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Four Axes of Mission: Conversion and the Purposes of Mission in Protestant History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2022

Alec Ryrie  and
D. J. B. Trim Open the ORCID record for D. J. B. Trim [Opens in a new window]
Alec Ryrie
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham, Durham, UK
D. J. B. Trim*
Affiliation:
General Conference of Seventh Day Adventists, Office of Archives Statistics and Research, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email alec.ryrie@durham.ac.uk; davidtrim@icloud.com
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Abstract

This article offers a framework for historical analysis of the goals of Protestant missionary projects. ‘Conversion’ in Protestantism is not clearly defined, is liable to be falsified and may (in some missionary views) require preparatory work of various kinds before it can be attempted. For these reasons, Protestant missionaries have adopted a variety of intermediate and proxy goals for their work, goals which it is argued can be organised onto four axes: orthodoxy, zeal, civilisation and morality. Together these form a matrix which missionaries, their would-be converts and their sponsors have tried to negotiate. In different historical contexts, missionaries have chosen different combinations of priorities, and have adapted these in the face of experience. The article suggests how various historical missionary projects can be analysed using this matrix and concludes by suggesting some problems and issues in the history of Protestant missions which such analysis can illuminate.

Keywords

missionsChurch historyimperial historyProtestantism
Type
Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 32 , December 2022 , pp. 113 - 133
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society

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References

1 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols., i, Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, ii, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, 1991, 1997); Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, 1993), esp. 3; David W. Kling, A History of Christian Conversion (Oxford, 2020).

2 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY, 2009); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), esp. 43–50, at 45; David Lindenfeld, World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2021), esp. 9–30.

3 For an example of the phenomenon of the ‘conversion’ of missionaries, eased in this case by Vatican II's avowed openness to learning from ‘what is good and holy’ in non-Christian religions, see Rademaker, Laura, ‘Going Native: Converting Narratives in Tiwi Histories of Twentieth-Century Missions’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 70 (2019), 98–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 113. This is distinct from the wider notion that missionary ventures could be transformative, even ‘conversionary’, for the societies which sent them: see David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton and Woodstock, Oxon., 2017).

4 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, i, 7, 10–11; and see next note.

5 Norman Etherington, ‘Introduction’ to Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford, 2005), 2, 4, reviews literature depicting missionary motivations as tainted by commercial and imperial imperatives, which Etherington sees as of the past; but cf. John Barker, ‘Where the Missionary Frontier Ran ahead of Empire’, ibid., 86–106, esp. the conclusion at p. 105; and Mark Thomas Edwards, Faith and Foreign Affairs in the American Century (Lanham and London, 2019), 19–23, 52–5. The tendency in the social sciences to see missionaries’ motivations predominantly in negative terms is effectively problematised by Priest, Robert J., ‘Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist’, Current Anthropology, 42 (2001), 29–68CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

6 Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 662–3 and cf. 18–19, 261–2.

7 David Bosch, Witness to the World: The Christian Mission in Theological Perspective (Louisville, 1980; Eugene, 2006), 117–18.

8 Cf. Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 663.

9 The Day-Breaking, if not the sun-rising of the Gospell with the Indians in New-England (Wing S3110. London, 1647), 15; Jongeneel, Jan, ‘The Missiology of Gisbertus Voetius’, Calvin Theological Journal, 26 (1991), 47–79Google Scholar, at 64–5.

10 For some compelling recent case studies that illustrate this truism, see Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford, 2012); D. L. Noorlander, Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, 2019); James Van Horn Melton, ‘Conversion and Its Discontents on the Southern Colonial Frontier: The Pietist Encounter with Non-Christians in Colonial Georgia’, in Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformation, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge, 2020), 228–53. In the nineteenth century, famously, David Livingstone won only a single African convert.

11 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, ii, 77.

12 See Clifford Putney, ‘Introduction’ to The Role of the American Board in the World: Bicentennial Reflections on the Organization's Missionary Work, 1810–1920, ed. Clifford Putney and Paul T. Burlin (Eugene, 2012), xx.

13 Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (eds.), ‘Introduction’ to Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning (Aldershot, 2014), 1; Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 661–2.

14 Not to be confused with the better-known Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), established in 1701.

15 An act for the promoting and propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England. Die Veneris, 27 Julii, 1649. Ordered by the Commons assembled in Parliament (Wing E2505A. London, 1649), 407–8.

16 Elias Neau to John Chamberlayne, 3 Oct. 1705, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, SPG Letterbooks A2/125 p. 3.

17 R.G., Virginia's cure, or, An advisive narrative concerning Virginia discovering the true ground of that churches unhappiness, and the only true remedy (Wing G1624. London, 1662); Robinson, W. Stitt Jr, ‘Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia’, Journal of Southern History, 18 (1952), 152–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 160.

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19 The Day-Breaking, if not the sun-rising, 5.

20 Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA, 2013), esp. 30.

21 Cf. Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History, The Modern Library edn (New York, 2002), xxxii–xxiii, 25, [38]–39, 56–9.

22 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr (Chicago, 1994), 45–7, 51.

23 Dennis C. Landis, ‘Lutherans Meet the Indians: A Seventeenth-Century Conversion Debate’, in The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville, 2004), 99–117.

24 Philip Baldaeus, ‘A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East-India Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, as also of the Isle of Ceylon’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (ESTC T097848. London, 1704), iii, 802.

25 Storm, Dikka, ‘The Church, the Pietist Mission and the Sámi: An Account of a Northern Norwegian Mission District in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Norwegian Journal of Missiology, 3 (2017), 59–75Google Scholar; Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford, 2008), 147–67.

26 Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842), p. 505.

27 Indeed, Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, ii, 118, conclude that, due to the ‘disappointingly low’ number of converts, missionaries to the Tswana gradually but overwhelmingly came to prioritise ‘the civilising mission’ over ‘salvation’ – as if the two were alternatives.

28 See e.g. Talhamy, Yvette, ‘American Protestant Missionary Activity among the Nusayris (Alawis) in Syria in the Nineteenth Century’, Middle Eastern Studies, 47 (2011), 215–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okkenhaug, I., ‘Christian Missions in the Middle East and the Ottoman Balkans: Education, Reform, and Failed Conversions, 1819–1967’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47 (2015), 593–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Proctor, J. H., ‘Scottish Medical Missionaries in South Arabia, 1886–1979’, Middle Eastern Studies, 42 (2006), 103–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorothy Birge Keller and Robert S. Keller, ‘American Board Schools in Turkey’ and Virginia A. Metaxas, ‘Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee and the Changing Role of Near East Missionaries in Early Twentieth-Century Turkey’, in The Role of the American Board, ed. Putney and Burlin, chs. 4–5.

29 See Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, 2009), 54–8, 64–6, 72, 297, 306.

30 See Gareth Atkins, ‘Missions on the Fringes of Europe: British Protestants and the Orthodox Churches, c. 1800–1850’, in British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600–1900, ed. Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villani (New York, 2021), 215–34.

31 See e.g. Philip Wingeier-Rayo, ‘The Impact of the World Missionary Conference on Mexico: The Cincinnati Plan’, in The Reshaping of Mission in Latin America, ed. Miguel Alvarez (Oxford, 2015), 36–46, 731–3, 736–7; Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 414–15, 420–2; Fernando Santos-Granero, Slavery and Utopia: The Wars and Dreams of an Amazonian World Transformer (Austin, 2018), 21–2, 139–64, 167–9, 173–7; Richard W. Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf, Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, rev. edn (Nampa, ID, 1995), 276–8, 283–6; G. Alexander Kish, The Origins of the Baptist Movement among the Hungarians (Leiden, 2012); Ackers, Peter, ‘West End Chapel, Back Street Bethel: Labour and Capital in the Wigan Churches of Christ c.1845–1945’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47 (1996), 298–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for more recent history, Hans Krabbendam, Saving the Overlooked Continent: American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940–1975 (Leuven, 2020).

32 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, ii, 67.

33 See e.g. Norma Youngberg, Under Sealed Orders (Mountain View, CA, 1970).

34 Maria Haseneder, A White Nurse in Africa (Mountain View, CA, 1951), 120.

35 See Emma Wild-Wood, Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Change in the African Great Lakes c.1870–1935 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2020), quotation at p. 33; Peggy Brock, ‘New Christians as Evangelists’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Etherington, 132–52; Jehu Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport, 2002); and, for early commitment to the same principle, Edward E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

36 Jones, Timothy Willem, ‘The Missionaries’ Position: Polygamy and Divorce in the Anglican Communion, 1888–1988’, Journal of Religious History, 35 (2011), 393–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar,

37 This was typical of eighteenth-century projects in both the Dutch and British empires: see for example the Congregationalist missionary to the Native Americans, John Sergeant, who in 1743 concluded, after five years in the field, that there was no alternative but to ‘take such a Method in the Education of our Indian Children, as shall in the most effectual Manner change their whole Habit of thinking and acting; and raise them, as far as possible, into the Condition of a civil industrious and polish'd People … to root out their vicious Habits, and to change their whole Way of Living’: most of the adults were beyond hope. Samuel Hopkins, Historical memoirs, relating to the Housatunnuk Indians (ESTC W14473. Boston, MA, 1753), 97–8. For a similar, more systematic approach in the Dutch empire, see Jurrien van Goor, Jan Kompenie as Schoolmaster: Dutch Education in Ceylon 1690–1795 (Groningen, 1978).

38 This was typical of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical Anglicans, and of the rather different evangelicals of twentieth-century North America: Grayson Carter, Anglican Evangelicals [2001] (Eugene, 2015), ch. 1; Richard Turnbull, Shaftesbury: The Great Reformer (Oxford, 2010), 28–34, 51–7; Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of American Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 2–5, 326–31; Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 401–5.

39 This term apparently originated in the early seventeenth-century Dutch East Indies: Johannes Keuning, ‘Ambonese, Portuguese and Dutchmen: The History of Ambon to the End of the Seventeenth Century’, in Dutch Authors on Asian History, ed. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, M. E. van Opstall and G. J. Schutte (Dordrecht, 1988), 362–97, at 383.

40 Eire, Carlos M. N., ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 10 (1979), 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, 1996), 86–117; Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, 2017), 382–5, 464–5.

41 As in, archetypally, the debacle of Karl Gützlaff's ‘Chinese Union’ and the resulting long hangover of scepticism: Jessie G. Lutz and R. Ray Lutz, ‘Karl Gützlaff's Approach to Indigenisation: The Chinese Union’, in Christianity in China from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford, 1996), 269–91.

42 Cho, Eunsik, ‘The Great Revival of 1907 in Korea: Its Cause and Effect’, Missiology, 26 (1998), 289–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 296.

43 The Day-Breaking, if not the sun-rising, 9; Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), 187–95.

44 Moffat, Missionary Labours, pp. 496, 508.

45 Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart. Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-Day Adventists and the American Dream, 2nd edn (Bloomington, 2006).

46 David Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience (1982), 46–51; Etherington, Norman, ‘Outward and Visible Signs of Conversion in Nineteenth-Century Kwazulu-Natal’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 32 (2002), 432CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennifer Fish Kashay, ‘“We will banish the polluted thing from our houses”: Missionaries, Drinking, and Temperance in the Sandwich Islands’, in The Role of the American Board, ed. Putney and Burlin, 287–311.

47 Kling, A History of Christian Conversion, 13–14.

48 Cf. Hebrews 11:13–15; Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992); Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, i, 172–5

49 D. E. Mungello (ed.), The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, Monumenta Serica 33 (Nettetal, 1994); Peter Hinchliff, ‘Colenso, John William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

50 See e.g. Oxford, Bodleian Library, USPG Papers 2: Committee Minutes, vii.134–7.

51 Glasson, Mastering Christianity.

52 Noorlander, Heaven's Wrath, esp. 174–83.

53 E.g. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990); Brian Stanley (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, 2003); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004); Etherington, Missions and Empire; Hilary M. Carey, God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011).

54 See e.g. Sujit Sivasundram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (New York, 2011), 127–31; Etherington, ‘Introduction’, 7.

55 Behrman, Cynthia F., ‘The After-Life of General Gordon’, Albion, 3 (1971), 50–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 55.

56 Lindenfeld, World Christianity and Indigenous Experience, pp. 21–4. And see Andrew Walls, ‘The Translation Principle in Christian History’, in his The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY, 1996), 26–42.

57 On perhaps the most spectacular and certainly the bloodiest example of this process of indigenisation, see Kilcourse, Carl S., ‘Instructing the Heavenly King: Joseph Edkins's Mission to Correct the Theology of Hong Xiuquan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (2020), 116–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 For a pioneering overview of the terrain, see Andrew F. Walls, ‘The Domestic Importance of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Missionary’, in his Missionary Movement, 211–20.

59 Ibid., 217–19; Hilary Ingram, ‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing: British Overseas Medical Missions and the Politics of Professionalisation, c.1880–1910’, in Complaints, Controversies and Grievances in Medicine: Historical and Social Science Perspectives, ed. Jonathan Reinarz and Rebecca Wynter (New York, 2015), 75–90.