Missions and Unity

Lessons from History, 1792—2010

Thomas

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781621890973
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This study is the first comprehensive history of the impact of the modern missionary movement on the understanding of and work toward Christian unity. It tells stories from all branches of the church: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in its many types (conciliar, evangelical, Pentecostal, and independent).Part 1, Historical, highlights the contribution of modern missions to Christian unity, from William Carey and his antecedents and peers to present-day missions.Part 2, Ten Models of Unity, takes an inductive approach to history, asking not how should Christians cooperate? but how has the missionary movement helped Christians to work together at the local, national, regional, and global level?Part 3, Wider Ecumenism, broadens the evidence to include how the missions movement has helped not only institutional churches but also broader society to have concern for the unity of the entire human family. Included here is the story of how the Protestant missionary movement influenced the forming of the United Nations as well as the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The study also covers the movement's impact on Christian attitudes toward, and relations with, persons of other faiths.Mission and Unity is the standard reference work in the field for persons studying modern history, modern church history, missions, and ecumenics.

part one

Historical

1

William Carey’s Pleasing Dream and Its Antecedents

On May 15, 1806, William Carey, the pioneer Baptist missionary to India, wrote from Calcutta to Andrew Fuller, secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society:

The Cape of Good Hope is now in the hands of the English; should it continue so, would it not be possible to have a general association of all denominations of Christians, from the four quarters of the world, kept there once in about ten years? I earnestly recommend this plan, let the first meeting be in the Year 1810, or 1812 at furthest. I have no doubt but it would be attended with very important effects; we could understand one another better, and more entirely enter into one another’s views by two hours conversation than by two or three years epistolary correspondence.1

Two months later Carey outlined his plan to his neighbor Henry Mar-tyn, the Anglican chaplain in Calcutta. Martyn was very much pleased with the idea “not on account of its practicality, but [because of] its grandeur.”2

However, Andrew Fuller rejected the proposal, declaring that “in a meeting of all denominations, there would be no unity, without which we had better stay at home.”3 He represented the dominant view of the period that Christians of different denominations could not meet without quarreling and thereby intensifying their differences.

The seed of what Ruth Rouse has called “the most startling missionary proposal of all time” had fallen on stony ground. Walls of division—the results of historic church conflicts—remained intact. Yet for missionaries working among the Bengalis of Calcutta, or later among the Chinese of Canton, or in other fields, such divisions increasingly were judged to be both unbiblical and unnecessary.4

Revolution and Religious Dissent

Carey was not the only visionary in 1806. In that year Napoleon Bonaparte had his own vision—that of military conquest. In 1806 sixteen minor German states formed the Confederation of the Rhine, throwing their futures in with Napoleon’s ambitions. They were Napoleon’s spoils of war following his victory at the battle of Austerlitz. Although the British had destroyed the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon’s army, which had swept eastward in Europe, could now move westward again. Until his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was to convulse the continent with his ambitions of empire.5

Earlier the ideals of the French Revolution had been welcomed by English Dissenters at a time when they were battling for religious liberty. Carey, serving as secretary of the Dissenters’ Committee in 1790, watched France’s awesome drama with sympathy and hope as “a movement towards a completer humanity.” At first he believed it was “God’s answer” and that “a glorious door opened, and likely to be opened much wider, for the gospel, by the spread of civil and religious liberty, and by the diminution of the papal power.” Carey hoped that religious liberty would spread from France to England. Parliament’s rejection of a motion to repeal the detested Test and Corporation Acts, which placed restrictions on Dissenters, could only have reinforced Carey’s radical opinions.6

Carey’s “radicalism,” however, was that of a stalwart defense of religious liberty, which had been and remained a hallmark of religious independency, especially among Quakers and Baptists. The old dissenting sects, which 140 years earlier had provided foot soldiers for Cromwell’s army, had become more prosperous and less politically radical. Presbyterians and Independents were strongest in the commercial and wool manufacturing centers, while Baptists attracted small tradesmen, small farmers, and rural laborers. All these dissenters were inspired to holiness of life by reading John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress more than to political action by reading Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.7

Élie Halévy believed that England was spared a political revolution, toward which her contradictory polity and economy might have led her, through the stabilizing effect of evangelical religion. “The influence of Methodism,” the French social historian wrote, “contributed a great deal, during the last years of the eighteenth century, to preventing the French Revolution from having an English counterpart.”8

At the time, however, the jury was still out. On the one hand, John Wesley remained an Anglican clergyman and a good Tory throughout his life. In contrast to other Dissenters, he had defended Lord North against the American revolutionists at some considerable cost to his fledgling movement there. On the other hand, Methodism in England attracted many of the working class who shared political grievances and the appeals of the radicals. After Wesley’s death in 1791, many politicians and Anglican clergy reacted with paranoia at the prospect of there being over 100,000 Methodists under the tight discipline of their Committee of One Hundred. They were the only body of organized people capable of making a revolution.

Halévy argued cogently that Methodism aroused the passions of England’s working class, but for revival and reform—not political revolution. The concern for a new morality spread from them to other Dissenters, and through the evangelicals into the Church of England. The visible expression of this new persuasion was to be found in the activities of voluntary associations.9

On June 1, 1792, the Baptist Association, meeting in Nottingham, approved the groundbreaking proposition of Andrew Fuller “for forming a Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the Heathens.” The next day the Nottingham weekly Journal was filled with the latest developments of the revolution in France, riots in Birmingham, and executions at Newgate. The action taken by the Baptist Association did not even rate a line, yet would be an event remembered over two hundred years.10

It is significant that the voluntary associations for missions developed in the eighteenth century in those states in Europe in which religious toleration had been accepted. The dream of a Christian society, a corpus Christianum, cherished by many throughout the Middle Ages, was not entirely shattered by the sixteenth-century Reformation. Calvin’s Geneva, while a haven for oppressed Protestants, was also to be a holy commonwealth of those who believed in a common catechism. Dissenters were to be expelled or, like Servetus, exterminated. Menno Simons, the Anabaptist, faced persecution from both Roman Catholics and Lutherans. The turmoil of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was ended not by guarantees of religious freedom, but by the power of the ruler to determine the faith of all his subjects—the principle of cujus regio, ejus religio. The resulting state-church pattern, whether Protestant or Catholic, did not encourage independency.11

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries two new factors provided the seedbed for voluntarism in missions. The first was colonialism. Once European powers ventured to the East, where subject peoples could not be converted by the sword, they accepted a de facto religious plurality. British North America posed a special situation, where almost all the chief European strains of Christianity were present yet none was in the ascendancy. This provided a second seedbed—the recognition of a plurality of churches and ultimately a separation of church and state.12

Carey’s Mission Antecedents

His imagination fired by reports of the voyages of Captain Cook, William Carey hoped that he might serve his Master in the South Pacific. In doing so he was part of the long line of missionaries from St. Paul onwards who heard the call “to come over and help us.” Since fifteenth-century explorations were sponsored largely by the rulers of Spain and Portugal, the first link of missions with colonialism was by Roman Catholics. By the seventeenth century, Dutch and English commercial companies joined in the competition for trade with the East, and added chaplains to their payrolls. Initially they ministered to company employees, but often branched out to work with local peoples, as with the Dutch in Java.13

Royal and Company Initiatives

Anglicans led in ecumenical initiatives in mission in the eighteenth century. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698, maintained close connections in cooperation with Lutheran and Reformed churches on the continent and with their clergy who had recognition as Corresponding Members. Using the corporate model, Anglicans established in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). An incorporated society with royal charter, its main work was to care for Anglicans while overseas in the Caribbean or North America. However, missionaries were also to be sent to work with Native Americans, and with the slaves being brought from Africa. During the same period King Frederick IV of Denmark took royal initiative to send missionaries to the tiny Danish settlement of Tranquebar on India’s southeast coast. Lacking Danes ready to serve, he asked the Pi...