Pierson called for all peoples to receive “the knowledge” of the gospel, not for all humankind to respond to it. As one prophecy conference speaker explained in 1878: “We have failed [at missions] simply because we have been aiming at universal conversion and not at universal evangelization. We have been trying to convert patches and not evangelize the whole.”18 To civilize as well as Christianize—the long-standing order of denominational missions work—was foolhardy and ineffective, based on a triumphalist postmillennial eschatology of an earlier age. Interdenominational efforts, on the other
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there is western paternalism in both but this was an explicit movement away frim disciplship toward evangelism as the primary goal

