The Great Century of Missions

"Expect great things"

For two centuries after the Reformation, Protestants did little mission work beyond Europe, apart from the Moravians and a few Pietists (see Pietists and Moravians). Many Calvinists assumed that if God wanted to save the "heathen," he would do it without human effort. That changed dramatically at the end of the 1700s.

William Carey (1761–1834) was an English shoemaker, self-taught in several languages, and a Baptist pastor. He kept a homemade map of the world on his workshop wall. Inspired by Captain Cook's voyages and Jonathan Edwards's writings, he wrote An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792). When he proposed to a ministers' meeting that they discuss world mission, an older minister reportedly told him to sit down: if God wanted to convert the heathen, he would do it without Carey's help. Carey persisted. In a famous sermon he urged: "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." That year the Baptist Missionary Society was founded.

In 1793 Carey sailed for India. For seven years he saw no converts. His son died, and his wife sank into mental illness. Working from the Danish colony of Serampore near Calcutta with colleagues William Ward and Joshua Marshman, he translated the Bible, in whole or part, into some 35 Indian and Asian languages. He founded Serampore College, studied botany, and campaigned against sati (the burning of widows), which was banned in 1829. Carey is often called the "father of modern missions."

The missionary societies

Carey's example sparked a wave of voluntary missionary societies, a new kind of organization, funded by ordinary church members' donations:

• London Missionary Society (1795, nondenominational, later Congregational)
• Church Missionary Society (1799, evangelical Anglican)
• British and Foreign Bible Society (1804)
• American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810)
• Many Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Reformed societies

The first American missionaries, Adoniram Judson and his wife Ann Hasseltine Judson, sailed for Asia in 1812. On the voyage they became Baptists, which spurred American Baptists to organize for mission. In Burma (Myanmar), Judson was imprisoned and tortured during the Anglo-Burmese War, and Ann nursed him and died soon after. He translated the Bible into Burmese. His work laid the foundations for large churches among the Karen and other peoples. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China (1807), translated the Bible into Chinese and compiled a dictionary, though he baptized only a handful of converts.

Where Christians lived, 1800 and 1910 (approximate share of world Christians)

Africa and David Livingstone

The most famous missionary of the century was David Livingstone (1813–1873), a Scottish doctor who went to southern Africa in 1841 with the London Missionary Society. He made only one known convert, a chief who later lapsed. He became an explorer instead, crossing the continent from coast to coast and searching for the source of the Nile. He believed that "Christianity, commerce and civilization" would end the Arab-Swahili slave trade that was devastating East Africa. His writings about its horrors stirred Britain. When the journalist Henry Stanley found him in 1871, he supposedly greeted him with "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone died in 1873 in what is now Zambia. His African companions buried his heart there and carried his body over 1,500 kilometers to the coast to be returned to Britain.

In West Africa, freed slaves resettled in Sierra Leone became key evangelists. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809–1891), rescued as a boy from a slave ship, became a linguist and in 1864 the first African Anglican bishop. His story shows both the promise and the problems of the era. The Church Missionary Society's secretary Henry Venn championed "self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating" African churches. But after Venn's death, younger European missionaries undermined Crowther, and the next bishop of the region was white. Resentment of such treatment led to the founding of independent African churches.

Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) went to China in 1853. Unlike most missionaries, who lived in Western-style compounds in coastal treaty ports, he adopted Chinese dress and the queue (pigtail) and moved inland. In 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission with a new model:

• missionaries from any Protestant denomination, including those without university education, and single women;
• no guaranteed salaries and no public appeals for money. They would trust God to provide ("faith mission");
• leadership based in China, not in London;
• a goal of reaching every province of China's interior.

By his death the CIM had over 800 missionaries. The "faith mission" model inspired many later evangelical mission agencies.

Women in mission

By the late 1800s, women made up the majority of missionaries. Barred from ordination at home, women found in mission an outlet for leadership, preaching, teaching and medicine. Women's missionary societies raised huge sums. Missionary women could reach women in cultures where men could not. They founded thousands of schools for girls and pioneered women's medical care in India and China.

Mary Slessor (1848–1915), a Scottish mill girl, worked for decades in Calabar (Nigeria), living among local people, rescuing twins (whom local custom considered cursed and left to die), and serving as a magistrate. The American Southern Baptist Lottie Moon (1840–1912) worked in China and urged women at home to support missions. She died of malnutrition after giving away her food during a famine. In India, the brilliant Brahmin convert Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) founded a home for child widows, translated the Bible into Marathi, and led a revival.

Catholic missions revive

Catholic missions, battered by the Revolution and the suppression of the Jesuits, revived strongly after 1815. Dozens of new missionary orders were founded. Cardinal Charles Lavigerie of Algiers founded the White Fathers (1868), who worked in Africa dressed in Arab-style white robes, and he campaigned against the slave trade. Catholic missionaries reached the Pacific, China, Korea and Africa. Father Damien of Molokai of Molokai (1840–1889) served people with leprosy in a Hawaiian colony until he caught the disease and died. In Uganda, 22 young Catholic and over 20 Anglican converts were burned alive in 1885–1887 on the orders of King Mwanga. The Uganda Martyrs are honored by both churches.

Missions and empire

The Great Century of missions coincided with the height of European imperialism. The relationship was complicated:

• Missionaries often traveled under the protection of colonial powers, shared assumptions of European cultural superiority, and sometimes supported conquest. In China, missionary rights were secured by "unequal treaties" after the Opium Wars, deeply associating Christianity with foreign aggression. That helped fuel the Boxer Uprising (1900), in which over 200 missionaries and some 30,000 Chinese Christians were killed.
• Yet missionaries were often the sharpest critics of colonial abuses. They campaigned against slavery, forced labor (as in King Leopold's Congo), opium and the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.
• By translating the Bible into hundreds of local languages, often creating the first written form of the language, missionaries strengthened local cultures and identities. The scholar Lamin Sanneh argued that this "translation principle" made Christianity more African than European in the long run. Mission schools educated many future leaders of independence movements.

The real evangelists

Recent historians stress that most of the actual work of spreading Christianity was done not by foreign missionaries but by local Christians: catechists, Bible women, evangelists, teachers and prophets. In Africa especially, African Christians carried the faith far beyond missionary control. Some founded their own "African Initiated Churches" (see The Global South).

Edinburgh 1910

The Great Century culminated in the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, chaired by the American Methodist layman John R. Mott. Its slogan was "the evangelization of the world in this generation." Over 1,200 delegates attended, though only about 17 were from Asia and none from Africa. It is usually considered the start of the modern ecumenical movement (see The Ecumenical Movement). Delegates were optimistic. Four years later, Christian Europe went to war with itself.