Christian Missionaries

8 Key excerpts on "Christian Missionaries"

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  Advanced Missiology

  How to Study Missions in Credible and Useful Ways

  • Kenneth Nehrbass(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  258 By now, most academicians have all but given up hope for objectivity; and no longer expect human nature to operate throughout history according to “laws” the way physics does. However, we can still use history to theorize about human nature and how people typically respond to missionaries and to the Christian faith.

  Rather than studying the history of missions diachronically, this approach utilizes what Bradley and Muller referred to as the “special or synchronic method.”259 We look at a specific issue and see how this has been understood throughout history. This tactic of extracting truths from the study of the history of missions goes back as far as the third-century historian Tertullian who theorized that martyrdom causes the church to spread further.

  Current academicians still use history in this way. For instance, Bonk’s history of missionaries in Africa and China argues that Christianity spread as missionaries identified with local cultures.260 Kim’s history of Christianity among Koreans living in Myungdongchon village, China, attempts to build on the theory of “people movements” by examining indigenous leadership patterns and the holistic approach of missionary efforts in that region.261

  To consider some other universal principles: Missiologists have tried to look at historical data to determine if Christianity is spread top-down, through influential elites, or if it is primarily a movement at the grassroots. For example, Neill262 shows how Francis Xavier enjoyed success by reaching the elite of Japan—the “best people yet discovered”; and how Christianity spread rapidly through the Pacific by reaching the kings of Tonga and Tahiti. Irvin and Sunquist’s history of the world Christian movement demonstrates that Christianity expanded where colonial powers went: Calvinism spread with the Dutch, who proscribed Catholicism; Catholicism spread with Spanish, French, Italians, and Portuguese, who tried to convince Thomist, Ethiopian, Orthodox, and Coptic Christians to conform to Rome; Lutheranism accompanied Germans in their colonial expansion, and Methodism and the Anglican Church spread in British colonies.263

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  The Atlas of Religion

  • Joanne O'Brien, Martin Palmer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Religious education is more and more judged by educational standards relating to child development, rather than by religious standards of conversion or of nurturing children into a specific religion. Sources David Lara, Libertad religiosa y educación religiosa escolar , Bogota: PUJ, 2006. Personal communications: Professor John Hull, Professor Emeritus of Religious Education, University of Birmingham, UK; Professor Robert Jackson Director of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, University of Warwick, UK; Dr Gunnar J Gunnarsson, Dr Pille Valk, University of Tartu, Estonia; Dr Chrissie Steyn, Dr Peter Schreiner, Comenius Institut, Munster, Germany; Dr Jose Luis Meza and Dr Roseanne McDougall Christian Missionaries (pages 52–53) The Christian missionary movement is as strong, if not stronger, than it has ever been. It has 4,100 missionary organizations, over 419,500 full-time career missionaries and an annual expenditure of $15 billion. It is far removed from the 19th-century stereotype of the missionary, dressed in white and paddling up the Limpopo, or the notion of going to a ‘heathen’ country to bring about conversions. Christianity has always been a missionary religion – the Apostle Paul was its first major missionary figure – but in the 21st century, just 1 percent of all Christian Missionaries work with non-Christians. Almost all go to Christian majority countries in response to requests from local churches, a principal known as ‘partnership’. A massive amount of time, energy and finance is spent on ‘home’ missions – and 70 percent of missionaries work in their home country. Further, the total impact of foreign mission is difficult to calculate, since large numbers of Christians work abroad for non-Christian organizations and engage in part-time missionary work. Others go out under the auspices of groups not officially described as missionary organizations.

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  Christianity in Southeast Asia

  • Robbie B. H. Goh(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  In such countries, the tendency over time has been for the proliferation of different denominations through 14 Christianity in Southeast Asia the establishment of different missions as well as the growth of a variety of “independent” (i.e. of local origins) Protestant churches. This multiplication of different missions has generally tended to spur the development of varied and far-reaching social programmes and institutions, as the Christian organizations both collaborated and competed with each other in terms of community penetration, church planting in new areas, the establishment of new ministry areas, and of course the winning of converts. Despite these differences, what the various Christian missions to Southeast Asia had in common was an overall effect of social transformation in the movement to modern education on European-American models, social attitudes to women, cultural traditionalisms, and a whole range of welfare and relief work. In most cases Christian organizations provided aid and services to the community which the various colonial governments were unable or unwilling to provide. By targeting needy and marginal groups such as the poor and destitute, racial minorities, recent immigrants, women, and rural communities, Christian Missionaries played a significant role in calling attention to the plight of these groups, and ultimately in fostering ideas of social integration and community-building. The work of Christian Missionaries was not, of course, without its problems: these included objections and obstructions by indigenous and traditional religions in various countries, persecution by local authorities (particularly true of the Catholic priests who worked in the era prior to the main period of European colonialism), accusations that they were interfering with and diluting the cultures and traditional ways of local peoples, and other such conflicts and tensions.

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  Transnational Transcendence

  Essays on Religion and Globalization

  • Thomas J. Csordas(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Historically, missionization has been associated with conversion, a term the historian of religion Arthur D. Nock defines, in his 1933 classic Conversion (a book I use as a point of reference for this chapter), as follows: “By con-version we mean the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliber-ate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right” ([1933] 1963: 7). More than a con-cept, this definition presents us with a central category of Christian thought. The notion of missionization is attached to this category as a movement ex-panding in the wake of precisely this universal impulse toward conversion. As a result, missionization is frequently associated with various passages from the Gospels (Matt. 28:16–20; Acts 2:1–4), although it does not explicitly ap-pear in the holy text and despite the fact that there are numerous other verses that define Christianity as a movement internal to Judaism (Matt. 10:5–6; 15:24). According to Nock, the first conversion in the full sense takes place only with Saint Paul, whose persecution of the early Christians as Saul already confirms the sense of being faced with a rupture. From then on, repentance and conversion become an attraction in themselves (Nock [1933] 1963: 220). Following this line of reasoning, the first missionary voyages were un-dertaken by Paul (and Barnabas)—at least when seen (or reinterpreted) in hindsight (191). Seen at a farther distance today, we can perceive just how much this nar-rative is connected to a focus on the western development of Christianity and hence Latin rather than Greek, Syriac, or Coptic Christianity.

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  Mission as God's Spiral of Renewal

  • R. Ross(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Mzuni Press

    (Publisher)

  Migration – People of Faith on the Move Migration and mission ran together in the 19 th and 20 th centuries but, though overlapping, they could be distinguished from one another. This is becoming ever less the case. The people who take the faith from one place to another are more often migrants or refugees than missionaries in the traditional Western sense. Dynamic witness to Jesus Christ is borne by a criss-crossing pattern of diasporic communities spread across the face of the earth. As Andrew Walls has observed: The great new fact of our time – and it has momentous consequences for mission – is that the great migration has gone into reverse. There has been a massive move-ment, which all indications suggest will continue, from the non-Western to the Western world. 3 Among those on the move are the refugees up-rooted by the many conflicts that have afflicted the developing world in recent times. Despite the widespread resentment against immigrants from the South and the barriers put in their path, it seems safe to predict 2 Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Mission , Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994, p. 66. 3 Andrew F. Walls, “Mission and Migration: The Diaspora Factor in Christian History, Journal of African Christian Thought , Vol. 5/2 (December 2002), p. 10. 124 that South-to-North migration will continue to occur on a massive scale for the foreseeable future. So long as many of the migrants are people of profound and adventurous Christian faith, the potential of this vast movement to contribute to worldwide missionary engagement is enor-mous. For example, there can be little doubt that immigration has dramatically changed the character of Christianity in Europe today. It has been esti-mated that there are more than three million Christians of African origin living in Europe. This introduces quite a new composition to church life in Europe.

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  Missions

  Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Strategies

  • Gailyn Van Rheenen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  chapter

  6

  Types of Missionaries The Many Faces of Missionary Ministry

  I

  N THE PAST, MISSIONARIES TENDED TO BE GENERALISTS . They planted churches, developed training schools for church leaders, organized public or private education, fed the poor, began the first translations of Scripture, and perhaps became local veterinarians as well. Their skill set was broad because workers were few, finances limited, and Christian movements small. They were also overtaxed and frustrated, as they felt compelled to engage in ministries for which they may not have been particularly gifted.

  We have entered, however, an era of specialization in which there are multiple expressions of mission throughout the world. This chapter describes these types of ministries. Some missionaries plant churches among unreached and lightly churched people; others train church leaders, translate Scripture, serve as agents of transformational development, seek justice for the oppressed, and provide logistical support for fellow missionaries on the field. Some missionaries work in multidisciplinary teams, in which different “specialists” combine their ministries to produce a more complete expression of the kingdom of God.

  Many missionaries today still serve multiple functions, either simultaneously or during different periods of their missionary careers. They may initially learn languages and cultures, discover how to connect with local peoples, and develop the first communities of faith in their areas — the classical approach of church planting. In later years, however, they may become trainers of leaders and/or compassionate advocates of the poor by launching ministries of transformational development.

  Jim and Julie came to believe that God was calling them to participate in the missio Dei

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  Civilizing Missions

  International Religious Agencies in China

  • M. Hirono(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In addition to their work in education, the liberal Christian Missionaries were involved also in medical work, relief, and social reform. It is obvious that this more technical kind of work required more specialized knowledge and skills. Although the ethos of Christianity was important to the objectives of the Christian missions, in reality, skilled people without a theological background were also employed to conduct “mission activity.” Christian missions became more pro- fessional organizations, and a higher degree of institutionalization was necessary. The institutionalization of educational and medical work began in the 1880s and continued into the twentieth century, by which time these practitioners had become “in increasing num- ber no longer just Christian Missionaries but missionary specialists” (Hyatt 1966: 115). One can argue that this educational and medical work amounted to the secularization of the missions. The evangelical missionar- ies, who devoted themselves simply to preaching the message of the Gospel, languished among accusations of being old-fashioned. Latourette clearly demarcates the three-dimensional aspects of this new type of mission activity: There was the possibility that Protestant Christianity would be swamped by institutions, that the energies of missionaries and Chinese Christians would be absorbed in the machinery of organi- zation, and that the Church would forget that its primary function was to serve as a vehicle for a religious and spiritual message . . . This tendency was reënforced [sic] by the fact that institutions more and more demanded specialists—teachers, nurses, and physicians—whose professional training had crowded out careful preparation in theol- ogy, philosophy, the Bible, and kindred subjects. Protestantism was threatened with secularisation. (1929: 618)

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  Spiritual Encounters

  • Griffiths, Cervantes(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • University of Birmingham Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Spreading the Word: missionaries, conversion and circulation in the northeast DAVID Mi RRAY During the seventeenth century 7 the native peoples of northeast America were the subject of a series of missionary enterprises, which combined with varying degrees of contact with traders and settlers and the devastating effect of European diseases to create a profound challenge to their beliefs and social patterns. While the loss and destruction have been evident enough, the remarka-ble strategies of adaptation and change on the part of the Indian communities have only more recently been fully acknowledged, and it is in this context that the missionary encounter, and con-version itself, need to be seen. Conversion implies, at its sim-plest, changing something which is already present, and while the absolutist and exclusive rhetoric of a monotheistic Christianity 7 may invoke total transformation, it is reasonable to ask of any conversion, as opposed to an ex nihilo creation, what exactly, and how much, is actually being changed. 1 Connected with this is the question of how far change might involve exchange, a two-way process, an altogether more problematic idea for Christian Missionaries. Their enterprise entailed the dissemination of new ideas which were intended to replace or transform what was there before, in a one-way transmission, but I want to show how, since they were involved in a complex network of exchanges, cultural, economic and linguistic, the missionaries could not control the meanings of what they gave or introduced. What entered into circulation, whether a word, an idea, or a religious object, then took on a value given by its circulation within that particular ma-terial and discursive economy, and it could not from that point onwards be restricted or authorized only by its Christian origins. 43 David Murray The native peoples of the northeast ranged from subarctic hunt-ers to largely sedentary farmers.

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