CHAPTER 44

The History of Mission Strategy

R. Pierce Beaver

R. Pierce Beaver was professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He specialized in the history of missions in America and was for fifteen years a formative director of the Missionary Research Library in New York City. Beaver authored, among other books, all Loves excelling, a description of the initiatives of American women in world evangelization.

From Beaver, R. Pierce, “History of Mission Strategy,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1970): 7–28. Used by permission.

Fifteen centuries of missions preceded the Protestant movement. This article presents a capsule history of mission strategy before Protestantism, then examines Protestant strategy. Due to lack of space, we omit modern Roman Catholic missions.

Boniface

Boniface, in the eighth century, was the first instance of a mission strategy from an English mission to the continent of Europe. He preached to Germanic peoples in a similar, therefore understandable, language. His methods were aggressive: He defied their gods, demolished their shrines and sacred trees, and built churches on pagan holy sites. In the end, his methods were effective and some believed. He founded monasteries with academic programs and also taught agriculture, grazing, and domestic arts. This helped create a settled society, a well-grounded church, and Christian discipleship. For the first time women were formally used in mission work when Boniface brought nuns from England. In time, clergy and monks came from the local populations. Boniface sent reports and requests to the church “back home” in England, and discussed strategy with them. The English bishops, monks, and sisters sent Boniface personnel, money, and supplies and undergirded the mission with intercessory prayer.

This example of a sending mission disappeared due to the destruction that invaders wreaked on England. Mission on the continent was defined by imperial expansion. Political and ecclesiastical leaders such as the Frankish kings, their German successors, the Byzantine emperor, and the pope used missions to build their empires. The Scandinavian kings only used English missionaries who were their own subjects or had no political connections.

The Crusades

The series of European wars against the Muslims, called the Crusades, made mission to Muslims almost impossible, leaving a heritage of hatred for Christianity in the Muslim world. Yet, before the Crusades had ended, Francis of Assisi had gone in love to preach to the Sultan of Egypt and had created a missionary group that would preach in love and in peace.

Ramon Lull, the great Franciscan leader, gave up his status as a noble in the court of Aragon to reach Muslims as “the Fool of Love.” He would use reason and debate and wrote Ars Magna to answer any question or objection raised by Muslims or traditional nature-worshiping polytheists. He devised a logic machine into which various factors could be entered and the right answer would appear. For decades before his martyrdom, Lull begged popes and kings to establish colleges for teaching Arabic and other languages and for training missionaries.

Colonial Expansion

During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Christianity, with the expansion of the Portuguese, Spanish, and French empires, became a worldwide religion. The pope divided the non-Christian lands of the earth (those discovered and yet to be discovered) between Portugal and Spain. This gave these monarchs the obligation to evangelize the peoples of those lands, to establish and maintain the church. Mission became a function of government.

The Portuguese built a trade empire, and except in Brazil, held only small territories under direct rule. They suppressed the ethnic religions, drove out the upper class who resisted, and created a Christian community composed of their mixed-blood descendants and converts from the lower strata of society.

Spain, on the other hand, attempted to transplant Christianity and civilization, both according to the Spanish model. Ruthless exploitation killed off the Carib Indians and stimulated missionaries like Bartholome de las Casas to struggle heroically for the rights of the remaining Indians. Since then, missionaries have played an important role in protecting native peoples from exploitation by Whites and colonial governments. Through great effort, missionaries abolished slavery and forced baptism, making them both civilizers and protectors of the Indians.

A frontier mission would have a central station surrounded by a town of Indians who became permanent residents. The priests taught and supervised the Indians in the religious practices of the church. They were actively enlisted to serve as assistants during worship gatherings and as singers and musicians. Folk festivals were Christianized, and Christian feasts and fasts were introduced. Farms and ranches were developed with the Indians, who were taught grazing and agriculture. Thus the Indians were preserved—not killed off or displaced as would later be the case in the United States. Unfortunately, when the government decided that the missions had civilized the Indians, the missions were “secularized.” Secular government officers replaced the missionaries. Lacking the missionaries’ love for the people, they distributed lands among Spanish settlers. Over time, the Indians were reduced to the level of landless day-laborers.

French policy in Canada was the opposite of Spanish policy. Only a small colony was settled to be a base for trade and a defense against the English. The French wanted animal furs and other products of the forests. Therefore they disturbed Indian civilization as little as possible. The missionaries developed a strategy consistent with this policy in which they lived with the Indians and adapted to the conditions in their villages. They preached, taught, and baptized individuals, performed the rites of the church, and allowed the converts still to be Indians.

The French were also involved on the other side of the globe in what was to become French Indo-China (present-day Vietnam), where the region came under French rule much later. Because French missionaries were persecuted and expelled from the region for long periods, Alexander de Rhodes devised a radical new evangelistic strategy. Rhodes created an order of native lay evangelists living under the rule of a religious order. They were hugely successful, winning converts by the thousands. Stimulated by this experience, Rhodes and his colleagues founded the Foreign Mission Society of Paris. They advocated the policy of recruiting and training a native diocesan clergy to be the chief agents in evangelizing the country and pastoring the churches.

Mission Strategists of the Seventeenth Century

Jose de Acosta, Brancati, and Thomas a Jesu were innovative mission theorists of the seventeenth century. They expanded the faith by writing manuals of missionary principles and practice, qualifications for missionaries, and instructions on cross-cultural evangelism. In 1622, an organization was created in Rome called the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. It gave central direction to Roman Catholic missions and established missionary training institutes.

The Jesuits were the courageous innovators in this period. Representing many nationalities, they went to the Orient through Portuguese channels but defied Portuguese restrictions. They were the modern pioneers in indigenization—the practice of accommodating to the local culture, employing local cultural forms and customs.

In Japan, the first Jesuits lived in Japanese-style houses, wore Japanese clothes, and followed most of the local customs and social etiquette. They made great use of the Japanese language in producing Christian literature. Japanese deacons and religious instructors bore the heaviest load in evangelism and teaching. A few were admitted to the priesthood. A large Christian community soon developed. When the Shogun, fearing foreign aggression, closed Japan to all outsiders and persecuted Christians in the seventeenth century, many thousands of Japanese died as martyrs. Christianity went underground and endured until Japan opened up again to the West two centuries later.

A second experiment at Madurai in South India went much farther. Robert de Nobili believed that the Brahmin caste must be won if Christianity were to succeed in India. Consequently, he became a Christian Brahmin. He dressed like a guru or religious teacher, observed the caste laws and customs, and learned Sanskrit. De Nobili studied the major schools of Hindu philosophy and presented Christian doctrine as much as possible in Hindu terms. He is one of the few evangelists who won many Brahmin converts.

The most noted attempt at cultural contextualization was in China, where the strategy was set by Matteo Ricci and developed by his successors, Schall and Verbiest. Just as in Japan, the missionaries adopted the local way of life and fundamentals of Chinese civilization. However, they went further and gradually introduced Christian principles and doctrine using Confucian concepts. They permitted converts to practice ancestral and state rites, regarding these as social and civil rather than religious in character. The missionaries gained tremendous influence as mathematicians, astronomers, mapmakers, and experts in various sciences. They introduced Western learning to the Chinese, made friends with influential people, and found opportunities to present the faith. They served the emperor in many capacities for one purpose—to open the way for the gospel. Success crowned this strategy, and a large Christian community developed, including influential people in high places.

Other missionaries, however, could not appreciate anything that was not European. Motivated by nationalistic and party jealousies, they attacked the Jesuits and brought charges against them in Rome. Ultimately Rome ruled against the Jesuits’ principles, banned their practices, and required that all missionaries going to the Orient take an oath to abide by that ruling. Chinese Christians were forbidden to practice family and state rites. Christianity appeared to strike at the root of filial piety, the very foundation of Chinese society. Two centuries later, the oath was abolished, and modified rites were permitted. Today, almost all missionaries of all churches recognize the necessity of contextualization or indigenization.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

New England Puritans: Missions to the American Indians

Protestants began participating in world missions early in the seventeenth century with the evangelistic work of the chaplains of the Dutch East Indies Company and the New England missions to the American Indians. Mission was a function of the commercial company, but many of its chaplains were genuine missionaries. The aim of the missionaries was to preach the gospel so effectively that the Indians would be converted, individually receive salvation, and be gathered into churches where they could be discipled. The intention was to make the Indian into a Christian man identical to an English Puritan Congregationalist. This involved civilizing the Indian according to the British model.

Most missionaries followed John Eliot who began with public preaching, although Thomas Mayhew Jr., who was very successful at Martha’s Vineyard, began with a slow, individual, personal approach. Like the Moravians, David Brainerd preached the love of God rather than His wrath, and effectively moved people to repentance.

A major strategic emphasis in the 1600s was to establish Christian towns. John Eliot and his colleagues believed that segregation and isolation were necessary for the converts’ spiritual growth. The converts must be removed from the negative influence of their pagan relatives and bad White men. The missionaries established Christian towns of “Praying Indians” so that new converts could live together under the strict discipline and careful nurture of the missionaries and Indian pastors and teachers. Most of these towns did not survive the devastation of King Philip’s War in 1674.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries to people in Africa and the Caribbean isles continued to guard the purity of the converts’ faith and conduct by segregating them into Christian villages. The effect was to alienate Christians from their people. A separated people cannot pass on the contagion of personal faith.

John Eliot’s Indian Catechism was the first book ever published in an American Indian language. Both the local language and the English language were used. The English language would enable the Indians to adjust better to White society, but the native language was more effective in communicating Christian truth. Reading, writing, and simple arithmetic were taught along with Bible study and religious instruction. Agriculture and domestic crafts were also taught.

To the credit of the New England Puritans, they never doubted the transforming power of the gospel or the potential ability of the Indians—sending some to the Boston Latin Grammar School and a few to the Indian College at Harvard College.

Fundamental to the New England mission strategy was the recruiting and training of native pastors and teachers. Both the missionaries and their supporters realized that only native agents could effectively evangelize and give pastoral care to their own people. Unfortunately, the old Christian Indian towns declined under continuing White pressure and the dwindling supply of pastors and teachers.

There were two enduring effects of the Indian missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Firstly, the lives of Eliot and Brainerd inspired many to become missionaries in a later day. Secondly, they gave Protestant missions its initial strategic plan: evangelism through preaching, church planting, education aimed at Christian nurture, Bible translation, literature production, use of the local language, and the recruitment and training of native pastors and teachers.

The Danish-Halle Mission

The first sending mission from Europe was the Danish-Halle Mission in 1705. The king of Denmark sent German Lutheran missionaries to his colony of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India. The pioneer leader, Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, developed a strategy followed by later missionaries—a strategy that was far ahead of his time. It stressed worship, preaching, education, translation work, and the production of literature in the local language. Ziegenbalg pioneered the use of Tamil lyrics in worship. He blazed a trail in the study of Hindu philosophy and religion, recognizing the importance of such knowledge for evangelism and church growth. This mission also included medical work. Unfortunately, the authorities in Germany opposed these strategies and methods.

Another famous Halle missionary was Christian Frederick Schwartz, who served in the British-controlled portion of South India. His strategy was unique and unplanned. Although still a European by all appearances, Schwartz became a guru or spiritual teacher. People of all religions and castes loved and trusted him and gathered around him as disciples, regardless of their status. His ministry was remarkable in terms of its adaptation to the culture.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement

Moravian Missions

The most distinctive missions strategy developed in the eighteenth century was that of the Moravian Church, developed under Count Zinzendorf and Bishop Spangenberg. The Moravian missionaries, beginning in 1734, were purposefully sent to the most difficult areas and neglected people. These missionaries were to be self-supporting, which led to the creation of industries and businesses that not only supported the work but brought the missionaries into close contact with the people. Such self-support could not be undertaken among the American Indians, however. Consequently, communal settlements (e.g., Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and Salem in North Carolina) were founded with a wide range of crafts and industries whose profits supported the mission.

Moravian missionaries were told not to apply “the Herrnhut yardstick” (i.e., German home-base standards) to other peoples. They were to be alert in recognizing the God-given distinctive traits, characteristics, and strengths of those people. Furthermore, they were to view themselves as assistants to the Holy Spirit. They were to be messengers, evangelists, and preachers who were not to stress heavy theological doctrines but rather tell the simple gospel story. In God’s time, the Holy Spirit would bring converts into the church in large numbers. Meanwhile the missionaries were to gather the first fruits. If there was no response, they were to go elsewhere. Actually, the missionaries left only when persecuted and driven out. They were remarkably patient and did not give up easily.

The “Great Century” of Protestant Missions

Out of these beginnings, there came the Protestant missionary overseas enterprise of the nineteenth century. It began in Britain when William Carey founded the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792. Mission societies began in the United States in 1787; more than twenty societies were formed, all with a worldwide objective. However, the frontier settlements and the Indians absorbed all their resources. Eventually, a student movement in 1810 broke the deadlock and launched the overseas mission through the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

The new societies and boards began their work with strategic presuppositions and methods inherited from the American Indian missions and the Danish-Halle Mission. Initially, the directors at home thought they had a superior understanding of mission strategy, so they gave detailed instruction to each missionary. After half a century, they discovered that the experienced missionaries on the field were the best ones to formulate strategy and policy, which might then be ratified by the mission society back home.

Even in countries with a complex culture, such as India and China, European missionaries stressed the “civilizing” objective as much as their colleagues in primitive regions because they regarded the local culture as immoral and superstitious—a barrier to Christianization. During the early decades no one questioned the legitimacy of the civilizing function of missions. Missionaries only debated which had priority—Christianization or civilization? Some believed that a degree of civilization was necessary to enable people to understand and accept the faith. Others believed in beginning with Christianization since the gospel had a civilizing effect on society. Most missionaries believed the two mutually interacted and should be stressed equally and simultaneously.

India soon received the greatest attention from mission boards and societies, and the strategies developed there were imitated in other regions. The Baptist “Serampore Trio” of Carey, Marshman, and Ward was especially influential in the early period. Although Carey sought individual conversions, he wanted to foster the growth of a church that would be independent, well sustained by literate and Bible-reading laypeople, and administered and shepherded by educated native ministers.

Carey was not content with establishing elementary schools, so he also founded a college. Their vast program of Bible translation and printing ranged from the local Indian languages to works in Chinese. This established the high priority of such work among all Protestant missions.

The Serampore Trio demonstrated that research is vital in determining mission strategy and action. They produced linguistic materials needed by all missionaries and took the lead in studying Hinduism.

This famous trio also worked for social transformation through the impact of the gospel. They became a mighty force for social reform, pressuring the colonial government to abolish suttee (widow burning), temple prostitution, and other dehumanizing customs.

The Scotsman Alexander Duff also worked in India during this period. Like Robert de Nobili, he believed that the Indian people would be won for Christ only if the Brahmin caste were first reached. He sought to win Brahmin youths through a program of higher education in the English language. He succeeded, but his venture led to tremendous emphasis being put on English language schools and colleges. These produced few converts but did financially help the churches. The schools also produced English-speaking staff for the civil service and commercial businesses, which pleased the colonial establishment. However, such educational institutions soon drained a large part of the mission’s resources.

At the same time, without any strategic planning, huge central mission stations emerged where converts clustered in financial and social dependence on the missionaries. Unless a convert came to Christ with his entire social group, he would be cast out of his family and would lose his job. Simply to keep such converts alive, missionaries would give them jobs as servants, teachers, and evangelists. The church became over-professionalized, with members being paid to do what they should do as volunteers. This bad practice spread to missions in other regions. In a mission station with a central church, schools, hospital, and often printing press, a missionary was pastor and ruler of the community. Such a system had little place for a native pastor, contrary to what William Carey had intended.

This changed in 1854–55, when Rufus Anderson visited churches in India and Ceylon. He caused the American Board missionaries to break up the huge central stations, form village churches, and ordain native pastors. He decreed that education in the local language should be the general rule and education in English the exception.

Mission Strategists of the Nineteenth Century

The two greatest mission theoreticians and strategists of the nineteenth century were also the executive officers of the largest mission agencies. Henry Venn was general secretary of the Church Missionary Society in London. Rufus Anderson was foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Anderson’s mission strategy dominated American mission work for more than a century, as did that of Venn in Britain. The two men arrived independently at the same basic principles and in later years mutually influenced each other. Together they established the famous “three-self “ formula, which became the recognized strategic goal of Protestant missions from the middle of the nineteenth century until World War II. The three-self goal of mission was to plant and develop churches that would be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

According to Anderson, the missionary’s task was to preach the gospel and gather the converts into churches. The missionary should always be an evangelist and never a pastor or ruler. Churches were to be organized at once out of those who demonstrated genuine conversion without waiting for them to reach the standard expected of church members from Christianized societies in the West. These churches should be led by native pastors and develop their own local and regional governing structures.

Both Anderson and Venn taught that when the churches were functioning well the missionaries should move on to “regions beyond” to begin the evangelistic process once again. The whole point of church planting was for those churches to engage spontaneously in local evangelism and in sending missionaries to other peoples. Mission would beget mission. In Anderson’s view, education in the language of the people would be for the sole purpose of serving the church, raising high-quality laypersons, and training ministers adequately. The British missions resisted Anderson’s views on vernacular education. American missions adopted his strategy and in theory held to his system for more than a century. However, after Anderson’s time they stressed secondary and higher education in English to an even greater extent. This was because social Darwinism had converted Americans to the doctrine of inevitable progress. This led to replacing the old eschatology (end times doctrine) with the idea that the kingdom of God was coming through the influence of Christian institutions such as schools.

John L. Nevius, a Presbyterian missionary in Shantung, devised a strategy that somewhat modified that of Anderson, placing more responsibility on the laypeople. He advocated for the layman to stay in his regular job while serving as a voluntary, unpaid evangelist. His colleagues in China did not adopt his system, but the missionaries in Korea did, with amazing success.

A Colonialist Mentality

Despite their avowed commitment to the Anderson-Venn formula, Protestant missions changed their mentality, which changed their strategy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Under Venn, British missions in West Africa had two goals: (1) the creation of an independent church with its own clergy, which would evangelize the interior of the continent, and (2) the creation of an African elite, i.e., an intelligentsia and middle class, which could support such a church and its mission. Soon after Venn’s term of leadership ended, mission executives and field missionaries took the colonialist view that Africans were inferior and therefore could not provide ministerial leadership. Consequently, Europeans were needed to fill leadership positions. It reduced the native church to a colony of the foreign planting church.

A very similar development occurred in India in the 1880s. Americans and other Westerners caught this colonialist mentality from the British. German missions, guided by their leading strategist, Professor Gustav Warneck, aimed to create national churches (Volkskirchen), but until they reached full development, the churches were kept in bondage to the missionaries.

Paternalism—treating the native church as young children—stunted their development. All missions were paternalist and colonialist at the turn of the century. This unhappy state of affairs lasted until research conducted for the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 destroyed complacency and inertia. They revealed that the local church was competent and restless under paternal domination. This conference led to a tremendous drive for the transfer of power from the mission organization to the church. Practically all boards and societies supported this ideal, at least in theory.

Evangelism, Education, and Medicine

In summary, mission strategy of the nineteenth century (until Edinburgh 1910) aimed at individual conversions, church planting, and social transformation through three main types of action: evangelism, education, and medicine. Evangelism included preaching in all its forms, the organizing and fostering of churches, Bible translation, literature production, and the distribution of Bibles and literature.

In the area of education, trade schools were generally abandoned in favor of academic education. By the end of the century, Asia had a vast educational system, ranging from kindergarten to college, including medical and theological schools. Africa, however, was neglected with respect to secondary and college education.

The first missionary doctors were sent mainly to take care of other missionary families. However, they quickly discovered that medical service created goodwill with the native people and provided evangelistic opportunities. Hence, medical services became a major branch of mission work. By the middle of the twenty century missions realized that health services in the name of Christ are a dramatic form of gospel proclamation.

With regard to other religions, mission strategy was aggressive, seeking to displace them and convert the people completely. This aggressive stance declined towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The customs of the Orient made it almost impossible for male missionaries to reach women and children in large numbers. Missionary wives worked to set up schools for girls and to penetrate the homes, zenanas (a secluded place for women in the home), and harems. However, they did not have enough freedom from homemaking and childcare and could not travel easily. Realistic strategy demanded that adequate provision be made for women and children, but the boards and societies stubbornly resisted sending single women out as missionaries. In desperation, women in the 1860s began organizing their own societies and sending out single women. A whole new dimension was thus added to mission strategy: the vast enterprise to reach women and children with the gospel, to educate girls, and to bring adequate medical care to women.

When women came into the church, their children followed them. The emphasis that the women placed on medical service led the mission societies to upgrade the medical work and put greater stress on medical education. American women pioneered these great endeavors, followed by the British and Europeans. As a result, women of the Orient gained access to prestigious careers as doctors, nurses, and teachers.

Comity

One more feature of nineteenth-century mission strategy must be listed. This was the practice of comity—the coordination of different organizations for the benefit of all. Southern Baptists were among the founders and practitioners of comity. Good stewardship of personnel and funds was a priority among boards and societies. Waste was abhorred, with a strong desire to stretch resources as far as possible. By coordinating their strategies, mission agencies could prevent the overlap of mission programs and eliminate competition as well as denominational differences that would confuse people and hamper evangelism. Prior occupation of territory was recognized, and new missions went to unoccupied areas. This custom produced “denominationalism by geography” (churches with various denominational affiliations based on their location).

Different mission groups agreed to recognize each other as valid branches of the one church of Christ. They agreed on baptism and transfer of membership, on discipline, on salaries, and on transfer of national workers. These agreements led to further cooperation in establishing regional and national boards for the mediation of conflicts between missions and to accomplish mutual goals. These goals included “union” Bible translation projects, publication agencies, secondary schools and colleges, teacher training schools, and medical schools. Effective strategy called for cooperation on all things, which could be better achieved through a united effort. City, regional, and national missionary conferences in almost every country provided opportunities for dialogue and planning.

Consultations and Conferences

Cooperation on the mission field led to more consultation, cooperation, and planning at home. The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 inaugurated the series of great conferences: Jerusalem 1928, Madras 1938, Whitby 1947, Willingen 1952, and Ghana 1957–58.

From Edinburgh 1910 to World War I, the most notable development of strategy was putting the national church in the center, giving it full independence and authority, and developing partnerships between the Western churches and the young churches. “The indigenous church” and “partnership in obedience” were watchwords that expressed the thrust of prevailing strategy.

Since World War II

Roland Allen expounded a radically different mission strategy in his books Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? and The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. However, he had no followers until after World War II, when missionaries of the faith missions rallied to his position. His strategy is this: the missionary communicates the gospel and transmits to the new community of converts the simplest statement of the faith, the Bible, the sacraments, and basic skills for how to minister to their communities. He then stands by as a counseling elder brother while the Holy Spirit leads the new church, self-governing and self-supporting, to develop its own forms of polity, ministry, worship, and life. Such a church is spontaneously missional.

Allen’s theory applied to new pioneer beginnings, whereas the old boards and societies were dealing with established churches that were set in their ways. The latter seldom sought to open up new mission fields. One after another, the mission organizations on the fields were dissolved. Resources were placed at the disposal of the churches and missionary personnel assigned to direct them. The Western boards and societies initiated little strategy that was new, but they did much to develop new methods: agricultural missions or rural development, some urban industrial work, mass media communications, more effective literature. This was the final state of an era of mission work, which had been in progress for three hundred years.

Now the world was no longer divided into Christendom and heathendom. There could no longer be a one-way mission from the West to the remainder of the world. The base for a mission was established in almost every land, and there existed a global Christian church and community with an obligation to give the gospel to the whole world. The moment for a new world mission with a radical new strategy had arrived.

New understandings of mission, new strategies, new organizations, new ways, new means, and new methods are demanded by our changing world. The central task of the church will never end until the kingdom of God comes in all its glory. It will help us in our task as we pray, study, plan, and experiment, if we know the past history of mission strategy.

RETURN TO LESSON 6: Expansion of the World Christian Movement