The Making of the Christian Global Mission, Part 5: Good News for Body and Soul

Manokwari, the capital of West Papua, Indonesia (formerly known as Irian Jaya). Image: David Worabay / Wikimedia Commons

Another situation began arising toward the end of the eighteenth century and within the first eight to nine years of the nineteenth was the extension of English missionaries into China, partly due to Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. Drake’s presence in the western Pacific was critical for England to begin with as the merchant ships of the Netherlands were also present especially in the vicinity of the Spice Islands now known as Indonesia while eastward toward the central Pacific the Spanish Galleons docking and disembarking from Manila in the Philippines. Robert Morrison arrived in China in 1807 from England, three years before Adoniram Judson and his wife arrived in Burma as missionaries representing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The English missionaries concentrated on inland China and besides preaching the gospel established schools and medical facilities. This concentration culminated in the formation of what became known as the China Inland Mission founded by Hudson Taylor and his wife in 1865. A faith mission, the China Inland Mission operated on the basis that one went without financial support and with trust in God for provision. There were also no stipulation as to the gender of the missionary. Of the fifteen missionaries on Taylor’s initial journey into inland China, seven were seven single women. This pattern would remain not only for the China Inland Mission, now known as Operation Mobilization, but was adopted by other mission societies clear into the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

By the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th there were forty women’s mission organizations, and more women were serving in American missions than men. Both Ruth A. Tucker’s From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya (Zondervan, 1983, p. 288) and Andrew Walls’ The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY; Orbis Books, 2002, p. 231) attest to this figure.

The end result of England’s entry into organized mission societies having a thought-out mission agenda involving evangelism, education, medicine, and outreach to those in direst need had a direct effect upon the whole Christian spectrum with Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, and others imitating the China Inland Mission. It began the process that was to eventuate in breaking down the walls among Christians on the mission field and at home.

It also redesigned the character of the Christian world as it fostered and gave birth to the indigenization of the Christian message in which the various congregations birthed in each country took initiatives in leadership, mission outreach, and self-funding. It was in the late nineteenth century, about 1895, when Roland Allen, sent out from England by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, advised missionaries to found their work on the idea of the Three Selfs–self-governing, self-funding, and self-propagating.”

One can trace the origin of the “three-self” movement and the spread of each body of Christians indigenous to the country in which the gospel took hold back to the years that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent out Adoniram Judson and his wife and family in the early 1800s and the China Inland Mission and the London Missionary Society later. Between 1807 and ending in 1953 with the departure of Arthur Matthews and Dr. Rupert Clark of the China Inland Mission, thousands of foreign Protestant missionaries and their families lived and worked in China alone not to mention southeast Asia and the sub-continent of India. At the time of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 which ended the French and Indian War which ensured British dominance in Canada and India and the independence of what came to be known as the United States of America, the way was made for the furtherance of the gospel within the British-held lands from Canada, Barbados in the Caribbean, India, Australia, New Zealand, and eastern Africa.

The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden extended itself from Sweden into its settlement which later became known as Delaware and then spread its congregations across the American Midwest and the northern plains states. The Netherlands swapped possessions with England. England gained New York and the Netherlands gained the Spice Islands later re-named Indonesia. During the Dutch period, the Marble Collegiate Church of New York City was built as a congregation of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Christian Reformed Church also from the Netherlands spread across the American northern states, established congregations, schools and Christian publishing houses all across the northern Midwest. Into China went the American Presbyterian Mission, the American Southern Baptist Mission, the English Presbyterian Mission, the Protestant Episcopal Mission, and the English Baptist Missionary Society, to name a few.

Mustang, Nepal. The name “Mustang” comes from the Tibetan language and means, “Plain of Aspiration.”
Image: Anup Raj Rai / Wikimedia Commons

There were problems to contend with when the missionaries entered areas of central Asia and even China. One of the problems was the presence of Islam in western, central, and southern Asia. Another was the prominence of Hinduism and a multiplicity of differing people groups in India and in the Himalayan mountain chain where lived the inhabitants of Bhutan, Tibet, and Mustang, Nepal, to name a few. Still another was that of unfamiliarity with the remnants of Eastern Christians long isolated from those of the Mediterranean world and of Europe by the westward advance of Arabic, Mongols, and Turkic peoples into the Mediterranean and Eastern European lands. The Church of the East, erroneously called Nestorians by the Greek Orthodox Church, had adherents in northwestern India and held to the Syriac translation of the Bible while the Europeans had the King James Version, the Geneva Bible, or the translation into German by Luther. It took a number of years for acceptance of each other as fellow Christians in a common gospel mission. In time that acceptance came.

At the same time the sense of a fuller Christian mission emerged beyond that of evangelism as the missionaries from England, America, and Europe included nurses, schools, hospitals. In fact, the evangelical churches as the Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and the Cumberland Presbyterians had more women missionaries than men. This became increasingly so with the passage of the nineteenth century that by the early 20^th century “Among the personnel of conservative faith missions, women outnumbered men nearly two to one,” wrote Kathryn T. Long in her recent book God in the Rain Forest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, p.28). Leading in this trend were the “Brethren” such as the Plymouth Brethren, the Church of the Brethren to name and the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

The American origin arose with a Presbyterian Minister, Rev. John J. Shepherd and a missionary Philo P. Stewart in the summer of 1832. These two men became friends in Elyria, Ohio. The two were concerned with what they discerned to be the lack of strong Christian principles among the settlers of the American west. The two decided to establish a college where they would “train teachers and Christian leaders for the boundless most desolate fields in the West.” They found support from Albert Finney, a circuit-riding Presbyterian evangelist. They adopted the some of the ideas of an Alsatian pastor John Frederick Oberlin, who introduced educational programs throughout the Alsace and Lorraine areas of France. Oberlin’s programs not only included biblical and Christian studies but courses in the manual trades as blacksmithing, masonry, and road construction. In the spring of 1833, with faith in their project and their labor, combined with funding from several wealthy and sources, and promotion from Rev. Finney, Shepherd and Stewart established the town of Oberlin, Ohio and Oberlin College. It was a high-water moment. In December 1832, 29 men and 15 women began classes of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute. It was the first school in America to welcome into its program African Americans. It was critical for those who would be ministers of the Gospel in the developing American West and important for co-educational higher education in America.

Oberlin was not the only important school of higher education established in the opening of the American mid-west. Seven years after the founding of Oberlin College, Bethany College was founded in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, one mile from Pennsylvania and five miles from Ohio in the neck of what is now known as West Virginia, in 1840, by anti-burgher seceder Presbyterian preacher Alexander Campbell, one of the participants in the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and who in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky, along with Barton Warren Stone, a New Light Presbyterian, formed the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ). Each believed in opening the celebration of the Lord’s Last Supper to the new frontiersmen and settlers of the Midwestern lands irrespective of their past church affiliations be they Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, Mennonite, Catholic, or Moravian. In fact, Campbell had high regard for Comenius, the Czech Brethren minister, who had one time was invited by the founders of Harvard University to be its first President [Editor’s note: see Further Reading at the end of this article]. Comenius declined the offer but did encourage the founding of America’s first primary schools for children. Campbell adopted a statement made by Comenius as the hallmark of the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ): “In faith, Unity; in opinion, Liberty; and in all things, Brotherly Love.”

This regard for open communion among the churches foreshadowed what we now call the Christian ecumenical movement of the late 1890s and the early 1900s. Another step that Campbell took thirteen years later in 1845 was the creation of the United Christian Missionary Society through which congregations could co-operatively support missionaries wherever they went whether Africa, India, South America, Asia, or elsewhere.

At the same time by the 1830s the Midwestern lands were progressively being welcomed into the union as new states, beginning with Ohio Kentucky, and later Indiana. The expansion westward required something more than pastors. The need for traveling evangelists, preachers, and teachers became increasingly important and men like Francis Asbury, Thomas Coke, and Peter Cartwright for the Methodists went as circuit preachers and evangelists. Asbury and Coke became the makers of the Methodist Church in America more so than Wesley who retained his identity as an Anglican evangelist. Walter Scott was the outstanding evangelist for the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ). Other Christian bodies followed suit in sending out circuit riding pastors who served more than one congregation. The evangelists sought any potential setting outdoors or meeting house. Cartwright once held an evangelistic meeting in a frontier dance-hall.

At the time of the settling of the American Midwest, Great Britain was forging ahead in foreign missions. England, having lost out in gaining ground in what became known as the United States of America concentrated on developing what became known as Canada and its growing influence in East Africa, India, and the Pacific.

The evangelical presence in England occasioned by the preaching of John Wesley occasioned the establishment of a society made up of Church of England laymen and their wives and single women based in Clapham, London, at the beginning of the 1800’s. Historian Stephen Michael Tomkins described the society as “a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its centre of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values. They were noted for their social activism, by their love for each other, and for taking the gospel throughout the world.” The Clapham Society focused on the abolition of slavery. It initially gathered at the church of John Venn, rector of the evangelical Anglican Church in the Clapham neighbor- hood in south London. Its membership not only included Wilbur Wilberforce, but also Henry Thornton, and John Newton, rector of an evangelical Anglican church in Olney, who gained fame as lyricist of the hymn “Amazing Grace” in memory of his conversion to Christ Jesus and put to music later in 1831 to a traditional American melody by Edwin O. Excell to appear in Carrell and Clayton’s Virginia Harmony.

As intimated in the foregoing, the Clapham Sect had an influence far beyond England and had set a precedent for American, as well as British, evangelical Christianity, as well as India and the rest of the English-speaking world. The Clapham Group also had clout politically, economically, and socially as Wilberforce and Newton and the others brought an end to African slavery throughout the British sphere of influence by 1831, and in a round-about way had an impact on the American abolition movement. The Clapham sect, as it came to be called, also had direct impact upon “foreign” missions as the participants practically underwrote the entire missionary enterprise outside of the British isles. Among the evangelicals were Henry Thornton, the English financier and Zachary Macauley, sometime Governor of Sierra Leone, and Lord Teigmouth formerly Governor-General of India. The term “Clapham Sect” was a later description given to the group by James Stephen in an article of 1844 which uplifted the work of the membership. They were among the founders of the Church Mission Society, the Anti-Slavery Society, the Free Church of England and other Christian-related outreaches.

England also set a precedent worth noting as affecting the later course of action within its overseas “possessions.” England set up a political infrastructure which allowed a stable representative government should they seek independence from the “Mother Country.” This transition differed radically from that of Spanish, Belgic, and French policies, and most likely furthered by the Clapham Sect whose membership was characterized by individuals prominent in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the British Parliament.

The consequence of such was a great interest in sending missionaries into India not only as evangelists but also as educators. India, however, was not solely the mission field for the British. About the same time it attracted missionaries from the United States of America at an early date and simultaneous with the westward movement. The apparent earliest American missionary to India was Dr. John Scudder, Sr., and his wife, Elizabeth. Their story is unique in the history of missionary outreach as their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren carried out their parents and grandparents for four or more generations.

Born in Freehold Township, New Jersey, September 3, 1793, Rev. Dr. John Scudder, Sr., was the first medical missionary in Ceylon and India. He graduated from Princeton University, a school of the Reformed Church in America in 1811, and went on to study at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons and graduated from there in 1813. After experiencing success as a Physician in New York City, he felt God’s call to be a missionary. He and Elizabeth founded the first American medical facility in Asia in Ceylon and later became the first American medical missionary in India. The succeeding four generations of children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren, carried on that mission. Dr. Ida Sophia Scudder, born on December 9, 1870, of the third generation, a great-granddaughter, carried on her great grandfather’s legacy. In 1918, she started one of Asia’s finest teaching hospitals, the Christian Medical College & Hospital in Vellore, India. She served her whole life in India dedicating herself to the health of Indian women in the fight against cholera, leprosy, and the bubonic plague. She was back in the United States of America for a brief period to study at Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts but returned to Madras in India to help her father, Rev. Dr. John Scudder, Jr., when her mother was ill at the mission bungalow at Tindivanam, Madras Province in India. Ida Scudder lived to be nearly 90 in 1970. She died at the age of 89 in her home in India. One of her noted students who studied under her and worked with her was the noted Dr. Paul Brand, who did most of his work as a leprosy researcher.

Between the 1840s and 1900 there were dramatic changes in missionary outreach through Europe, America, and elsewhere. Among the changes were growing co-operation among the churches of differing Reformation traditions. Another was the creation of Wheaton College in Illinois in 1860 which became a school for missionaries and evangelists and which at its time of formation, a haven for African-Americans, as a way station of the Underground Railroad. In 1877, the inner-city mission field opened up in Chicago, Illinois, when Colonel George and Sarah Dunn Clarke opened a ministry in a tiny storefront at 386 South Clark Street. The Pacific Garden Mission still operates after 140 years as the oldest inner-urban rescue mission in the United States of America, and today has a nation-wide broadcast.

A. B. Simpson (1843-1919)

In 1870 A.B. Simpson left a successful pastorate in New York City when he had the call to reach the lost and forgotten within the urban areas of both the United States of America and of the global world. He established the New York Gospel Tabernacle and set up a Missionary Training Institute to provide training for men and women to take the gospel to the urban centers of the world. In 1884, he sent out the first team of missionaries to Lusaka in the Congo. Not long after another team was sent to Tokyo in Japan. The Christian and Missionary Alliance was formed as a missionary society. The earliest congregations were known as branches which were made up of members from the major denominations. In 1919, Simpson died and Dr. Paul Rader was chosen to lead the Christian and Missionary Alliance. One of the most well-known C & MA spokesmen was A.W. Tozer.

The Crucified Life: How To Live Out A Deeper Christian Experience

Experiencing the Presence of God: Teachings from the Book of Hebrews

God’s Pursuit of Man

A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)

Within the time frame of the 1860s and the 1880s the spread of the Christian missionary endeavor was more and more a global endeavor and much organized beyond that of the individual workers in the field and much more in line with Jesus’ total vision as outlined in Luke 10:1-12 and much more organized both within the different church groups and in some instances co-operative one with the other in a common endeavor. By 1868, the London Missionary Society sent out Griffith John into China where he labored at Sichuau. In 1881, Samuel R. Clark of the China Inland Mission was the first to rent a home in Chengchu and was one of the responsible individuals in establishing Huafi Hospital.

In the same year the West China Union University, now Sichuan University was established and a Foundling Hospital founded. Today Christianity is part of the mainstream of China’s landscape due to the English and American missionary endeavor and has been able to weather the abuse by the Communist takeover under Mao Tse Tung. Islam is dominant only among non-Chinese ethnic groups on China’s outer margins. Christians make up the third largest grouping after Buddhism and those who practice folk religions. More important the Christian faith is strongest within the countryside and mostly away from Beijing and the seats of political power. This is due to the fact that the missionaries of the late 18^th and the major part of the 19^th majored on inland China. To relate the conditions of the 20^th century or even the present is getting ahead of this narrative.

The earliest known contact is recorded on a plaque worked into a wall of rectangular platform built of close fitting stones, and given the Hawaiian title of Hikiau Heiau. On the front side was an obelisk built of the same lava rock but secured in a very non-Polynesian way. The obelisk stood twelve feet high and was mounted with a bronze commemorative plaque that read:

Kealakekua Bay in the morning.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In this Heiau,
January 28, 1779,
Captain James Cook R.N.
read the English burial service over
William Watman, Seaman.
The first recorded
Christian Service
in the Hawaiian Islands.
Erected by the Kona Civic Club, 1928

Here was a far different record from the one the heiau actually told. This was a record of an accidental arrival of the Christian gospel. However, this record is more like a record of the coming of Englishmen in the South Pacific, more specifically that part to the east and southeast of Indonesia, New Guinea and Sumatra and southeast of the Philippines and including to that part of the Pacific referred to as the Coral Sea. Oceania includes the Solomon Islands, Tahiti, and a large number of small islands and an island group known as the Marquesas. The Pacific as a whole is a little over 12,000 miles (180 degrees ) across. North to south, from the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska to the Antarctic , the ocean stretches nearly 10,000 miles. Magellan entered into Oceania in the 1500s but that was all he did as he sailed northward along the western coast of South America until he came out of Oceania by turning westward from coastal Peru and sailed westward until his ship entered into the area of the Philippine Islands.

Spanish, British, and Dutch ships entered the far western edge of Oceania where the Indian Ocean ends and the Pacific begins and skirted northeastward to the Malay peninsula and the coastal waters of southeast Asia, China, Indonesia, to Where the South China Sea meets the Pacific. This vast area so described by The European navigators became the last frontier of Christian mission. It started not by Christians from either North America or South America but by English, Portuguese, Dutch, and Americans already present in Calcutta, Thailand, the islands of Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Spice Islands, and Sumatra. Western New Guinea, later known as Irian Jaya, lay within this part of the Pacific while the larger landmass of New Guinea lay within the sea lanes of Oceania which stretched toward New Zealand and Easter Island some ten thousand miles or more. The first Christian missionaries who entered western New Guinea came with the Dutch merchantmen who entered the waters of the Spice Islands.

About the same time that England, The Netherlands, Portuguese, the Spanish and French were plying the inner seas washing the shores of North America, South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, turmoil was seething back in Europe, mainly France and especially central and eastern Europe. In 1685, King Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau which ordered that Huguenot [French Reformed] Church buildings and schools be closed. The state-sanctioned suppression of all non-Catholics moved to a new stage.

PR

Further Reading:

For more on Comenius, the father of modern education, see: Global Pentecostal Renaissance? Reflections on Pentecostalism, Culture, and Higher Education, by Jeff Hittenberger

Bernie Van De Walle reviews: Michael G. Yount, A. B. Simpson: His Message and Impact on the Third Great Awakening (2016)

It is easy to agree that human beings are created in the image of God. More debate may arise if we widen the idea to say that humankind as a whole—humanity if you will—reflects the divine image. The difference between the two may be described as the primary focus of the kind of public theology that forms the subject of Daniela Augustine’s book. As the title suggests, she offers a vision of shared flourishing in the image of God that focuses on how God’s Spirit leads humanity to the common good. In her own terms, she pursues the question how a market-shaped world can be mended by the common good in the Spirit’s activity. This task leads through the question how we can get from the common image to the common good (Chapter 1) and how we turn from a world of violence that destroys God’s image to a life that reflects the new creation (Chapter 2). The way to answer these questions leads trough rather unusual terrain for Pentecostals: the recovery of the Eucharist as a sacrament of the divine presence in the realm of economics (Chapter 3) and the experience of forgiveness and reconciliation in the agency of the Spirit (Chapter 4). The book concludes with reflections on how Christians make this agency visible and what moral imperatives are gained for a concrete living community.

Daniela C. Augustine is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Lee University.

Augustine’s unusual repertoire for this volume comes from field work with the Pentecostal community in Eastern Slavonia and religion’s role in the transformation of postwar civil society. Augustine argues that “due to their historical neutrality in the conflict, the Pentecostals were uniquely positioned to provide safe space for social healing and facilitate reconciliation among the warring (Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim) factions” (p. 5). This research provides the backdrop for writing a narrative of the human agency that contributes to the healing and flourishing of life, a hagiography, in the terms of the Christian traditions, or in Augustine’s contemporary terms, a narrative of “the socio-transformative capacity of the saints’ lives as pneumatic embodiment of the world’s eschatological future” (p. 7). That this imagery and vocabulary is not usual for Pentecostal discourse, especially in the West, and the application of this “ancient” Christian tradition, particularly with resources from Eastern Orthodoxy, to contemporary concerns for peace, justice, and forgiveness, on the one hand, and to economics and human flourishing, on the other, make this book both a constructive and creative as well as a challenging read.

Reviewed by Wolfgang Vondey

Publisher’s page: https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/4385/the-spirit-and-the-common-good.aspx

De Arteaga suggests there are several dangers in the present demonstrations to produce some collateral damage, especially damage that would result if extremists got control of the demonstrations. He encourages Christians to pray specifically for good fruit to result from the demonstrations.

Quotations from the article:

Historically, the assertion that frustration leads necessarily to violence is nonsense. Such statements give the TV commentators or politicians who say that a feeling that he or she are making a worthy moral observation. In fact, in regimes where injustice and tyranny are highest but the police apparatus brutal and merciless, the public swallows its anger and suffers its injustices without comment.

It would have been spiritually beneficial for prominent clergy to say the simple, biblical thing, “Sin should not be met with counter-sin. Police brutality is a sin, but looting is evil and a sin also.”

The famous Russian dissident and prophet, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, in his Harvard commencement address of 1978 noted that the abrupt end to the Vietnam War, forced by the anti-war movement, cost millions of lives. I and many of us who were in Vietnam agree. Had we stayed a bit longer, and continued to give the South Vietnamese Army our air support, we would have today in South Vietnam a democratic, economically vibrant and spiritually healthy county similar to South Korea.

Politics normally breeds exaggeration, and protest movements exaggerate the exaggerations. The TV reporters and pundits often use the phrase “endemic racism” about Americans. This is an exaggeration that is convenient to the protest organizers and politically Left groups, but this can be a sin of false or exaggerated judgment. … Also note how many Whites participate in the demonstrations. This alone should be cause to temper the accusations of “endemic racism.” Let us begin using the phrase “vestigial racism” to signify those who have not yet overcome their prejudices.

Protests on May 31, 2020 in Washington, D.C.
Image: Koshu Kunii

“A Charismatic Historian’s Response to the George Floyd Demonstrations”
Link to the blog: http://www.pentecostaltheology.com/a-charismatic-historians-response-to-the-george-floyd-demonstrations/

Missionary David Joannes speaks with Pneuma Review about his book, The Mind of a Missionary, and about sharing the story of Jesus no matter the cost.

PneumaReview.com: You are involved in cross-cultural missions. Please tell our readers how long you have served overseas and where.

David Joannes: I got started in missions in 1994 at the age of fifteen. I went to Russia with Teen Mania Ministries and have never been able to shake the missionary call. At age eighteen, I bought a one-way ticket to Kunming, China, and have been living overseas for the last twenty-two years. Southwest China is home to hundreds of ethnic tribes and was the perfect place to launch out into ministry among unreached people groups. After years of evangelism, discipleship, and church-planting, my wife and I founded a ministry called Within Reach Global. Working alongside the underground Church, we have seen God move in the lives of countless unreached communities.

PneumaReview.com: What kinds of resistance or persecution have you experienced while serving in ministry overseas?

Author of The Third Force in Missions, Missionary-scholar Paul Pomerville speaks with PneumaReview.com about theologies and attitudes he believes have hindered the effectiveness of the church, particularly the church in the West. He urges Pentecostals to throw off the poisonous ideas of colonialism and the Enlightenment and instead be filled with the Holy Spirit of justice and peace.

PneumaReview.com: Please tell us about your experience in missions.

Paul Pomerville: After study in the national language of Indonesia, I started my service as an Assemblies of God missionary educating Indonesian ministers on the Island of Sumatra. I established a “theological education by extension” program that provided theological education for candidates for the ministry and active pastors in ten different areas of the island by way of independent study materials, a traveling faculty and weekly seminar-type training sessions. It was the first program of its kind in Southeast Asia; it was modeled after a similar program by missionary Dr. Ralph Winter in South America. When I was on furlough in the United States I started graduate education in missions. The next missionary service was in Brussels Belgium at the International Correspondence Institute, an arm of the Foreign Missions Division of the Assemblies of God. The Institute was preparing ministerial training materials and printing them on site for pastors and Christian educators via correspondence both in Western countries and also in the countries of the Southern Hemisphere. I wrote several courses and prepared an audience profile model of the developing countries for course writers for that part of the world, and also gave writers an orientation to that very different cultural audience. I also served as managing editor. On the next furlough in the United States I finished a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission. I then served as professor and Department Chairman of the Missions and Cross-cultural Communications Department at the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield Missouri.

PneumaReview.com: In your book you state that there are certain theologies that hinder the cause of missions. Please tell us what those theologies are and how they impede the missionary cause.

Paul A. Pomerville, The Third Force in Missions: A Pentecostal Contribution to Contemporary Mission Theology (Hendrickson Publishers, 2016).
Read the review by Anna M. Droll.

Paul Pomerville: The central thesis of The Third Force in Missions concerned the Pentecostal contribution to mission theology. At the time the first edition was written (1983) there were doubts as to whether there even was a Pentecostal contribution to mission theology. My contention at that time was that Pentecostal-charismatic Christians made up one-third of the world’s evangelical Christians and their growth was evidence of a potential Pentecostal contribution. However, the unprecedented Pentecostal-charismatic movement in the Southern Hemisphere today, the “third wave” of Pentecostal-charismatic renewal has proven the question of a Pentecostal contribution to be a “moot point.” Today, 800 million-plus Pentecostal-charismatic Christians are now a “first force” in Christian missions. It is clear that this unprecedented rapidly growing movement south of the equator was not due to “theology,” but rather the Pentecostal-charismatic experience with the Holy Spirit. Obviously, there is a “Pentecostal theology” undergirding the Pentecostal-charismatic movement that emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit that two of the most influential theologies in the Northern hemisphere have not emphasized, but rather have neglected and outright denied—1) Western rationalistic scholastic theology of the post-Reformation period and 2) dispensational theology.

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.

We are looking for new writers

The PneumaReview.com editorial committee is always looking for good writers that speak to our audience of Pentecostal and charismatic church leaders. Our vision is to build a bridge between the seminary and the local church and to create an online forum where Christians of all traditions can discuss the gifts of the Spirit for today.

How to get started

I welcome you to peruse PneumaReview.com. Consider leaving some comments under articles you find interesting, or sharing them through social media. As you become more aware of our audience and the kinds of material we are publishing, let us know you are interested in getting involved or make submissions by sending an email to the editor on our Contact page (this is a link to our legacy site, PneumaFoundation.org).

Reviewing books

An excellent way to get started is by reviewing books. Have you read something recently that you would like to reflect on? Mike Dies, our reviews editor, prefers reviews between 500 and 1200 words, with 700 as an ideal target. Write to the Editor if you would like to be added to our list of writers that receives the list of books we are currently seeking reviewers for.

Have you written a book?

PneumaReview.com often features full chapters from published books. Consider asking the editors about making one of your chapters available. This exposure promotes your book for exactly the right reasons: readers will get a taste and they’ll want more. We would be glad to work with your publisher to make an excerpt available.

Other Media

Moving from print to an online digital format has been an exciting transition for us, and we are still investigating new avenues to reach our expanded audience effectively. Speak with us about featuring an audio or video recording of a lecture, teaching, or paper presentation you have made.

New content and previously published content

The editorial committee prefers to consider articles, chapters, reviews, and papers that have not yet appeared online. Work that has already been published in print is welcome, but we do not usually republish material that can already be found on the world wide web. If you have a blog where you would like to have your work appear, let us know that and we can work with you to have it appear first at PneumaReview.com and then on your website.

Authors retain their rights

Authors retain full rights to their intellectual property. By submitting it for consideration, authors are granting PneumaReview.com the license to publish it through our outlets.

We need you

PneumaReview.com and our parent organization, the Pneuma Foundation, are volunteer-run ministries. We cannot continue without help from Christian leaders like you. Thank you for looking at how you may become involved.

Raul Mock, Executive Editor

Further reading: Insights: feedback and the editorial process

Walter Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 125 pages, ISBN 9780664235161.

This excellent little book presents three addresses given by the author. This, together with the narrative theology represented, makes this work eminently readable and engaging. Brueggemann, a pre-eminent Old Testament scholar, is deliberately provocative whilst thoroughly rooted in contemporary Old Testament perspectives, bringing to the reader an insight of how the world of Biblical Studies can effectively and usefully address issues facing the church and our witness today.

In three chapters, Brueggemann looks at Scriptural narratives which engage the liberation from captivity in Egypt through to the Sinai visitation and instructions of God; the conflict between the revelation of God and the choices made by Israel in the succeeding years; then the challenges of engaging with God’s vision for reconstruction in the post-exilic period. Brueggemann takes each of these and, having identified the main narrative themes present, applies them to present issues and challenges affecting the North American context.

Two features of this book were of especial interest to the present reviewer. Firstly, Brueggemann expertly brings the narrative themes together and shows how his observations find expression in and through the ministry and teachings of Jesus Christ. In this way, he properly shows how the Old Testament narratives lead to their realisation in and through the ministry of our Lord. His skill in doing this is exemplary, and whilst the reader may not agree with all his final observations, the method which he employs in bringing the whole scope of Biblical testimony into play is, in itself, something for all to learn from.

Secondly, Brueggemann holds to an understanding of righteousness which, in the present debates between advocates of imputed righteousness and other forms, brings an important contribution. As Brueggemann puts it, ‘Righteousness concerns active intervention in social affairs, taking an initiative to intervene in order to rehabilitate society, to respond to social grievance, and to correct every humanity-diminishing activity’ (page 63).

This is a manageable piece of scholarship for the working pastor to digest, an informative as well as a challenging resource both for personal study and sermon preparation.

Reviewed by Jim Purves

Preview Journey to the Common Good: books.google.com/books?id=aN0JVqSMIHAC

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?”