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| Kenneth B. Mulholland, Professor Ministry Studies, Missions | Print-Friendly Version (PDF - requires Acrobat Reader) |
On October 31, 1517— nearly five hundred years ago— Martin Luther tacked his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, Germany, and sparked what we know as the Protestant Reformation. Soon the gospel— salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone— was being trumpeted all over Europe. Is that correct? Yes. Then 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.
Roman Catholics believe in apostolic succession, the view that all priests and bishops can trace their lineage in unbroken order back to the apostles through the laying on of hands. Because of the supposed unbroken line of succession, they believe theirs is the true church. But in the years after the Reformation, Roman Catholics spoke of the apostolic nature of the church in a different way. They reasoned that since the word "apostolic" comes from "apostles," meaning "sent ones," the church should be a sending church.
They reasoned, "Since we are sending out missionaries, and Protestants are not, we are the true apostolic church." So, amazingly, the early Protestants, who believed the Bible and its gospel message, still lacked a sense of God's global purpose.
Besides theological reasons, there were geographical reasons for the Protestant lack of missions involvement. Central Europe, where the Reformation took root, was not in touch with the rest of the world. Until Holland and England rose as sea powers years later, countries in Central Europe had little contact with Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Nations that were in touch with the non-Christian peoples of the world were Spain and Portugal and, to a lesser degree, Italy. Aware of the masses of non-Christians around the world, those were the nations that desired to communicate the Christian faith.
There were also ecclesiastical reasons. Many Protestants were absorbed in seeking to maintain the gains they had made earlier in the Reformation and define themselves over against the Roman Catholic Church and other Protestants. On the other hand in the Counter Reformation, a number of Roman Catholic leaders, including Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Bartholomew de las Casas, and some popes, had a concern for the spread of Catholicism. They were missionary in their orientation.
Another factor that accounted for absence of Protestant missionary activity was organizational. Before the Reformation, monastic orders carried on missionary activity. When people in those orders took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they constituted a highly mobile missionary force. They were not married, and having taken vows of obedience, they constituted a highly mobile missionary force. They were not married, and having taken vows of obedience, they could readily go wherever the church decided to send them. However, because Martin Luther believed in the priesthood of all believers, he saw no need for the monasteries. Thus by closing down monasteries he dismantled a potential sending structure for Protestant missions. For 275 years, until the time of William Carey, Protestantism failed to develop a missionary structure that was reproducible and sustainable. Protestants had no structure through which to send missionaries.
In this book Carey surveyed the advance of Christianity through the centuries, discussed the religious state of the world, and then addressed every conceivable objection people might raise against the sending of missionaries.
This book met with keen opposition. It was highly controversial because of three words in the title: "to use means." Carey was a Baptist, and almost all Baptists at that time were hyper-Calvinists. Calling themselves "Particular Baptists," they did not believe missionary societies should be formed to send missionaries. So at a Baptist ministers association meeting Carey proposed that they debate the thesis, "Whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not binding on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world." John Ryland stood up and said to him, "Young man, when God wants to convert the world, He'll do it without your help or mine!" The prevailing opinion was that if God meant to convert people who were not in touch with the gospel, He would predestine them to be saved. And whether they became saved was not the concern of Baptist ministers.
Carey, however, persisted. In 1792, at another Baptist ministers association meeting, he preached a sermon based on Isaiah 54: 2-3, "Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide. Do not hold back. Lengthen your cords. Strengthen your stakes" (NIV). He concluded that message with the words, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." He pressed for the formation of a Baptist missions society, but his plea for action was tabled until the next meeting. Finally, in the fall of 1792 a small group of Baptist ministers and laypeople agreed to found the Baptist Missionary Society. After 275 years, at last the Protestant Church had a sustainable, reproducible instrument for sending missionaries.
Not surprisingly, Carey volunteered to be the first missionary sent by that society. He went to India, where he labored for forty-one years without taking a furlough. When Carey was about to depart India, he gave a speech in which he drew on the imagery of the early industrial revolution with its mining industry. In the primitive mining industry miners were lowered into dangerous holes in the ground with ropes. If danger occurred, the mine workers were pulled up by those ropes. He said, "Yonder in India there is gold. I descend to India to mine for souls. Hold the ropes." That was to be the responsibility of the mission society.
In India, Carey developed a missions strategy that historian Stephen Neill summarizes in five points: widespread preaching of the gospel by every possible method, distributing the Bible in the languages of the people, establishing a church as soon as possible, studying the background and world views of the people, and training indigenous leaders. [4] Even now one is hard-pressed to prove on that strategy of more than two hundred years ago.
Where did Carey's ideas come from? In the 275 years from Luther to Carey there were some helpful developments in Protestantism. From these planks he constructed the platform from which he launched the modern Protestant missionary movement. These three planks were Pietism, Moravianism, and Puritanism. These movements each contributed to modern missions and also are relevant to the church today. (A following article will discuss Moravianism and Puritanism.)
Second, no person is excused before God because of ignorance of the gospel. Those who do not believe are presumed to have rejected the gospel when it was preached to them by the apostles during New Testament times, and God is not obligated to give them a second chance. Therefore European Christians have no need to assume responsibility for the lostness of the heathen. Third, rulers are responsible to propagate the gospel in their own territories alone. The Wittenberg fathers were satisfied that the rulers had faithfully carried out this duty.
From the ashes of this situation a movement called Pietism began to emerge. Today the word "pietist" suggests pretense rather than righteousness, hypocrisy rather than holiness. But Pietism was an international, interdenominational movement of evangelical renewal that arose in the mid-1600s in attempt to complete the Protestant Reformation. In other words Pietism did not try to undo or disown the Reformation; Pietism tried to complete the Reformation. The church had had a reformation in doctrine; now it needed a reformation in life.
Two streams of influence fed the development of Pietism. The first flowed from Johann Arndt, a German Lutheran pastor and then district superintendent, who lived from 1555 to 1621. Emphasizing the believer's new life in Christ, he insisted that pastors must be models of the Christian life. A contemporary said of him, "He was tireless in reconciling those at enmity, rousing the lukewarm, instructing the ignorant, and rebuking the perverse." [7] His sermons continued to be reprinted for more than one hundred years after his death, and he wrote True Christianity, one of the most influential books of his time.
A second stream flowed from Justinian von Welz. In three pamphlets written in 1664, he boldly set forth the missionary duty of the church. He called for the formation of a society for extending the gospel among non-Christians and establishing a college to train missionaries. He set before the slumbering conscience of the church these three questions: (1) Is it right that evangelical Christians hold the gospel for themselves alone and do not seek to spread it? (2) Is it right that theology students are not encouraged to labor for Christ in other lands? (3) Is it right to spend so much money on dress and on delicacies in eating and drinking but give no thought to the spread of the gospel? [8]
Theologians rebuked von Welz, calling him a dreamer, a fanatic, a hypocrite, and a heretic. How absurd, they said, to cast the pearls of the gospel before the heathen, the holy things of God before such dogs and swine. [9] But von Welz was not deterred. The church in Germany would not ordain him, but the church in Holland did. Only two years after going to Surinam as a missionary, he died of a tropical disease.
Arndt and von Welz were forerunners of Pietism. Pietism took its definitive form in the year 1675 when German pastor Philipp Jacob Spener wrote Pia Desideria. [10] In English the full title of that Latin work is Heartfelt Desire for a God-Pleasing Reform of the True Evangelical Church together with Several Simple Christian Proposals Looking toward This End. Spener discussed the defects of the civil authorities, the clergy, and the common people, described the potential that he saw in the church, through four editions and sold 80,000 copies, an amazing large number for seventeenth-century Germany. [11] Not until 1964, when the North American church rediscovered church renewal through small groups, was the book translated into the English language.
In his call for reform Spener focuses on six points. [12]
These proposals received a mixed response. In fact Spener was forced to leave the church where he was pastoring. He moved to Berlin, where he became a pastor highly influential throughout Germany. He established the University of Halle near Berlin. He was responsible for the conversion of a close friend by the name of August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), and Francke became the leader at the University of Halle.
Francke was an outstanding educator, an organizational genius, a magnificent teacher, and a spiritual giant. Around the university he organized an orphanage, two homes for widows, a school for poor children, a ministry for feeding needy students free of charge, a home for beggars, a hospital, and a ministry to provide free medicine for the poor. He also made regular visits to prisons and hospitals, and he encouraged Christians to care for the handicapped. His orphanage was developed on the basis of faith, and it was from him that George Mueller got the idea for his orphanages. And from George Mueller, J. Hudson Taylor got the idea for faith missions.
Francke established schools, including a school for poor children, called a charity school, that enrolled 2,200 children. The concern for universal education stems not from the Reformation but from Pietism. Also Spener established a "Bible institute," which was a print shop and a center for distributing Bibles. The Pietists had a great passion to get the Scriptures into the hands of common people. Through Francke's correspondence with Cotton Mather, many of Francke's ideas spread into American Puritanism.
Spener, and particularly Francke, had a great heart for missions. Lutheranism evangelized Colonial America through graduates of the University of Halle. Six thousand ministers graduated from that university, including Henry Muhlenberg, after whom a university in Pennsylvania is named. However, a problem arose when the Pietists wanted to send missionaries. The German church refused to ordain people for missionary service because of the opinion of the faculty at Wittenberg. So the Pietists had no way to send missionaries to the non-Christian world.
Then one of the most remarkable incidents in missions history occurred. Denmark's king, who was a Christian and a Pietist, saw that Roman Catholic princes were sending out missionaries. He said, "We Protestants ought to be doing that. Let's find some missionaries here in Denmark to send to our colonies." But they could not find any. Then the king's court chaplain, a graduate of the University of Halle told the king he knew of some people in Germany who wanted to become missionaries. So the king got in touch with Francke, who found Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plutschau, who were willing to go as missionaries. [13] Here was a strange Phenomenon: the Danish king using state funds to send German missionaries to Danish colonies in India!
When Ziegenbalg and Plutschau arrived in Tranquebar, India, in 1705, they shared the gospel with Hindus. Ziegenbalg and Plutschau thus became the first Protestant missionaries to Asia. Over a period of years they developed a missions strategy from which William Carey later benefited, because Carey read almost everything Ziegenbalg wrote. Their strategy consisted of five principles. [14] First, they educated the people. Pietists established schools wherever they went because they believed people should be taught to read so that they could read the Bible. Second, they made the Bible available in the language of the people. Within six days after arriving in India, Ziegenbalg and Plutschau began to study the Tamil language. At first they sat on the ground with native children and drew pictures in the sand to seek to comprehend the rudiments of the Tamil language. Ziegenbalg, a gifted linguist, was fluent in Tamil in eight months and by the end of his third year he translated the New Testament into the Tamil language. In its revised form, that translation is still used today by the Tamil-speaking people.
Third, they sought to know the culture. Pietists insisted that missionaries learn the language and the culture of the people with whom they worked. Pietist missionaries sometimes wrote lengthy descriptions of their host cultures in order to instruct new missionaries. But people back home did not like that. They said, "Why are you wasting your time studying heathen religions and heathen cultures? Your business is to rout Hinduism from India, not to propagate heathen superstition in Europe." But they persisted in emphasizing the importance of learning not only the language but also the culture and the mid-set and religions of those to whom they went.
Fourth, they preached for personal conversion. Just a few months after they landed they baptized five slaves of Danish masters. A few months later they baptized nine former Hindus.
Fifth, they advocated church indigenization. Pietists moved quickly to establish local congregations led by native pastors. They were well ahead of their time in this respect. When Ziegenbalg died in 1719, he left behind a native church with its own ministry as well as a Christian community of about 350 people.
Ziegenbalg and Plutschau took the only furlough of their career in 1714, and in Denmark they started a college for the training of missionaries. They had a strong influence on the students at Halle as they visited there. They helped start the first student mission movement in Protestantism and they asked the archbishop of Canterbury and the king of England for support from the English-speaking world for their mission.
Why, then, is Carey called the father of modern missions? Should not Ziegenbalg and Plutschau be known as the founders of modern missions? The answer is that the Danish-Halle mission was a unique missionary expression. It could not be reproduced. And it ceased to exist by the 1830s. Yet the Pietism of Germany— which Cotton Mather called the "flame of God which burns in the heart of Germany"— paved the way for modern missions. [15] Here was a small-group renewal movement; that is what Pietism essentially was. People went to church, they heard sermons, they took the sacraments, they learned the catechism. Then they gathered in small groups and discussed the sermon, heard reports on spiritual biographies, read the Bible, applied it to their lives, and held each other accountable. They prayed for one another and encouraged each other in faith and good works. They became involved in good works in their community and in praying for missionaries around the world. They called this strategy ecclesiola en ecclesia, "The little church in the big church." It was a small-group movement for the nurture of piety.
Pietism, an authentic renewal movement, put missions on the church's agenda. Twenty years ago Peter Wagner wrote a book on church growth in which he identified several church-growth "diseases," [16] one of which he calls "koinonitis" or "inflamed koinonia." It is fellowship that has become so all-consuming that the church turns inward on itself rather than facing outward to a world in need. Pietism, on the other hand, teaches that authentic renewal looks outward to the ends of the earth as well as inward to spiritual renewal. Pietism was an essential plank from which William Carey launched the platform of modern missions.
In studying the Scriptures, defending the inerrancy of Scripture, and being committed to theological orthodoxy, believers dare not let the Great Commission become the "Great Omission" in their lives and ministry. May every believer's faith be so stretched that in the words of Carey, each one can say, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God."
*This is article one in a two-part series adapted from "Planks in the Platform of Modern Missions," delivered by the author as the Missions and Evangelism Lectureship at Dallas Theological Seminary, November 2– 5, 1997.
Source: Bibliotheca Sacra 156 (Jan-Mar) 1999. Copyright © 1999 Dallas Theological Seminary. Used by permission.
[1] For a more extensive discussion of Roman Catholic advance in the light of limited Protestant missionary activity see Kenneth Scott Latourette, Three Centuries of Advance (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1938-49\ 7), 25-28, and J. Herbert Kane, A Global View of Christian Missions (New York: Harper & Brothers), 73-75. For a more positive view regarding Luther's missiological insights, see John Warwick Montgomery, In Defense of Martin Luther (Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1970), 160-69. Calvin's involvement in sending missionaries to Brazil is documented by Amy Glassner Gordon, "The First Protestant Missionary Effort: Why Did It Fail?" International Bulletin of Missionary Research (January 1984): 12-18. The best book on the Anabaptist approach to missions is Wilbert R Shenk, ed., Anabaptism and Mission (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1984).
[2] Material on William Carey is drawn primarily from Timothy George, Faithful Witness: The Life and Mission of William Carey (Birmingham, U. K.: New Hope, 1991); Kane, A Global View of Christian Missions, 84-86; and Christian History 11 (1992).
[3] William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, ed. John L. Pretlove (reprint, Dallas, TX: Criswell, 1988). This book was originally published in Leicester, England in 1792.
[4] Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2d ed., rev. Owen Chadwick (New York: Penguin, 1986), 224.
[5] For an excellent description of the setting in which Pietism arose see John Weborg, "Pietism: The Fire of God Which… Flames in the Heart of Germany," in Protestant Spiritual Traditions, ed. Frank C. Senn (New York: Paulist, 1986), 185-92.
[6] James A. Scherer, Justinian Welz: Essays by an Early Prophet of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 28.
[7] "Gallery: Thumbnail Sketches of Important Leaders in the Pietist Movement," Christian History 5 (1986): 13.
[8] Justinian von Welz, quoted in Robert H. Glover, The Progress of World Wide Missions, rev. J. Herbert Kane (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 46.
[9] Ibid. Also see Kane, A Global View of Christian Missions, 76.
[10] Philipp Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964).
[11] Peter C. Erb, ed., Pietists: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1983), 5.
[12] Spener, Pia Desideria, 87-122.
[13] John Aberly, "Bartholomew Ziegenbalg: The First Protestant Missionary to the Gentiles," in Missionary Heroes of the Lutheran Church, ed. L. B. Wolf (Columbia, SC: Lutheran Board, 1911), 39-65.
[14] Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 195-96. Also see C. George Fry, "Pietism's Contribution to Missions," Missionary Monthly, October 1984, 18-21.
[15] Weborg, "Pietism," 211. From Cotton Mather, Nuncia bona e Terra Longinqua (1715), quoted in John T. McNeill, Modern Christian Movements (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 74.
[16] C. Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Be Healthy (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979), 77-87.