• Global ministry celebrates 70 years: In 1955, Brother Andrew began a work that this year celebrates its 70^th anniversary, as the organization Open Doors.
• The hidden scale of the need: 380 million Christians face persecution worldwide—1 in 7 believers.
• What Open Doors does today: Open Doors strengthens persecuted Christians worldwide through comprehensive support programs including Bible distribution, discipleship training, pastoral development, and presence ministry in the most restricted and dangerous places.

ORANGE, Calif., July 29, 2025 — In the summer of 1955, a young Dutch missionary named Andrew van der Bijl loaded a suitcase with Bibles and drove toward the Iron Curtain. What he found behind those borders changed everything: Christians who thought the world had forgotten them.

That first journey of “God’s Smuggler” launched what would become Open Doors—and revealed a truth that still drives the ministry as it celebrates its 70^th anniversary. Persecuted Christians need more than just Bibles. They need everything.

When governments or fringe groups restrict religious freedom, they don’t just ban Bibles—they block Christians from jobs, education, and community life. Open Doors’ response has grown to match. What began with Bible smuggling has evolved into a sophisticated global network addressing every aspect of persecution, providing everything from medical care and trauma healing to discipleship training, legal advocacy to economic development.

Beyond Smuggling: Meeting Every Need

Image: Vladimir Zuhovitsky

Brother Andrew, as he became known, began with Scripture. But as his ministry grew across Europe and beyond, other needs emerged that were just as critical. Isolated church leaders needed training. Families driven from their homes needed food and shelter. Children faced with discrimination needed educational support. Believers under surveillance needed safe spaces to gather.

Brother Andrew and his growing network of friends didn’t have anything like the skills and resources for this scale of a challenge. So they started praying, and sought to keep being faithful to the next thing.

This past year alone, the organization they began has achieved things that are a true “loaves and fishes” story when one thinks back to Andrew’s little suitcase full of Bibles. In 2024, Open Doors reached 9.5 million persecuted Christians in 70+ countries. The statistics tell a remarkable story of expansion: 5.7 million people received biblical training and discipleship. 2.5 million received Bibles and Christian literature. More than 535,000 received socio-economic support. Another 542,000 received advocacy support.

“Brother Andrew’s mission has undoubtedly changed the world,” said Open Doors US CEO Ryan Brown. “One man, through Christ alone, made an irreversible impact wherever he went. That’s how Open Doors started—and it’s how it continues today.”

When Faith Costs Everything

The need has never been greater. Today, 380 million Christians—1 in 7 believers worldwide—face persecution for their faith. In some countries, owning a Bible can mean execution or life in a concentration camp. Yet believers still risk everything to read Bibles buried under trees, awakening in the dead of night to gather in secret.

And when people have this kind of courage, Open Doors is there to make sure they aren’t alone — with an approach mirroring the comprehensive nature of persecution itself.

The Legacy Continues

In the biblical verse that launched Brother Andrew’s mission—“Strengthen what remains and is about to die” (Revelation 3:2)—persecuted Christians found hope. In Open Doors’ comprehensive response, they find practical support that helps them not just survive, but thrive as witnesses in their communities.

As Open Doors marks its 70th anniversary, the mission that began with one man’s courage continues through thousands of supporters who understand a simple truth: when someone comes alongside you in your darkest moments, everything changes.

Today, that “someone” continues coming for 380 million persecuted Christians worldwide.

About Open Doors

Open Doors works in the world’s most oppressive regions, strengthening Christians to stand strong in the face of persecution and equipping them to share the gospel in their communities. Since Brother Andrew started the work in 1955, the ministry has mobilized prayer, support and advocacy for Christians living in places where faith in Jesus can be costly. Now working in more than 70 countries around the world, Open Doors is committed to standing with persecuted Christians through Bible distribution, training and socio-economic aid. Learn more at opendoorsus.org.

Missionary-scholar Jim Harries argues that the wide differences between the West and the Rest are being ignored by anti-racist strategies. These misunderstandings are perpetuating dependencies in the majority world and stunting sustainable development. However, there is a way forward, a path of humility that rejects colonialism and embraces real equality.

Abstract

Strategies designed by Western nations to counter racism can conceal difference between non-Western and Western peoples. Such concealment results in a misleading obscuring of social reality outside of the West. Because the globalised world is dominated by European languages and scholarship, non-Western academics can be forced to plan their strategies for socio-economic development in the light of contexts and peoples other than their own. By preventing development in the majority world this provides a back door to the ongoing stoking of racist thinking in the West. “Anti-racist” strategies in the West and the tidal spread of globalisation seem at the moment to be relentless. This article suggests that Christian champions practicing vulnerable mission make a contribution taking us towards a society more accepting of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity that can understand rather than condemn difference. Once understood, difference can be compensated for and appreciated rather than ignored.

Introduction

Image: Sergey Pesterev

This article links two issues which are frequently addressed separately—development for the poor in the majority world (with a focus on Africa) and anti-racist strategies in the West. The author, who is British born and raised but has lived in Africa since 1988, points to an antagonism between the above two: policies designed to counter racism are oriented to ignoring consequential cultural differences that fall along racial lines. Such ignoring frustrates efforts at majority world development.

The first section looks at the roots of racial thinking and its ongoing impact in global perspective. It finds that a self-deception on the part of the West, perhaps arising from its “shame”[1] over a history of racist thinking and policy, is undermining the efficacy of scholarship about “the other.” This in turn is skewing strategies pertaining to international and intercultural relationships, including development intervention in the majority world. There has been a “rise of claims to global knowledge in the contemporary world,” according to James.[2] I interpret James as telling us that the contemporary Western world these days considers itself to be well informed about human societies beyond its shores. It does so in part since the Western world conducts much well-funded anthropological and other research. Unfortunately, such research may follow over-simplified models of translation from indigenous languages of the majority world. These models often arose from work in Bible translation,[3] but have in extension of their use resulted in insensitivity to indigenous cultures.[4]

The West, through interpreting non-Western ways of life according to its own categories has perceived non-existent similarities. Visitors to the majority world, missionaries included, can be determined at all costs to find the “sameness” that they are told back home should exist. This renders them impervious to signals that point to massive and deep cultural differences. Because the way in which majority world cultures are different from Western ones is consequential to their economic and social development, development strategies that ignore these differences are constantly frustrated. Through contributing to the perpetuation of poverty in Africa, the undermining of development aggravates racist thinking in Africa, which impacts back in the West.

The second section seeks for solutions to the above scenario. The option of doing nothing could be disastrous. This author advocates for champions operating based on vulnerable mission. Champions are people who dedicate themselves to intercultural service on behalf of others. The term vulnerable mission refers to ministry using indigenous languages and resources.  Champions practicing vulnerable mission buck the system by expressing a deep love for and commitment to people in the majority world as they are, rather than as they ought to be according to the West.

The author’s personal experience in Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa should be borne in mind as a backdrop to this discussion.

Black people referred to herein are predominantly those of sub-Saharan origin, including some now living in Europe or the United States. Whites described are those originating from Europe or the United States, some of whom are living in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cultural Linguistics

 I will in this article draw on very recent work on ‘cultural linguistics’. Sharifian, a self-proclaimed leader in this field,[5] draws heavily on research into Aboriginal people in Australia. Genetic evidence points to Aboriginal origins in Africa, their having left Africa separately and prior to European and Asian peoples.[6] Cultural similarities remain between them and African people, as observed by some visitors,[7] and as is clear from scholarly descriptions.[8]

“Cultural linguistics,” according to Sharifian “explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualisation.”[9] Such “exploration brings to the surface ‘differences’ and arising issues that were not previously visible.”[10] Whereas it has traditionally been thought that learning a language required knowing words and their meanings, Sharifian points out that “cultural conceptualisations … underlie the use of human language.”[11] These conceptualisations that arise from a people’s culture, mean that two people coming from different cultural communities can use the same language very differently. This applies even if they say the same words. Sharifian found Australians who, “because they sounded like speakers of Australian English, were not identified by their teachers as Aboriginal English speakers,” yet, “English words such as family, home, and shame evoked cultural conceptualisations in these students that were quite different from those of Australian English speakers.”[12] For Aboriginal people, for example, contrary to the understanding of Western people, land is a living being.[13] This is strikingly similar to the understanding of land held by Luo people in western Kenya, for whom land can speak (piny owacho), can die (piny otho), and can be us (wan e piny).

Hidden but ‘real’ differences between Africans and Westerners

African people can sometimes be surprised by portrayals they receive through the media of fellow blacks who have emigrated to and live in the West. That is, the way they are depicted may be contrary to expectations at home in Africa. To some extent this may be because blacks who have migrated to the West have adapted and become “Westernised.” Additionally, I suggest, it arises from determined efforts by Westerners not to represent people of African origin as “inferior.” Since Westerners implicitly understand “inferior” behaviour to be any that is “not-western,” these efforts are in effect to depict them as behaving essentially no differently than white Westerners.

Handling issues of racial identity is a big concern in Western nations. Robert Young explains that not so long ago different (especially black) races were looked upon by the West almost as if they were different inferior species (“types”).[14] According to Neville Alexander, race replaced religion as the main social status differentiator in British society in about 1806.[15] The West is still trying to recover from the reverberations arising from its legacy of scientific racism. In reaction to this past the West has developed an extreme sensitivity to any portrayal of Africans that one could interpret as implying their inferiority.

African people tend to be monistic in their thinking.[16] That is: Africans typically make a much less clear distinction between the spiritual and the material than do Westerners.[17] Such has certain out workings. It results in a holistic approach to problem solving: if problems (i.e. misfortune) are caused by “spiritual agents” then they need to be resolved by prayer, the shedding of animal blood, the following of customary law codes, etc.[18] When Africans who live in the West are depicted as using Western reasoning to solve problems, those who remain in Africa ask themselves whether that depiction is accurate.

Any attempt at providing evidential support for hidden difference will need to draw on contextual contributors largely invisible to Westerners, but very evident to many Africans. This is what Sharifian refers to as conceptualisations that are associated with a language, which are peculiar to a culture. The Luo people of Western Kenya have a term jochiende that refers to a cause of negative feelings in living people that are linked to less than positive experiences of people who are at the time already deceased. For example, a girl who dies childless could bring misfortune to a living woman. The term jochiende is commonly translated into English as ‘spirits’. English speaking people who come across the term ‘spirits’ and consider themselves already to have an understanding of what they are will be missing specifically African conceptualisations. Luo people, who may also take spirits as the English translation of jochiende, can remain largely unaware of Westerners’ assumptions that arise from their understanding that jochiende = spirits.[19]

The message given at a Pentecostal church I attended in Kenya regarding dealing with your past seemed to be strongly akin to ways in which counsellors in the West endeavour to help people to come to terms with prior experiences. Paying careful attention to what was going on in this church however revealed that the actual targets of the preacher’s message were the ancestral spirits that were troubling the congregation. The service turned out to be a massive exercise in exorcism involving 90% of the congregation. People’s relationships with their ancestors are complex and rooted in numerous traditions. Dealing with ancestors implicitly brought all that profound complexity onto the scene. To have depicted those African people to be dealing with their past, in the way that this English phrase seems to suggest when used in western circles in England, would have been failing to grasp local conceptualisations.[20]

Questioning African people’s capabilities as scientists could be considered a very racist position. Yet “In contrast to the classic European, the Negro African does not draw a line between himself and the object … Thus the Negro African … abandons his personality to become identified with the Other … he lives in symbiosis [with it]”.[21] A foundation for science, is that it is practiced by people who in some way endeavour to separate themselves out from the objects that they are studying. How can an African person do this if he “does not draw a line between himself and the object” (as cited above)? In so far as Senghor is right, an African person’s capabilities in science must be limited or at least different from that of a typical westerner. To claim that this is not the case is misleading untruth.

Shamala tells us that ceremony is “the bedrock to African Obuntu [i.e. communalism].”[22] “Ceremony denotes … the presence of the departed,” Shamala adds, linking to our point from the church service above.^[23] The love for ceremony does not suddenly end when Africans leave their homeland to live in the West. It will continue in the West. Western people who do not perform such regular ceremonies tend to ignore such goings on amongst Africans living in their midst. Could ignoring such be doing many Africans a great injustice?

A lady who had for many years lived in South Africa approached me a few years ago. She explained that the standard of English of many South Africans is far too poor for them to submit their writing as it is to their professors. They are obliged to use people like her (a native English speaker) to radically re-work what they have done before submission. The level of editing she was doing for South African students was high. That reminded me of comments I have often heard from British friends of African students studying in the UK telling me things like: “I told my friend what to write,” or even, “I wrote something for my friend, because it was obvious that he would not get his degree without my help.”

My final piece of evidential support for difference comes from a fascinating if frustrating experience that I had on accompanying a North American colleague visiting a Kenyan in the USA, who had already lived for a number of years in the USA. The difference between my engagement with that Kenyan, and that of my North American colleague, was to me very striking. My American colleague treated the Kenyan (I have lived in Kenya, engaging very closely with indigenous people, since 1993) as if he was American. He ignored endless ‘Kenyanisms’ that I was constantly perceiving. For example, my American friend told the Kenyan that I wash in the traditional way. The Kenyan articulated with his hands, a movement like that of throwing water over oneself with one’s hands. My American friend did not recognise this movement, or the implications that someone who washes in that way is somehow ‘primitive’ or of the lower classes. This Kenyan was not very impressed by the way in which I lived with his fellow countrymen in Kenya – something to which my American colleague remained oblivious. I was very aware that the tribe that I live with tends to be despised by this American Kenyan’s tribe. My American friend was oblivious as to how this inter-tribal relationship profoundly detracted from the development of good rapport between myself and this American Kenyan. My American friend was oblivious to endless conceptualisations attached to my Kenyan colleague’s English.[24]

I hope the above provide sufficient evidential support for ways in which the West is determined to ignore ways in which African people differ from them. It is drawn from personal experience, and in each case depicts insights hidden from regular Westerners. It is because the above bases for difference are hidden that they are easily ignored by the West.

Anti-racist policies in the West contribute to the ignorance of Westerners

Samuel Tshehla once observed that globalisation can be the global spread of provincialism.[25] While the West may believe that globalisation enables a flow of information to and from all corners of the globe, the reality is that information flow is rather heavily from the West to the rest.[26] The evidence for this in fact is rather overwhelming. The influence of the Western film industry is enormous globally. So is the influence of Western academia.[27] Western news media are translated into numerous languages and listened to almost everywhere around the world. Can poorer countries have a voice in the global world? Gayatra Spivak’s study of majority world women concludes that they, along with subalterns (the global poor and “underprivileged”) in general, “cannot speak.”[28]

A general concealing of cultural differences contributes significantly to this unidirectional flow of information.[29] Westerners are deceiving themselves into the belief that concealed differences between cultures, such as those between dualistic (Western) and monistic (African) ways of understanding, do not exist. To use Sharifian’s language, they “conceptualise the source domain in terms of the target domain,” that is, they assume monistic conceptualisations simply to be equal to Western ones. To restate that: Major efforts being made in the West by all kinds of organisations and institutions to conceal cultural difference by means such as positive discrimination and other strategies, can end up misleading the population of the West itself. Westerners can believe that conceptualisations that are concealed from view have disappeared.

If the general populous in the West is misinformed by the above mechanisms, then it is likely that policy makers and academics are making decisions on a misinformed basis. We must ask; can Western scholars writing about Africa, including those advocating for particular means towards social-economic development, be trusted?[35] Were the impact of their scholarly study to be clearly visible and receiving feedback from genuine intercultural experience, then the reality of the context could be preventing them from going too far astray. The outcome of research on Africa arising from Western scholarship could be more reliable if the Western scholars doing the research were on an ongoing basis deeply immersed in African contexts and languages. This cannot be happening if a Western scholar writes about the other (say indigenous African people) on the basis of a misguided assumption that what he or she appears to find in the West will also be found in Africa, while fearing that to suggest otherwise could bring an accusation of racism. In reality, many scholars draw for their research on the writings of other scholars and short-term relatively shallow interaction in Africa confined almost universally to engagement in European languages.[36] While they may draw on what the others (in our case Africans) have written about themselves, this writing typically being in English is limited for reasons outlined above.

As well as Western people being determined not to find differences in the course of their exploration of Africa, Africans may well attempt to conceal that about themselves which is different from Westerners. This could be for many reasons, and I can only touch briefly on a few here. 1. They are unlikely to want their visitors to receive confirmation of the once-held notion that Africa is a dark continent with all that this implies.[37] 2. African people prefer as far as possible to themselves control the interventionist strategies proposed by their visitors. If “the problem of Africa” is in the behaviour of the African people themselves, this implies that Westerners should be in charge of the many foreign-funded projects that are designed to “put Africa right.” It is understandable that African people get tired of having their affairs run by outsiders.[38] This makes it often in African people’s interests (at least in the short term) to deny extant difference in order to be given charge of whatever project is at hand, even if this means that the project concerned may not function as was intended and may instead “fail.”[39] The high rate of “failure” of projects in Africa is a known concern.[40]

Because Western countries do not sit high and dry from the rest of the world, issues that affect the majority world, including Africa, come back to them through new immigration, the media, travellers, migrants, the globalised communication system and other means.

Strategies for dealing with “anti-racism” in the West, in global perspective

We have seen above how “anti-racist” policies in the West are causing considerable confusion in Africa (and quite likely the majority world as a whole). I now want to look at possible resolutions to the stark picture painted above.

The barriers (many mentioned above) to the circumvention of our problem are so enormous as to appear at the moment to be insurmountable. There is a place for those who attempt to challenge the status quo both in the academic and in the political arena. The people who will do so will, as things appear at the moment, have an uphill struggle.

A lot of research has in recent decades been done into what is the appropriate choice of language for education.[48] Contrary to apparently widely assumed wisdom, it is believed by researchers to be in the interests of majority world people’s intellectual development for them to use their own language (typically their mother tongue) for as long as possible in the educational process.[49] Westerners working with a people using the people’s own language can help them appreciate and value it. They can help in the growth and expansion of that language. They can thus add directly and indirectly but powerfully to the prospects of a people’s intellectual development. Working with a non-Western people using a Western language undermines the non-western people’s competency in their own tongue. I refer those who consider Africa’s problems to be that it has too many languages to the writings of Prah.[50] One cause of the ongoing failure of African languages to thrive is the smothering effect of subsidised Western languages like a blanket for formal purposes over African communities.

An outsider’s refusal to subsidise his key activity with foreign resources will enhance local productivity and reduce the production of dependence. If outsiders can do something using local resources, then so should local people be able to imitate them without becoming dependent in an unhealthy way on outside donations.

Disquiet expressed in this article can be considered to be part of a wider category of post-colonial concerns. The post-colonial legacy in parts of Africa, when examined closely, can be extremely discouraging. This article is an attempt at encouraging Christians (and others) in the West to develop an awareness of such concerns. Considered from within the West, racially based bias is clearly the bad guy. From a global perspective, if as appears to be the case non-Western races are often foundationally culturally different from Westerners, trying to avoid racially based bias can result in the spreading of types of knowledge that do not have a fit to local understanding.

This article, especially through drawing on linguistic insights, proposes that committed individuals are key to finding solutions to some of the world’s problems. Sufficiently committed individuals in focus here are those inspired by their faith in Christ. It is very difficult for those not so inspired to achieve the standards here advocated.

This article does not claim to present the silver bullet required to resolve global issues. Interrelationships in today’s world are such that a change in one area has implications everywhere else. Yet, a renewed look at the race-question in global perspective is an important piece to be considered in the process of unravelling deep contemporary injustices in the interests of building a better society for tomorrow.

What “champions” are able to do, once they have acquired sufficient understanding, includes sharing beneficial information from the wider world with people who are disenfranchised. They may be able, through a careful process of translation in the light of the local context and language, to share benefits of Western academia, literacy, history,  the experiences of other cultures, religious traditions, and so forth—things that otherwise remain trapped in foreign languages and traditions.[52] By doing this, a “champion” will empower a community to resist the attack of globalisation by building their own capacity and literacy.

Should foreign (non-Western) communities be able to develop their own innate competencies, then clearly this will reduce the competence gap between them and the West. This in turn will undermine racism, reduce numbers of migrants, and perhaps do so much more effectively than current “anti-racist” regulations.

Producing champions

Given that dominant models of intervention into the Majority World have been found wanting (Africa certainly being a case in point), we have suggested a need for “champions.” This raises the question of how one is to find these “champions” who can follow the alternative “vulnerable” means of intervention here advocated?

I have above narrowed the defining characteristic of a champion as being the practice of vulnerable mission, which is itself defined as the use of local languages and local resources in ministry to the people being reached. This has in the past usually happened by default rather than through purposeful intention. However, recent colonial and neo-colonial conditions increasingly give potential Western champions a choice. Such a champion (i.e. missionary) should remember the Spirit-given example set in Acts 2:11, in which every person in Jerusalem at the time heard the Gospel in his or her own language. Acts 22:2 gives a clear example of how Paul’s knowledge of the mother-tongue of a very aggressive mob that wanted to lynch him enabled him to share the gospel with them. Acts 14:8–20 is a little more complex: Paul and Barnabas’ preaching to the Lystran people without first having learned their language resulted in a very serious misunderstanding, as a result of which instead of being able to communicate about God, they were taken as being gods. Could this passage represent a way of warning would-be missionaries not to engage in serious ministry until they have a grasp of indigenous tongues?

The overt motivation for a lot of the use of outside resources by Western missionaries in Africa in recent decades has been compassion. Western missionaries who have perceived problems of poverty, ill-health, hunger, morbidity, infant mortality, and so on chose to invest western resources into communities that they have been reaching. This has led to many problems, not least unhealthy dependency and a very widespread prosperity gospel in much of the continent of Africa and beyond. Careful consideration of Christ’s own approach to mission and ministry (reflected in the Christian Scriptures) reveals that Jesus did not hand out material resources as a means to boost his ministry. He rejected that option in a very overt way through his refusing the temptation by the devil to turn stones into bread (Lk 4:3–4). Later, after Jesus had fed thousands, he had to walk-away from both them and his disciples to avoid being given political office by force (Jn 6:15). While Jesus taught people to be compassionate (and he had compassion for those who suffered) we do not find him raising funds abroad so as to initiate projects in the way that has become common practice in mission in recent decades. I believe that his failing to initiate such “projects” was intentional. It allowed him to identify with communities as a champion. Such practice on the part of Christ himself is often known in Christian doctrine as his incarnation.

Impacts of champions can be widespread even if not always visible. I want to give just a few simple examples from personal experience, having lived and worked amongst Africans since 1988. In one instance, a local church had invited me to share in some door-to-door ministry in a part of Tanzania. When it was time to leave, a motorised rickshaw was sent to pick us up. I got in and said nothing. My hosts paid for my trip back. I was told that a few years earlier they would have expected a white person like myself to pay for my own trip. My failure to offer to pay transformed me from an agent from the outside into a servant under local leadership, who could potentially be entrusted with sensitive local information. Another example involves the fact that outside speakers coming into western Kenya are usually ignorant of a very pernicious problem troubling local people. The problem is known locally as chira. This Luo-language term represents the outcome of people’s failure to follow ancestral decree. Outsiders’ unfamiliarity with the details of what causes chira can prevent outsiders from intelligently articulating and dealing with it. My own position of having learned the Luo language and culture in-depth, and my ability to communicate using the same language enabled me to apply healing balm in the form of Christian teaching to this gaping wound.[55]

I can illustrate how one may as a result of being better informed apply ‘healing balm’ by way of an example: Chira, suffering caused by sin, for the Luo people in many ways resembles AIDS. Telling people that AIDS is not caused by sin is either to radically re-define sin, or to be 180 degrees in contradiction with an incredibly deeply held belief and fear. Correct Christian teaching has, to my understanding, to find a more profound and helpful ways of understanding and dealing with sin than simply to deny that it causes misfortune such as chira / AIDS.

I believe that it is Christian teaching, the full depth of which has only been touched upon in the above few paragraphs, that by the power of God’s Spirit produces true champions. The deep influence of Christian teaching in the West over many centuries continues to influence our era. As a result, even many Western people who no longer confess Christ have been so profoundly affected by this kind of ethic as to be able also to appreciate the role of champions. The closer people are to their Christian roots, the more likely they will be able to appreciate the role of champions. The church can, through the production of champions, begin to counter the problems identified in this article that are brought on by “anti-racist” strategies that run on the basis of ignorance of the impact of conceptualisations on language use, in the West today.

Conclusion

Scholarship in the West that looks at inter-cultural relationships, especially those involving Africa, is found in this article to have been seriously undermined by strategies that are intended to counter racist thinking. This undermining has resulted in a skewing away from contextual truth in the planning of projects and programmes of all sorts oriented to the facilitating of development and healthy international relationships. Because this hampers or even prevents socio-economic development from occurring amongst many people outside of the West, it in turn accentuates unhealthy racist thinking in the West through the perpetuation of endless scenarios of apparently racially-based inferiority. The skewing of scholarship caused by “anti-racist” strategies is also found to conceal the importance of specifically Christian mission activities, such as the need for Christian discipleship.

Either the rate of globalisation should be slowed, legislation countering racism in the West withdrawn, or some means found to help to facilitate strategies that counter poverty that are drawn up in the light of non-Western conceptualisations. Because the likelihood that globalisation will be slowed or “anti-racist strategies” will be annulled in the West looks small, I have suggested another means by which enlightened Westerners can cut through the current screen of deception regarding race in their relationships with Majority World people. They may become champions who work on the basis of the practice of vulnerable mission. Such champions will become a cutting edge for new strategies that do take serious account of extant conditions in the promotion of socio-economic development in the majority world. Once such new strategies gain traction, they will reduce the apparent level of incompetence of majority world nations. Raising the capacity of Majority World people so that they can function effectively in their own contexts will remove the back door of feedback from outside of the West (including new immigration) which currently continues to fuel racist thinking inside the West. The Christian church in the West is well equipped to play a role in raising champions that can empower people in the majority world.

PR

Notes

[1] Nancy Lynne Westfield, “Teaching for Globalised Consciousness: Black Professor, White Student and Shame,” Black Theology: An International Journal 2, no. 1 (January 2004): 73.

[2] Wendy, James, ‘Introduction. Whatever Happened to the Enlightenment?’ in The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formulations. Wendy James, (ed.) London: Routledge, 1995, 1-14, 2.)

[3] https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2016/11/02/translation/

[4] Bible translation operates on the basis of an assumption of ongoing divine inspiration which means that the divine can use translations of his ‘living words’ to speak truthfully to a wide variety of linguistic communities. So called ‘secular’ translation has I suggest falsely presupposed that divine action to be universal to almost all translated texts.

[5] Farzad Sharifian, Cultural Linguistics. Amsterdam/PA: John Benjamins, 2017, 9.

[6] https://phys.org/news/2016-09-unprecedented-aboriginal-australians-africa-migration.html

[7] In conversations about traditions, it turned out that there were surprising similarities in the lives of the Aborigines and the Maasai – for instance in circumcision ceremonies. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/911809.stm

[8] Sharifian’s descriptons of Australian Aborigenes’ ways of life have striking parallels with that, from personal experience and much reading, of many African peoples. (Farzad Sharifian, ‘On Cultural Conceptualisations’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3(3), 2003, 187-209, 194-198.)

[9] Sharifian, Farzad, (ed) 2015, ‘Cultural Linguistics’, 473-492 in: Sharifian, Farzad, (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 473.

[10] Sharifian, Farzad, 2017, Cultural Linguistics. Amsterdam/PA: John Benjamins, 36.

[11] Sharifian Cultural, 21.

[12] Sharifian Cultural, 194.

[13] Sharifian Cultural, 55.

[14] Robert C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge, 1995, 13, 15, 117.

[15]  Neville Alexander, “An Introduction to Perceptions and Conceptions of ‘Race’ in South Africa,” in Racism in the Global African Experience, ed. Kwesi Kwaa Prah, Cape Town: CASAS, 2006), 129–141, 130.

[16] Jim Harries, Secularism and Africa: in the light of the Intercultural Christ, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2015.

[17] In this, as many other cultural features, Australian Aboriginals appear to be very similar to African people, hence finding any difference between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘real’ to be invalid (Sharifian Cultural, 42).

[18] Note that “Aboriginal people [as Africans] sometimes use words such as spirit and spiritual when talking about ‘beings’ in their worldview, as a communicative strategy to facilitate somehow non-Aboriginal people’s understanding of experiences that draw on the Aboriginal worldview” (Sharifian, Cultural, 42.)

[19] See also Sharifian Cultural, 201.

[20] Sharifian Cultural, 168.

[21] Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism, London: Frederick A. Praeger. 1964, 72.

[22] Lucas Shamala, The Practice of Obuntu among the Abaluyia of Western Kenya: A Paradigm for Community Building. Saabruecken, Germany: VDM Verlag 2008, 135, 54.

[23] Shamala, 10.

[24] I encourage my reader to go to Sharifian Cultural in order to grasp what I mean by conceptualisations.

[25] Samuel M. Tshehla, “’Can Anything Good Come out of Africa?’  Reflections of a South African Mosotho Reader of the Bible,’” Journal of African Christian Thought 5, no. 1 (2002): 15–24, 23.

[26] I would argue that a lot of what might be supposed to be the flow of information from the non-West to the West is more accurately a reflection back of what the West wants/expects or is able to hear from the non-West; hence not a non-West to West flow but West to West.

[27] Hans de Wit, “Africa Must Lead Innovation in Higher Education Internationalisation,” University World News: The Global Window on Higher Education, no. 239 (September 16, 2012).  http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120912160836275&

[28] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ”Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271–313, 308.

[29] Jim Harries, “Racism in Reverse: the impact of the West on racism in Africa.’ In: Jim Harries, Vulnerable Mission: Insights into Christian Mission to Africa from a Position of Vulnerability, Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2011, 163–184, 175–176.

[30]  Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Post-colonial Studies,” Interventions  13/1 (2011): 1–12, 7.

[31]  Jim Harries, Communication in Mission and Development: Relating to the Church in Africa, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013, 106–124.

[32] Andreas Musolff, ‘Metaphors: sources for intercultural misunderstanding?’ International Journal of Language and Culture, 11, (2014), 42-59, 48.

[33]  Aidan W. Southall, “History and the Discourse of Underdevelopment among the Alur of Uganda,” in The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formulations, ed. Wendy James, London: Routledge, 1995, 45–57, 51.

[34]  Benjamin Graves, précis of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”  http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/poldiscourse/spivak/spivak2.html

[35] “The fact that scholarship is tradition-bound, in such a way that the cultures and societies create their own scholarship, which speaks to the experience of their societies, remains lost on us till the present day” (Kwesi Kwaa Prah, The African Nation: the state of the nation, Cape Town: CASAS, 2006, 114.)

[36] Thiong’o comments on this in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd., 1981, 6–8.

^[37] See the above account of the church service in which African people were told to exorcise those aspects of their past that might hold them back from being modern and prosperous. By faith, people who have gone through such an experience, believe their past and traditions to be ‘gone’.

[38] Aboriginal people in Australia have a different problem. Whereas many African people want it to be known that they no longer have a ‘a culture’ and so can run their own affairs, Aboriginal people point to their culture as the source of their authority in modern-day Australia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06UpQQQ7cBM

^[39] Although what constitutes a failed project for Westerners may not be so understood by Africans: David Maranz, African Friends and Money Matters: Observations from Africa, Dallas: SIL International, 2001, 151.

[40] Andrei Schleifer, “Paul Bauer and the Failure of Foreign Aid,” Cato Journal  29/3 (Fall 2009): 379–390.

[41] See David Maranz, African Friends and Money Matters: Observations from Africa., Dallas: SIL International, 2001, 9.

[42] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmann’s Publishing Company, 1983, 32.

[43] Wolterstorff 32.

[44] Neville Alexander, ‘English Unassailable but Unattainable: the dilemma of language policy in South African Education.’ Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the International Federation for the Teaching of English, University of Warwick, England, UK, July 7-10, 1999, 6. http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=ED444151 (accessed 28.08.08).

[45] Jean Johnson of World Mission Associates (USA) is particularly concerned about this kind of unhealthy dependency: http://www.missionexus.org/counterproductive/

[46] Robert A. White, “Research on Communication for Development in Africa: Current Debates,” African Communication Research 2/2 (2009): 203–252, 218.

[47] For examples, see http://www.jim-mission.org.uk/articles/index.html

[48] Allan Pitman, Suzanne Majhanovich, and Birgit Brock-Utne, “English as a Language of Instruction in Africa: Policy, Power, and Practice,” in Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa—Highlights from a Project, ed. Birgit Brock-Utne and others, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010, 1–10, 3.

[49] Kwesi Kwaa Prah, “The Burden of English in Africa: From Colonialism to Neo-colonialism,” (Keynote address presented to the department of English fifth international conference at the University of Botswana on the theme, Mapping Africa in the English-Speaking World, June 2–4, 2009, 9. See also Sharifian Cultural, 207-247.)

[50] Prah, “The Burden,” 5.

[51] Kwesi Kwaa  Prah, ”The Language of Development and the Development of Language in Contemporary Africa: The Challenge of African Development in the Context of Current Linguistic Realities and Dominant Knowledge in Applied Linguistics.” (Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Chicago, March 26–29, 2011), 11.

[52]  Martha A.S. Qorro, “Unlocking Language Forts: Language of Instruction in Post-primary Education in Africa—With Special Reference to Tanzania,” in Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa (LOITASA), ed. Brock-Utne and others, Dar-es-Salaam: E and D Limited, 2003, 187–196.

[53] Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, New York: Orbis Books, 1989, 174.

[54] A process that could take many years.

[55] A problem with both of my examples is that their full explanation would require a lot more contextual explanation than I can give in a limited space. This is of course exactly the difficulty that I am dealing with in this article. The examples illustrate what they cannot, given limitations of space, fully articulate.

[56] For more discussion on this see Jim Harries, From Theory to Practice in Vulnerable Mission: An Academic Appraisal, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2012, 94–111.

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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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. In Part 3, he invites us to learn more about the Quakers and other marginalized groups whose convictions had them following God on paths often disdained by other Christians.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, events were unfolding in England, Europe and North America that would change how the gospel message was being proclaimed. Although little was being done in the strict evangelical sense of proclaiming the message (kerygma), much was done in the area of the living out of the Christian message and in the complexion or appearance of the total church in Europe and especially in North America.

During this time, Southern Europe, especially along the Mediterranean coastline, remained dominantly Roman Catholic, from Portugal all the way to the Balkans and no further. The Balkans were strongly Orthodox within a growing Islamic presence. Slavic Europe, outside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was also Orthodox. Austria-Hungary and the Czech and Slovak areas remained Catholic but were quickly experiencing the effects of the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptist Radical Reformation. The Hussite Brethren, better known as the Moravians, were leaving for western Europe and then continuing to go overseas. However, similar Brethren bodies, such as the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Hutterian Brethren, remained. These had a significant impact on the Christian complexion of Eastern Europe outside of Russia.

To see the unfolding of the worldwide Christian mission, let us look at England and Germany in particular. First, there are two Englishmen worthy of attention, George Fox and William Penn.

George Fox was born on July 1624 in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicester, England, and is credited with being the founder of the Society of Friends, now known as the Quakers. By the time that he turned 19 years of age, he was conscious of an “inner voice” which evangelicals and Pentecostals would identify as the leading of the Holy Spirit. Fox became an assiduous student of the Bible. He was the first person on record to argue for the equality of women with men in the propagation of the gospel. In 1647, Fox began preaching publicly. He preached in fields and markets. He attracted gatherings of people who flocked to listen to his messages. At times, they gathered in houses after the services. Originally, the new believers referred to themselves as “Children of the Light” or “Friends of the Truth” and later still “Friends,” a term which continued to be in use along with “Quaker.” Fox became a public figure, but not of his own making. Officials were suspicious of him because of the stands he took on military service, the place of women in home and in public, and how the incarcerated and children should be treated.

George Fox refusing to take the oath at Houlker Hall, 1663. From a painting by John Pettie (1839-1893).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

At the same time, he gained approval from people in prominent positions: James Naylor, a prominent preacher in London, became one of Fox’s first converts to the Quaker position. By the end of the 1650s, the Society of Friends became more organized. The British Commonwealth under Cromwell in the 1650s was also the Friends’ most creative period. Even though the restoration of the monarchy was threatening for the Friends, now characterized as Quakers, it became the era when believers migrated to North America and settled in Puritan New England. The revolt in 1661 by the Fifth Monarchists led to the suppression of the Quakers and the repression of other dissenters, instigating an exodus. It was in the aftermath of the Fifth Monarchist coup that Fox and eleven other leaders among the Friends issued a statement which became known as “the peace testimony” from which stems their stand against military conscription.

A woman preaches during a Quaker Meeting in London (circa 1723), engraving by Bernard Picard (1673-1733).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Their stand against military conscription and for equality of rights between men and women in both civil matters and the ministry of the church. This did not sit well with many in either England or Puritan New England. When some of the New England Quakers came to London to plead their case, Fox met with them. After his release from prison in 1666 for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to the existing political regime in England, Fox set about normalizing a system of monthly and quarterly meetings throughout Great Britain, extending to Ireland’s Quaker population, a system which has persisted to this day. In 1669, Fox married a widow with eight children, Margaret, at a Quaker meeting in Bristol. They shared together in the administration the Society of Friends. In 1671, George and Margaret Fox embarked on a voyage to the West Indies and North America where they visited groups of Quakers who had earlier left England for Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland, and North Carolina. After the travels abroad, the Foxes returned to England. It was there that George and Margaret met with William Penn and Robert Barclay, men of wealth and position who became allied with the Friends.

In 1683, Penn, who had been granted land in North America, turned 1,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania to Fox and the Quakers. Although Fox was never able to visit for himself the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, he was overjoyed with what was granted. Penn, himself a Quaker, furthered the ministry within Pennsylvania. The Act of Toleration of 1689 put an end to the uniformity law under which the Friends and other dissenting Christians had been discriminated against and persecuted. It was a great day for Fox and the expanding Quaker movement, both within what would later become the United States of America, and in the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Germany. Fox died in January 13, 1691, soon after preaching at the Gracechurch Meeting House in London. He left a journal and letters and other writings which were subsequently published after his death. His name is immortalized at the prestigious George Fox University with campuses in Portland, Salem, Newberg, and Redmond, Oregon.

Of equal importance was the Quaker emphasis on the leading of God’s Holy Spirit in a person’s life and, thereby, an increase of Christian witness. The spiritual health of the witness is as important as the sermon that is preached. Walt Whitman, who was raised by parents inspired by Quaker principles, wrote of George Fox: “George Fox stands for something too—a thought—the thought that wakes in silent hours—perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the immortality of identity” (Prose Works, Philadelphia, David McKay, 1892). Modern Christians have taken seriously the writings of Elton Trueblood, who for years taught at Earlham University in Indiana, on how Christians are yoke-fellows in Christ’s work of outreach and ministry. This writer has met Dr. Trueblood in person at a meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, around 1956, at the Texas Christian University.

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

The work of Richard Foster, who inspired the Renovaré moment and the Renovaré Spiritual Formation Study Bible, is another example of Quaker influence. The Renovaré Study Bible is an inter-denominational venture that seeks to plumb the spiritual depths of the Scriptures using quotations of Christians from the past with the intent of deepening the devotional life of the believer and consequently improve the quality of Christian witness.

A side effect of Penn’s donation of land to the Quakers was to encourage the settlement of the same area by other dissident Christian groups, particularly those with pacifist leanings such as the Mennonites of the Netherlands and the Amish of Switzerland. The designated land was composed of what is now known as Lancaster County, which historians consider the birthplace of American agriculture. The new Mennonite and Amish immigrants were principally farmers and agriculturists. Their children would later migrate into the American Midwest, during James Monroe’s presidency in the early 1820s, taking their agricultural skills with them. These migrations saw the development of farmlands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, proudly displays a billboard advertising Quaker Oats as you enter the city. These families also displayed a quality of Christian life that enabled them to relate to the Native Americans of that section of our country. One of the earliest of these was the family of Daniel Boone. His earliest portrait identified him, by way of personal adornment and headwear, as a Quaker, a portrait that dispels the myth built around him by the Motion Picture industry and modern television frontier drama. Boone and his family of six children were able to balance the scales between the way of life of Native Americans and that of the immigrant settlers coming from the East.

What this did was to give a larger scope to the mission of the church beyond the preaching and purely evangelical to include the presentation of the Christian life lived out beyond that of preaching. The role of the church is not only that of the kerygma (proclamation) and the didactic (teaching) but the presentation of a kind of communal life which reaches outward beyond itself to reconcile, heal, extend mercy, befriend, encourage, and inspire.

What would become the United States of America was not merely a haven for different Christian groups from England and Europe. For many colonial American Christian leaders, it was also a model of what was envisioned by Peter the apostle when he spoke at the festival of the Pentecost a short time after Jesus’ ascension and by John, years later, when, banished to the island of Patmos, he envisioned those who were redeemed “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9-10). It is important to note that within that vision, the redeemed were not identified by their church polity, interpretive stance, racial or ethnic origin, but having come from every tribe, tongue, people and nation whether Slavic, Germanic, Scandinavian, African, Asian, or whatever. It would take another century for some incoming church groups to set aside prejudices and begin to co-operate in both evangelism and outreach and in some cases merge.

Adoniram Judson in 1846.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the young USA, only sixteen years old, a meeting occurred near the newly formed Williams College that sparked America’s initial entry into the Christian world mission. This event is referred to in American history as the Haystack Meeting in August of 1806. Several students of Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, gathered for prayer in the shadow of a haystack close to the school. Among the students were Samuel Mills, James Richards, Adoniram Judson, Robert Robbins, Harvey Loomis, and Bryan Green. The news of Carey, his wife, and family departing from England to spread the gospel in India and translating the Scripture into the language spoken near Calcutta reached America and spread to Williams College. The news lit a fire in the hearts of the six young men. Of the six of them, Adoniram Judson decided to meet William Carey in India.

The Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806 has been considered the beginning of America’s entry into the Christian world mission. It was, however, in 1810, that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was formed by Baptist churches who set aside their extreme congregationalism to in order to have a General Convention the purpose of which was to enable and support Baptist missionaries around the world. It was under this Board that Adoniram Judson and his wife were able to make contact with William Carey in Calcutta and then go on to southeast Asia.

The evangelistic outburst in mid-America, often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was not an altogether novel idea. It was a sudden earnestness in Christian devotion and discipleship. It made headway from the leadership of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, grandson of Jonathan Edwards. As it spread into the trans-Appalachian west, two of the leading figures were Thomas and Alexander Campbell in Pennsylvania, Barton Warren Stone, a New Light Presbyterian, in Kentucky, and Peter Cartwright, a Methodist Circuit Rider who once took evangelism into a dance hall. He later served in the United States Congress as a representative from Illinois.

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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.

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 2: Missions to the First Americans

Before proceeding to dealing with the spread and growth of the Christian gospel into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is also the need to look at the contribution of a lone figure of Norman-French heritage who as a Jesuit missionary opened the pathway for mission and evangelism in North America. In his travels in Canada, he not only spread the gospel among a particular native American people, the Hurons, but also lived among them for several years and penned the lyrics of the first Christmas carol written and composed in North America. This song was later translated from the Huron language by Jesse Edgar Middleton in The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 244 “Twas in the moon of wintertime.”

Huron moccasins (circa 1880 CE) on display at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

I want to introduce the figure of Jean de Brébeuf, whose biography Saint among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf  was first written in 1949 by Francis X. Talbot and published by Harper & Brothers and most recently republished in 2018 by Ignatius Press. Brébeuf was a Norman from the north of France, the descendant of Scandinavians who invaded northern France in the early 1500s. He was born in what is now know as Condé-sur-Vire, March 25, 1593, in the diocese of Bayeux in eastern Normandy. In 1617, at the age of 24, after finishing his schooling and settling family affairs, he applied for entry into the Society of Jesus and thereby became a part of the missionary-minded Jesuits, an independent minded order not initiated by the Church but by Ignatius Loyola and which had gained later recognition as a missionary arm of the church. Even after gaining such authorization, the Jesuits were allowed to function as an independent mission arm of the Roman Catholic Church under its own umbrella, the Society of Jesus. This same independence also affected the relationship of the Jesuits with the different countries in which they operated. In some cases, they were regarded with suspicion from the political realm of the countries in which they served as missionaries of the Gospel. Mexico was one such country as were Brazil and Argentina in South America.

It was in 1625 that Jean de Brébeuf learned that the Jesuits were opening a mission in New France (Canada). This was five years after the founding of the Plymouth Plantation in New England. The year before, in October of 1624, Brébeuf met two Récollet [a Franciscan order] missionaries just returned from the New World.

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

In March of 1625, with full royal assent, the Viceroy of Quebec issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a residence in Quebec and other parts of New France for the Jesuits and to associate its members with the Récollets in the conversion of the “savages.” On April 24, 1625, after several delays resulting from opposition by the Montmorency Company in both Paris and Rouen to the proposal, the authorization came through, and Brébeuf and the other missionaries crossed over into the open waters of the Atlantic for New France (Canada). They entered into Canada by navigating around Cap Gaspé and through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and to Quebec. From 1625 to 1649, the year of his death at the hand of the Iroquois, de Brébeuf labored among the Huron who lived along the borderlands of the Great Lakes all the way from southern Canada to Michigan’s shoreline to Sault Ste. Marie.

The point of this short excursus is that the Jesuits did not engage in general evangelism among Native Americans but focused their attention on specific people groups, both in Canada and Brazil. The 1986 motion picture The Mission portrayed the Jesuit work and also their conflict with the political regime of the Portuguese which governed Brazil at the time of the Jesuit mission work. The independence of the Jesuits in their missionary evangelism also brought them into an adversarial relationship to the Spanish viceroys which governed out of Mexico City.

John Eliot

Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as The Algonquian Bible.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Concurrent with Brébeuf in North America was John Eliot in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first Puritan missionary to Native Americans who concentrated on the Algonquian language of the local Massachusetts. Helping him learn the language was a young Native American named Cockenoe. The youth had been captured in the Pequot War of 1637 and was a servant of an Englishman named Richard Collicot. Eliot later wrote in his diary that Cockenoe “was the first that I made use of to teach me words, and to be my interpreter.” Cockenoe could not write English but he could speak it as well as he could speak Algonquian. He was able, thereby, to help Eliot translate the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and other portions of the Bible and prayers. His first attempts at sharing the gospel with the Native American in 1646 were meager, if not failures, but eventually met with success. He also became able to produce printed publications for the Indians in their own language. In 1663, Eliot completed a translation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts language, Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God. The printer who did the printing issued 1000 copies on the first printing press in the American colonies.

Three years later, in 1666, Eliot published The Indian Grammar Begun.

Through the succeeding years, fourteen towns of “praying Indians” grew up in Massachusetts Bay Colony, the best documented of which being the one at Natick, Massachusetts. Other missionaries also established praying Indian towns, one of whom, Samson Occom, was himself half Mohegan.

Eliot and his wife, Hanna, had six children, five sons and one daughter. Two sons, John Eliot, Jr., and Joseph Eliot, both became pastors of churches themselves. Joseph Eliot, a pastor in Guilford, Connecticut, and his wife, were parents of Jared Eliot, who also became a minister of the gospel was also a noted agricultural writer.

David Brainerd is another significant figure, not only in mission among Native Americans but also upon the future development of the missionary enterprise world–wide. Brainerd was born April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of a Connecticut legislator, and his wife Dorothy. Although he died young at the early age of 29 from tuberculosis on October 10, 1747, his ministry intersected with that of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, and Jonathan Dickinson.

From David Brainerd, the apostle to the North American Indians, published in 1891.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1742, at the age of 24, he was licensed by a group of Presbyterians known as the “New Lights” which included such figures as Barton Warren Stone, Jonathan Dickinson, and the initiators of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, the first-known organized missionary society.

Brainerd’s ministry in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Long Island became an inspiration for William Carey, Brainerd’s cousin, James Brainerd Taylor (1801-1829), and the 20^th century’s Jim Elliot who ministered among the Aucas (Huaorani) in Ecuador, South America. Brainerd was the forerunner of the evangelical missionary enterprise[1] which emerged with William Carey in England and the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1810 in Massachusetts.

Thomas Bray, the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts and also the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, supported the ministry of Whitefield both in England and the English colonies which were to become known as the United States of America. Because the focus was upon North America and the British isles, the site of the activities was not global but British North America. A world, or global focused evangelical witness, first became reality with the initiation of the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Heathen in 1792 in Kettering, England, where 12 ministers signed an agreement to support the missionary work of William Carey and John Thomas in Bengal, India. Carey and Thomas were first sent out in 1793. To this day, William Carey is considered to be the initiator of the Christian world mission with schools and organizations and a book publishing house named after him in both the United States and Canada. This first missionary society is still in operation to this date. In A.D. 2000, its name was changed to the Baptist World Mission and presently supports over 350 workers in 40 countries.

PR

Notes

[1] The reason to not consider George Whitefield and John Wesley as the forerunners of the evangelical missionary enterprise is that both Whitefield and John Wesley were more revivalists than missionaries. Their preaching missions were to revive Christian faith in believers and reinvigorate a Christian witness that would lead others to faith in Christ.

First Virtual Global Pentecostal Studies Conference: “Mapping Global Pentecostal Issues”

When: Saturday, 31st October 2020, from 12:00-20:00.

What: The European Research Network on Global Pentecostalism (GloPent) will be having its first Virtual Conference, hosted by The Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at the University of Birmingham. The theme is “Mapping Global Pentecostal Issues.”  

Keynote Speakers

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu (Trinity Theological Seminary Ghana). “The Lord is the Spirit (II Corinthians 3:17): An African Critique of Global Pentecostal Theologies.”

Corneliu Constantineanu (Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad). “The Spirit Engaging and Transforming Life: Tenets of Romanian Pentecostalism.”

Daniel Chiquete (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey). “¿Lugares del espíritu? El pentecostalismo y sus representaciones espaciales en América Latina” (in Spanish).

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (Fuller Theological Seminary). “Identities of Global Pentecostalism(s) in the Pluralistic and Secular World: Theological Tasks and Challenges.”

More Information: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/theologyandreligion/events/2020/glopent-world.aspx

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

The Making of the Christian Global Mission

Part 1: Jan Hus and the Moravians

It may seem odd to associate the making of the Christian global mission to the trans-oceanic voyages of the maritime ventures of the merchant ships of Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, England, and the Baltic countries of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Yet it is not without reason when one considers what was happening in the world at that time. A trans-oceanic trade network was opened between East and West, North and South. The ports of entry receptive to the merchant marine also became the harbors who welcomed the newcomers who were tradesmen, many of whom were Christians.

1587 woodcut of Jan Hus by Christoph Murer.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

It would be easy to think of Western European Christians going overseas to the Americas or to the East Asian landmass without considering what was happening to Christians in central and eastern Europe, places where Christianity was more Orthodox than Catholic or Protestant. We seldom consider the reverberations of the Protestant Reformation upon those areas. We focus primarily upon Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Menno Simons, and William Tyndale who reshaped the Christian landscape of western Europe and the British Isles. We forget that it was a Christian priest in Moravia, now known as the Czech Republic, known as Jan Hus (also spelled John Huss), who lit the fire of the Reformation. Before the Lutherans, there were the makings of the Moravian Christians who in later years had a significant impact upon John Wesley. Another seldom considered contribution to the Christian world mission came out of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the Orthodox Churches, the Russian Orthodox were probably the most mission oriented, spreading Christianity across the Asian steppes and beyond the Ural Mountains. This became more so in the late 1600s as a result of Patriarch Nikon’s move to modernize the Liturgy of Worship which caused the first major split.

Those who split referred to themselves as the “Old Believers,” and it was they who spearheaded a mission clear across the top of Asia to Siberia and to the coast of the Bering Sea. That is a story in and of itself, and it becomes part of a larger story played out through the 18^th and 19^th centuries when Slavic Christians started spreading out beyond their initial homelands.

Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, by Karl Friedrich Lessing (1842).
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Reverse image of the German or Austrian 16th century Jan Hus Centenary Medal.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

]]> https://pneumareview.com/the-making-of-the-christian-global-mission-part-1-jan-hus-and-the-moravians/feed/ 0 https://pneumareview.com/unite714-global-prayer-initiative/ https://pneumareview.com/unite714-global-prayer-initiative/#comments Mon, 18 May 2020 14:41:08 +0000 http://pneumareview.com/?p=16256

Unite in prayer for the eradication of COVID-19 and a spiritual awakening around the world.

Launched in March 2020, the Unite714 movement has grown into a worldwide phenomenon in a remarkably short time – to include millions of believers and thousands of churches in 178 countries. The movement can be found online at ​Unite714.com​.    International Christian leaders such as Brian Houston, Christine Caine, Dr. Goodwill Shana, Chris Hodges, Nicky Gumbel, Miles McPherson, Robert Morris, Jentezen Franklin, Carlito Paes, Daniel Ho, and Rich and DawnCheré Wilkerson. Many others have endorsed the initiative and encouraged churches and individual Christians to pray every day at 7:14 a.m. and 7:14 p.m.

When: Friday, May 29, 2020 at 10 a.m. CDT

The global webcast will happen on Friday, May 29 (Pentecost weekend) at 10 a.m. Central Daylight Time (US) and will be broadcast on various Christian television channels throughout that weekend and the following week. You can find out more on the movement’s website at ​Unite714.com​.

Adapted from the May 15, 2020 press release.

The world needs Spirit-empowered believers like never before!

When: May 31 through June 10, 2020

Empowered21 knows that you want to be encouraged and equipped to make an impact during the unprecedented season you are in, and we realize the importance of hearing what the Holy Spirit is saying as you prepare for the future.

Due to the current limitations on gathering, it’s easy to feel disconnected and discouraged, which is why we have planned a FREE GLOBAL CONGRESS, where over the course of 10 days you are invited to be part of the largest gathering of Spirit-empowered leaders on the planet. Each of the unique sessions will provide encouragement for where you are NOW, and help you to get clarity from the Holy Spirit about what is NEXT!

Empowered21 has assembled over 70 influential leaders from around the globe, including PneumaReview.com authors Heidi Baker and Doug Beacham.

Register

Adapted from the May 14, 2020 email invitation.

Dr. Elijah J. F. Kim is Founder and President of Grain of Wheat College and Graduate School in the Philippines. He is also the President of Pathos Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of this foundation is to work for revival and awakening in America and the rest of the world. He is the overseer of A Grain of Wheat Christian Ministries in the Philippines. Dr. Kim served as the director of the Vitality Project of Emmanuel Gospel Center in Boston and is a former member of the Steering Committee of City Impact Roundtable, USA. He is the author of many books in English and other languages.

The Rise of the Global South is a very substantial volume, both in length and in content, it contains a wealth of information. In addition to the author’s writing the text contains graphs, tables, maps, and statistics that the author has drawn from a number of different sources. The research that was utilized in the writing of this book is quite extensive (the bibliography is a little over 28 pages long). In view of the scope of this book, this review will focus on some of the “big picture” themes that are found in it

The reader will find a significant amount of church history in this book, both European history and American history. Many well-known ministers are mentioned, people like John Wesley, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody. In addition many renewal movements are mentioned, among them are, the Waldensians, the Methodists, and the Quakers. It should be noted that Europe and American did not both follow the exact same religious course, Dr. Kim notes the differences. The reader will also find information about specific denominations in the text. This data reveals that a number of mainline denominations have suffered significant losses in membership over the years.

The decline of the church at certain times has not always been due solely to weaknesses from within. Dr. Kim calls attention to various developments in the larger culture that have had negative effects on the church. He looks at the impact of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. Though these things are not in and of themselves spiritual, or evil, they have at times had a negative impact on the faith of significant numbers of people.