Turning points, third edition, chapter 12

Throughout the history of Christianity, as the faith has spread into the world in the spirit of the Great Commission, the church has adopted local idioms in order to make the universal Christian message accessible in new environments. The missionary expansion of the twentieth century has been no exception. While some missionaries tried to transpose unaltered their Western hymnody into non-Western settings, others encouraged the development of lyrics and melodies more in harmony with local traditions. The following hymn from China, “Rise to Greet the Sun,’is an example of the latter efforts. It also illuminates the fertilization from the mission field back to the Western church. Written by T. C, Chao in 1936 and set to a Chinese folk melody, this hymn was translated into English by Bless Wiant in 1946. Interestingly, its own Chinese idiom echoes the theme of Christ as light that inspired much of the first great hymnody of the church.

The 1910 World Missionary Conference was called to order on the evening of June 14 at the Assembly Hall of the United Free Church of Scotland, in the shadow of Edinburgh’s famous castle. ^[1]); and for the definitive modern treatment, see Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference: Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).] After an opening prayer, the president of the conference, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, read greetings from the Imperial German Colonial Office, from former US president Theodore Roosevelt (who had been named a delegate to the conference by the Dutch Reformed Church in America but was prevented by press of business from attending), and from King George V of England, the upright sovereign who only a month before had succeeded his dissolute father Edward VII to the British throne. After the last greeting, the delegates arose spontaneously to sing “God Save the King.”

Speakers for the evening were Lord Burleigh, who voiced the hope that “a unity begun in the mission field may extend its influence, and react upon us at home and throughout the old civilisations”; the archbishop of Canterbury, who expressed the opinion that some at that meeting might “not taste death till they see the Kingdom of God come with power”; and the American missionary statesman Robert E. Speer, who challenged the delegates to remember that no one can follow Christ “without following Him to the uttermost parts of the earth” and urged them to believe that “living faith will make it possible for Him [Christ] to use us for the immediate conquest of the world.” ^[2]

For the next ten days, dramatic speeches were interspersed with wide-ranging debate as the conference took up eight separate subjects. For each theme there was a full volume of published reports. The authors of these reports drew liberally from over one thousand extensive questionnaires that had been returned by missionaries. The topics considered were (1) the transport of the gospel to the whole non-Christian world, (2) the church in the mission field, (3) the place | of education in national Christian life, (4) the message of Christian missions in relation to non-Christian faiths, (5) the preparation of missionaries, (6) the home base of missions, (7) missions and governments, and (8) the promotion of Christian unity. Distinguished British, American, and European missionaries from around the globe led the discussions, which were often enlivened by recitations of missionary experience itself.

The conference ended with the shared conviction that the gathering was too important simply to let slip away. Discussions begun at Edinburgh in 1910 did in fact continue. Eventually they led to the establishment of the International Missionary Conference, and less directly in 1925 to the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work and in 1927 to the World Conference on Faith and Order, two organizations that eventually merged in 1948 to create the World Council of Churches. The missionary conference in Edinburgh was, therefore, the beginning of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. It also represented the high tide of Western missionary expansion, which had gathered strength all throughout the nineteenth century. In that century— when first Britain filled a vacuum of worldwide leadership and then the United States emerged as a great economic power and shaper of civilization—the proportion of the world’s population associated with Christian churches increased more rapidly than at any time since the fourth century. Where less than a quarter of the world could be identified as Christian in 1800, almost 35 percent could be so numbered at the time of the Edinburgh Conference. ^[3] The zeal of Robert Speer and the optimism of the archbishop of Canterbury were thus understandable, The delegates at Edinburgh had lived through an unprecedented expansion of the church, much of it the direct result of missionary efforts. It seemed as if they had a right to rejoice, to anticipate the speedy completion of the Great Commission, and even to assume that this great task would be brought to its end under the leadership of the Protestants responsible for the Edinburgh Conference.

But if Edinburgh marked a high point, it was also, in the phrase of mission historian Stephen Neill, “the end of an epoch.” ^[4] From a perspective at the start of the twenty-first century, the Edinburgh meeting looks as curious as it was remarkable. It was a conference on the worldwide mission of the “church,” but only Protestants attended. (In 1900, there weré approximately 520 million people worldwide affiliated with Christian churches; of these about 135 million were Protestant [including Anglican], 115 million Orthodox, and 265 million Roman Catholic.) Even more, it was a meeting to discuss the evangelization of “the world,” but over 80 percent of the approximately 1,200 delegates were from Britain and North America, with only 170 from the European Continent and only eighteen representing the world beyond Europe and North America. The overwhelming British and American preponderance can be explained in part by the fact that missionaries from these regions were the major planners of the meeting. But another part of the explanation is that as of 1910 in Edinburgh—or New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Berlin, or Copenhagen—“ worldwide Christianity” still meant a Christianity reaching out from Europe (and its North American extensions) to the rest of the globe.

The World Missionary Conference is a turning point in the history of Christianity because of its ecumenical significance. As it happens, at Edinburgh voices were heard speculating whether Christianity should be considered the absolutely final revelation from God or merely the best revelation from God. These were notes that, from the standpoint of traditional Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, would come back later to haunt the movement leading to the World Council of Churches. Even more, Edinburgh marked a turning point because it represented just about the last moment when “worldwide Christianity” could in any meaningful sense be equated with the Christianity of Europe and North America. The wave of the future was toward a world Christianity defined as much outside of Europe and North America as by Europe and North America; the wave of the future was the indigenization of Christianity in countless regional cultures around the world; the wave of the future pointed toward the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, which is described more fully in the next chapter.

Standing as it did between a Western definition of Christianity and the worldwide expansion of the faith, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference provides an excellent vantage point for examining the missionary tides that led up to it, as well as those that swept beyond 1910 to cover the world. Yet in the general history of Christianity, mission activity is incomplete without the local indigenization of the faith. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the transition from missionary expansion to local appropriation has taken place at different times in different ways. For the Christian history of recent centuries, that transition has been every bit as significant as it was in the dynamic explosion of the first three centuries after Christ.

For a number of reasons pertaining to life both inside and outside the churches, the expansion of Christianity beyond the West had slowed to a crawl during the eighteenth century. To be sure, missionary-minded Roman Catholics carried on the work of the Catholic Reformation that had witnessed Dominicans, Augustinians, and (preeminently) Jesuits fanning out with their message to many parts of the world. In addition, the renewal of European Protestantism by the pietist movement was also responsible for promoting considerable missionary vigor. But apart from efforts to stimulate the faith among the European colonists of North America, the eighteenth century was not a great age of Christian expansion. Some of the reasons for this situation were political. Quarreling between the Jesuits and several European monarchs, especially in France, led to the elimination of that premier missionary order in 1773. (The Jesuits would be restored in 1814 and would shortly thereafter become a major missionary force again.) In Russia, which had become the leader of the Orthodox world, heavy-handed interference in Orthodox affairs by rulers like Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) and Catherine II (reigned 1762-96) acted as a general drain on the energy of the church, including its concern for mission. For most of the eighteenth century, intermittent warfare between the two great European powers, France and England, created logistical barriers to missionary service and also undercut allegiance to Christ with allegiance to nation. At the end of the century, turmoil from the French Revolution and then the wave of national liberation movements fostered by Napoleon further diminished European concern for cross-cultural Christian expansion.

The external conditions were matched by serious problems within the churches themselves. Reaction to the seventeenth-century wars of religion included the rise of various forms of the Enlightenment, which promoted religious tolerance much more than Christian zeal. The major churches in Europe and North America were, in general, more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with expansion, On the Continent, Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic Churches all faced problems of self-protection in conflict with the era’s aspiring monarchs (who wished to be known as Enlightened Absolutists). From the mid-eighteenth century, Britain’s established Anglican and Presbyterian Churches, as well as the dissenting denominations, were quickened by evangelical impulses, but they also were reeling from efforts to meet religious needs in burgeoning cities in the face of galloping industrialization. In North America the Protestants who predominated in the British colonies as well as the Catholics in French Quebec had all they could do simply to survive in a largely inhospitable wilderness.

Christian outreach revived in all of the historic Christian regions of Europe and North America as a by-product of more general Christian renewal. The rise of Pietism among European Protestants and of evangelicalism among British Protestants in both the Old World and the New soon fueled missionary expansion. The very humiliations that Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) suffered at the hands of Napoleon worked a spiritual purification in the Roman Catholic Church that soon bore missionary fruit. Also in Russia and the East, the nineteenth century brought significant currents of spiritual renewal that soon spilled over into notable missionary labor among the Orthodox.

For Roman Catholics the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century witnessed another fertile period in the establishment of religious orders, which, as had also been the case in the sixteenth century, provided a great stimulus to missionary activity. Among the orders with longest-lasting significance was the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa, founded in 1868 by Charles Lavigerie, the archbishop of Algeria. Soon known as the White Fathers, for the adoption of Arabic dress, and soon joined by an order of White Sisters, similarly clothed, Lavigerie’s order remained stalwart in its dedication to Rome and a conservative vision of Catholic theology, but also stalwart in its dedication to evangelize the center of the continent around Lake Victoria and Africa’s other great lakes.

Missionary renewal among the Orthodox was led by several dynamic Russian priests who exerted special labors in bringing Christianity to Siberia and points even farther east. One of the most important of these missionaries was John Veniaminou (1797-1879), who was born in the Siberian province of Irkutsk. As a young priest, Veniaminou volunteered for service in the Aleutian Islands, where his preaching was received with great eagerness. Later he personally evangelized in, or sent out missionaries to, Alaska, Japan, the island of Sitka, and the far reaches of Russia’s vast eastern empire. When at the age of seventy Veniaminou finally retired to a monastery, he thought his life’s work was over, but the death of the patriarch of Moscow led to his election to that key post. For another decade this veteran—who, with his fellow missionaries, had been “forged by the experiences of life in Siberia” and came “back to Russia with their souls renewed, well-instructed and zealous” ^[5] —guided the Russian church and greatly expanded its missionary vision.

The awakening of a similar vision among Protestants calls for a fuller account in light of the fact that, with only a few exceptions, Protestants for more than two centuries after the Reformation displayed remarkably little interest in cross-cultural proclamation of the gospel. ^[6] When systematic Protestant missionary efforts finally began, they did so as a result of the expanding vision of a Protestant monarch. Just as earlier Roman Catholic mission was linked to awakening world-consciousness in Spain and Portugal, so now in the eighteenth century the world concerns of northern European Protestants began to make a difference. In this case it was the pietistic King Frederick IV of Denmark and Norway who carly in the eighteenth century took steps to provide for the spiritual welfare of the people affected by his country’s trading center in Tranquebar, South India. When Frederick could not find candidates in Denmark, he turned to August Hermann Francke in Halle, who commissioned two German pietists for the task, including Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719), who became the first widely recognized Protestant missionary statesman. Ziegenbalg’s multifaceted work in Tranquebar was a particular inspiration in Britain, where the same mixture of religious and economic concerns that prevailed in pietistic Denmark were beginning to fuel interest in non-European areas of the world.

For most of the eighteenth century, however, German pietists, with the assistance of like-minded believers from other northern European Protestant states, remained the mainstay of Protestant missionary efforts. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (1694-1760), a professor at Halle, was an eager student of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish who hoped that the publication of Christian literature in these languages would effect the conversion of Muslims. Besides his interest in Islamic evangelism, moreover, Callenberg’s concern for the Middle East led him to found the Jewish Institute in 1728, which promoted peaceful evangelistic practices in place of the violent coercion that had so often marked Christian outreach to Jews, Missionaries from Halle were also sent as ministers to the German-speaking populations migrating to the New World. Among these missionaries, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-87) was the leading figure. He arrived in Pennsylvania in 1742 and by 1748 had succeeded in establishing the Pennsylvania ministerium as the first Lutheran synod in North America.

The Moravians, who shared so many emphases with the Halle pietists, became the most dedicated Protestant missionaries in the whole of the eighteenth century. During the first century after the Moravians were reconstituted as a church under the leadership of Count von Zinzendorf in the early 1720s, approximately two thousand (one-fourth of them women) volunteered for crosscultural missionary service. The first Moravian missionaries were J. L. Dober (1706-66) and David Nitschmann (1696-1772), who responded to Zinzendorf’s appeal (itself spurred by a call from the Halle missionaries associated with the Danish mission) by establishing a self-supporting Christian work in the Danish Virgin Islands. Soon there followed significant Moravian missions to Greenland, Surinam, South Africa, Estonia, Labrador, the Nicobar Islands, and still other places in Asia, Africa, North America, and Central America. In the 1730s, Moravian missionaries began a work among North American Native Americans that proved more successful than any other such European venture. Themselves a marginalized people who eschewed connections with nationalistic power, the Moravians’ very freedom from the ordinary concerns of politics lent special credibility to their message. Unfortunately, Moravians had more difficulty convincing the European settlers in North America of their Christian purposes than they did the Native Americans. Twice—in Pennsylvania as part of the French and Indian War of the 1750s and then in Ohio in the early 1780s after the American Revolution—Moravian Indian communities were attacked by American militia operating under the mistaken impression that the Indian converts were supporting the enemy. The longtime leader of North American Moravian missions, David Zeisberger (1721-1808), finally found a refuge for his Delaware Indian converts in Ontario, where remnants of that community survive to this day

The early pietist and Moravian missions promoted goals of Christian selfsufficiency for new converts that the most far-seeing missionaries of later generations also pursued. Thus, in Tranquebar, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg learned Tamil so that he could translate the Bible into the indigenous language, he founded schools so that new believers could learn to read the Scriptures for themselves, he became a serious student of Indian culture and religions in order to make a credible presentation of the gospel in an appropriate idiom, he made medical assistance available, and he prepared Tamil converts for ordination to serve as pastors of Tamil congregations.

‘These were virtually the same tasks that William Carey (1761-1834) pursued when, at the end of the eighteenth century, he became the dynamic pioneer of English-speaking Protestant missions. To be sure, serious missionary attempts had earlier taken place among English colonists in North America, where John Eliot (1604-90) and the Mayhew family (first Thomas Jr. [1621-57], and then his father, Thomas Sr. [1593-1682]) had led to some Christian conversions among Algonquian-speaking Indians of Massachusetts and the Native Americans on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. But these earlier efforts were continually hamstrung by the need of Eliot and the Mayhews to placate white settlers as well as guide Indian converts. What began with William Carey was cross-cultural outreach with single-minded missionary purpose. Carey was a Baptist shoemaker whose dedication to missionary service grew out of the intense spirituality of Britain’s evangelical revival. In 1792 his pamphlet An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means [that is, human activity] for the Conversion of the Heathens sounded a clarion call for many who would follow in his train.

The next year Carey and his family embarked for India, never to return. At first they attempted to do their work under the aegis of the British East India Company, but when more propitious conditions became available under Danish auspices, they moved to Serampore, where Carey eagerly joined a teacher, Joshua Marshman (1768-1837), and a printer, William Ward (1764-1823), who had followed him to India under the sponsorship of the Baptist Missionary Society. Together, this “Serampore Trio” pursued evangelism and church planting, carried out or sponsored the translation of Scripture into many Indian languages, published Bibles and other Christian literature, studied and published Bengali and Sanskrit books, founded (and taught in) colleges, and took an active role in social and agricultural reforms.

Carey became an inspiration who drew others to India, among whom the American Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) became one of the best known. Carey’s work also was a factor in the broader missionary concern that soon was promoted by the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. And it paralleled an awakening of missionary interest throughout Protestant Europe. During the first third of the nineteenth century an unusual spirit of cooperation prevailed among the new missionaries. As an example, Johannes T. Vanderkemp (1747-1811), founder of the Netherlands Missionary Society, served for several years in South Africa under the London Missionary Society (interdenominational). After the formation of a mission society in Basel, Switzerland, in 1815, a number of these Swiss found service under the Church Missionary Society (Anglican). By the 1830s, most Protestant denominations in Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States had joined the missionary tide.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionary movements occurred in concert with an accelerating worldwide expansion of Western economic and political interests. Yet in this period the concurrence of missionary, trading, humanitarian, and political motives possessed an innocence that was later lost. For the British, as an example, early missionary efforts were tied closely to the campaign against slavery, Parliament’s ban of the slave trade in 1807 realized a prime goal in William Wilberforce’s evangelical aspiration for the moral reform of British society. But it also spurred British Protestants to carry the fight against slavery (and for Christianity) into Africa itself, Yet once the European scramble for non-Western colonies and advantage began with the opening of Japan in the 1850s, and then accelerated from the 1870s as nationalistic conflict in Europe fueled colonial conflict abroad, missionary effort became more and more difficult to disengage from imperial intent.

The earlier, relatively benign combination of imperial and Christian interests is well illustrated by the Niger Expedition of 1841. It was led by T. Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), Wilberforce’s successor as an evangelical leader in Parliament and antislave crusader, who hoped that promotion of “Christianity, commerce, and civilization” in the Niger River Valley of West Africa would overcome the ravages of the slave industry that still, despite the Parliament’s abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834, went on. (The continuation of slavery in the United States sustained both a market and a justification for the African commerce in human lives.) As it happened, Buxton’s expedition failed miserably, but it did serve as an inspiration for David Livingstone (1813-73) of Scotland. Livingstone’s lifetime of activity in sub-Saharan Africa—as missionary, explorer, scientist, consultant to European governments, and antislave zealot—was guided by a firm belief that modern agriculture, energetic commerce, and serious Christianity could together end the slave trade and ennoble African society. If Livingstone’s most serious difficulty in the early part of his career was to convince Africans of the merit of his goals, by its last years his main problem was with Europeans who had begun to pull back from earlier principles supporting self-sufficiency for indigenous peoples.

Those principles, however, were well established by early leaders in the Protestant missionary surge, and they continued to be articulated even when European and American imperialism bore down harder on the non-Western world at the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Venn (1796-1873), secretary of Britain’s Church Missionary Society (Anglican). and Rufus Anderson (1796-1880), foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (an interdenominational agency predominated by Congregationalists), were two of the leaders who thought missionary activity should lead directly, intentionally, and swiftly to indigenous leadership of the new Christian churches. In a work from 1869, Anderson summarized his understanding of New Testament missionary principles in words only slightly more compact than Venn had communicated to several generations of Anglican missionaries:

^[7]

Later in the century, two missionaries to China—the American Presbyterian John L. Nevius (1829-93) and the Anglican Roland Allen (1868—-1947)—teiterated similar principles at a time when Western engagement in Asia could be very heavy-handed. Their contemporary J. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905), founder of the China Inland Mission, was not as articulate as a mission theorist, but his policies of wearing native Chinese dress and of sending missionaries into the Chinese backcountry far beyond the reach of Western protection likewise promoted the indigenization of newly established Christian churches. ^[8]

From the start, a vitally important role in Protestant missions had been played by women, acting both as wives of missionary husbands and on their own. Ann Hasseltine Judson (1789-1826), the first wife of Adoniram, put a busy pen to use for promoting Christian devotion and for informing about missionary circumstances, especially while her husband was in a Burmese prison. Hudson Taylor’s first wife, Maria, was a full partner in the founding of the China Inland Mission, and his second wife, Jennie, also took a full share in directing outreach in China as well as sustaining support in Britain, the United States, and Canada.

Also from the first, however, single women could be found in the thick of Protestant missionary activity. Mary Slessor (1848-1915), who came from a poor Scottish home, was one of the most energetic of such women. Inspired by the death of David Livingstone to volunteer for missionary service, she arrived in 1876 at the Presbyterian Calabar station (in what today is Nigeria), where she quickly learned the local language and immediately became a fixture as a teacher. From 1880 she was in charge of her own mission. Through several moves to new areas she combined religious instruction, medical assistance, and advocacy for the unprotected (like orphans or abandoned twins) in ways that made her beloved of the Africans and respected by the British. So far did she go in identifying with her new environment that, in a breach of common missionary practice, she regularly went hatless and shoeless, as did the Africans,

The career of Lottie Moon (1840-1912) illustrated how spunk as a missionary could have as large an impact on a Western sending church as in the mission field. In 1873 Lottie Moon arrived in China as a missionary for the Southern Baptist Convention. Her notable efforts in Shantung Province as an educator, evangelist, and advocate of women’s ministry made a considerable mark in a region where missionaries were introducing the Chinese to various forms of Western life as well as to Christianity. But Lottie Moon’s effect was even greater in the United States. Her 1888 appeal for added funds to support her mission labors led to the organizing of the Southern Baptists’ Women Missionary Union and then in 1918 to the establishment of an annual offering among Southern Baptists for missionary work. The former agency has channeled immense energy into Southern Baptist mission life, while the latter has led to the collection of more than a billion and a half dollars to support mission work from the Southern Baptist Convention.

As the century went on and the number of Western missionaries increased dramatically, the proportion of single women missionaries leaving Western cultures for missionary service increased even more dramatically. In the latter part of the ninetcenth century, a number of important missionary societies were founded, funded, and directed by women acting on their own. These included the Female Education Society and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society in Britain, the Women’s Union Missionary Society in the United States, and several orders of German Lutheran deaconesses.

When the expanding Protestant concern for mission was added to the revival of missionary interest among Catholics and the Orthodox, the result was that the nineteenth century witnessed a broader and more diffuse expansion of Christianity than had happened since the very first centuries of the church’s existence. As preparation for the indigenous existence of significant Christian bodies on every continent, the nineteenth century truly was, in the phrase of the noteworthy mission historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, “the Great Century.”

The parallel with the early centuries is a reminder, however, that such crosscultural expansion does not take place without a cost. As in the church’s very earliest expansion, so also in the nineteenth century, the cost for both missionaries and new believers was often high.

Western histories naturally stress first the premature death of missionaries, of which there could be a nearly endless recital: fifty men and women dead in the Church Missionary Society’s first two decades of work in Sierra Leone (ca. 1805-25); or John Williams of the London Missionary Society clubbed to death and eaten in 1839 on the island of Erromanga in the South Pacific; or the Anglican Bishop Hannington slain in 1885 as he attempted to move overland into modern Uganda; and many, many more.

Yet if Western accounts are naturally attuned to the death of those who brought the gospel into previously non-Christian regions, the martyrology of recent centuries is in fact mostly a story of new converts who, like the Japanese Catholics two centuries before, were hounded to death while still young in the faith. To be sure, some of the outrages committed against Christians in the nineteenth century were a product of long-standing antagonisms, like the massacre of 35,000 Greek and Turkish Christians by Muslims in 1821." ^[9] Still other martyrs suffered at the hands of other types of Christians, like the Protestant evangelicals harassed by Orthodox in Ukraine from the 1880s. But most of the century’s occasions when Christians were faithful unto death took place where the entrance of Christianity was still a new thing. Thus, the death of perhaps 70,000 Roman Catholics in Vietnam in 1851, of countless others in Madagascar during the century’s middle decades, of 25,000 Catholics in Korea in 1866, of 100,000 Catholics in Indochina in 1885, of perhaps 50,000 Catholics and Protestants during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and still others in many other places of the globe testified to the enduring reality of Tertullian’s saying, that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. The personal dramas—whether heroic, pathetic, tragic, ennobling, or all at once—that lurk behind such numbers constitute an open invitation to the serious research they have not yet received.

One example must serve to convey something of the humanity latent in such rapid summaries. An event that helped precipitate an attack on new believers in Buganda, East Africa, occurred on May 22, 1885, when the mother of Princess Nalumansi presented her with her own umbilical cord as a symbol of the duty the princess owed to ancestral Bugandan religion. When the princess cut up the cord and threw it away, fuel was added to a fire already smoldering against the believers. The fire became gruesomely real less than two weeks later when thirty-one Christians—Catholics and Protestants together—were executed in a great conflagration at Namugongo, while at the same time Bugandan authorities ordered the execution of many others by sword and spear." ^[10]

The expansion of Christianity in the great age of missions was not, in other words, a bloodless triumph. Nonetheless, it was a triumph. Here are David Barrett’s laconic summaries on the “Global Status” of Christianity in 1750 and 1900:

Missionary outreach from the West, which from the early nineteenth century has played such a large role in the world history of Christianity, became permanently significant, however, only when it led to the appropriation of Christianity by non-Western peoples. That appropriation, along with the expansion of the faith in numbers and cultural impact, represents the truly momentous development in Christian history of the last two centuries. The link between Western missions and indigenous appropriation, moreover, is complex. Sometimes new churches reflect quite directly the forms and emphases of mission Christianity. Much more frequently the faith experienced as churches emerge in the Two-Thirds World differs—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes more manifestly—from the faith brought by the missionaries. Additionally, in a growing number of places, indigenous Christian communities have emerged that display scant connection at all with Western Christianity. The number of believers whom missiologist David Barrett calls “independent Christians” has simply skyrocketed over the course of the twentieth century, from less than 10 million in 1900 to over 270 million in 2010. The truly earth-shaking development heralded by the great mission conferences, like Edinburgh in 1910, is the varied process of appropriation. Whether leading to new adaptations of Roman Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, or entirely new churches, however, is of less moment than recognizing how important the cross-cultural diffusion of the faith has become in the most recent epoch of world Christian history. Four examples from Africa suggest something of the variety of Christian indigenization over the last two centuries as well as about the various connections between missionary labor and indigenous appropriation.

The life of Samuel Ajayi Crowther (ca. 1807-91) testifies to both the generosity and the petty-mindedness of Western missionaries, to both the potential and peril for Christianization in the nineteenth century.' ^[12] Crowther was born in Yorubaland (modern western Nigeria), was captured by African slavers and sold to a Portuguese trader for transport over the Atlantic, but was rescued by a British naval squadron and put ashore in 1822 at Freetown, Sierra Leone. This West African country had been established by British evangelicals to serve as a haven for the enslaved, whether returning from America or before they could be exported. In Sierra Leone, Crowther was converted; he was educated there and in England, and in 1843 he was ordained as an Anglican minister for service with Henry Venn’s Church Missionary Society (CMS). Crowther was one of the leaders of a successful missionary venture that took him and several other former slaves back to their native Yorubaland, where a vigorous Christianity soon arose. Yoruba Christian faith was distinctly Protestant in an evangelical Anglican style, but it also bore many evidences. of successful connection to traditional Yoruba religion. Thus dreams, which had been an important part of Yoruba religion, functioned also as important elements in the conversion of many to Christ. Yoruba tolerance for deities of all sorts meant that the introduction of the Christian God—who was called Olurun, the traditional Yoruba name for the Creator—was never a problem. Under the skillful leadership of Crowther and a talented body of African clergy (many like him from Sierre Leone) the Yoruba who became Christians were allowed to proceed at their own pace in burying or destroying their traditional holy objects, the Ifas and orisa.

Crowther’s manifest spiritual maturity as well as his capacity for leadership led Henry Venn in 1864 to secure Crowther’s ordination as an Anglican bishop. Rather than place him in charge of the Yoruba church, however, the CMS directed Crowther to undertake a mission along the Niger River, although this assignment took him to tribes of diverse languages and to areas under the influence of Islam. Nonetheless, Crowther labored diligently in the assignment. Especially noteworthy was his cautious approach to Muslims: Crowther made much of common ground between the Koran and the Scriptures, he was careful about making biblical tracts and texts available until their users could be warned against using them like charms, and he also developed an apologetic grounded almost entirely on biblical quotations. In the end, however, Crowther failed in his work along the Niger because the task was all but impossible, he could never find sufficient African helpers (European missionaries were no good since most who took up service along the Niger simply died), and his forced reliance upon British traders put him at the mercy of individuals who eventually became more interested in selling gin than promoting civilization or Christianity. In a tragic denouement to a sterling career, Crowther in 1890 was stripped of his ecclesiastical authority by a band of young English missionaries who were inspired by a wooden vision of proper spirituality and an unthinking dedication to a British imperial ideal. Crowther had taken genuinely significant steps toward the Africanization of Christian faith, but his work remained more a promise of what would come than its realization.

Even as Crowther’s effort to indigenize an evangelical Anglicanism was running aground, however, other movements were under way that proved more successful. One of the most important of these had its origins within fifteen years of Crowther’s death. In South Africa shortly after the turn of the century, an unlikely, but potent, mix of confessional European Protestantism, newer forms of Holiness teaching, and Pentecostal healing were acting on each other in the creation of Zionist movements.^[13] Early influences for Zionism were the devotional work of Andrew Murray, a Scottish pietist who had exercised a large ministry among the Dutch Reformed; P. L. Le Roux, an Afrikaner who carried Murray’s ideas, including his belief in faith healing, in mission to the Zulus; and emissaries from John Alexander Dowie, founder of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion City, Illinois, who was an early pioneer of several practices that defined the modern Pentecostal movement. Soon, however, these missionary impulses were appropriated by African leaders, like Daniel Nkonyane, who in 1908 replaced Le Roux as the head of the self-styled Zionist movement. (The term “Zion” came originally from the use of a Moravian hymnbook, The Songs of Zion, but was inspired more directly by Dowie’s restorationist theology, which pointed to charismatic practices as the herald of the appearance of the Heavenly City.) By 1920, and now completely under African leadership, the Zion movement was divided into several subgroups and had moved beyond the Zulus into Swaziland, Basutoland, and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Zionism’s power as a dynamic Christian movement has much to do with its ability to employ traditional aspects of African religion—like the exorcism of demons, ecstatic dance, the centrality of prophet-healers, and elaborate purification and initiation rites—in the service of a biblical, Christ-centered, Pentecostal form of Christianity. The contribution of the early Pentecostal, or Pentecostal-leaning, missionaries was critical in providing Western forms of the faith that bridged the gap to the world of African primal religions. But so thoroughly has that missionary contribution been integrated into a Christianity guided, organized, and proclaimed by Africans that the missionary connection is now almost completely irrelevant. Similarities to early Methodism in the English-speaking world are, however, striking, since Zionists encourage hard work, disdain the use of tobacco and alcohol (and also pork), sing vigorously, and, while encouraging solid citizenship, remain mostly apolitical. The numbers of Africans who belong to Zionist churches is contested, but they may today constitute as many as six or seven million out of South Africa’s population of fifty million, plus that many or more outside of South Africa. ^[14] The Zion churches represent perhaps the most rapid and most complete example of transition from missionary Christianity to African Christianity. Delegates to the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 almost certainly had very little grasp of what was happening in South Africa, even as they deliberated the future of Christianity, but the future largely belonged to the Africans who made their own sense out of missionary messages from Dowie, Murray, Le Roux, and other Westerners.

Not long after Zionism began to emerge as a distinctly African variety of Christianity in southern Africa, another important example of indigenization was taking place on the African West Coast. In 1910 William Wadé Harris (ca. 1860-1929) was put into a Liberian prison for supporting an effort to replace the African American government of that country with leaders eager to enter the orbit of British rather than American influence.' ^[15] Harris had been raised under Methodist teaching and had also done some teaching for an Episcopal church. While in prison he was visited by the angel Gabriel who, ina great wave of pure light, told Harris to preach as a prophet of the last times, destroy the fetishes that were a part of the region’s traditional African religions, baptize immediately all who would receive this Christian sacrament (it was customary for missionaries to require a long period of catechesis before baptizing converts), and set aside Western dress in favor of a white robe.

After Harris was released from prison, he left Liberia to proclaim this new message in the Ivory Coast (lying eastward of Liberia). It was July 1913; his impact was sudden and dramatic. Thousands responded and eagerly followed his advice to organize their local Christian life around the twelve apostles that Harris regularly appointed in converted communities. But Harris also urged converts to connect with churches directed by European missionaries. Converts were impressed by the fervor of the Christ-centered message that Harris preached, but also by the power it was supported with. Many healings were reported, and stories circulated of colonial administrators who died unexpectedly after they interfered with Harris and likewise of sudden death coming upon those who were baptized after claiming to have destroyed their fetishes but who had only buried them. Both Catholic and Protestant churches in the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and surrounding regions were overwhelmed by the thousands of Africans who sought membership in their churches (converts who were not gathered into the European groups formed an autonomous Harrist church). Missionaries were, however, less pleased with Harris’s toleration of polygamy. Mostly, however, they rejoiced at the harvest that Harris and his colleagues reaped so fully in regions where their own work had been mostly in vain.

William Wadé Harris’s form of Christian faith was not as thoroughly indigenized as the Zionist movements of South Africa, since his self-conscious willingness to incorporate converts into missionary churches left a clear Westein stamp on his movement. Nonetheless, what happened with his ministry was no less an illustration of the grounding of Christianity in new soil. David Shank, a leading authority on West African Christianity, summarized the “new indigenous lay religious movement” begun by Harris as “covering a dozen ethnic groups and involving new patterns of unity in the midst of diversity: one God, one theocentric law (the Ten Commandments), one day (Sunday), one book (the Bible), one symbol (the cross), one baptism (break with ‘fetishes’), one place of worship, one institution (church leadership by ‘twelve apostles’).” The missionary churches to which Harris directed converts as well as the independent Eglise Harrist that emerged were marked, again in Shank’s words, by “the distinct Harris stamp: strong anti-fetish accent on one God; prayer as a replacement for sacrifice; use of traditional music and dance; use of cross, Bible, calabash [a kind of gourd], and baptismal bowl as liturgical instruments; liturgical vestments following the model of Harris; traditional marriage practices, with preachers having only one wife; government by ‘twelve apostles’; self-supporting preachers chosen from within the local congregation." ^[16] Harris’s ways of connecting Christianity to Africa was not the only way to do it, but he left a remarkable legacy nonetheless.

Yet another pattern of indigenization has taken place among the Bor Dinka on the east side of the White Nile River in southern Sudan. ^[17] Christian missions began in 1906 among this group, but for the first seventy years and more of its activity, the CMS experienced only scant results. From the 1970s, and with accelerating force in the ’80s and ’90s, however, Christianity under the guidance of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan has expanded with remarkable strength. The external circumstances of this expansion are tragic, for the Dinka have been caught in civil war with various Muslim factions from northern Sudan. The Dinka have suffered great loss of life. They have also been stripped of the cattle herds that were the backbone of their culture, and they have been forced in massive numbers to migrate from ancestral lands. Precisely in these circumstances the Christian faith has taken root.

But it has done so in a distinctively Bor Dinka manner. Everywhere in the new Dinka churches and among the burgeoning tide of converts is seen the cross. The display of the cross is particularly striking in massed processions on holy days, when, as described by Marc Nikkel, “their crosses [create] a thick forest, surging with the crowds, thrusting heavenward with every beat of the songs they sing.” ^[18] In the first instance, the prominence of the cross in Bor Dinka life represents a Christianization of existing cultural forms, for the Dinka had historically put to use a wide variety of carved walking sticks, staffs, and clubs. Among Dinka converts, the Christian symbol has filled a form provided by traditional culture.

In the second instance, however, the Dinka appropriation of the cross has also become a powerful expression of pastoral theology. As revealed ina flourishing of fresh, indigenous hymnody, the cross is now a comprehensive reality of great power. The cross provides protection against hostile spirits, or jak; the cross figures large in the baptisms that mark conversions; in hymns the cross becomes an ensign or banner raised high for praise and protection; the cross brings the great God, Nhialic, close to the Dinka in the person of Christ, whose suffering is appropriated with striking subjectivity; the cross is spoken of as the mén, or the solid central post that supports the Dinka’s large, thatched cattle sheds; and the cross becomes a symbol of the potent Spirit who replaces the ancestral jak (sing. jok), whose protective powers have so obviously failed in recent years. A song composed by Mary Nyanluaak Lem Bol illustrates the depth to which the cross has entered Dinka culture in desperate times:

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Bor Dinka appropriation of Christianity, along with the other African examples, represents only the smallest fraction of the incredibly diverse number of individual narratives that have appeared outside of the West over the past century and a half. The story of Roman Catholic adjustments to traditional religious patterns in Africa, Latin America, and Asia is a huge subject by itself, since Catholicism has been, by far, the most widely represented form of Christianity around the world in the twentieth century. Similarly, however, the new flourishing of Protestant groups in several areas of Latin America and Asia would also require a sensitive ability to chart a full spectrum of means by which the Christian faith has come to be “at home” in regions where two hundred or one hundred or even fifty years ago it did not exist. Missionary initiative is part of the picture in many of those individual stories, though not all of them. But even where missionary initiative has played a large role, the climax of the story in these newly Christianized regions is inevitably a story of local appropriation.

The Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 represents a great turning point in the history of Christianity, not so much for what was done by its delegates, as for symbolizing a dawning consciousness concerning the worldwide extension of the faith. What has happened in the past century or two may mean just as much for the future of Christianity as early cross-cultural transmissions have meant. The main difference in the twentieth century is that earlier expansions of Christianity mostly involved single originating and single receiving cultures. To be sure, the ramifications were great indeed when the Jewish Christianity of the New Testament era was “translated” into the Hellenistic culture of the larger Mediterranean world, and then when the Hellenistic Christianity that resulted was translated into the tribal societies of northern Europe. The difference in recent centuries is that the church has been developing in several directions at once. Early Christian communities in Africa and Asia were seeds for this new expansion, but its great impetus has been the Western missionary efforts of the modern period. Mission, however, is always transitional, and it is the local appropriation of Christianity that makes a lasting difference. Given the situation of the past two centuries, where a process of local appropriation has been under way in many parts of the world at the same time, the implications for the history of Christianity are immense.

Such multiple translations of Christian faith at the same time in different parts of the globe can only appear chaotic, especially to those whose Christian experience is deeply rooted in the long Western appropriation of Christianity. What will come of the simultaneous translations of the Christian faith into so many of the world’s cultures, God alone knows. But a long historical perspective can inspire considerable confidence. As expressed by the Scottish historian of missions Andrew Walls, “It is a delightful paradox that the more Christ is translated into the various thought forms and life systems which form our various national identities, the richer all of us will be in our common Christian identity.” ^[20]

Hindsight shows that the delegates who met at Edinburgh in 1910 were foolish to think that Christian expansion throughout the world would replicate a faith that looked pretty much as it appeared in the precincts of Scotland’s United Free Church Assembly Hall. But they were far from foolish in being optimistic about the reality of that expansion. The appeal of Western Christianity would soon be tarnished by World War I, the Russian Revolution, rampant commercial materialism, and other cultural calamities. Yet since the delegates at Edinburgh were themselves the product of a Christianity that had been translated culturally to their ancestors (however distant), their very existence illustrated the vitality that could arise from faith transmitted to still other cultures. While the Western missions represented at Edinburgh would do their part, it was the appropriation of Christianity by peoples literally around the world that marked the critical turning point.

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