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April 10 - April 15, 2023
In many cases, as in India, China, and large parts of Africa, Christian missionaries were not so much breaking new ground as reopening ancient and quite familiar mines.
In the 1880s missionaries in the Kongo met with mass enthusiasm that would be difficult to explain if we did not realize that the people were rediscovering what had been the national religion only a century or so earlier.
Hudson Taylor, legendary missionary to China, popularized the term “the Great Commission” to describe Christ’s command in the Gospel of Matthew to carry the gospel to all nations.
In 1893 a World Parliament of Religions that met in Chicago proclaimed the triumph of Christianity in its liberal, Protestant, and quintessentially American form.
the age to come would be the American century, and also, inevitably, the Christian century (the magazine of that name was founded in 1902).
By the 1950s the United States would be supplying two-thirds of the 43,000 Protestant missionaries active around the world.42
for all their association with imperialism, nineteenth-century missionaries did make important concessions to native cultures (as opposed to native religions).
Protestants from the beginning recognized the absolute necessity of offering the faith in local languages, so the Bible was now translated, in whole or in part, into many African and Asian tongues.
In the 1850s, Henry Venn of the Church Mission Society asserted that missions would give way to churches
Venn spoke, unforgettably, of the coming “euthanasia of the mission.” The transition would come through a Three Self policy, in which the church should be built on principles of self-government, self-support, and self-propagation.
While we can more or less measure the numbers declaring themselves Christian, the inner dynamics of religious change do not lend themselves to counting of any kind.
The vision of perfect relativism breaks down somewhat when Western Christianity is concerned, since it is seen as ipso facto a less valid and desirable model than those which it is seeking to replace.
By 1970, African churches in particular were calling for a moratorium on Western missions because they stunted the growth of local initiatives.
If the modern missionary stereotype had any force, we can scarcely understand why the Christian expansion proceeded as fast as it did, or how it could have survived the end of European political power. There must have been a great deal more to global South Christianity than the European-driven mission movement.
These native converts were the indispensable pillars of the spreading network of missionary organizations.
Besides lacking popular recognition, these local activists were commonly denied formal positions or prestige, and were at best granted titles such as lay catechist, but the missions could not have succeeded without them.
Just how deeply, and how quickly, the new Christians appropriated the religion can be illustrated from the many stories of zeal in the face of persecution.
In the Madagascar of the 1850s, thousands of Christians were “speared, smothered, starved or burned to death, poisoned, hurled from cliffs or boiled alive in rice pits.”
In terms of the number of victims, the bloodiest persecutions of these years occurred in Asia.
One violent purge occurred in the native-ruled states of Indo-China during the mid- and late nineteenth century.
perhaps a hundred thousand in all.
Considered globally, the second half of the nineteenth century must be seen as one of the great ages of Christian martyrdom.
A people’s traditions could not be swept away overnight.” A religion that failed to synthesize old and new “would only maim a man’s soul.”
From the earliest days of the missionary enterprise, indigenous peoples found aspects of Christianity exciting, even intoxicating, to the extent that they tried to absorb them into local culture, without waiting for the blessing of the European churches.
Arguably, such charismatic prophets are an inevitable by-product of the conversion process, and their appearance in large numbers marks the transition from a grudging and formal acceptance of Christianity to the widespread internalization of Christian belief among the common people.
In a sense, this is how Christianity goes native.
The First World War era was fertile for the creation of such movements, perhaps because events in Europe stirred apocalyptic expectations around the world and aroused hopes for a new religious/political order.
there are the important Zionist churches that grew ultimately from charismatic sects in late nineteenth-century North America and which practiced faith healing and speaking in tongues. They take their name indirectly from Mount Zion in Jerusalem, but more immediately from Zion City in Illinois, the headquarters of an influential American charismatic movement.
Over the last two centuries, at least, it might have been the European empires that first kindled Christianity around the world, but the movement soon enough turned into an uncontrollable brushfire.
It was precisely as Western colonialism ended that Christianity began a period of explosive growth that still continues unchecked, above all in Africa.
Whatever their image in popular culture, Christian missionaries of the colonial era succeeded remarkably.
In many cases the major European-oriented churches successfully adapt and incorporate native ways into local liturgies and worship styles. In other instances, though, the result is the formation of wholly new churches, in a way that might have disturbed the missionary founders.
Regardless of the precision of any of these figures, we must be struck by the fact that almost one Christian in five worldwide is neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Anglican, nor Orthodox.
These Other churches represent a wide variety of denominations, often (but not always) included under the general label of Pentecostal.
One central division is that Pentecostal believers rely on direct spiritual revelations that supplement or even replace biblical authority.
Their numbers were tiny until the 1950s, when growth began in earnest. Since that date, Pentecostals account for 80 or 90 percent of Protestant/Pentecostal growth across Latin America.
And whatever our view of the IURD, its growth indicates that it is catering to a vast public hunger, so that even if this group were to disappear tomorrow, new movements would arise to take its place.
the Ethiopian word for Protestant is simply Pentay, or Pentcostal. How could there be any other kind?
One way or another, inside the Catholic Church or outside it, Christianity worldwide is becoming steadily more charismatic.
Asian churches too demonstrate a real excitement about the prospects for future growth, a sense of standing at the beginning of a new Christian epoch.
“Europe is in the times of Jesus with anti-establishment protests against an aging religious institution tottering under the weight of its wealth, property and privileges. Asia is in the times of Paul, planting a convert church in virgin soil.”
Christianity has made deep inroads into regions once closely associated with other religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese traditional faiths. The great exception to this statement has been Islam, and the historically Muslim lands into which Christian missions have rarely penetrated.
many of the new churches do have certain features in common, which set them apart from the traditional Christianity of Europe and North America.
One common factor is that the various Southern churches are growing in response to similar economic circumstances.
urbanization today does promise a new political and religious autonomy.
This sense of family and fellowship is crucial for understanding the wide and remarkably diverse appeal of the new Christian congregations.
In practical terms, the emphasis on domestic values has had a transformative and often positive effect on gender relationships, what Elizabeth Brusco has memorably called a “reformation of machismo.”
To be a member of an active Christian church today might well bring more tangible benefits than being a citizen of Nigeria or Peru.
To quote an observer of Brazil’s emerging churches, “Their main appeal is that they present a God that you can use. Most Presbyterians have a God that’s so great, so big, that they cannot even talk with him openly, because he is far away. The Pentecostal groups have the kind of God that will solve my problems today and tomorrow. People today are looking for solutions, not for eternity.”
the process of Christian expansion outside Europe and the West does seem inevitable, and the picture offered here is based solidly on current trends, religious and demographic.
