CHAPTER 35

As the Waters Cover the Sea

God’s Glory Expands to All Peoples

Bob Blincoe

Bob Blincoe is president emeritus of Frontiers USA. He moved to northern Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War and is the author of ethnic realities and the Church: Lessons from Kurdistan.

From Abraham to Jesus Christ was roughly two thousand years. From Jesus to the present day, about two thousand more. Christ stands halfway between Abraham and our day. Through these forty centuries of history God has had one overriding purpose, a purpose revealed in His promises in the Bible: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab 2:14). Because of His love, God is rescuing people from the kingdom of darkness and bringing ever greater numbers of people to serve Him under the lordship of His Son. God’s glorious purpose is to make disciples among all of the diverse peoples in the world.

This is the greatest story ever told, and it is accelerating in our time. A century ago, who would have imagined that millions of Chinese would come to faith and, despite persecution, would be sending many missionaries to some of the most difficult places? Who could have predicted two hundred years ago that growing, vibrant churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia would be sending millions of missionaries?

Fully describing this global spread of Christianity is beyond the scope of these few pages. Instead, we will focus on how the gospel spread from Jerusalem. Then we will examine how the amazing good news of Jesus spread throughout Europe and then to the ends of the earth. For the sake of convenience, I will divide our journey into four-hundred-year periods. Any historian will tell you that this kind of division is artificial. However, these periods are helpful for organization and memory.

Advancing Throughout the Roman Empire (To AD 400)

On the day of Pentecost, in about AD 34, thousands of Jews came to faith in Christ and were baptized. These “Jews for Jesus” continued to study and obey the law of Moses. They refrained from eating foods forbidden by the law of Moses. All of the believers continued to “remember the Sabbath,” keeping it free from work. They circumcised their male children. They went daily to the temple at the times of prayer (Acts 3:1). What distinguished them from other Jews was their faith in Jesus the Messiah. They believed that He rose from the dead and that He had sent them to deliver his message to the entire world. They assumed that as foreigners came to believe in Christ they would adopt the Jewish customs and observe the Jewish calendar and laws.

The Holy Spirit sent out missionary bands to establish churches among the gentiles (the ethne). Thus, Paul and Barnabas, Prisca and Aquila, and others were confident that they had “received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith” (Rom 1:5). They were able to establish “churches of the Gentiles” (Rom 16:3–4). Gentiles, Paul believed, should be accepted as fully part of God’s people without needing to become Jews for Jesus. In effect, these missionaries were de-Judaizing the gospel. Many Jewish believers strongly disagreed with Paul on this issue, believing that “Gentile believers must be circumcised and required to follow the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5). Paul sharply debated this. The result was a watershed decision of the Jerusalem Council in about AD 49. James stood and spoke for the apostles, saying, “Let’s not make it difficult for the ethne [the Greek word for gentiles] who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19). This allowed Paul and Barnabas and other missionary bands to assure the gentile congregations that they should resist pressure to adopt Jewish religious customs. There would be a new reality in the world: churches of people following Jesus who retained their languages and many customs. Thus began a long process of working with God to transform their own cultures. Gentile cultures were certainly depraved—Paul wrote about this in Romans 1:18–32. But they could be, and would be, delivered from evil so that they would bring their particular God-glorifying worship to the throne of God in Christ.

Over the next 250 years, the number of Christians in the Roman Empire increased by 40 percent each decade.¹ By AD 300, there were six million Christians. What attracted so many to Christianity? The attraction was Jesus Himself. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). No other deity that people had ever heard of was like this. Studying Christ’s Sermon on the Mount—the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, the Lord’s Prayer, and the “one another” verses of the New Testament—created the possibility for a whole new way of living. Jesus Christ changed the way that people thought about children, women, the marginalized, and foreigners. His power to heal, His power to deliver those who were demon-possessed, His forgiveness, His mercy, and His instructions to disciples to go everywhere to teach others—all of this established something entirely new on earth. We can call it “the way of the Lord” or “the kingdom of God.” In those first decades, many believers gave their lives for what they believed. Torn to death by animals in the arena or crucified in the same manner as their master, martyrs were evidence to others that nothing would separate them “from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:39).

A second reason for Christianity’s advance was the translation of the gospel from spoken Aramaic into Greek, Latin, and other languages. The reader will recall that on the day of Pentecost visitors to Jerusalem from all over the world heard the apostles preaching in their languages. Thus, no language is the sacred language. Lamin Sanneh wrote, “It seems to be part of the earliest records we possess that the disciples came to a clear and firm position regarding the translatability of the gospel, with the commitment to the pluralist merit of culture within God’s universal purpose. The contribution of Saint Paul must be especially considered.”² Soon after its beginning, the Christian faith was “translated” into the cultures of “Armenians, Copts, Goths, and Ethiopians, all of which followed a version of Christian faith expressive of their national character.”³

Persecution of Christians ceased and hardships eased after Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, allowing Christians to practice their faith openly. Great numbers submitted to baptism. Constantine convened a church council in Arles in 314. There, forty-three bishops from all over the Mediterranean, England, Carthage (North Africa), Gaul (France), and Rome met in Constantinople. In AD 325, 318 bishops convened at Nicaea, where they adopted the Nicene Creed. We pause to observe that there were no Jews present at either council, nor did anyone think this strange. Jerusalem had become a ghost town, its temple reduced to rubble after the failed Jewish Revolt of AD 70. By the fourth century there were no longer Jewish people following Jesus. It had become a Roman Christianity.

Christianity had become the religion of the empire by AD 380. By then, more than half of the entire population had become Christians. Unfortunately, the Christian majority began persecuting smaller Christian sects that did not adhere to the Nicene Creed; such intolerance recurs too often in Christian history.

So closely did the Roman Empire come to identify with Christianity that Roman and Christian began to be used interchangeably. The Spanish poet Prudentius (a Christian) said, “Roman and barbarian are as distinct from one another as are four-footed beasts from human beings.”⁴ One notable exception to this mindset was Ulfilas (311–383), a Germanic captive living in Cappadocia. Ulfilas asked to be sent as a missionary to his own people, the Goths. He successfully established the first congregations of believers among them. He completed a translation of the Bible in about 369. But for the most part, however, Roman bishops expressed little interest in taking the faith to peoples outside the faith. This delayed the mission beyond the borders. In the words of a leading modern historian, “Throughout the whole period of the Roman empire, not a single example is known of a man who was appointed bishop with the specific task of going beyond the frontier to a wholly pagan region in order to convert the barbarians living there.”⁵ Consider Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo (in today’s Tunisia). Though born a Berber, Augustine believed his fellow Berbers should learn Latin and become culturally Roman before they could put their faith in Jesus. Frederick Norris writes, “At the very moment when a Berber contextualization of the gospel needed strong pastoral guidance, Augustine’s own Latin culture left him unable to see the possibilities.”⁶

In 430, shortly before Augustine’s death, a Vandal army overran much of Rome’s North African provinces and besieged his city. “Rome was won,” Ralph Winter wrote, “but did not reach out with the gospel” to the Celts and Vandals, Visigoths, Alans, or Berbers. And so, “the Goths invaded Rome and the whole western (Latin) part of the empire caved in.”⁷ The missionary effort stalled, it seemed, until the Holy Spirit sent a blast of wind and fire to a far-off island people, converting them and filling them with missionary zeal “to preach the gospel where Christ was not known” (Rom 15:20 NIV).

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

The Irish Missionary Movement⁸ (AD 400–800)

At the western end of Europe lies Ireland. At that time Irish tribes took pride in fighting one another and wearing the skulls of their victims on belts slung round their waists. In about 402 Irish pirates landed in Britain, where they kidnapped sixteen-year-old Patrick. They hauled him to Ireland and sold him as a slave to a Druid priest named Milchu. Six years later Patrick escaped when an angel directed him to board a ship and return home. Years later, after maturing in his faith in Britain, another angel appeared in a dream and told him to return to Ireland. He obeyed this heavenly vision. From AD 432, when he returned to Ireland, until his death twenty-five years later Patrick preached to convert the inhabitants of his adopted country. He wrote that he had baptized thousands and built hundreds of church buildings all over Ireland. Entire Irish tribes became Christians in what we now call people movements. Clans at war made peace, casting aside their belts of skulls and instead tying books with ropes around their waists.⁹ Patrick appointed priests (for churches) and abbots (for monasteries) from among the sons of tribal leaders. These leadership positions were passed down to their sons, who were allowed to marry (a practice at variance with Roman Catholic practice). Patrick allowed Christian priests to wear white robes similar to those worn by Druid priests, thus taking steps to de-Romanize the gospel, bringing forth an Irish version of Christianity. His work was fruitful, but still Patrick lived in constant danger:

They arrested me with my companions, and that day they eagerly wanted to kill me, but my time had not yet come. They stole everything which they found in our possession, and they put me in chains, but on the fourteenth day the Lord rescued me from their power, and our possessions were returned to us, because of God and because of dear friends whom we had previously acquired Every day there is the chance that I will be killed, or surrounded, or be taken into slavery, or some other such happening. But I fear none of these things, because of the promises of heaven. I have cast myself into the hands of almighty God, who is the ruler of all places.¹⁰

Many Irish learned Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. They set themselves to the labor of carefully translating and copying by hand the Bible and commentaries. In fact, more than half of the known Bible commentaries written between 650 and 850 were by Irish monks. They also translated a great deal of Latin and Greek classic literature. By that time, Roman cities and Christianity in continental Europe had been decimated by the invasions of the Germanic tribes, but Irish scholars preserved Christianity in Europe during centuries that otherwise would have truly been the Dark Ages.

The story of Abraham in Genesis 12 inspired generations of Irish missionaries to leave their homes and go to places God would show them. These were the peregrini, the wandering companies of monks:

With a strange eagerness they sentenced themselves to perpetual banishment and went forth never to return. They began the new career without specific plans other than the intention to teach a foreign people. They found their way over rough seas and perilous roads and among strange tribes until they came to a spot that seemed by some circumstance divinely indicated as their place of labor.¹¹

One of the peregrini, Columba (521–597), established a monastery on the island of Iona, and from there he set out with twelve brothers for Scotland and northern England. Another missionary, Columbanus (543–615), also chose twelve from his monastery at Bangor in Northern Ireland, from whence they sailed for what is now France. His monastery at Luxeuil in eastern France attracted thousands of converts. Some of these, after completing their training, spread the gospel to Switzerland and northern Italy, reinvigorating Christians there who had lapsed into nominalism.

Another Irishman, Fursey (d. 650), founded a monastery in Killursa. From there, Fursey traveled to East Anglia, where he converted Pict and Saxon tribes. Fursey was known as a miracle worker, healing the sick and raising the dead. He crossed the channel to Europe, in what is now France. There he established a monastery in Lagny on the Marne River, about six miles from Paris.

Wherever Irish missionaries went they established two kinds of Christian structures: churches and missionary monasteries; the first for ministry to Christians, the second for training converts for missionary work. “That one small island should have contributed so rich a legacy to a populous continent remains one of the most arresting facts of European history…The weight of the Irish influence on the continent,” wrote James Westfall Thompson, “is incalculable. It penetrated the still unchristianized regions of central Europe. For three hundred years the light of Ireland flamed, shedding its rays upon Scotland, England and the Continent, until diminished in the darkness of the Norse invasions.”

Perhaps a hundred missionary efforts originated from Irish monasteries in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. The genius of the Irish was to found mission monasteries for the purpose of sending new teams ever further. Some traveled eastward all the way to Kiev. “Theirs was a monasticism that was ardently missionary; not seeking a place of retreat from the world but a place of preparation for mission.”¹² In the immortal words of William Marnell, “In a missionary country the monastery and not the parish is the obvious pattern of organization.”¹³

The Celts were not the only missionaries going “to the regions beyond” (2 Cor 10:16). In 596 Pope Gregory sent Augustine of Rome (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo) and thirty monks to Kent, England, at the invitation of Aethelbert, ruler of that region. Augustine became “the apostle to the English.” Birinus, a Benedictine monk, went farther west, converting the Saxons of mid-England from 634 onward. One of these, Winfrid (675-754), joined the monastery at Exeter, and, after completing his training, crossed the channel in 716. Winfrid took the name Boniface and won many converts after dramatically cutting down the Oak of Thor, which the god Thor was said to haunt. Boniface built a small oak chapel from its timber. He has been called “the Apostle to the Germanic peoples.” He died a martyr’s death in 754.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

To the Vikings and the Slavs (AD 800–1200)

Charlemagne (748–814) was the strongest king Europe had seen in centuries. He had himself crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800. His conquered subjects were Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples. He rid the countryside of robbers, thus reestablishing safety on the roads.

A renaissance of culture flourished throughout Charlemagne’s empire. Efforts were made to raise the level of religious observance, morality, and the process of justice throughout the empire The spiritual and literary movement called the “Carolingian renaissance” had many centers, especially in the empire’s monasteries. [Furthermore] Charlemagne respected the traditional rights of the various peoples and tribes under his dominion as a matter of principle.¹⁴

Charlemagne took steps to outlaw slavery in his empire after a bishop warned that slavery was immoral.¹⁵ As a result, the cathedrals of Europe were built by free men, not slaves. But a warrior people beyond his empire would soon come crashing into Christian Europe. The era of peace and prosperity would nearly come to ruin.

Perhaps peace in Europe would have been preserved had missionaries established a Christian presence among the Danes and Norsemen, people we know as Vikings. The Vikings destroyed the Irish monasteries at Iona, Bangor, and Lindisfarne. Monks there died by the sword. The monasteries had accumulated gold artwork, fine furnishings, and lavishly decorated manuscripts that the Vikings ransacked and looted. They also carried off many learned monks and Christian women as slaves. Shallow-draft Viking ships sailed up the rivers to London, York, and Hamburg, where more treasures could be seized. Unlike the Goths of an earlier era, the Vikings had no exposure to the gospel; their raids were more savage and murderous.

Then, in one of history’s great reversals, this warrior people began to be changed by the transforming “power of God” of the gospel (Rom 1:16). Monks and priests who had been forced to accompany the Vikings back to Scandinavia were allowed to establish formal worship and religious studies. Christian women, taken against their will as wives or slaves, brought with them their faith. Little by little, Christ Himself and Christian teaching took their captors captive. Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark, asked for baptism in about 957. King Olaf of Norway forbade the “exposure of newborn infants” and ordered that every spring, at the opening of the national assembly, “a slave should not be slain as heretofore, but freed.”¹⁶ Olaf converted Leif Ericsson, who brought a priest with him to Greenland. Moreover, “with the coming of Christianity, sacrifices at the bog sites ceased” in Denmark.¹⁷

During this time Christianity also expanded to Eastern Europe. In the ninth century a Slavic prince Rastislav appealed to Constantinople for missionaries. Cyril and his brother Methodius responded, establishing the first Slavic churches. After inventing an alphabet, known today as Cyrillic, they began translating the Bible into a local language in the 860s. Vladimir, the ruler of Kiev, adopted the Christian faith, thus founding the Slavic Orthodox Church. Magyars, in what is now Hungary, converted to Christianity in the tenth century. So did the Czech and Polish peoples. In Spain, great tracts of coastal lands were recaptured from Muslim rulers. “Europe and Christianity were becoming synonymous.”¹⁸

Rulers in Europe who wished to unite their subjects around a national religion pressed them to convert en masse. “In Western Europe of this period, faith was adopted as the religion of the community, usually at the command or at least with the energetic assistance of the prince.”¹⁹ This topdown method of conversion greatly expanded nominal Christianity in Europe after 900. Providentially, the routine of church attendance and Christian teaching had a positive effect on some of the subjects in the coming generations. In the year 1386, Lithuania became the last part of Europe to accept Christianity.

Islam Rising, Christianity’s Reversal, and Francis of Assisi’s “Not Yet” (AD 1200–1600)

In the seventh and eighth centuries, Islam came out of the Arabian desert and swept through North Africa and the Middle East. The vast Christian population in this area entirely disappeared, some converting to Islam, others emigrating to southern Europe. The ruins of church buildings in what are now the countries of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco speak in their silence of the extent to which Christianity had receded by 750. Islamic armies crossed the Mediterranean Sea to invade Spain and Italy. In the eleventh century, a Muslim people far to the east, the Seljuk Turks, gained victories against the Greek Christian domain that we know as the Byzantine Empire. Christianity at this time was on the defensive on all sides.

In 1095, Pope Urban II roused a great assembly of Christians at Clermont, France, convincing them that it was God’s will to win back the Holy Land. Great crowds in many cities throughout France and Italy took up the cry, “God wills it.”²⁰ The First Crusade began in 1096, followed by a series of crusades that continued until 1350.

Fortunately, Francis of Assisi raised his voice against the Crusades and showed a more excellent way. In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis tried to dissuade the crusaders from fighting. He predicted failure because they were not led by the Spirit of God but by the insolence of men.²¹ Then, Francis and one other Christian brother traveled to Damietta in Egypt to seek an audience with Sultan Malik al-Kamil. Francis’s biographer, Celano, described how Francis wished for a martyr’s crown, but when the Sultan received Francis as a guest, he preached his love for his master, Jesus Christ. This went on for some days. Francis was puzzled that his overtures did not have their desired effect, and for this reason Francis conceived of the idea of the “not yet” of God:

That no Muslim was ready to be converted, indicated to Francis that the time had not yet come. His disciples would have to be patient, then, and ready to serve in humbleness of spirit…At the same time, we Franciscans [today] are convinced that God is at work. The Holy Spirit is ahead of us, and many things happen altogether outside or apart from our activity. The plan of God moves ahead independently of us.²²

The other mission God had given Francis, repairing His church, also influenced his opinion of how Christians ought to encounter Muslims:

Francis tried in his gentle yet firm way to convert the attitudes of the Church with regard to Islam. He wished the Church to be among the Muslims as a poor and serving Church, powerless, identifying itself with the most marginalized persons.²³

The Franciscan “way of the Lord” is to refuse power, to be “minor” in a world where proud people desire to be “major.” The Crusades were a way of being “major.” Franciscans undertook missions to Morocco in 1219 and 1227, which ended in their martyrdom.²⁴ Ramon Lull, another Franciscan and professor of philosophy, made three missionary journeys to North Africa. Latourette writes, “On the first two he [Lull] preached until he was arrested and deported. On the third, in 1315 or 1316, when he was probably past eighty years of age, Ramon Lull was stoned severely and he died.”²⁵

Other Franciscans went farther. In 1253 William of Rubruck began a five-thousand-mile journey to modern-day Mongolia, where the great leader, Khan Mongke, gave him an audience. John of Montecorvino (1247–1328) founded the earliest Catholic missions in India and China. Dominican monks sent missionaries to Muslim peoples as well. Ramon de Peñafort established a training school in Tunis (1245) and in Murcia, Spain (1266), where missionary candidates studied Arabic. Another Dominican, Ramón Martí, after residing in Tunis in 1269, returned to Spain, where he compiled an Arabic-Latin dictionary, the first of its kind, for use by missionaries in the field.²⁶

Catholic Mission to the World and the Protestant Mission Ice Age

The Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther (1483–1546). Luther’s first great reform was theological, reestablishing faith alone as the way of salvation. His second was translating the Bible. In this way Luther aided in de-Latinizing the gospel and adapting it to the German-speaking peoples.

But did the Protestant Reformation produce a great missions advance? Brace yourself for we have to dispel a myth. Kenneth Mulholland explains:

Soon after Luther tacked his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, there came a tremendous explosion of missionary expansion in the wake of the Reformation, as missionaries almost immediately began to go to the ends of the earth. Correct? Wrong. Virtually no Protestant missionary activity took place between 1517 and 1792. Yet those years constituted the golden age of Roman Catholic missions.²⁷

We do not like to hear criticism of our Reformed fathers, but the historian Stephen Neill concedes,

It is clear that the idea of the steady progress of the preaching of the Gospel through the world is not foreign to his (Luther’s) thought. Yet, when everything favorable has been said that can be said, and when all possible evidences from the writings of the Reformers have been collected, it all amounts to exceedingly little.²⁸

A mission ice age descended on the Reformation. It would last for 275 years. Yet all the while, Catholic missionaries sailed to China (Matteo Ricci), Vietnam (Alexandre de Rhodes), the Philippines (Andrés de Urdaneta), Korea (Gregorio Céspedes), India and Japan (Francis Xavier), and the new world of the Americas (Junipero Serra, Eusebio Kino, and Bartholomew de las Casas). Others sailed for Angola (Balthazar Barreira), the Congo (Bonaventura de Sardegna), Ethiopia (Alphonsus Mendez), and Mozambique (Gonçalo da Silveira). Still others pressed on until they arrived in Tibet (Antonio de Andrade) and Siam (Pierre Lambert de la Motte). All of these missionaries were discipled in the monastic orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians).

What was the Catholic advantage? It was their special training and study centers. These were the greenhouses that grew generations of missionary candidates. David Bosch wrote, “It would take centuries before anything remotely as competent and effective as the monastic missionary movement would develop in Protestantism.”²⁹

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

To the Ends of the Earth (AD 1600–2000)

The Extraordinary Moravians

One important mission initiative brightened the Protestant record during its ice age, the Moravians. Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf invited a great number of Moravian refugees to settle on his estates in 1722. After an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in 1727, a prayer movement began that continued day and night for more than one hundred years. One day Zinzendorf met “two native Greenlanders and a black African slave from the West Indies. So impressed was he with their pleas for missionaries . . . that he himself returned home with a powerful sense of urgency.”³⁰ In 1732, the first Moravian missionaries, Johann Dober and David Nitschmann, sailed for the Caribbean islands. It is said that as their ship departed, they shouted to their loved ones on the shore, “May the lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!” This was a reference to Revelation 5:9. Over the next twenty years, the Moravians sent more missionaries than all of the Protestant churches had sent in two hundred years.

William Carey and the Means of Modern Missions

The Moravians inspired an English lay preacher, William Carey, to propose a way to send greater numbers of missionaries.³¹ At a meeting of the Northamptonshire Baptist Association in September 1785, twenty-four-year-old Carey suggested a topic for discussion: whether the command given to the apostles to “teach all nations” in Matthew 28 was still binding for Christians in his day. John Ryland Sr. dismissed the question out of hand, with a stern rebuke that may well be apocryphal: “Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid or mine!” Alice Ott writes, “Even if the rebuke is not authentic, it does reflect the predominant hyper-Calvinist theology within his denomination.”³² This objection had to be overcome, as Carey attempted to do in his book commonly called An Equiry. He wrote:

Suppose a company of serious Christians, ministers and private persons, were to form themselves into a society, and make a number of rules respecting the regulation of the plan, and the persons who are to be employed as missionaries, the means of defraying the expense, etc., etc. This society must consist of persons whose hearts are in the work, men of serious religion, and possessing a spirit of perseverance; there must be a determination not to admit any person who is not of this description, or to retain him longer than he answers to it.³³

Carey’s easy-to-assemble instructions set in motion the establishment of a considerable number of mission societies in the decades to come. In this way the Protestant mission era began.

The Twenty-First Century and the Hope of Global Glory

It is the twenty-first century; the expansion of the Christian movement is most apparent in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Who could have imagined fifty years ago that Nigeria today would have more Anglican bishops than England? Or that millions would follow Christ in China? Or that thousands in Iran would come to faith in Christ and be baptized? Who could have predicted a century ago that mission agencies in Brazil and South Korea would be sending thousands of missionaries to distant lands? No wonder Ralph D. Winter said, “We should be on tiptoes to see what is about to happen.”

Why are there thousands of people groups? It is “not an accident,” writes John Piper. “The diversity of the nations is God’s idea. The fame and greatness and worth of an object of beauty increases in proportion to the diversity of those who recognize its beauty. [For this reason] the eternal diversity of the nations magnifies the glory of God.”³⁴

An Englishman, Arthur Ainger, wrote a hymn in 1894. The lyrics he wrote point to the chief end of all history. With them, we conclude:

God is working His purpose out as year succeeds to year.

God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near.

Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that will surely be,

When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

Notes

1. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6–7.

2. Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, American Society of Missiology Series (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), 1.

3. Sanneh, 1.

4. R. A. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: H. Holt, 1998), 390.

5. Fletcher, 28.

6. Gerald H. Anderson, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 33.

7. Ralph D. Winter, “The Kingdom Strikes Back,” in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, ed. Ralph D. Winter and Steven C. Hawthorne, 4th ed. (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009), 213.

8. The story of the gospel’s advance eastward to Persia and China is told elsewhere in the Perspectives reader. That mission was under-taken by the Church of the East, not the church of the Roman Empire.

9. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (Anchor Books: New York, 1995), 196.

10. Saint Patrick, Confessio, https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/confessio_english# paragraphs 52 and 55.

11. John Thomas McNeill, The Celtic Churches: A History A.D. 200 to 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 155–56.

12. Paul Pierson, “The Celtic Missionary Movement,” in Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, ed. A. Scott Moreau (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 170.

13. William H. Marnell, Light from the West: The Irish Mission and the Emergence of Modern Europe (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 28.

14. “Charlemagne,” The New Encyclopedia Britannica (The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 15:743.

15. Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), 28.

16. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 1:558.

17. Louise E. Levathes, “Mysteries of the Bog,” National Geographic 171, no. 3 (1987): 404.

18. Latourette, History of Christianity, 1:401.

19. Latourette, 1:351.

20. The pope was responding to an appeal for military assistance from Alexius Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium. The context of the First Crusade was a century of Islamic advance toward Constantinople by the Seljuk Turks as well as provocations against Christian pilgrims and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem.

21. Father Mel Brady, “Franciscan Mission among Muslims, on the Occasion of the 8th Centenary of Francis’ Birth” (Assisi, Italy, 1982).

22. Brady, “Franciscan Mission.”

23. Brady, “Franciscan Mission.”

24. Fletcher, Barbarian Conversion, 325.

25. Latourette, History of Christianity, 1:404.

26. Fletcher, Barbarian Conversion, 325.

27. Kenneth B. Mulholland, “From Luther to Carey: Pietism and the Modern Missionary Movement,” Bibliotheca Sacra 156, no. 621 (1999): 85.

28. Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 222.

29. David Jacobus Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 245.

30. Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 71.

31. In his Enquiry, William Carey credited the Moravians, the Wesleyans, John Eliot, and other missionaries for his inspiration. An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (Leicester: Baptist Missionary Society London, 1792), 11, 37, 71.

32. Alice T. Ott, Turning Points in the Expansion of Christianity: From Pentecost to the Present (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 139.

33. Carey, Enquiry, 139.

34. John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993), 221–22, selected.