.

The shocking parable of the Good Samaritan provides an example of how the church can be an agent of transformation. In this story from Luke 10, a despised minority person demonstrates God’s love and shows today’s Christians the essence of authentic social transformation.

Image: Romary / Wikimedia Commons.

The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the best-known and best-loved of Jesus’ parables. For many it has become the story of the archetypal good guy who unselfishly helps a stricken stranger. What is more, he does so at great personal expense and inconvenience and without the prospect of getting anything in return. To be sure the above portrayal is there, but the story is much more than that. In fact, beneath the story is a paradigm of how God wants those in His kingdom to affect their world.

A Lawyer’s Bold Question

The Lawyer’s Astute Answer, But Hidden Motive vv. 27-29

Without hesitation (I imagine), the lawyer quotes two verses that summarize the heart of the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind’ [Deut. 6:5]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” [Lev. 19:17]. His answer actually distills Israel’s covenantal responsibility to two all-encompassing principles of the Torah, i.e., to love God supremely and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus can hardly find fault with this answer. After all, on another occasion, the Pharisees asked Jesus to identify the greatest commandment in the Law, and he answered with the same two scriptures adding, “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (See Matt. 22: 37-40). Consequently, Jesus affirms the correctness of his answer and says, “Do this and you will live.”⁴ Nevertheless, the answer raises the fundamental dilemma for a Jew. Under the Law, the covenant responsibility of loving God is inseparable from loving ones neighbor as oneself. Jewish teachers tended to identify “neighbor” with “fellow countryman” (i.e., Israelite).⁵ However, the broader context of Moses’ instruction was given to all the congregation of Israel (Lev. 19:2) and dealt with how they were to conduct themselves as a “holy” people. This included how they were to treat the “stranger” (v. 10) in the land. The lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” is really asking, “To whom do I owe that covenantal love Moses spoke about?”

The power of personal faith in Christ changing people and society around them. A study in Luke 19:1-10 by James D. Hernando.

Zacchaeus by Niels Larsen Stevns / Wikimedia Commons.

The story of Zacchaeus is one of the most intriguing in Luke’s gospel—a literary masterpiece filled with vivid imagery, drama, and biting irony. It is the story of the conversion of an arch villain in Jewish society who has a transforming encounter with the Lord. But it also offers marvelous insight into how the church transforms society one converted sinner at a time.

Enter the Villain

Luke quickly opens his story by introducing the main character in the briefest fashion. However, English readers seldom catch the innuendo of the Greek syntax. “There was a man called by name Zacchaeus.” Luke is undoubtedly calling attention to the man’s name, which is derived from the Hebrew root¹ meaning “pure” or “acquitted one.” The irony leaps out from Luke’s pen with the ensuing words, “and he was a chief tax collector.” Tax collectors (Gk. telonai) were locals hired by cities and towns to collect taxes for the Romans. Zacchaeus was a “chief” tax collector (Gk. architelones), which meant he probably had supervision over a region and number of tax collectors. Luke’s words “and he was rich” would certainly not go unnoticed by Jews in Jesus’ day. The privilege of collecting taxes was offered at a steep price and those who held that job set tax rates that often exceeded by far any quotas demanded by Rome. While tax-collectors had no authority to confiscate funds or property, they held great leverage over the people as they could exact severe penalties by reporting tax delinquency to the Romans. This they often did whether the charge were true or not.² And so here Luke presents an arch villain who is ironically named. He was anything but someone of pure or blameless character; he was, in fact, the exact opposite of his name. Keep in mind also that “tax-collectors” were notorious for their corruption and the mere mention of their profession aligned them with “sinners.” (See Matt. 9:11; Mark 2:15f; Luke 5:30).

The Action of Zacchaeus

Loren Cunningham with Janice Rogers, The Book That Transforms Nations: The Power Of The Bible To Change Any Country (Seattle: YWAM Publishing, 2007), 252 pages, ISBN 1576583813.

Loren Cunningham is a man with a passion and a man with a mission to reach the nations; he is the founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) which is a major missionary sending organization. He began YWAM as the result of a vision that God had given him of young people going into the nations of the world, and this is what YWAM workers have done now for about 40 years.

In this book Cunningham says that he is part of a small group of people who can say that they have visited every nation in the world. He has thus had ample opportunity to see first-hand the positive influence that the bible can have in different cultural settings. A word of clarification is perhaps in order here. The title of this book includes the words “transforms” and “change.” In using these words Cunningham is not talking only about spiritual salvation; he is speaking about the changes that the bible can bring about in all the various parts of a culture. The implementation of the bible’s teachings can transform a nation’s politics, economics, etc.

In chapter one Cunningham recounts the story of a biblical people who had “lost the book.” The nation of Israel had gone into great decline, and then during the time of King Josiah the book of God was found in the Temple of the Lord. When the king and the people heard the words of the book they responded to its teachings and it brought great transformation to the nation. The premise of The Book That Transforms Nations is that many nations that have never heard God’s Word would be changed if they are exposed to it.

The book includes some brief histories of people who have changed nations such as William Carey and John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper and Hans Nielsen Hauge. Calvin and Carey might immediately be recognized as ministers, but their influence on the wider culture is not as well known. In this book Cunningham makes us aware of the great impact that these Christians had on the countries that they ministered in. They were influential because they applied the teachings of the bible to all of life.

In addition to chronicling some of the historic accomplishments in the nations Cunningham also writes about some more modern transformations of nations, such as South Korea. He also shares some stories of his experiences in various YWAM ministries throughout the world. The bible is a trans-cultural book that will work anywhere in the world.

One topic in the book that may be of special interest is found in part 3 “Transforming Truths From God’s Book.” Cunningham makes the point that the kind of god that people worship makes a difference. He sees the doctrine of the trinity as significant, because it speaks to unity and diversity which all people groups need in order to function well.

Cunningham gives some insight into how churches can assist in the process of bible translation, even if they are unfamiliar with the languages involved. This has the potential of having a lasting global impact as there are currently 2,644 languages that do not have a bible translation of their own.

Cunningham is a statesman of the modern missionary movement and should therefore be listened to. This book encourages us with what has been accomplished and exhorts us to participate in transforming the world by bringing the bible to the nations.

Reviewed by John P. Lathrop