Vol. 36, No. 1
January 2012
Unity, Comity, and the Numbers Game
I
f the quest of the church is for unity in Christ, the on-theground reality has been kaleidoscopic fragmentation. And
the kaleidoscope is spinning with increasing speed. In the past
dozen years, formal organizational diversity among Christians
has grown by 26 percent, swelling from an estimated 34,100
denominations in the year 2000 to a projected 43,000 by mid2012 (see “Status of Global Mission, 2012, in the Context of ad
1800–2025,” by Todd Johnson, David Barrett, and Peter Crossing,
line 41, on p. 29 of this issue).
The tensions between ecclesiastical aspiration and achievement are evident in the Protestant mission enterprise of the past
two centuries as well. The number of foreign mission sending
Spirit of Missions 37 (February 1872): 137
Lydia Mary Fay and “Her Boys”
agencies has more than doubled in the past four decades (p. 29,
line 44). That development should perhaps give one pause—
who has measured the level of redundancy, competition, illcoordination of efforts, and striving to establish organizational
identity or “brand” that this level of multiplication entails?
Yet, madcap as it sometimes seems, this development is not
necessarily all negative. The founding documents of the church,
and hence of Christian mission, speak of diversity of gifts among
individuals and concordant differences in their function. If individuals vary in capability, expertise, cultural context, and social
conditioning, is there any reason why organizations should not
Continued next page
On Page
3 Comity Agreements and Sheep Stealers:
The Elusive Search for Christian Unity
Among Protestants in China
R. G. Tiedemann
10 Botany or Flowers? The Challenges of
Writing the History of the Indigenization
of Christianity in China
Gloria S. Tseng
14 Cheng Jingyi: Prophet of His Time
Peter Tze Ming Ng
17 Matteo Ricci: Pioneer of Chinese-Western
Dialogue and Cultural Exchanges
Jean-Paul Wiest
22 Attrition Among Protestant Missionaries in
China, 1807–1890
Jessie G. Lutz
28 Christianity 2012: The 200th Anniversary
of American Foreign Missions
Todd M. Johnson, David B. Barrett†, and Peter F.
Crossing
30 David B. Barrett: Missionary Statistician
Todd M. Johnson
33 Lydia Mary Fay and the Episcopal Church
Mission in China
Ian Welch
34 Noteworthy
38 Eugene A. Nida: Theoretician of Translation
Philip C. Stine
39 The Waning of Pagan Rome: A Review Essay
Alan Kreider
40 Worldwide Increase in Catholic Population,
Deacons, Priests, and Bishops
42 Book Reviews
54 Dissertation Notices
56 Book Notes
be similarly conditioned? Perhaps organizational diversity in
itself bears witness to the multifaceted love of God!
While it may be questioned whether diversity and fragmentation are precise synonyms, it is a historical fact that the ways
these tensions have played out in mission practice and in the
wider Christian movement have frequently been less than edifying. How often has failure in the quest for unity been papered
over with a mask of comity? How frequently has a Christendom
mentality sacrificed complementarity and functional diversity
on the altar of territorial or quasiterritorial separation, as though
Christ’s followers could be sufficient in themselves and did not
need each other?
As the articles in this issue by R. G. Tiedemann, Gloria Tseng,
and Peter Ng show, the planting of the Protestant church in China
provides an excellent case in point. Turfs—territorial, intellectual,
spiritual, and above all denominational—were carved out. When
the call of Cheng Jingyi came, giving voice to the desire in China
for “a united Christian church that was freed from denominationalism” (Ng, p. 15), many heard and followed his lead. In 1927 as
much as a quarter of the Chinese Christian community joined in
forming the Church of Christ in China. The majority, however,
held aloof. Tseng argues convincingly that the seeds of discord
planted then continue to bear bitter fruit to this day.
Whatever their shortcomings, missionaries to China in the
nineteenth century were sacrificial. They bore in their bodies
the truth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s dictum that, when Christ calls
a person, he calls that one to come and die. In the early years
particularly, many died, large numbers fell ill, most suffered
heartache with the loss of spouses, children, and colleagues. They
endured loneliness, suffered from depression, and ached with
social isolation in a land where they were often not welcome and
whose language they rarely adequately mastered. Jessie Lutz
Editor
Jonathan J. Bonk
Senior Associate Editor
Dwight P. Baker
Associate Editor
J. Nelson Jennings
Assistant Editors
Craig A. Noll
Rona Johnston Gordon
Managing Editor
Daniel J. Nicholas
Senior Contributing Editors
Gerald H. Anderson
Robert T. Coote
Circulation
Aiyana Ehrman
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2
places these pressures in sharp relief as she tabulates shifts in the
rates of missionary attrition throughout the nineteenth century.
The quest for relevant ministry was not only organizational
and denominational but at times deeply personal. Ian Welch
recounts the life of Lydia Mary Fay. She eventually found stable
footing overseeing the school where she nurtured “her boys,”
seen with her in the etching on page 1. An accomplished teacher
and administrator who would have preferred the domestic life
of a married woman, she volunteered for missionary service in
China, where she devoted the last twenty-eight years of her life.
She applied herself with diligence to study of the language, gaining a fluency that eluded others. But in mid-nineteenth-century
China she chafed under mission policies that put her under the
authority of less gifted males who served only short-term in her
school. In 1878, upon her death, the school that passed to her
successor was unquestionably “her school,” which was a credit
to her resolve, hard work, and innate administrative capabilities.
But one suspects that, in the end, she won the day in large part
because the day itself had changed. Single and married women
themselves had begun to be counted on the rolls of mission
societies.
Tributes to two individuals who placed their mark on
twentieth-century Christian scholarship appear in this issue.
The ways each of us thinks about Bible translation, as well as the
translations themselves, bear the impress of Eugene Nida. And
David Barrett, a contributing editor whose summaries of missional
statistics have appeared annually since 1985 in the January issue
of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, was
our era’s foremost statistician of the world Christian movement.
We look forward to ongoing annual statistical updates from the
hands of his longtime colleagues Todd Johnson and Peter Crossing.
—Dwight P. Baker
InternatIonal BulletIn of MIssIonary research
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International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Comity Agreements and Sheep Stealers: The Elusive Search for
Christian Unity Among Protestants in China
R. G. Tiedemann
O
ne persistent criticism of the Protestant missionary
enterprise in China has been its failure to overcome
denominational divisions and create a genuine Chinese Protestant church. This accusation has been made most vociferously
by many Chinese commentators. Indeed, as early as 1910, none
other than Cheng Jingyi (1881–1939), eminent Beijing pastor
who was prominent among Sino-foreign Protestants, publicly
decried Western-imposed denominationalism at the Edinburgh
Missionary Conference.1 To be sure, in the early twentieth century
the Protestant missionary endeavor was marked by considerable
denominational variety in China. It was, moreover, represented
by organizations and agents from several countries of Europe
and North America, as well as from Australia and New Zealand.
In the course of the second half of the nineteenth century,
missionaries from various mainline denominations had been
able to establish themselves in most provinces of China. At the
same time, existing missionary work was expanded and intensified, with greater emphasis on medical, educational, and social
works. Around the turn of the twentieth century, new mainline
missionary societies, especially missions supported by Lutheran
churches in Scandinavia and ethnic Scandinavian churches in
the United States, were entering the field. These developments
called for greater coordination of, and greater unity within, the
Protestant movement in China. Early moves in this direction
had already been made at the General Conferences of Protestant
Missionaries of China, held in Shanghai in 1877 and 1890, which
no foreign mission body failed to attend.2 These consultations
achieved a significant consensus and prepared the way for a
number of China-wide cooperative ventures, as well as comity
agreements among the mainline societies that sought to prevent
undue overlap of evangelistic work. Several cooperative councils
and agencies were set up, such as the China Medical Missionary
Association (1886) and the China Christian Educational Association (1890), to coordinate various activities of the major European
and North American sending agencies. A traditional evangelical
theology inherited from the nineteenth century provided further
common ground, as shown for example in the role of the Student
Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), coordinated
by John R. Mott and so influential from the 1890s to the 1920s.3
A sense of community among the mainline denominational missionaries was also created by the publication since 1867 of the
Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal. In addition to informing its
readers in China about current events, situations, problems, and
movements, “its main functions [were] to be a medium for the
exchange of ideas, methods, proposed experiments and policies
between missionaries, Chinese and western Christians working
in China and the Chinese and western churches.”4
R. G. “Gary” Tiedemann, a citizen of Germany, has
taught as a visiting professor at Chinese universities
since his retirement from the University of London. He
is currently associated with Oxford House Research
Ltd and is the editor of the Handbook of Christianity
in China, vol. 2: 1800 to the Present (Brill, 2010).
—[email protected]
January 2012
The China Centenary Missionary Conference at Shanghai
in 1907 provided further impetus to cooperation on the China
mission field.5 In some ways this gathering anticipated the
developments arising from the Edinburgh World Missionary
Conference of 1910, the gathering that initiated the process leading to the formation of a nondenominational Chinese church.
Plans for establishing local Chinese churches had already been
developed in the nineteenth century, starting with the Amoy
Plan in the 1860s.6 This approach was subsequently adopted by
American Presbyterians in their drive toward a united Chinese
Presbyterian church. One of the key issues they considered was
the role of foreign missionaries in the local bodies. More concrete
steps toward nationwide Christian unity were taken by Presbyterian missionaries in China in 1906, on the eve of the Centenary
Missionary Conference of 1907, with the establishment of the
Synod of the Five Provinces as an autonomous Chinese church.
This in turn led to the formation of the Council of Presbyterian
Consultations prepared the
way for a number of Chinawide cooperative ventures.
Churches, with representatives from the mission churches of the
Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (representing the Northern states), the Presbyterian Church in the United
States (representing the Southern states), the Reformed Church
in America, the Church of Scotland, the United Free Church of
Scotland, and the Presbyterian churches in Canada, Ireland, and
England, to act as a coordinating body for the new church that
was to be established. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in China met in Shanghai in 1922 and decided on a
name for the church. Having opted for “The Church of Christ in
China,” the Presbyterians invited other church bodies in China
to join this union.7
In the meantime, another ecumenical venture with significant Presbyterian involvement had been initiated. Following the
1910 Edinburgh conference, the China Continuation Committee
of the National Missionary Conference was set up to promote
coordination among Christian groups in China and to serve as a
means of connection between the Christian groups of China, the
Continuation Committee of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, and the mission boards in the West. The committee brought
its work to an end with the calling of a National Conference
of delegates elected by virtually all branches of the Protestant
churches and missions in China in 1922. This conference, in turn,
created the National Christian Council of China (NCC), a national
Protestant coordinating and liaison body which was to “foster
. . . unity of the Christian Church in China; to watch and study
the development of the Church in self-support, self-government,
and self-propagation; to encourage every healthy movement of
the Church that leads to full autonomy; and to seek and work
for the adaptation of the Church to its environment and for its
naturalization in China at as early a date as practicable.”8 Asher
3
Raymond Kepler (1879–1942), of the American Presbyterian
(North) mission, a committed proponent of church union, was
asked by the National Christian Council in 1922 to prepare the
convocation of a general assembly to formally establish the
interdenominational Church of Christ in China (CCC).
The First General Assembly of the CCC was held in Shanghai in October 1927. The following groups were connected with
this church:
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions
Baptist Missionary Society
Church of Scotland
London Missionary Society
Presbyterian Church in Korea
Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (North)
Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (South)
Presbyterian Church of England
Presbyterian Church of Ireland
Presbyterian Church of New Zealand
Reformed Church in America
Reformed Church in the U.S.
South Fujian Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church
United Brethren in Christ
United Church of Canada
In addition, the CCC included some independent Chinese
churches. As a consequence of this union, the CCC became the
largest Protestant church in China, as well as the most powerful
member of the NCC. Despite differences in nuances and even
outright disagreements over issues such as the role of schools or
social services versus evangelization, the unity of the mainline
Protestant community, still led by foreign missionaries but with
The more radical
evangelical bodies shunned
any kind of organizational
arrangements and refused
to enter into comity
agreements.
increasing numbers of Chinese Christians playing leading roles
as well, was to a large extent maintained until the end of the missionary era in China. However, the National Christian Conference
of 1922 was the last major Protestant forum at which almost all
missions and even some new independent Chinese churches
were represented.9 That is to say, the creation of the Church of
Christ in China was only a partially successful move toward a
genuine united national Protestant church.
Continuing Denominational Separatism
Despite this drive toward greater unity, Protestant Christianity
actually became far more diverse during the first half of the
twentieth century. Several factors account for this. For one thing,
the CCC found it difficult to overcome inherent limitations.
“In effect the Church of Christ in China lived a double life. On
4
the one hand it was a national church representing a variety of
denominational traditions and carrying on programs in the name
of the total church. On the other hand it was a group of regional
churches in loose association with a central staff and not very
close relations with each other.”10
At the same time, several major mainline denominations
did not join this venture but set up their own Chinese national
churches. In the wake of the First World War, the so-called
fundamentalist-modernist controversy split the entire Protestant
community in China, missionaries and Chinese Christians alike.
Furthermore, a bewildering variety of new Protestant groups,
large and small, were establishing themselves throughout the
country—not to mention the many older groups, separated by
belief and nationality.11 Some of these were from relatively new
sects at the fringe of the traditional evangelical consensus—
Holiness people, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists, for
example. Most were ardent millenarians, expecting the imminent
second coming of Christ.12 Especially the more radical evangelical
bodies shunned any kind of organizational arrangements and
refused to enter into comity agreements. Finally, the Chinese
independent churches that emerged during the early decades
of the twentieth century further added to the divisions of Protestantism in China.
The Anglican Communion in China. In accordance with the resolutions of their 1909 conference in Shanghai, the churches of every
branch of the Anglican Communion in China—American, British,
and Canadian—were amalgamated in 1912 into one ostensibly
independent church, the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui (Holy
Catholic Church of China). This included the churches of the
American Church Mission, that is, the Domestic and Foreign
Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the
United States of America, the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Church Missionary Society, the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, the Bible
Churchmen’s Missionary Society, and the Church of England
Zenana Missionary Society. In addition, the Missionary District
of Shaanxi, “an area of abject poverty and hotbed for political
revolutionaries,” was formed as an initiative among the Chinese
clergy and was to be completely funded and pioneered by Chinese.
However, as Michael Poon has observed, the foreign missionaries “failed to establish a church in China that was rooted in its
cultural and social contexts.” It was only in 1949 at the Tenth
General Synod that the decision was taken to set up a national
office and a central theological college in Shanghai.13
The Lutheran Church of China. Under an agreement reached at the
Jigongshan (Henan) Conference of 1917, the Chinese churches of
several Lutheran mission societies from Europe and the United
States became part of the Lutheran Church of China, which
was formally established in 1920. This church maintained the
Lutheran Board of Publication and the Lutheran Theological
Seminary. At the National Council meeting in 1949, at the very
end of the missionary era in China, four more societies joined
the Lutheran Church of China. It should be noted, however, that
the Basel and Rhenish societies had not only Lutheran but also
Reformed missionaries.14
Faith Missions and Holiness Movements
One of the earliest and ultimately largest missionary societies with
a mission strategy at variance with the operations of the “classical”
Protestant missions was the interdenominational China Inland
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Mission (CIM). It differed from the traditional mission societies in
several significant ways. During the late Qing Dynasty the CIM
adopted an “extensive” rather than an “intensive” missionary
strategy, promoting relatively superficial proclamation of the
Gospel by foreign as well as Chinese itinerating laymen and the
deployment of single Western women in the interior of China.
Perhaps most important, the CIM began as a “faith mission,”
meaning that the necessary funds were not overtly solicited.15
By the end of the nineteenth century several new organizations had been founded on the CIM’s faith-mission principle.
In this connection, the Swedish evangelist Fredrik Franson
(1852–1908) became an important organizer of missions to China
among the Scandinavian immigrants in the United States, in
Scandinavia, and in the German-speaking countries.16 Most
of these new societies became associate missions of the CIM
in China. Eventually there would be thirteen bodies working
under CIM auspices:
China Alliance Mission of Barmen
Evangelical Congregational Church
Free Missionary Society, Finland
Friedenshort Deaconess Mission
German Women’s Missionary Union
Holiness Mission (Sweden)
Liebenzell Mission
Norwegian Mission in China
Norwegian Mission Union
Scandinavian Alliance Mission of North America
Swedish Alliance Mission
Swedish Mission in China
Vandsburger Mission
Thus, by the early twentieth century the CIM and its associates
formed the largest Protestant missionary organization in the
country, with foreign evangelists present in nearly every province
and territory of the Manchu Qing Empire.17
Besides the China Inland Mission and its affiliates, the Holiness movements and premillennialist revivals spawned several
other missionary organizations with work in China at the turn of
the twentieth century. Canadian-born Albert Benjamin Simpson
(1843–1919) and his Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA)
had a significant impact on, and was affected by, the emerging
Pentecostal movement, both in North America and in the China
mission field.
Among the Protestant denominations that began to send
missionaries to China at this time, including those of a postmillennialist persuasion, several were connected with the National
Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, known
from 1893 as the National Holiness Association (NHA). The Canadian Holiness Movement Mission initiated its work in Hunan
Province shortly after 1900. The Free Methodist Church of North
America commenced its China mission in 1904. The Hephzibah
Faith Mission sent its first workers to China in 1905. The Church
of God (Anderson, Indiana) opened stations in Shanghai (1909)
and Zhenjiang (1910). The first official Church of the Nazarene
mission in China opened in Zhaocheng (Shandong) in 1914. As
a “second blessing” Holiness church, it cooperated extensively
with the National Holiness Association’s China mission (started
in western Shandong in 1910). Having been influenced by different strands of the Holiness movement in Britain, and in keeping
with its dual role of evangelism and social work, the Salvation
Army became involved in famine relief and medical work in
China beginning in 1916.
January 2012
Fundamentalist Reaction
The emphasis on social, educational, and medical work, as well
as the increasing appreciation of Chinese culture by the majority
of missionaries associated with the Church of Christ in China,
provoked a response from conservative, fundamentalist elements within the mainline denominational missions. They became
increasingly concerned about the high incidence of “modernism”
in the various cooperative ventures and feared that cooperation
During the late Qing
Dynasty the CIM adopted
an “extensive” rather than
an “intensive” missionary
strategy.
in union projects would lead to doctrinal compromises. The ensuing fundamentalist-modernist controversy became particularly
acute within American Presbyterianism and affected the missions
in China. Alarmed by what they saw as the liberal nature of the
CCC, conservative Presbyterians, with the support of the North
China Theological Seminary at Tengxian, Shandong, organized
a “continuing” Presbyterian Church to preserve traditional Presbyterianism and remain outside the multi-confessional union of
the CCC. This fundamentalist Presbyterian Church, consisting
of the five presbyteries from Jiangsu and Shandong as well
as the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Manchuria and the
Christian Reformed Mission, organized the General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church of Christ in China in November 1929.
Being to some extent dissatisfied with the Bible Union of China
(founded in 1920 to “maintain . . . the fundamental and saving
truths revealed in the Bible, especially those now being assailed”),
these Presbyterians were instrumental in forming the League of
Christian Churches in 1929. In addition to the General Assembly,
this new organization included the churches connected with the
Baptist China Direct Mission (Tai’an), the Mennonite General
Conference Mission, the Bethel Mission Church, the churches
connected with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Anhui
Province, and the churches connected with the China Inland
Mission Church Council of Henan.18 In other words, “Even as
the fundamentalists refused to join or else withdrew from the
union institutions, they formed their own inter-denominational
fellowships according to their own vision of Christian unity.”19
There was considerable diversity within the fundamentalist
camp. According to Kevin Yao, there were, on the one hand, such
“mild” fundamentalists as Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936), after
1925 a “continuing” missionary of the Presbyterian Church in
Canada,20 as well as Walter Stephen Moule (1865–1949), Anglican;
Dixon Edward Hoste (1861–1946), director of the China Inland
Mission and one of the Cambridge Seven; and Watson McMillan
Hayes (1857–1941), a member of the Northern Presbyterian mission in Shandong. On the other hand, a radical minority group
included Hugh Watt White (1870–1940), Albert Baldwin Dodd
(1877–1972), and members of the Christian Fundamentals League
for China, a new fundamentalist organization set up in 1927 that
was much more militant than the Bible Union of China. Of all
the mainline fundamentalists opposed to the NCC’s program,
the American Edgar Ellsworth Strother (1884–1947), from 1909
to 1928 general secretary of the Christian Endeavor Society in
5
China, surely was the most militant. His publication The National
Christian Council of China: A Bolshevik Aid Society expresses quite
well the acrimonious nature of his polemical attacks.21
As concerns the controversy in the United States, the
PCUSA ministers who perceived serious doctrinal error in their
denomination formed the Presbyterian Church of America in
1936, renamed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in 1939.
In 1937, however, many of the OPC members who advocated
the establishment of a fundamentalist and evangelical church
left to form the Bible Presbyterian Church, taking with them the
Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, which
had been organized in 1933 for “Bible-believing” Presbyterians.
Unaffiliated Missionaries
In a climate of heightened revivalist expectations, many new
and more radical mission groups sought access to the vast
China mission field. Some of these were unconnected with any
denominational church but were established solely to send missionaries to countries targeted for evangelization. Whereas some
of the larger nonclassical missions such as CIM or CMA were
Some independent
churches were quite
separatist and had almost
no contacts with other
Christians, Chinese or
foreign.
organized as tightly controlled operations, many of the new
groups in China showed an inherent distrust of any centralized
decision-making body. At the same time, there was a significant
increase in independent faith missionaries. These were individuals who were often not part of any organization at all but came
to China entirely on their own, leading a precarious existence
and sometimes leaving the field in disillusionment after a short
time, a pattern that was particularly evident among the early
Pentecostal missionaries.
In a time of extreme spiritual ferment among radical evangelicals at the turn of the twentieth century, when many premillennialist Christians believed that they were living in “the last days”
and the evangelization of the “heathen” took on great urgency,
the Pentecostal movement came into being. In these early days,
however, it was not perceived to be a radical departure from the
prevailing revivalist currents. As Allan Anderson has so aptly
put it, “Pentecostalism was in a process of formation that was not
seen as a distinct form of Christianity at least until a decade after
the revival and missionary movements in which it was entwined.
. . . [I]t is a movement or rather a series of movements that took
several years and several different formative ideas and events
to emerge. Pentecostalism then as now is a polynucleated and
variegated phenomenon.”22
Finally, it is important to note that the emergence of Pentecostal missionary enterprises was not confined to North America.
Evangelists from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia were among
the earliest Pentecostal workers in China.23 Some traveled directly
from Europe to the East; others had been recent immigrants in
North America. Some went as individuals; others came in groups.
6
Some of the men and women who joined the Pentecostals had
come to China with older faith missionary societies. Thus, several
members of the CMA, the CIM, and the South Chihli Mission
joined the early Pentecostal missionary movement. Given their
diverse backgrounds and religious convictions, the arrival of
these radical elements on the mission field was not conducive
to the creation of a united Protestant Church in China.
Chinese Independent Churches
The single most important factor in the continuing divisions
within Chinese Protestantism was the rapid growth after 1900
of independent Christian movements under Chinese control,
that is, only marginally connected to, or entirely separate from,
foreign missions and indigenous in ideas and leadership.24 Several
important individuals founded new churches in the early decades
of the twentieth century. Others were self-supporting evangelists
or pastors. The independent churches were a diverse sector,
made up of a combination of organized church groups (some
nationwide with hundreds of congregations) and of individual
congregations or even individual local Christian workers. Some
of these coexisted with and interacted with the mission churches;
others were quite separatist and had almost no contacts with
other Christians, Chinese or foreign. These movements involved
several major components.
Church federations. Various church federations were made up
of self-supporting and self-governing congregations that had
broken away or distanced themselves from foreign missionary
bodies. One of these, the Chinese Christian Independent Church,
had started as an independent, all-Chinese congregation, formed
in Shanghai in 1906 by the Presbyterian pastor Yu Guozhen
(1852–1932) and others. By the 1920s it had become a federation with over one hundred affiliated congregations. A smaller
North Chinese movement emerged in 1912 in Shandong. The
Tianjin congregation of this federation was led by Zhang Boliang
(1876–1951), the founder of Nankai University. Cheng Jingyi
(mentioned above), who subsequently held important offices
in the mainstream Sino-foreign Protestant establishment, was
briefly the leader of the independent church movement in Beijing.
The True Jesus Church. A Pentecostal church founded in 1917, the
True Jesus Church may have been the largest of the independent
groups nationwide by the 1930s. Wei Enbo (later Baoluo [Paul]
Wei; d. 1919) was instrumental in founding what became and
remains today the largest and most dynamic Chinese Pentecostal
church in the world, the True Jesus Church (Zhen Yesu jiaohui).
Wei had been a member of a mission church in Beijing, where in
1916 he encountered the relatively new Pentecostal ideas of the
baptism of the Holy Spirit and supernatural spiritual gifts. In
early 1917 he claimed to have had a dramatic vision and personal
encounter with God. In this vision, after which he changed his
name from Enbo to Baoluo (Paul), he heard God command him
to correct and reform the entire Christian movement in China.
Within two years Wei helped bring into being an aggressively
proselytizing, millenarian, and often antiforeign Pentecostal
movement that included a sprinkling of Adventist ideas. This
indigenous movement spread rapidly from northern China
throughout the rest of the country to become the largest independent Chinese church before 1949.
The Assembly Hall (Juhuichu or Juhuisuo) or Local Church (Difang
jiaohui). More commonly called Little Flock (Xiaoqun), this moveInternational Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
ment was organized in the mid-1920s by Ni Tuosheng (Watchman
Nee, 1903–72). It was a strongly proselytizing church and rather
antiforeign. After the True Jesus Church, this was probably the
second largest independent Protestant group in China before
1949. In the 1920s Nee was influenced by Plymouth Brethren
teachings, especially dispensationalist premillennialism, and
by a strong focus on the Holy Spirit derived from the Holiness
tradition.
The Jesus Family (Yesu jiating). A Pentecostal communitarian
church, the Jesus Family was started by Jing Dianying (1890–
1957) in rural Shandong Province in the 1920s. Jing, a native of
the province, absorbed a great variety of religious influences
before 1920, including education at a secondary school run by
Methodist missionaries, elements of Chinese popular religion,
Major Protestant Church and Mission Groups
in China, 1934
Church and Mission Groups
Communicants
Church of Christ in China
China Inland Mission
Southern Baptist Churches
Methodist Episcopal Church
Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui
Lutheran Church of China
Methodist Church
Seventh-day Adventists
North China Kung Li Hui Methodist Episcopal Church, South
American (Northern) Baptists
Basel Mission TOTAL
Missionaries
123,043
85,345
41,450
41,272
34,612
21,853
21,203
14,546
14,258
12,991
12,595
7,501
430,669
1,151
1,356
203
234
569
256
124
215
85
89
143
53
4,478
Source: 1936 Handbook of the Christian Movement in China, p. vi.
and exposure to Pentecostal ideas and practices from a nearby
American Assemblies of God mission. The result was his creation
of a Pentecostal rural commune in the late 1920s. Dozens of
other Jesus Family communities were established in later years,
especially in Shandong but also more widely in North and Central China, all in rural or semirural areas. The believers in these
communities lived and worked together, holding property in
common, under the direction of the “family head” (jiazhang).25
Other independent movements. Several other independent but more
loosely organized groups arose, such as the Spiritual Gifts Church
(Ling’en hui), which emerged as a revival movement in Shandong
in the 1930s. In addition, individual evangelists and teachers such
as Wang Mingdao (1900–1991) and the radical revivalist preacher
Song Shangjie (John Sung, 1901–44) contributed further to the
growing indigenous diversity.26
It is indeed ironic that these indigenous churches and independent preachers, opposed to foreign denominationalism,
insisted on maintaining their own separate identities. Some
Chinese Christian commentators found the intensely competitive
nature of Chinese Protestantism highly divisive. Z. K. Zia (Xie
Songgao), for example, mused whether the numerous indigenous
evangelistic campaigns in the 1930s were having a harmful effect
on Christian unity in China. Hinting at the danger of a degraded
form of Christianity gradually taking shape on Chinese soil,
he noted that the approaches of John Sung and the Little Flock
were splitting local Christian communities.27 Indeed, Watchman
Nee—who decried the evils of divisive denominationalism—was
January 2012
regarded as a “sheep-stealer” who denounced other indigenous
movements as likely the work of the “prince of darkness.”28 In
this light, it is perhaps not surprising to find J. Usang Ly (Li
Zhaokuan; a.k.a. Li Yaosheng, b. 1888) arguing that the prevailing trend of building an indigenous church was undermining
the catholicity of Christianity.29
The refusal to cooperate with others is also exemplified
by the True Jesus Church (TJC). When the China Continuation
Committee called the National Christian Conference in 1922 to
promote cooperation among denominational missions and indigenization of Christianity in China, it also invited the TJC to send
delegates to Shanghai. The TJC leaders, on their part, saw in the
conference “an exceptional opportunity to spread the [teachings
of their Universal] Correction Church” and sent three delegates.30
At the conference, these delegates proved rather uncooperative,
accusing the numerous foreign churches in China of “hanging
up a sheep’s head but selling dog’s meat” and of “being used
by the imperialists as the vanguard of their invasion.”31 This
radicalism embarrassed the Chinese church leaders who had
helped organize the conference, including Cheng Jingyi, who
was chairing it. While the spirit of antiforeignism and the rise
of Chinese nationalism precluded meaningful cooperation with
the foreign mission churches, the TJC, the Jesus Family, and the
Assembly Hall did not attempt to establish a genuine united
indigenous church, but formed competing movements that went
their separate ways.
Conclusion
The efforts of most liberal Protestant missionaries and Chinese
leaders notwithstanding, at the end of the missionary era, true
church union remained as elusive as ever. Although the Church
of Christ in China—in its attempt to create an identity as an
indigenous Chinese church—represented a substantial proportion of the total communicants, it could not overcome the significant divisions even among the mainline denominations, as the
accompanying table indicates. It is also clear that missionaries
of mainline bodies continued to play a significant role, not only
in the Church of Christ in China but also in the denominational
church unions.
Besides the major groups listed in the table, there were many
smaller bodies (none with more than 5,000 communicant members), some of which worked unobtrusively in China and left
hardly any written record of their activities. Although cooperation among the major denominational missions increased during
the Anti-Japanese War in Free China, especially with regard to
relief operations, we can only speculate whether the mainline
mission-supported churches would have progressed toward
greater indigenization and unity had it not been for the victory
of the Chinese Communists in 1949. In any case, the influx of
new, more radical missionary groups during the early decades
of the twentieth century undermined the drive toward unity. At
the same time, radical patriotic Chinese Christians and various
emerging indigenous churches, especially those with Pentecostal
tendencies and those promising exclusive salvation, also failed to
initiate moves in this direction and went their separate ways. In
other words, when foreign missionary operations ended in China
in the middle of the twentieth century, the Protestant movement
was far more divided than it had been at the beginning of that
century. Indeed, in spite of the best efforts of the authorities in the
People’s Republic of China to create one unified postdenominational faith, deep divisions persist to this day within indigenous
Protestant Christianity.
7
Notes
1. For extensive quotations from this famous speech by Cheng, see
Charles Boynton’s obituary notice, “Dr. Cheng Ching-Yi,” Chinese
Recorder 70 (1939): 689–98.
2. Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China,
Held at Shanghai, May 10–24, 1877 (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission
Press, 1878; reprint, Taibei: Ch’eng Wen, 1973); Records of the General
Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China, Held at Shanghai, May
7–20, 1890 (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890).
3. On the SVM in China, see Clifton J. Phillips, “The Student Volunteer
Movement and Its Role in American China Missions, 1886–1920,” in
The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John King Fairbank
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 91–109.
4. 1936 Handbook of the Christian Movement in China Under Protestant
Auspices, comp. Charles Luther Boynton and Charles Dozier Boynton
(Shanghai: Published for the National Christian Council of China
by the Kwang Hsueh Publishing House, 1936), p. 141.
5. Records, China Centenary Missionary Conference, Held at Shanghai,
April 25 to May 8, 1907 (Shanghai: Centenary Conference Committee,
1907; New York: American Tract Society, n.d.). See also Donald
MacGillivray, A Century of Protestant Missions in China (1807–1907),
Being the Centenary Conference Historical Volume (Shanghai: printed
at the American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1907; repr., [Boston]:
Elibron Classics, 2006).
6. David Cheung (Chen Yiqiang), Christianity in Modern China: The
Making of the First Native Protestant Church (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
7. See G. Thompson Brown, Earthen Vessels and Transcendent Power:
American Presbyterians in China, 1837–1952 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1997), pp. 211–12.
8. China Mission Year Book, vol. 11 (Shanghai: Christian Literature
Society for China, 1923), pp. 329–31. It should be noted that the
Southern Baptists and, a few years later, the China Inland Mission
chose not to be affiliated with the NCC.
9. See James A. Patterson, “The Loss of a Protestant Missionary
Consensus: Foreign Missions and the Fundamentalist-Modernist
Conflict,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions,
1880–1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert Shenk (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 73–91; and William R. Hutchison, Errand to the
World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 4.
10. Wallace C. Merwin, Adventure in Unity: The Church of Christ in China
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 69.
11. For a fairly complete listing of Protestant missionary groups in China,
see R. G. Tiedemann, Reference Guide to Christian Missionary Societies
in China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2009), part IV: “Protestant
Missionary Societies.”
12. On faith missions, see Dana L. Robert, “‘The Crisis of Missions’:
Premillennial Mission Theory and the Origins of Independent
Evangelical Missions,” in Earthen Vessels, ed. Carpenter and Shenk,
pp. 29–46. For the arrival of some of these new groups on the China
missions scene, see Daniel H. Bays, “Christian Revival in China,
1900–1937,” in Modern Christian Revivals, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer and
Randall Balmer (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 168–69.
13. Michael Nai Chiu Poon, preface to “CSCA Chung Hua Sheng Kung
Hui Source Documents,” www.ttc.edu.sg/csca/skh/index.html.
14. For a study of Lutheran missions in China in the late 1940s, see Jonas
Jonson, Lutheran Missions in a Time of Revolution: The China Experience,
1944–1951 (Uppsala: Svenska Institutet för Missionsforskning, 1972).
15. On the principle and growth of faith missions, see Klaus Fiedler, The
Story of Faith Missions (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1994).
16. On Franson and his contribution to the missionary enterprise in
China, see Edvard P. Torjesen, Fredrik Franson: A Model for Worldwide
Evangelism (Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1983). For a
history of the German faith missions to China, see Andreas Franz,
Mission ohne Grenzen. Hudson Taylor und die deutschsprachigen
Glaubensmissionen (Giessen and Basel: Brunnen Verlag, 1993).
17. For details, see Tiedemann, Reference Guide to Christian Missionary
Societies in China.
18. See Kevin Xiyi Yao, The Fundamentalist Movement Among Protestant
Missionaries in China, 1920–1937 (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 2003), pp. 216–19, 281–83.
19. Ibid., p. 222.
20. Following the merger of the majority of Canadian Presbyterians with
the Methodist Church of Canada and the Congregational Union to
form the United Church of Canada in 1925, the term “Continuing
Presbyterians” was used by those who did not participate in this
merger.
21. Edgar E. Strother, The National Christian Council of China: A Bolshevik
Aid Society (Shanghai: E. E. Strother, [1927?]). This brief publication
reprints correspondence from the North China Daily News and the
Shanghai Times.
22. Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early
Pentecostalism (London: SCM Press, 2007), p. 4.
23. Thomas Ball Barratt (1862–1940), the primary revivalist leader in
Norway, was instrumental in spreading the Pentecostal message
to other parts of Europe, influencing Alexander Boddy in England,
Lewi Pethrus in Sweden, and Jonathan Paul in Germany.
24. For a detailed study, see Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Shaping of
Popular Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 2010).
25. For a comprehensive study, see Tao Feiya, Zhongguo de Jidujiao
wutuobang: Yesu jiating (1921–1952) (A Christian utopia in China:
The Jesus Family), (Xianggang: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2004).
26. For further details, see Daniel H. Bays, “The Growth of Independent
Christianity in China, 1900–1937,” in Christianity in China: From the
Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Bays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 307–16.
27. Z. S. Zia, “Indigenous Evangelism and Christian Unity,” Chinese
Recorder 67 (July 1936): 408–12.
28. Noted in Lian, Redeemed by Fire, p. 171.
29. J. Usang Ly, “Do Chinese Christians Need a Special Fellowship?”
Chinese Recorder 67 (July 1936): 412.
30. Quoted in Lian, Redeemed by Fire, p. 57.
31. Wei Yisa, Zhen Yesu jiaohui chuangli shanshi zhounian jinian zhuankan
(Commemorative volume on the thirtieth anniversary of the
founding of the True Jesus Church), (Nanjing: Zhen Yesu Jiaohui,
1948), pp. C22, C27, quoted in Lian, Redeemed by Fire, p. 58.
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International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
978-0-8308-3943-8, $22.00
TREASURE IN
NORTH AFRICA
“The study of early Christianity in North Africa has
been largely confined to the regions around Carthage
and Alexandria, but what lies between, Tripolitania
and Cyrenaica, has been virtually ignored. In Early
Libyan Christianity Thomas Oden uses literary and
archaeological evidence to fill that gap. This is truly a
groundbreaking work.”
—Birger A. Pearson, University of California, Santa Barbara
IBMR ad Early Libyan #8000 1
11/8/11 12:36:38 PM
Botany or Flowers? The Challenges of Writing the History of the
Indigenization of Christianity in China
Gloria S. Tseng
T
he impressive growth of Christianity in a rapidly modernizing China in the post-Mao decades has attracted
much recent media attention.1 A look at the development of the
Chinese church in the past century of China’s tumultuous history
reveals an even more extraordinary record.2 Yet the remarkable
story of Christianity in China has been burdened by emotional
baggage stemming from deep historical roots. An element of this
baggage is the unfortunate association of Christianity with Western military power in the minds of many Chinese in the past one
and a half centuries because the door to missionary activity was
opened in the nineteenth century by various “unequal treaties”
following the Opium War of 1839–42. Another is the current state
of the Chinese church, divided between government-sanctioned
Three-Self churches and “house churches,” which are subject to
government suppression. Both elements are important to the history of Christianity in modern China, but this essay will address
only the latter. More specifically, this essay will address the challenges of writing an integrated history of the indigenization of
Christianity in twentieth-century China given the current state of
scholarship on the subject, and with a view to the divided state
of the contemporary Chinese church.
The history of the indigenization of Christianity in China
in the twentieth century has three currents: (1) the ecclesiastical
development of the Church of Christ in China, which was the
culmination of the church-union movement in China in the first
decades of the twentieth century; (2) the emergence of Chinese
Christian intellectuals associated with missionary colleges and
universities, the best known of which was Yenching University;
and (3) the emergence of independent preachers and their mass
followings outside denominational missions. The first and the
second developments shared a similar set of historical actors:
representative figures such as Cheng Jingyi, T. C. Chao (Zhao
Zichen), Liu Tingfang, Wu Leichuan, and Y. T. Wu (Wu Yaozong).
The third development involved historical actors such as John
Sung (Song Shangjie), Wang Mingdao, and Watchman Nee. The
rise of these preachers took place somewhat later than the first
two developments. Cheng Jingyi was one of the three Chinese
delegates to attend the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh
in 1910, and in 1919 Chinese intellectuals at Yenching University
formed the Peking Apologetic Group, later renamed Life Fellowship. Momentum for church union in China led to the formation
of the National Christian Council of China in 1922. Hence, the
individuals associated with the first two developments were
already in positions of leadership and considered the spokesmen
of the emerging indigenous Chinese church by the time Wang,
Sung, and Nee entered the national scene. Wang began a congregation of his own in Beijing in 1925; Sung began preaching in
Gloria S. Tseng is Associate Professor in the History
Department of Hope College, Holland, Michigan. She
teaches courses on modern Europe, modern China, and
Christianity in China.
—[email protected]
10
his native Fujian Province in 1928 and first became known as a
national revivalist in 1931; and Nee began to attract a small circle
of followers in Nanjing in 1927, which developed into the Little
Flock movement. This story is further complicated by the fact
that a theological fault line ran between the third development
and the first two. It became pronounced from the mid-1920s
on and even shaped the responses of Chinese Christians to the
Communist regime’s policies after 1949.
The ecclesiastical, intellectual, and independent-preacher
subplots of the indigenization story are told separately, often
with conflicting assessments of the historical significance of
the first two on the one hand, and the third on the other. This
state of affairs brings to mind a sermon in 1931 by A. W. Tozer
entitled “The Love of God.”3 In this sermon Tozer gave a word
of caution to his hearers concerning the subject on which he was
preaching: that in analyzing the various aspects of God’s love, one
risks becoming a botanist who takes apart the petals of a flower,
with the outcome of this endeavor being botany and no longer a
flower! While the conflicting currents and historical assessments
may seem to be of merely academic interest with regard to the
pre-1949 period, they take on greater immediacy with regard to
the post-1949 period, for the painful divisions in the contemporary Chinese church can be traced back to the pre-1949 period.
The history of the indigenization of the Chinese church is the
spiritual heritage of Chinese Christians; yet without a balanced
assessment and honest acknowledgment of this history, Chinese
Christians cannot fully lay hold of this heritage. This essay will
examine four representative studies as they pertain to one of the
three currents of indigenization. The list is by no means exhaustive; rather, it is only an illustration of the dichotomy that exists
in historical assessments of these currents of indigenization.
Edinburgh 1910 and Cheng Jingyi
Of the three currents of indigenization, the ecclesiastical is the least
well studied in terms of depth, though not necessarily in terms
of the number of volumes. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that
within the missionary establishment and among Chinese Christian
circles associated with it, the movement toward indigenization
received significant encouragement and impetus from the 1910
World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh, Scotland. In
his recent study on the conference, Brian Stanley mentions the
contribution of Cheng Jingyi, one of only three Chinese delegates
out of 1,215 official delegates to the conference.4 At the time of the
conference, Cheng was a twenty-eight-year-old assistant pastor
of a newly established church of the London Missionary Society
(LMS) in Beijing. He was also a fairly new Christian, having been
converted at the age of seventeen at a revival meeting in Tianjin.
He had already been to Great Britain, having been invited there
in 1903 to assist an LMS missionary in revising the Union version
of the Mandarin New Testament; he had also studied at the Bible
Training Institute in Glasgow from 1906 to 1908.
This current of indigenization was located within the Protestant missionary enterprise in China, even though its initiative did
not originate solely from missionaries. In fact, Stanley observes
that Cheng “made a profound and even disturbing impact” at
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
the conference through the two speeches he gave: one on the
morning of Thursday, June 16, in the debate of the report of
Commission II; the other on the morning of Tuesday, June 21, in
the debate of the report of Commission VIII. Both commission
reports—“The Church in the Mission Field” (II) and “Cooperation
and the Promotion of Unity” (VIII)—addressed issues that were
pertinent to the Chinese church. In his speeches, Cheng urged
that the Chinese church be allowed to support itself and direct its
own life, and that a united Protestant church be formed in China.5
Cheng’s participation in the 1910 World Missionary Conference propelled him into a position of leadership in the Protestant
missionary enterprise in China and gave him a place in subsequent
international missionary conferences. The respect to him given by
the conference leaders can be seen in the fact that he was among
those recommended by the business committee for membership in
the Continuation Committee to carry on the spirit of cooperation
in missions; he was chosen as the one representative from China
among the thirty-five members.6 Subsequently, the Continuation
Committee evolved into the International Missionary Council in
1921, in which Cheng remained involved until the end of his life.
Upon his return to China, he was ordained to be the pastor of
Mi-shi Hutong church, where he had served as an assistant pastor.
In addition, following steps to establish a national branch of the
Continuation Committee in 1912–13, Cheng was appointed the
first joint secretary of the China Continuation Committee. The
six conferences of the China Continuation Committee held in
China in early 1913 stressed three-self principles as the goal and
promoted the idea of federation as a first step toward full union.
In Shanghai in 1922 he presided over the inaugural conference
of the National Christian Council of China, which was the successor to the China Continuation Committee. And from 1924 to
1933 he served as the general secretary of the National Christian
Council of China. In 1927 he presided over the formation of the
Church of Christ in China, which united sixteen Presbyterian,
Congregational, and Baptist church bodies; Cheng was appointed
its first moderator (later general secretary), serving till his death
in 1939. The impetus given by the Edinburgh conference to the
indigenization of the Chinese church is reiterated by Stanley: “The
vision of a single three-self nondenominational church, which
the Communists forcibly imposed on the Chinese Protestant
churches after 1951, thus saw a partial realization over twenty
years earlier, a fact which is often forgotten. The Edinburgh conference had played an important part by giving Cheng Jingyi and
other Chinese spokesmen the platform for the initial articulation
of that vision.”7
Wallace Merwin on Chinese Church Union
The ecclesiastical development of the Church of Christ in China
probably deserves more scholarly attention than it has received
to date. The developments of the church union movement in
China in the early decades of the twentieth century are chronicled
in the yearly Zhonghua Jidu jiaohui nianjian (China Church Yearbook), published by the China Continuation Committee and
the National Christian Council of China from 1914 to 1936. As
of yet there is no study based on this valuable primary source.
Even Wallace Merwin’s Adventure in Unity: The Church of Christ
in China (1974), the only English-language work on the Church
of Christ in China, uses only English-language sources. In Merwin’s estimation, the church union movement represented by
the Church of Christ in China was “of considerable significance
and a worthy chapter in the history of the Christian church.”
His assessment of this current in the indigenization of the
January 2012
Protestant church in China is unequivocally positive: “Finally, a
word of tribute should be voiced for all those servants of the
Church, Chinese and missionary, who had a share in the movement for unity which culminated in the Church of Christ in
China, and the many who quietly and devotedly participated,
often under great difficulty, in danger and deprivation, in the
work and witness of that Church. Many of them are already gone
from our midst; most of their names have already disappeared
from man’s notice. But they are known to God, and their labors
have surely borne good fruit.”8
Samuel Ling on Chinese Christian Intellectuals
This sanguine assessment of the Church of Christ in China and
the indigenization movement it represented is called in question by at least two studies, each a representative work on one
of the other two currents of indigenization, namely, the Chinese
Christian intellectuals and the independent preachers; they are
Samuel Ling’s “The Other May Fourth Movement” and Lian
Xi’s Redeemed by Fire. Both studies have an indirect bearing on
assessing the historical significance of the Church of Christ in
China, and they illustrate the bifurcated state of historical studies
on the indigenization of Christianity in China, which is in turn
mirrored in the divided state of the contemporary Chinese church.
“The Other May Fourth Movement” is a study of Chinese
Christian intellectuals of the May Fourth generation,9 men who
had been converted to the Christian faith as a result of having
The painful divisions in
the contemporary Chinese
church can be traced back
to the pre-1949 period.
been exposed to the liberal wing of the Protestant missionary
enterprise in China and who went on to take their place as
leaders of the liberal wing of the Chinese Protestant church and
in the movement leading up to the formation of the Church of
Christ in China.10 In this work Ling argues that Christianity has
an important place in the intellectual history of the May Fourth
movement, even though the impact of Christianity has been
obscured by the Communist victory of 1949. Ling focuses on
Chinese Christian intellectuals of the liberal persuasion, because
Chinese Christian fundamentalists such as Wang Mingdao and
Watchman Nee were not active in the May Fourth circles.
Ling points out that liberal Protestant Christianity, in contrast with conservative, fundamentalist Protestantism, had certain
distinctive theological presuppositions: the educability of man,
the immanence of God, emphasis on the humanity of Christ,
and the hope of the coming kingdom through social reform.
It also found expression in China through institutions such as
the Christian colleges and schools, as well as the Y.M.C.A. and
Y.W.C.A. These missionary organizations constituted the theological and institutional contexts in which the members of the
Life Fellowship operated. Ling names two central concerns of
the project of these Chinese Christian intellectuals, who sought
to find a viable alternative for China’s social problems: “These
two concerns can be summarized by the terms ‘indigenization’
and ‘social reconstruction.’ The former is a concern specific to
Christians; the latter is shared by almost all Chinese intellectu11
als at the time. ‘Indigenization,’ understood as the sinicization
of both the organization and the theology of the church, can be
seen as the Christian parallel of nationalism in China. ‘Social
reconstruction’ represents the desire to solve China’s social
problems; it is here especially that the ‘contest of ideas’ took
place. The important point, however, is that Chinese Christians
shared the concerns of their contemporary nationals. Their fate
was the fate of the Chinese people; they identified themselves
first with the Chinese people, and second with their religion.”
In other words, the Chinese Christian intellectuals’ engagement
with the political concerns of their age significantly shaped the
indigenization they represented. In the end, Ling offers the following less-than-sanguine assessment of these Christian intellectuals’ project: “After 1927, their appeals for Christian social
reconstruction became increasingly hollow and obsolete. Some
turned disillusioned, and became radical. In both their intellectual
outlook in 1919, and the onslaught of their critics in 1922, the
Christian Renaissance typified the failure of liberal Protestantism
to infiltrate the Chinese society and to capture leadership in the
intellectual arena.”11
Lian Xi on Chinese Independent Preachers
In contrast, Lian’s Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China examines various indigenous, or populist,
manifestations of the faith, as opposed to developments within
denominational or missionary churches or among Westerneducated Chinese Christians associated with denominational
or missionary churches. Regarding contemporary indigenous
Chinese Christianity, Lian observes, “With a predominantly rural
and lower-class membership, the homegrown Christianity has
been characterized by a potent mix of evangelistic fervor, biblical literalism, charismatic ecstasies, and a fiery eschatology not
infrequently tinged with nationalistic exuberance.” He traces
these characteristics through his study of the various indigenous
Christian groups examined in the book. He also notes the dramatic
change of Christianity’s relationship with the rural masses: “It is
not an insignificant change in the fortunes of Chinese Christian-
The history of the
indigenization of
Christianity in China
is not only fragmented
but also contentious.
ity over the past century that, in many areas of the country, the
rural masses have completed a journey from church demolishers
to church builders and defenders.” Lian defines “popular Christianity” as follows: “For the Republican period, I find it mostly
outside denominational missions, even though its influence also
spread among them. After 1949, it retained its antiestablishment
predilection and throve in opposition to the Three-Self churches,
although the latter were not impervious to its irrepressible energy.
During both periods, it captured the religious fervor and creativity of the masses that were excluded, for the most part, from the
pursuits of the elite in Chinese society.”12
Lian argues that the two main elements of popular Chinese
Christianity and their historical roots are nationalism and messianic convictions. He describes popular Chinese Christianity
12
as “ostensibly Christian in theology but no less traditionally
Chinese in temperament,” because “popular millenarianism
came to define the indigenous, largely sectarian, Christianity in
the twentieth century.” Lian sees the growth of popular Christianity as the latest development in the line of popular millennial
movements in Chinese history:
In fact, the emergence of homegrown churches since the Republican era points to an evolution of popular religion in modern
China, when Christianity joined indigenous beliefs in supplying
the core ideology in sectarian movements. Like most messianic
convulsions in Chinese history, the drive toward a fiery, apocalyptic Christianity in modern China was largely induced by
political, national, and environmental crises, and by momentous
social change along with overwhelming personal distress; it has
also brought forth a religious response on a matching chiliastic
scale. . . . It has, in sum, fostered a new form of messianism in a
country where millenarian movements have been one of the few
possible ways to channel the aspirations and the discontent of
the masses.13
Whereas Ling presents the subject of his study in opposition to the conservative wing of Protestantism, Lian presents
the subject of his study in opposition to the liberal wing of Protestantism—more specifically to the version of indigenization
represented by the Church of Christ in China and its leaders.
Both, however, come to a very similar historical assessment. Lian
sees the student-led anti-Christian movement that broke out
across China in 1922 as evidence that early twentieth-century
missionary efforts at indigenizing Christianity had failed, for
Chinese students had rejected the message of the YMCA and the
Mott-Eddy campaigns, which equated national salvation with
the development of Christian character. Concerning these efforts
to indigenize Christianity in China, Lian notes, “At best, Cheng
Jingyi and his generation of Protestant leaders cultivated by the
missionaries succeeded only in fulfilling the missionary vision
of a native church safely within the limits of mainline Western
Protestantism.” In short, Chinese Christian leaders who rose
through the Protestant missionary enterprise preached “a missionary Christianity.”14 This is essentially the same conclusion
mas Ling’s assessment that Chinese Christian intellectuals associated with the Protestant missionary establishment failed to
persuade their countrymen of the relevance of the social gospel
for China.
The Need for an Integrated History
As the studies discussed above show, the history of the indigenization of Christianity in China is not only fragmented but
also contentious. Which one of the three currents represented
the genuine emerging indigenous Chinese church? Implicitly
or explicitly, this question runs through the works of Merwin,
Ling, Lian, and, to a lesser extent, Stanley, even as each work
demonstrates the unique contributions of each of the three
currents of indigenization. All three agree on the importance
of developments in the pre-1949 period, and two of the three
studies specifically point to a theological fault line that divided
the ecclesiastical and intellectual currents on the one hand from
the independent preachers on the other: that is, the modernistfundamentalist controversy.
The roots of the divided state of both historical scholarship on
the indigenization of Christianity in China and the contemporary
Chinese church are theological and historical. The modernistfundamentalist controversy had a far-reaching impact on the
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
indigenizing Chinese church. It was highly divisive within both
missionary and Chinese Christian circles, as Kevin Xiyi Yao’s
2003 study on the fundamentalist movement among China
missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s carefully documents and as
the discourse of fundamentalist Chinese Christian leaders of
the time illustrates.15 It shaped the initial responses of Chinese
Christians to the Chinese government’s religious policy in the
first decade of the Communist regime’s existence, evidenced
most notably in the fact that the leader of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in the 1950s was the modernist Y. T. Wu, and
the most vociferous opponent to this movement on theological
grounds was the fundamentalist Wang Mingdao.16 Moreover,
it has shaped to some extent the ways in which historians deal
with this history and the three currents that are found in it, as
the studies discussed above show.
In addition to the theological fault line, the historical circumstances of the post-1949 Three-Self Patriotic Movement added
political oil to the theological fire. Today, even though most Chinese Christians have a very limited knowledge of the historical
roots of the current state of the Chinese church, historical wounds
Notes
1. “New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China,” NPR, July
19–23, 2010. Two of the five reports in the series were devoted to
Christianity: “In the Land of Mao, a Rising Tide of Christianity,”
July 19; and “China’s Divided Catholics Seek Reconciliation,” July
20. Also Heart and Soul, “Christianity in China,” two episodes, BBC
World Service, first aired on August 25 and September 1, 2010.
2. Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity,
1910–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2009), p. 140, report
that between 1910 and 2010, the number of Christians in China grew
from 0.4 percent to 8.6 percent, or from approximately 1.7 million to
115 million.
3. Tozer was a longtime pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance
and editor of Alliance Life. The Web site of the C&MA contains audio
files of Tozer’s sermons, at www.cmalliance.org/resources/tozer
-audio-sermons.
4. Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 91–92.
5. Ibid., pp. 108–9.
6. Ibid., pp. 109–10.
7. Ibid., p. 311.
8. Wallace C. Merwin, Adventure in Unity: The Church of Christ in China
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 11.
9. The May Fourth alluded to in Ling’s title is May 4, 1919, when several
thousand students in Beijing protested against the decision taken
by the Allied powers at the Versailles Peace Conference to transfer
German rights in Shandong province to Japan. This outburst of
continue to cause a painful rift between Three-Self and house
churches after the reopening of churches in 1979, especially for
long-time Chinese Christians who have suffered through the years
of Communist repression and are now elderly. Ironically, a visitor
who walks into a Three-Self church and a house church today
will likely find that the two are not very different theologically.
In fact, modernist theology has all but disappeared, except at the
highest level of national leadership.17 This in itself is an interesting
historical development worthy of a separate study, but more
important, the fragmented state of current scholarship on the
history of the indigenization of Christianity in China mirrors
the divided state of the contemporary Chinese Church. Just as
an integrated history that brings together the three currents of
indigenization is essential to an accurate understanding of this
significant historical development, so acknowledging the theological and political roots of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement
as it developed after 1949 is key to a mature Chinese church, in
which Chinese Christians fully lay hold of their unique spiritual
heritage.
Chinese nationalism, in addition to laying the foundation for the
later rise of the Chinese Communist Party, came to be synonymous
with the intellectual effervescence of the 1910s and 1920s.
10. Samuel D. Ling, “The Other May Fourth Movement: The Chinese
‘Christian Renaissance,’ 1919–1937” (Ph.D. diss., Temple Univ., 1980).
11. Ibid., pp. 5–6, 10, 81.
12. Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern
China (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 2, 3, 12.
13. Ibid., pp. 14, 16.
14. Ibid., pp. 40­–41.
15. Kevin Xiyi Yao, The Fundamentalist Movement Among Protestant
Missionaries in China, 1920–1937 (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America,
2003). Wang Mingdao and John Sung were both well known for their
denunciations of modernist theology.
16. For Wu, see Gao Wangzhi, “Y. T. Wu: A Christian Leader Under
Communism,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century
to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1996). For Wang, see Thomas Alan Harvey, Acquainted with
Grief: Wang Mingdao’s Stand for the Persecuted Church in China (Grand
Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002).
17. Its foremost spokesman is K. H. Ting, former Anglican bishop,
currently principal of Nanjing Union Theological Seminary. He was
the president of the China Christian Council and the leader of the
Three-Self Patriotic Movement from 1980 to 1997. Modernist theology
can also be found among “cultural Christians” in academia, but they
are not pertinent to the issues raised in this essay.
International Association for Mission Studies 13th Assembly
The IAMS 2012 Toronto Assembly, to be held August 15–20,
2012, in Toronto, Canada, will explore the profound missiological dimensions of human migration and dislocation,
past, present, and future. It will attend especially to the many
repercussions of widespread contemporary human movement
for the theory and practice of Christian mission.
The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, reflecting the lives
of God’s people who were uprooted, exiled, and scattered,
feature epic experiences of human mobility such as the call
to a new land, exodus and resettlement, and the scattering of
the early Christians. Dislocation, compelled and voluntary,
continues to characterize our contemporary human story
January 2012
as people cross state boundaries or move within their own
countries in search of safety or well-being. Christian mission, often a feature of large-scale movements of peoples,
must continue to attend responsibly to these historic global
realities.
Proposals for papers on the topic, “Migration, Human
Dislocation, and the Good News: Margins as the Center in
Christian Mission,” with 150–200-word abstract, are due by
January 31, 2012. Draft papers are due by June 1, 2012. For
guidelines and conference details, read the IAMS Matters
newsletter at www.missionstudies.org/index.php or e-mail
[email protected].
13
Cheng Jingyi: Prophet of His Time
Peter Tze Ming Ng
C
heng Jingyi (C. Y. Cheng, 1881–1939) distinguished him- missionary movement was dominated by organized missionary
self by presenting what has been called the best speech at societies, most of them agencies of Western mainline denomithe Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference. In his remarks national churches. (The China Inland Mission was the primary
he said: “As a representative of the Chinese Church, I speak entirely exception.) After 1900, however, there was a great increase in the
from the Chinese standpoint. . . . Speaking plainly we hope to amount of local, independent missionary work done by Chinese
see, in the near future, a united Christian Church without any Christians. Much attention has been paid to the development of
denominational distinctions. This may seem somewhat peculiar denominational Christianity in China, but only in more recent
to you, but, friends, do not forget to view
years have scholars begun to look into the
us from our standpoint, and if you fail to
growth of Chinese indigenous Christiando that, the Chinese will remain always as
ity immediately after 1900.5 Daniel Bays,
for example, reports that “the number
a mysterious people to you.”1
Jingyi was a Chinese born in Beijing
of Protestant Christian church members
on September 22, 1881. His father was a
grew rapidly, from 37,000 in 1889 to 178,000
pastor with the London Missionary Sociin 1906.” He also notes, “In retrospect, the
most important feature of this period was
ety (LMS). Jingyi received education from
the growth of the spirit of independence
LMS’s Anglo-Chinese College in Beijing
in Chinese Protestant churches. This had
and theological training from LMS’s theohardly begun in the nineteenth century,
logical school in Tientsin (Tianjin). Within
but it was a prominent theme after 1900.”6
two weeks of his graduation day in 1900,
Jingyi and his family became involved
Indigenous Movements from
in the terrible experiences of the Boxer
outbreak. “Six times he had very narrow
1900 to 1949
escapes from death. His family was shut
Chinese Christians exhibited a strong desire
up in the British Legation quarter in Peking
for independence after the outburst of the
for two months, where they suffered terBoxer incidents in 1900. Chinese Christians
rible hardships, costing the life of his little
had long been accused of believing in a
sister and permanent injury of his younger
foreign religion (yang jiao).7 They were
brothers.”2 These experiences had a great
Cheng Jingyi, 1910
impact on Jingyi’s life.
criticized for being protected by Western
He went to England in 1903 to help
missionaries and foreigners and for enjoyGeorge Owen of the LMS in the translation of the Union version ing a number of privileges as a result of religious court cases
of the Mandarin Bible. Then from 1906 to 1908 he studied at the (jiaoan) that arose as a result of the so-called unequal treaties
Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, Scotland. In the summer of made with Western governments.8 In order to avoid these accu1908 he returned to China and served as an assistant pastor at sations, a new consciousness arose among Chinese Christians
the Mi-shi Hutong Church in Beijing. He returned to Scotland that sought a form of Christianity freed from the dominance of
for the 1910 Edinburgh conference, then back to Beijing, where the foreign missionaries. Chinese Christians, including Cheng
he was ordained as pastor of this church, which was associated and others, were seeking a new identity for themselves. They
with LMS but was an independent Chinese church.3 Cheng wanted to demonstrate their independence, fostering a self-reliant
was thus working on the front lines of promoting indigenous Christianity that was freed from foreign funding, from foreign
Christianity in China. Some parts of China saw some “three- mission direction, and from foreign preaching and theology—that
self” movements initiated by missionaries in the mid-nineteenth is, the churches should be self-supporting, self-governing, and
century, including the development of the First and Second self-propagating.9
As early as 1902, two years after the Boxer incident, Pastor
Amoy Church in Xiamen, as well as the self-governing presbyteries under the English Presbyterian Mission in Swatow.4 Yu Guozhen and some Chinese Christians met in Shanghai and
The movement was led to a second stage with the indigenous formed the Chinese Christian Union (Zhonghua Jidutuhui). Realmovements started by local Chinese Christians in response to izing the utmost importance of developing three-self Christian
the Boxer movement.
churches, in 1903 they started a quarterly magazine, the Chinese
Throughout China in the nineteenth century, the Protestant Christian (Zhongguo Jidutubao),10 and in 1906 formed the Chinese Christian Independent Church (Zhonghua Yesujiao Zilihui),
Peter Tze Ming Ng was a professor in the Depart- an independent, all-Chinese Christian organization. It was
ment of Religion, the Chinese University of Hong clearly stated that this church was to be separate from all
Kong (CUHK), from 1985 to 2008. He now serves as foreign missionary societies in order to demonstrate to the
Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study Chinese people that they could run their own churches, hence
of Religion and Chinese Society, Chung Chi College, becoming truly native and fully self-governing, self-supporting,
CUHK.
—[email protected] and self-propagating. By 1924 more than 330 local churches had
joined the Chinese Christian Independent Church, with over
20,000 total members.11
14
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
In 1907 the Centenary Missionary Conference was held in
Shanghai, with the topic of the Chinese church high on its agenda.12
There had already been suggestions as to how to establish threeself, independent Chinese churches for indigenous Christianity
in China. They included proposals for uniting independent
churches and of organizing regional conferences in different
parts of China.13 In 1910 a movement was started in North China
involving a comparable federation of independent churches. It was
also called the Chinese Christian Independent Church, but with a
different Chinese name (Zhongguo Jidujiao Zilihui); Chang Po Ling
was appointed president.14 The federation centered in Beijing and
Tianjin and soon was joined by independent Chinese churches
from all over Shangdong and Shanxi Provinces, including Tsingdao (1911), Jinan (1912), and Yantai (1919). These movements of
the independent churches laid a substantial groundwork for a
series of regional conferences throughout China. The conferences
led to the first national conference of the China Continuation
Committee in Shanghai between the years 1912–13, and the later
development of the National Christian Council in China, which
was formed by Cheng Jingyi in Shanghai in 1922.15
Consider some interesting statistics. Between 1910 and 1920
the number of foreign missionaries grew from 5,144 to 6,204, an
increase of 20.6 percent, whereas the number of Christian believers more than doubled, from around 180,000 to 366,524. With
the anti-Christian movements attacking missionary work in the
1920s, the number of missionaries dropped to 4,375 by 1928. Yet
the number of Christian believers continued to rise: to 446,631
in 1928, then 536,089 in 1936, and then 834,909 in 1949.16 Western
missionaries had obviously done much good work and laid a
substantial foundation for the subsequent growth of Christianity
in China. But the dramatic growth in the number of Christians in
the twentieth century witnesses also to the significant effort made
by the various indigenous Christian groups and independent
Chinese churches, not to mention individual Chinese Christians,
for a Christianity that was truly self-propagating.17
The Quest for Indigenous Christianity
With this understanding of the development of indigenous
Chris-tianity in China as background, we now turn to what C.
Y. Cheng did at and after the Edinburgh conference in 1910. At
the conference he made two speeches; one was at the debate of
Commission II on the topic “The Church in the Mission Field,”
and the other, “Co-operation and the Promotion of Unity,” was
part of the debate of Commission VIII.18 In his first speech Cheng
declared with some urgency: “The problem in China is the independence of the Chinese Church.” He assured his audience that
the formation of a Christian church in China should be viewed
as “a joy, not a burden.” And he made a strong appeal for support of the development of indigenous churches in China,
saying: “I hope with all sincerity that this Conference will
recommend and take measures towards helping the Chinese
Church movement.”19
In his second speech, as quoted in the first paragraph of
this article, Cheng restated his hope of seeing a united Christian
church without any denominational distinctions whatsoever.
While Western missionaries were thinking of unity as a means
to the end of cooperation in mission, Cheng was saying that
Christian unity—a united Christian church—should be the end
of mission work in China. Cheng could see that for the missionaries, “unity” primarily applied to the denominations and various
mission boards. He made it clear that Chinese Christians were
January 2012
more concerned with the development of a united Christian
church in China that was freed from denominationalism. For
the Christian churches to cooperate and to unite in China, they
needed to put aside the spirit of denominationalism. As a matter
of fact, “denominationalism has never interested the Chinese
mind. He finds no delight in it, but sometimes he suffers for
it.”20 The statement “Your denominationalism does not interest Chinese Christians” has been often repeated and quoted.21
It is striking that Cheng could make such a statement at the
1910 conference.
As noted, some observers thought that Cheng’s speech
was the best speech of the conference. Afterward he returned to
China and continued to work for the development of a united
Chinese Christian church along the lines he had envisioned. With
the support of John R. Mott and the China Continuation Committee, Cheng traveled widely throughout China in 1912–13,
working to promote interdenominational cooperation among
denominational churches, as well as to foster coordination
among individual Chinese Christians. He helped independent churches attain the goals of the three-self movement and
promoted the idea of federation as a first step toward union
among the Chinese Christian churches.
When the China Continuation Committee met in 1913,
it was attended by 1,100 representatives, one-third of whom
were Chinese. Because of Cheng’s work among the independent churches, when the committee convened again in 1922,
the number of Chinese representatives had increased to more
than half of the total attendance. At the second meeting, Cheng
proposed broadening the work of the committee and renamed it
the National Christian Council (NCC, Zhongguo Jidujiao xiehui).22
Cheng was appointed its general secretary. He also worked for
the formation of the Church of Christ in China (CCC, Zhonghua
Jidujiao linhui), which began operating in 1927. The CCC soon
became the largest Protestant church in China, representing close
to a quarter of China’s Protestant churches, including members
from both denominational and independent churches. In short,
Cheng had successfully labored to expand the work of the China
Continuation Committee, not only for the promotion of cooperation and unity among denominational churches but also for
the realization of his vision to institute the three-self principles
and to accomplish the federation of Christian churches in China.
The federation was formed not only for the sake of cooperation
among the missionaries, but also for the sake of unity among the
Christian bodies in China, while at the same time maintaining
cooperative links with the missionaries.23
Conclusion
Cheng died on November 15, 1939, at the Lester Chinese Hospital in Shanghai at the age of fifty-eight.24 He indeed understood
accurately the situation in China and saw the need not only
for the pursuit of cooperation among missionary churches, but
also for the development of indigenous, three-self churches.
Despite his youth and his being a Manchu working among the
Han people, Cheng demonstrated great leadership in relation to
the foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians and in moving
them toward a unified Christian church.25 Cheng was indeed a
great man and a great prophet of his time.26 Much of what Cheng
said in Edinburgh and much of his subsequent work remained
of immediate relevance for decades. To this day, the issues he
perceived as important in 1910 are central to the development
of Christianity in China.
15
Notes
1. “Report of Commission VIII,” in Reports of Commissions I to VIII
and The History and Records of the Conference, 9 vols. (Edinburgh and
London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910), 8:196. The Boston
Missionary Herald judged it “without question the best speech”
(106 [1910]: 354); see Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference,
Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 108. The picture of
Cheng Jingyi on p. 14 is from U. W. Schreiber, ed., Die Edinburger WeltMissions-Konferenz (Basel: Verlag der Basler Missionsbuchhandlung,
1910), opposite p. 56.
2. C. L. Boynton et al., “Dr. Cheng Ching Yi: Resolution—Reminiscences,”
Chinese Recorder 70, no. 12 (1939): 691.
3. The Chinese church attained full independence, financially and in
every other way, while maintaining the most friendly relations with
the parent mission (ibid.).
4. See, for example, research work done by David Cheung (Chen Yi
Qiang), Christianity in Modern China: The Making of the First Native
Protestant Church (Leiden: Brill, 2004), and George A. Hood, Mission
Accomplished? The English Presbyterian Mission in Lingtung, South
China (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986).
5. See, for example, Daniel Bays, ed., Christianity in China: The Eighteenth
Century to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996);
Jessie Lutz and R. Ray Lutz, Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant
Christianity, 1850–1900, with the Autobiographies of Eight Hakka
Christians (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); and R. G. Tiedemann,
“Indigenous Agency, Religious Protectorates, and Chinese Interests:
The Expansion of Christianity in Nineteenth-Century China,”
in Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History,
1706–1914, ed. Dana L. Robert (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008),
pp. 206–41.
6. Bays, Christianity in China, p. 308.
7. “The Christian religion is the only one of the religions of foreign origin
for which the Chinese reserve the designation ‘foreign religion.’ The
foreign taste of Christianity is perhaps too strong for the Chinese
people to like it” (C. Y. Cheng, “The Development of an Indigenous
Church in China,” International Review of Missions 12 [1923]: 371).
8. Reports of jiaoan (religious cases) can be found in Paul A. Cohen, China
and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese
Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963),
and Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1987).
9. It should be noted that foreign missionaries had long been relying on
the “unequal treaties” as guarantee and protection for all missionary
activities in China. It was extremely difficult for missionaries to
understand the feelings of Chinese Christians, who demanded a
truly Chinese church independent of the foreign control. From the
missionaries’ perspective, the Chinese were simply trying to seize
power.
10. There was much discussion among Chinese Christians, and their
opinions were expressed in this magazine. The Shanghai Municipal
Archives contains a full set of the magazine (in Chinese), nos. 2–60,
from 1904 to 1915 (U128-0-1 to U128-0-11).
11. See Duan Qi, “The Development of Christianity and the Independence
Movement in the Early Twentieth Century” (in Chinese), in Duan
Qi, Historical Documents of the Indigenization of Chinese Christianity
(in Chinese) (Taiwan: Cosmic Light Publication, 2005), pp. 127–32.
12. Centenary Conference Committee, Records of the China Centenary
Missionary Conference (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1907).
13. Cheng had been so impressed by the movement that he wrote an
article for the Chinese Recorder even before he attended the Edinburgh
conference: “What Federation Can Accomplish for the Chinese
Church,” Chinese Recorder 41, no. 2 (1910): 156–60.
14. See Charles E. Ewing, “The Chinese Christian Church in Tientsin
(Tianjin),” Chinese Recorder 43, no. 5 (1912): 282–85. It should be noted
that before Cheng attended the Edinburgh conference in 1910, he had
been working for two years as assistant pastor at the Mi-shi Hutong
Church, in Beijing, where he would definitely have been involved in
and influenced by this independence movement. This background
helps explain his strong appeal at the Edinburgh conference.
16
15. See Wang Zhixin, Concise History of Chinese Christianity (in Chinese)
(Hong Kong: Chinese Christian Literature Council, 1959), pp. 255–57.
16. For all these figures, see Jonathan Chao, “Seeing Church Growth
from the Development of the Chinese Church” (in Chinese), in
Essays on Christianity and Modern China (in Chinese), ed. Peter Chi
Ping Lin (Taiwan: Cosmic Light Publication, 1981), pp. 350–62.
17. There were also other great evangelists in those years such as Shi
Meiyu (Mary Stone, 1873–1954), Song Shangjie (John Sung, 1901–44),
and Chen Chonggui (Marcus Cheng, 1884–1964). See, for reference,
Bays, Christianity in China, pp. 314–15.
18. See “Report of Commission II” and “Report of Commission VIII,”
in Reports of Commissions I to VIII, 2:352–53 and 8:195–97.
19. “Report of Commission II,” 2:352. Cheng further elaborated his
points in a subsequent article, “The Chinese Church in Relation to
Its Immediate Task,” International Review of Missions 1, no. 3 (1912):
381–92. John C. Gibson, who was an active leader in both the
Shanghai (1907) and the Edinburgh (1910) conferences, also had the
following remarks: “The time is well within the memory of working
missionaries when we had to labour with the Home Church and
persuade it to believe that there was such a thing as the Chinese
Church in existence. . . . It was now beyond doubt that the Chinese
Church was an important adjunct to the Christian Missions in
China.” He also recalled: “When the Centenary Conference of 1907
met, the minds of missionaries were fully prepared for this recognition. The organizers of the conference touched the core of the matter
when, in drawing up the programme, they set down as the first
topic: ‘The Chinese Church,’ and appointed a representative Committee to deal with it and allotted to it the whole of the first day of
the Conference work. . . . It was impossible that the Chinese Church
should any longer fail to be recognised as holding the foremost
place among the forces which are now creating a Christian China”
(“The Part of the Chinese Church in Mission Administration,”
Chinese Recorder 43, no. 6 [1912]: 347–49).
20. Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, pp. 277–79.
21. See, for example, Chinese Recorder 70, no. 12 (1939): 689.
22. Meanwhile, the editor of the Chinese Recorder commented, “Has the
Christian movement in China during 1922 found a new pivot? Yes!
The transfer from missions and Western Christians as a pivot to the
Chinese Church and Chinese Christians has been made. The Survey
and Commission reports are set up mainly in terms of missions and
the contributions of Western Christians. The outlook of the National
Christian Conference and the National Christian Council, however,
together with their program are painted in colors of the Chinese
Church and Chinese Christians” (“The Christian Movement in
China During 1922,” Chinese Recorder 54 [1923]: 8).
23. Both Cheng’s outlook and level of involvement can be seen in Cheng
Ching-Yi, “The Continuation Committee Conferences in China: II.
A Chinese View of the Conferences,” International Review of Missions
2, no. 7 (1913): 507–12.
24. For further information on the life and ministry of Cheng Jingyi, see
Nelson Bitton, “Cheng Ching-yi: A Christian Statesman,” International
Review of Missions 30, no. 4 (1941): 513–20; Howard L. Boorman and
Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967), 1:284–86; Cha Shi Jie,
“Cheng Jing Yi,” in Brief Notes on Characters of Chinese Christianity
(Taiwan: China Evangel Seminary Press, 1983), pp. 121–28; Francis P.
Jones, “Cheng Ching-yi,” in Concise Dictionary of the Christian World
Mission, ed. Stephen Neill, Gerald H. Anderson, and John Goodwin
(London: Lutterworth Press, 1970), pp. 120–21.
25. Cheng also attended the International Missionary Council (IMC)
meeting at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1918; the IMC meeting
at Jerusalem in 1928, where he was elected a vice-chairman; and the
IMC meeting at Madras, India, in 1939. He was the only Chinese to
be present at all three of these great world missionary conferences.
26. At Cheng’s death an editorial in the Chinese Recorder commented,
“Many times he [Cheng] had been likened to be a prophet—a really
true and great prophet like one of Old Testament times” (70, no. 12
[1939]: 689).
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Matteo Ricci: Pioneer of Chinese-Western Dialogue and Cultural
Exchanges
Jean-Paul Wiest
The article that follows is a slightly edited version of a paper presented at the First Nishan Forum of World
Civilizations, held September 26–27, 2010, in Qufu, China, the traditional birthplace of Confucius.
—Editors
T
o commemorate the beginning of the third millennium
and the opening of the twenty-first century a.d., the Chinese government built a monument shaped like a sundial. Inside,
a long fresco celebrates individuals who have made significant
contributions to the progress of civilization during the several
thousand years of Chinese history. In this impressive succession of important people, only two Westerners are represented:
Marco Polo (1254–1324), the man who made China known to
the West, and Matteo Ricci (Li Madou) (1552–1610), the man who
made the West known to China. Ricci is mentioned in the fresco
as the promoter of cultural exchanges. With him, shown using
a telescope, are pictured two Chinese of the late Ming dynasty:
Li Shizhen, renowned for his medical discoveries, and Wang
Yangming, the famous Confucian philosopher who liberated
Chinese Confucianism from its rigid scholasticism.1
At this Nishan Forum, celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci in Beijing, I consider it appropriate
to reflect on the person the Chinese government has deemed the
symbol of the golden age of Sino-Western relations, representing
peaceful interaction, on an equal footing, between China and the
West. Why and how were Ricci and the Jesuits who succeeded
him at the court successful in gaining the confidence and respect
of the emperor and many Confucian scholars? Why were they able
to enter into a dialogue and an exchange among equals that still
remain a viable and exemplary model for our times?
Ricci’s Training and Formation
Matteo Ricci was born in 1552 in the small town of Macerata in
the Marche region of Italy, near the Adriatic Sea. At the age of
seventeen he journeyed to Rome to study law and two years later
entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) at the Roman College,
the future Gregorian University, where he made his novitiate and
studied philosophy and theology. While there he also received
training in music, mathematics, cartography, cosmology, and
astronomy. One of his teachers was none other than the renowned
Jesuit father Christopher Clavius, a friend of Johannes Kepler and
Galileo Galilei.2 In 1577 Ricci’s superiors granted his request to
be sent on the missions in the Far East. After arriving at Goa, the
capital of the Portuguese Indies, he worked there and at Cochin
as a missionary until the spring of 1582, when Father Alessandro
Valignano (Fan Li’an), who had been his novice-master in Rome
and now was in charge of all the Jesuit missions in the Far East,
summoned him to Macao to prepare to enter China.
Jean-Paul Wiest is Research Director for the Beijing
Center for Chinese Studies, located on the campus of
the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China. He is coeditor of The Catholic
Church in Modern China: Perspectives (Orbis
Books, 1993) and author of Maryknoll in China: A
History, 1918–1955 (Sharpe, 1988).
—[email protected]
January 2012
At that time Western missionaries believed in the superiority
of European culture and brought along their own cultural patterns,
which they imposed on people they considered uncivilized. This
attitude, unfortunately, endured among many until the middle
of the twentieth century. During the sixteenth century, however,
a few individual missionaries, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas
in South America, had already acknowledged the richness of
local cultures. In Japan and China also, some experienced a
real conversion of the mind. Impressed by the achievements
they observed in Japanese and Chinese literature, politics, and
philosophy, they decided to make this culture the foundation
of their missionary project. Valignano was the one who masterminded this new approach, which was based on the concept of
a multipolar world whose center was no longer Europe. He in
fact wrote the first comparative study of China, Japan, and India,
entitled Historia del principio y progresso de la Companía de Jesús
en las Indias Orientales, 1542–1564.3 The treatise provides insight
into the Jesuits’ perception of Asian religions, societies, political
systems, and everyday life.
Another of Valignano’s outstanding accomplishments, beginning with his appointment as Visitor in 1573, was to assert his
spiritual authority above the political control of the Portuguese
Padroado and the Spanish Patronato and, by the same process,
to achieve a measure of independence for the Jesuits in China.4
From the start, he insisted on recruiting missionaries not deeply
affected by the conquistador understanding of Christianity and
the world. From his experience as novice-master, he knew that
most young Italians trained in the Roman College of the Society
of Jesus were free from this infection, were imbued with the ideas
of the Italian Renaissance, and were intellectually well prepared.
As a result, Ricci and many of the early China Jesuits, handpicked to pioneer Valignano’s new model for the church’s mission
in Asia, were Italians. These were a distinct group of people raised
and nurtured in what Andrew Ross described as “the cultural
golden age of a specifically Catholic humanism.”5 According to
the new paradigm, Europe was no more the exclusive model for
civilization and Christianity. Christianity should shed its Western
garb and be clothed, equally well, in Chinese style.
Valignano required all Jesuits assigned to China to know
the language before he would let them enter the country.6 Upon
arriving in Macao in August 1582, Matteo Ricci was therefore
assigned a Chinese tutor who taught him Chinese using the
classic Confucian texts known as the Four Books. A year later,
Ricci and his fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri (Luo Mingjian), at
the invitation of Wang Pan, the magistrate of Zhaoqing, then
the administrative capital of the province of Guangdong, took
residence in that city. Thus began the amazing story of Matteo
Ricci in China until his death in Beijing in 1610.
Matteo Ricci’s Relevance for Today’s World
While Valignano was the one who taught his young Jesuits to
think outside the box of European culture and to envision a new
17
missionary model, Ricci clearly became the one who applied it
to the Chinese context. He successfully lived out a completely
fresh approach for the West in its engagement with China. In
the pursuit of this goal, Ricci had at his disposal not only his
training as a Jesuit but also an impressive array of physical and
intellectual attributes. He was impressive in physical appearance,
with blue eyes and a voice like a bell; he was endowed with a
facility in foreign languages and a photographic memory; and he
was keen in his ability to grasp the essentials of Chinese culture
and to discern the means of entry into a sophisticated culture
like that of China.
The invitation to this Nishan Forum states: “Confronted with
critical challenges and dilemmas in human society, many have
begun to realize that the most effective solution lies in recognition
of the diversity of world cultures, and the conducting of continuous dialogue between different civilizations, to promote mutual
understanding and trust among countries and nations.” Some
four hundred years ago Matteo Ricci had already adopted such
a program. While in China he displayed a profound respect for
the diversity of cultures, promoted mutual understanding, and
was a master of dialogue on an equal footing. From a Chinese
viewpoint, the Italian missionary’s attitude and behavior might,
however, sound more like a distant echo of Confucius himself.
Long before Ricci set foot in the country, China’s great thinker
and educator advocated “harmony as the most precious thing”
and stressed that “one could always learn from others,” thus
affirming that harmony could coexist with diversity.
It is also important to realize that, to a large extent, Ricci’s
way of life was as much, if not more, the “result of [his] reaction to
what China was and who the Chinese were” as it was the “proactive and creative elaboration” of “a conscious and well-defined
policy conceived by Valignano.”7 In other words, Ricci became
who he became because his being in China and his encounters
with a number of Confucian scholars encouraged him, both
directly and indirectly, to rethink and reshape his own identity.
Ricci’s Respect for the Diversity of Cultures
Ricci’s journey into China is therefore a journey into the minds
and hearts, language and culture, symbols and sensibility of those
with whom he came in contact. This way of life accounts in great
part for the fascination with his achievements, which extends well
beyond church circles. He became thoroughly familiar with the
long history of this rich culture, its classics, and its philosophy.
In 1594 he translated extensive parts of the Four Books into
Latin and developed the first system for Romanizing Chinese.
He tested the effectiveness of his work as teaching material on
newly arrived European Jesuits. For this accomplishment of
allowing two different cultures to communicate with each other
on the basis of the Confucian classics, Ricci should be considered
the founder of Western sinology.8
Ricci also set aside standard traditional European mapmaking when, in a map he prepared in 1602, he placed China instead
of Europe near the center of the world. This work is one of his
many accomplishments that show his thoughtfulness and great
admiration for the empire that called itself the Middle Kingdom.
One of his comments, placed on the map just south of the Tropic
of Capricorn, declares: “I am filled with admiration for the great
Chinese Empire, where I am treated with friendly hospitality far
above what I deserve.”9
Ricci’s China journal was taken to Europe and published in
Latin by Nicholas Trigault (Jin Nige).10 It confirmed that Marco
Polo’s “kingdom of Cathay” was indeed China, and it reported
18
on many miscellaneous details, such as the use of chopsticks.11
Most important, however, Ricci’s journal provided Western
readers with a carefully written and reasoned description of the
attainments of this great civilization on the other side of the world.
The journal also spoke of Ricci’s efforts to win the good will of
the Chinese people “little by little” and by living an exemplary life.
As a religious man, it seemed clear to him that, through the wise
men of China’s past, God had continuously sustained the development of Chinese culture and society. To his friend Xu Guangqi,
Ricci confided that on his way to China he had passed through
many countries and found none that could compare with China,
whose Confucian and music rituals he found the most brilliant in
the entire world. But when Xu asked why China remained at the
mercy of natural disasters, Ricci suggested that China’s scientific
knowledge in some areas was still insufficient and lagging behind
when compared to that of the West. So Xu, who had already helped
Ricci in the publication of several religious books, proposed that
they publish some books on European science.
Xu belonged to a group of late Ming officials and scholars who
were worried about the state of the country and sought concrete
ways to save it from decay. Their search was in reaction against
the intuitionist movement from the Wang Yangming school,
which advocated that principles for moral action were to be found
entirely within the mind and heart. Xu and his colleagues instead
looked for “solid learning” or “concrete studies” (shixue). This
quest is to a large extent the reason for Xu’s proposal; over the
years it resulted in a unique interaction between many Chinese
literati and Ricci and the Jesuits who followed him.
Ricci’s response to Xu’s request was that they ought to translate Euclid’s Elements of Geometry before any other scientific work
because, Ricci insisted, the understanding of Euclid’s geometry
was actually the key for understanding the logic of the West. At
that time in China, Western logic was practically unknown. So
as Ricci explained the various points of the Elements, Xu often
found it difficult to understand what the missionary meant and
to translate it into Chinese. Shifting from the Chinese way of
thinking, which was in terms of images, to Western-style deductive logic required a thoroughgoing revolution of the reasoning
process. The two men had to go beyond the mere translation of
words, sentences, and equations to make compatible two different systems of logic.
Ricci passed away after they had translated six of the
thirteen books of the Elements (Jihe yuanben). Yet Ricci’s verbal
explanations and Xu Guangqi’s written accounts of Euclid’s Elements were sufficient to open for future generations a bridge in
East-West cultural exchange that crossed the language barrier.
In addition, the new Chinese terminology, which Xu Guangqi
had to invent for point, curve, parallel line, acute angle, obtuse
angle, and so forth—concepts alien to Chinese mathematics and
therefore with no words for them—soon became a standard part
of Chinese mathematics.
Ricci’s Promotion of Mutual Understanding
At first it might seem odd that the first book Ricci published
in Chinese was not a tool to preach the Christian religion but
rather a small volume based on his recollection of what Greek
and Latin authors had written on the subject of friendship. This
book, entitled Jiaoyoulun (On friendship, 1595), was for the missionary a way to publicize his program to the Chinese, stating
that friendship as a partnership among equals would be at the
root of his communication strategy.12
Ricci wrote the book because of what China had taught him.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
From the day he arrived he discovered the importance of true
and influential friends to maintain his presence in the country.
The concept of guanxi, or personal relationship, has always
been central to any understanding of Chinese social structures.
It denotes an essential part of network-building within Chinese
social life. The many difficulties encountered by Ricci and his
companions in trying to establish a residence in various cities
were often due to their lack of personal connections.
At the same time, Ricci’s decision to write Jiaoyoulun was also
likely influenced by his discussions with late Ming scholars, for
whom the word “friendship” had become something of a code
word for the promotion of a Chinese society where relationships
would be among equals and entered into by personal choice. The
book was widely circulated and gained Ricci a measure of fame
and many visitors.
For a person whose early attempts at winning converts among
the common people had ended in frustration, the success of the
book reinforced his decision to shift to a top-down approach by
“whispering to powerbrokers”13 rather than preaching to the
masses. He determined that he would have more success through
quiet consultations with scholars and officials. This decision
proved to be correct. Because of his great learning and personal
probity, these conversations eventually led some to inquire about
his religion. By pointing out that many of his faith’s main tenets
could be found in the Confucian classics, Ricci was able to bring
several high-ranking officials to embrace Christianity.14 He used
to tell his Chinese visitors that “the law of God was in conformity
with the natural light [of reason] and with what their first sages
taught in their books.”15
After the Confucian temple built in Qufu, the birthplace of
Confucius, the Confucius temple of Beijing is the second largest
in all of China. Next to it is the Imperial College, where the civil
service examinations for the highest rank of jinshi took place every
three years. The names of the jinshi graduates were inscribed on
commemorative stone monuments still on display in the temple
courtyard. These names include those of three influential scholars who were converted to Catholicism by Ricci and his fellow
Jesuits. Commonly known by Chinese Catholics as the “three
pillars,” they are Yang Tingyun, who passed the examination in
1592; Li Zhizao, who became a jinshi in 1598; and Xu Guangqi,
who passed the examination in 1604 and later rose to some of
the highest positions in the Ming government.
On the one hand, Ricci and his fellow Jesuits were able to
reassure these three scholars and many others who followed suit
that they indeed treated Chinese friends as equals and that the
Christian message they brought was respectful of China’s own
culture and national dignity. On the other hand, without the
welcoming and questions of friends like Xu Guanqxi and their
passion in revealing to Matteo Ricci Chinese ways of thoughts
and cultural treasures, there probably would not have been
the Ricci I am describing here. The interaction between these
two—the genial Renaissance missionary and the earnest Confucian scholar—is a fascinating chapter in the history of scientific,
cultural, and spiritual encounters. I believe that this enduring
friendship based on equality in partnership serves as model for
meaningful relationships among individuals, as well as, on a
larger scale, for peaceful and fruitful interactions between China
and the rest of the world.
Ricci as a Pioneer of Dialogue
Ricci’s most enduring legacy may be his strategy in engaging with
a culture so different from his own. “He was very determined in
January 2012
how he pursued dialogue.”16 He responded to the curiosity of the
Chinese intelligentsia about the Christian God in Tianzhu shiyi
(The true meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603).17 The book is not
conceived as a typical catechism in the form of short questions
followed by short answers that are to be memorized by Christian
neophytes. Rather, it is a work meant to dispose readers to the
reception of the Gospel. Ricci wrote it as a dialogue between a
Confucian scholar and a sage from the Occident; as such, it is “the
first attempt by a Catholic scholar to use a Chinese way of thinking to introduce Christianity to Chinese intellectuals.”18 Many of
the aphorisms found in the Tianzhu shiyi have a familiar ring, as
if they were taken out of the Analects of Confucius:
The virtuous person speaks little or not at all.
Nothing is more conducive to a better life than to examine
our conscience and discover our faults.
The rich miser is more unhappy than the poor beggar.
By foolishly trying to discover the future, a man incurs
misfortune.
Because Ricci valued Chinese respect for a philosophical
consideration, explanation, or proof of God; the nature and act
of creation; and the differences between the human soul and the
souls of birds and animals, he discussed these topics, as well as
the question of the goodness of human nature. In doing so, he
strove to “expound Catholic thought with the aid of China’s
existing cultural heritage.”19 By the same token, he displayed his
deep confidence in the human ability to communicate with one
another in truth and mutual respect with the help of reason and
the natural and acquired talents at one’s disposal. Throughout
the book, friendship and trust are both the starting point and the
fruit of the dialogue.
From a Christian perspective, Ricci’s approach to nonChristians resembled in many ways that of the early Christian
church. He went to China to spread the Catholic religion, but he
carefully avoided the pitfalls of cultural confrontation. Instead,
he followed a policy of cultural accommodation in an effort to
reconcile two disparate systems of faith and thought. In 2009, in
a message sent to the bishop of Macerata, the hometown of Ricci,
Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “What made his apostolate original
and, we could say, prophetic was the profound sympathy he
nourished for the Chinese, for their cultures and religious traditions. . . . Even today, his example remains as a model of fruitful
encounter between European and Chinese civilization.”20
Just as his use of the science and instruments he brought
with him from the West dazzled Chinese intellectuals, so did
his mastery of the Chinese language and cultural tradition.
Ricci was thus reengaging with the theological tradition of the
Greek Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, who brought the
heritage of Homer and Plato to the service of Christian thought.
For a while it looked as if Ricci’s successors might bring about a
successful implanting of Christianity within the Chinese context
when, a few decades after his death, the Kangxi emperor issued
an edict allowing the preaching of the Christian religion in the
empire. But history did not repeat itself, because the popes and
most of Christian Europe of that time failed to endorse Ricci’s
method of cultural accommodation. Pope Clement XI in 1704 and
1715 and again Pope Benedict XIV in 1742 rejected this approach
and forbade its practice “for all time to come.” Not until 1939
did the Vatican finally acknowledge that it had made a mistake
and commend Ricci’s method.
Today, attempts are under way at renewing the dialogue
between Christianity and China begun by Ricci 400 years ago. The
Vatican has given its full support to Ricci’s approach. The author
19
of the booklet On Friendship is being hailed as a missionary who
undertook “a farsighted work of inculturation of Christianity
in China by seeking constant understanding with the wise men
of that country.”21
Conclusion
Reflecting on Matteo Ricci’s accomplishments, Wolfgang Franke,
one of the leading sinologists of the twentieth century, rightly
called him “the most outstanding cultural mediator between
China and the West of all times.”22 Indeed, Matteo Ricci’s methods
Notes
1. The stated goal of this and subsequent Nishan Forums is, on the
basis of values and insights shared by Confucianism and major
world religions, to build toward universal cooperation by celebrating
diversity in a spirit of responsibility, faith, tolerance, and harmony.
2. For more details on Ricci’s training, see Gianni Criveller, “The
Background of Matteo Ricci: The Shaping of His Intellectual and
Scientific Endowment,” Chinese Cross Currents 6, no. 4 (2009): 72–93.
3. Josef Wicki, ed., Historia del principio y progresso de la Companía de Jesús
en las Indias Orientales, 1542–1564 (History of the commencement
and development of the Society of Jesus in the East Indies) (Rome:
Institutum Historicum S.I., 1944).
4. By the Treaty of Tordesillas of June 1494, Portugal and Spain divided
their claims to lands discovered and to be discovered outside Europe
along a meridian 950 miles from the Cape Verde Islands. In these
territories both crowns had to support and “protect”—hence the
names Padroado and Padronato (“patronage” in Portuguese and
Spanish)—the expansion of Christians missions.
5. Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China,
1542–1742 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 206.
6. See Valignano, letter from Goa, December 23, 1588, to Don Theotonio
de Bragança, archbishop of Evora, in Cartas que os Padres e irmaos da
Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos Reynos de Japão e China (Evora, 1598),
2:170: “When I was in Japan, I determined that two of the fathers
[Ruggieri and Ricci] who were in Amacao, the Portuguese port of
China, should devote themselves to nothing else but learning the
language and literature of China, and be given masters and everything
else necessary. And it happened that they made great progress in
the language, so when I returned from Japan, I appointed them to
this great enterprise of entering China.”
7. See Nicholas Standaert’s interesting article “Matteo Ricci: Shaped
by the Chinese,” in Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British
Jesuits, May 21, 2010.
8. Regrettably, Ricci’s translation has been lost.
9. A rare copy of this map is on permanent display at the James Ford
Bell Library of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
10. The original manuscript, in Italian, is entitled Della entrata della
Compagnia di Giesù e Christianità nella Cina. A recent reprint of this
original can be found at Quaderni Quodlibet, Milan, 2000. Nicholas
Trigault’s Latin translation of Ricci’s journal, which is not always
accurate, appeared first in Augsburg in 1615 under the title De
Christiana expeditione apud Sinas sucepta ab Soc. Jesu. Louis Gallagher
translated and commented on Trigault’s Latin text under the English
title China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci,
1583–1610 (New York: Random House, 1953).
11. In a letter dated August 24, 1608, Matteo Ricci appraised his brother,
Canon Anton Maria Ricci, of some of his findings: “It is now certain
that China is this great kingdom that our predecessors called the
Great Cathay and that the king of China is the Great Can and that
the city of Pekin is Canbaluc” (Matteo Ricci, Lettere dalla Cina, 1580–
1609, ed. Piero Corradini [Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2001], p. 589.)
20
are today considered by foreign diplomats and business people
in China to be textbook negotiating strategy.
Ricci’s usual demeanor, far from being confrontational,
placed great emphasis on harmonious relationships. He knew
how to display patience, tolerance, and kindness with his visitors.
His good manners, understanding, and respect for the Chinese
people and culture, combined with his outstanding scholarship,
enabled him to adapt himself to the Chinese environment and
to gain the confidence and friendship of many Chinese literati.
As a result, a number of these were also drawn to the Christian
message he brought with him.
12. Jiaoyoulun, or De Amiticia, was published in Nanchang in 1595. It was
recently translated into English by Timothy Billings, On Friendship:
One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 2009). For a list of twenty-two works that Ricci published
in Chinese, see http://padrematteoricci.it/Engine/RAServePG
.php/P/253210010409/L/1.
13. James T. Areddy coined the expression in his article “Whispering
Preacher Set Diplomatic Course,” Wall Street Journal, digital edition,
August 13, 2010.
14. On this subject, see in particular Jonathan Spence, To Change China:
Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960 (New York: Penguin Books,
1980), pp. 3–33.
15. P. M. D’Elia, ed., Fonti Ricciane (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1949),
1:195. This is one of the passages that was obscured by Ricci’s Latin
translator Nicholas Trigault, or perhaps by Trigault’s German editors, by a long theological addition about “the innate light of nature,”
and adding to the natural law the supernatural law, as taught by
“God become man.” Gallagher, in his translation of Trigault, further
distorts it by reading “inner light” as conscience, not reason (China
in the Sixteenth Century, p. 156). For further information on the
subject, see Paul A. Rule, “What Were ‘The Directives of Matteo
Ricci’ Regarding the Chinese Rites?” Pacific Rim Report (Univ. of San
Francisco), no. 54, May 2010.
16. Claude Haberer, chairperson of Association Ricci, in “Whispering
Preacher Set Diplomatic Course,” Wall Street Journal, digital edition,
August 13, 2010.
17. Tianzhu shiyi was known in Europe by its Latin title De Deo verax
disputatio (True argumentation about God). The book was authored
between 1593 and 1596, and its draft was widely distributed before
publication. Feng Ying Jing attempted to publish the book in 1601 but
was financially unable to do so. It was finally published in Beijing in
1603. The work consists of two books, eight volumes, and 174 items
in dialogue form. For a publication with both Chinese text and an
English translation, see Douglas Lancashire, Peter Kuo-chen Hu, and
Edward Malatesta, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven = T’ien-chu
shih-i (Chinese and English parallel text) (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1985).
18. True Meaning, preface, p. xiv. The Chinese scholar explains traditional Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism of China, and the
European scholar quotes the classical works of the early Confucianists
to explain the doctrines of Christianity, using Scholasticism, the
traditional philosophy of European Catholicism.
19. Ibid.
20. “Matteo Ricci: A Model of Dialogue and Respect for Others,” Vatican
Information Service, May 18, 2009.
21. Ibid.
22. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming
Biography (1368–1644) (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976),
p. 1144.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
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Attrition Among Protestant Missionaries in China, 1807–1890
Jessie G. Lutz
A
ttrition narratives for almost every Protestant mission
represented in China between 1807 and 1890 paint very
similar pictures.1 Consider a number of representative accounts
drawn up by contemporary observers and later historians:
It is estimated that it requires at least five years of residence and
study for a missionary to become fully effective in China, and
only one of the missionaries of the M. E. [Methodist Episcopal]
Church, South, who went out prior to the Civil War remained as
long as this. After a promising start and the baptism of the first
convert in 1851, health difficulties began to beset the mission.2
Of the [first] fifty-three missionaries sent out . . . by the CIM
[China Inland Mission], only twenty-two adults (and eighteen
children) remained in the mission, and of these only four or five
men and three or four women were much good.3
Health problems . . . held a special urgency since the health of
mission personnel in other areas had been disastrous—fortyfive deaths abroad since the founding of the American Board [of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions], plus fifty-three returnees,
thirty-one of which were for reasons of their health or the health
of members of their families.4
To say that twenty-seven missionaries and missionary wives
arrived in Foochow between the beginning of 1847 and the end
of 1851 could give a misleading impression of the size of the missionary force. . . . The fact is that the missionaries had serious
health problems, and casualties were heavy. By the end of 1853,
only fifteen of the twenty-seven who had arrived between 1847
and 1851 remained in the field; the rest had either died or left.5
Although the Oberlin Band [of student volunteers for foreign
missions] were joined by two more couples in 1884—a total of
eleven, five married couples and a single man—it remained a
“feeble Mission” that at one point was down to three members.6
Of the three hundred and thirty-eight missionaries named in the list
[of Protestant missionaries to China by 1867], the aggregate term of
service in China has been 2,511 years, giving an average of nearly
seven and a half years to each. . . . These numbers include the time
that missionaries have been absent on visits to their native lands or
elsewhere, generally on account of their health.7
Of the eleven [women] who pioneered these stations [in Shanxi]
in 1886–87, two died young, one committed suicide, two were
sent home to die, and two died at the hands of the Boxers. Only
four survived past 1900.8
Inevitably the prevalence of health breakdowns and deaths
influenced the mood and effectiveness of those who remained.
It is not surprising that the early missionaries often seemed to
be preoccupied with death and sickness. Conversations, it was
Jessie G. Lutz is Professor Emerita of Chinese
History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New
Jersey. Her publications include (with R. R. Lutz)
Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant Christianity,
1850–1900 (M. E. Sharpe, 1998) and Opening China:
Karl F. A. Gützlaff and Sino-Western Relations,
1827−1852 (Eerdmans, 2008).
—[email protected]
22
said, frequently centered on recent departures of ill colleagues,
the death of a newborn, or the sickness of a friend. More than
one missionary perceived a relationship between early departure
and despondency over health problems and the lack of converts.
William Lennox of Peking Union Medical College, who in 1918–19
made a statistical study of the health of missionary families in
China, concluded that a significant number of missionaries left
China because of “neurasthenia,” or nervous breakdown.9 At
the time, “departure for health reasons” often covered mental
health as well as physical health. Since the records rarely mention
mental health, however, the precise proportion of those departing
because of mental problems cannot be determined. Biographies
of individual missionaries do reveal that many missionaries
experienced depression. Elijah Bridgman, Dr. Peter Parker, and
Tarleton Crawford, for example, often were plagued by weeks or
months of despondency. In the course of 1848 James Legge of the
London Missionary Society experienced the death of his father,
his infant daughter, a close friend, and his wife, in childbirth.
His translation work appears to have provided a refuge from
the sorrows of his personal life.10
Periods of ill health that made active evangelism impossible were common, especially in South China, where malaria
and intestinal parasites undermined the health of missionaries
while the hot, humid summers depleted their energy. In North
China missionaries were more apt to suffer from respiratory ill-
More than one missionary
perceived a relationship
between early departure
and despondency over
health problems and the
lack of converts.
nesses, including tuberculosis. Home furloughs at approximately
seven-year intervals helped to restore health, but sometimes the
furloughs had to be extended to two or three years before the
missionary was well enough to return to China. Morbidity was
high, and missionaries were frequently unable to operate at full
capacity. In his 1850 report on the American Episcopal Church
mission in Shanghai, Elijah Bridgman noted that, on account of
ill health, fellow missionary Bishop William J. Boone, Sr., was
unable to sit with the Committee of Delegates and had been
forced to restrict his preaching to infrequent services at the
schoolhouse chapel.11 Boone’s condition was far from unique
among the missionaries. In 1851 Karl Gützlaff persevered in his
preaching activity among the people of Hong Kong, the boat
people, and Hakka villagers on neighboring islands although
edema so hindered his walking that he had to crawl up hills.12
Peter Parker suffered a physical and mental breakdown that
lasted for months; he even despaired of his life.13
One self-protection developed by the missionaries might
be called the martyr complex. There are numerous examples of
missionaries who died early on the field but who expressed joy
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
over giving their life for the Christian cause. Missionaries on their
deathbed did not necessarily give way to sorrow or to regret that
they had chosen to come to China to bring the Gospel. Rather,
they looked forward to reward in heaven for bringing the Good
News to the damned. Missionaries often attempted to explain
a death as the will of God. Bridgman, in commenting upon the
death of a missionary who had appeared to have a most promising
future career, could only conclude: “In the mysterious providence
of God it was ordered otherwise.” He, like other missionaries,
assumed that colleagues, “having finished their course below,
are now witnesses before the throne of God and the Lamb in
the heavenly world.” The trials of the missionary life had their
purpose: “Such afflictions are doubtless designed, while they
teach us our frailty, to incite us to greater diligence and purer
devotion.”14 Most missionaries found such arguments sufficient;
they were able to retain their faith in the cause. Some, however,
were devastated and had to leave the field.
Costs and Tensions
The cost in morale, health, and the lives of missionaries who
were in their prime was deplorable; most of those who died
were between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. From the
viewpoint of the home board, there was also a monetary cost.
To recruit, outfit, and transport a missionary couple entailed
a very considerable outlay of funds by the board. In addition,
there was the expense of their settling in a home and hiring a
language tutor. As James Cannon stated, if the young missionary
died less than five years after reaching China, he enjoyed a very
short period of effective evangelism.15 To become proficient in a
spoken Chinese dialect was neither easy nor quick and generally
required a minimum of two years of diligent application. Pioneer
missionaries had Robert Morrison’s Chinese grammar and his
dictionary, but few other aids for learning the language. The
usual method was to hire a Chinese tutor, none of whom knew
any English or had experience in teaching a language. Westerners had had no previous exposure to a tonal language and often
found mastering the tones challenging. It was said that James
Legge, the great translator of the Chinese classics, never became
adept in spoken Chinese because he did not have a musical ear.
Learning Chinese, therefore, could be a disheartening experience,
and more than one missionary suffered bouts of despondency
before becoming capable of preaching in Chinese.
Westerners had initially thought that missionaries would
convert a few Chinese and then these converts would carry the
promise of salvation throughout China; the Gospel would be
gladly received, and China would become a Christian nation
within a relatively short period of time. Such a view had quickly
proved to be a pipe dream. Most Chinese were indifferent to the
Christian message and offended by its exclusivism. Adding Jesus
to their pantheon of deities was a possibility, but few Chinese
could be persuaded to abandon their Daoist, Buddhist, and
Confucian beliefs and practices, most especially veneration of
the ancestors. Converts were few and far between. Missionaries
faced a disillusioning and in many ways unrewarding career.
They needed a strong faith if they were to persevere.
The high attrition rate coupled with the low conversion rate
affected home supporters as well as the missionaries. Disappointment on the field at the paucity of converts was echoed
at home. Mission boards regularly requested reports of conversions from the missionaries as proof that their investment was
yielding results. They were often critical of missionaries who
engaged in activities other than direct evangelizing—for example,
January 2012
education, publishing, and even medical work—if they were
not accompanied by evangelism. Elijah Bridgman was under
constant pressure from the American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to discontinue his editing of the
Chinese Repository, the journal he had started in 1832 to draw
Converts were few and
far between; missionaries
needed a strong faith if
they were to persevere.
together information about conditions in China. The demands of
his medical work left Peter Parker with no time for evangelism,
causing him pangs of guilt and eventually leading the ABCFM
to discontinue its support for him. On more than one occasion
the secretary of the London Missionary Society cautioned James
Legge against giving so much time to translating the Chinese
classics that he neglected evangelistic work.16
Decline in Attrition
By the 1870s the attrition rate began to decline. In a report
published in 1907 the Southern Presbyterian Mission recorded
of its presence in China that, “in round numbers, during forty
years out of 120 missionaries nearly one-third (thirty-eight) have
died or left the Mission, and over two-thirds (eighty-two) are in
the harness.”17 This was almost a direct reversal of the statistics
for the years before the 1870s. And the Southern Presbyterian
Mission was not alone in experiencing a decline in the attrition
rate of its missionaries. A number of factors contributed to the
decrease in attrition and the increase in the average years of
active service. As the numbers of missionaries grew, so did the
numbers of medical missionaries. Several Western-style hospitals
were founded, one in Canton and one in Shanghai, for example.
Thus better and more accessible medical care became available.
Greater knowledge about the sources of malaria and intestinal
parasites led to greater emphasis on protections such as mosquito netting and prophylactics in the one case and sanitation
and hygiene in the other. Also, vaccinations for such diseases
as smallpox and typhoid fever were becoming available by the
end of the century.
With the greater number of missionaries came the formation
of mission enclaves, wherein missionaries adopted a Western living style insofar as possible. Although the missionaries are often
criticized for isolating themselves from the Chinese, the enclaves
did make for a healthier environment. Learning Chinese, even if
still difficult, became less daunting as aids were composed. And
toward the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries began to
establish summer retreats in the cooler hills and mountains so
that they could escape the debilitating heat present in summer.
Tracking Missionary Attrition
In this article missionary attrition and early departure are defined
as leaving or removal from the field of missionary service for any
reason (such as ill health, death, the ill health or death of a spouse
or family member, resignation, personal or doctrinal conflict, or
change of vocation or ministry; see table 1 on following page)
before old age dictated retirement.
23
Despite the general consensus that the attrition rate among
China missionaries was high during the first three quarters of
the nineteenth century and began to decline during the fourth
quarter, exact figures are lacking. I have tried to bring a degree
of exactitude to this widespread impression by examining the
careers of 1,579 Protestant missionaries who came to China
between 1807 and 1890, 665 women and 914 men. One set of
statistics lists the length of service separately for women and
men. A second set lists the causes for termination of service.
These figures represent the majority of the missionaries who
arrived in China between 1807 and 1890, but not the total number. Furthermore, the information concerning the reason for
departure is incomplete in some cases. I think, however, that
there are sufficient numbers and data to lend some specific-
ports. Thus the number of missionaries for the period 1807–46
was small, only 264 (I have data on 113 women and 151 men),
and most of them arrived during the 1840s.
During this period guidelines for evangelism to be done by
the missionaries were lacking, and mission boards knew so little
about conditions on the field that they could offer little specific
advice. Communication was slow, leaving missionaries largely
free to develop their own methodology. It might take a year for
an exchange of communications to occur, and missionaries often
complained of being neglected by the home board. When missionaries itinerated outside the treaty ports, they had to rely on
Chinese housing and food. Medical facilities and knowledge of
the importance of sanitary practices were lacking. That the attrition rate during this period should be exceptionally high is to be
expected. That problems of morale were
Table 1. Reason for Termination
common is not
Death
Ill
Retirement/ Other
Conflict:
Withdrawal/
surprising.
Ill
of
health of resignation employ-
personal/Retire- resignation/ Incomplete
During the sec
Death health spouse spouse of spouse
ment Finances doctrinal ment marriage
data
ond period, 1847–60,
the number of mis
Period 1, 1807–46: Women (113), Men (151)
sionaries coming to
China increased. I
Women % 46.0 14.2 11.5
3.5
15.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
6.2
0.0
3.5
have data on 146
Men %
31.8 41.4
3.9
3.3
0.0
3.3
2.6
2.0
5.6
0.0
6.0
women and 204 men,
a total of 350. As new
Period 2, 1847–60: Women (146), Men (204)
treaty ports were
opened to foreign
Women % 35.6 15.8 10.3
4.8
14.4
0.7
0.7
2.1
4.8
2.8
10.3
residence and trade,
Men %
26.0 34.8
2.0
2.9
0.0
4.9
1.0
2.0
7.4
3.9
15.2
evangelism in inte
rior China became
Period 3, 1861–76: Women (141), Men (266)
possible. The cause
of the China field had
Women % 24.1 22.7
7.8
1.4
12.8
0.0
0.0
1.4
7.1
2.1
20.6
Men %
25.6 31.2
1.1
3.4
0.0
2.3
0.8
1.9
7.5
0.0
26.3
been popularized at
home by both mis
Period 4, 1877–90: Women (265), Men (293)
sionaries and mis
sion boards. MisWomen % 23.8 26.8
4.2
0.0
18.5
0.4
0.0
0.8
17.4
5.7
2.6
sion societies had
Men %
28.0 30.7
0.7
1.4
0.0
3.1
0.0
1.7
24.9
3.4
5.1
strengthened ties
with church groups,
Note: Because of rounding, percentage totals in the rows may not equal 100.
while women’s missionary associations
ity to the general impression of high attrition. More complete had begun to take up the cause of China missions. Although
information would probably indicate an even higher attrition medical missionaries were among the new arrivals, conditions in
rate, since the missionaries with short careers are the ones more the field still left much to be desired; medical care was minimal.
likely to be missing from the records.
The attrition rate remained high.
In order to trace the changes in attrition rates, I have divided
By the third period, 1861–76, the home base for China misthe era into four periods: 1807–46, 1847–60, 1861–76, and 1877–90. sions was becoming quite well organized. A framework for
(The figures and percentages in the accompanying tables show the recruiting missionaries and soliciting funds was in place. The
length of service and reason for termination of service according China field had been well publicized. As a result of the Second
to the missionaries’ arrival date. The term of service of a mission- Opium War, 1856–60, China had become more open and the
ary who arrived during one period would frequently extend number of Western evangelists increased. I have records for 407
into or beyond the following period.) The period from 1807 to missionaries, of whom 141 were women and 266 men. As mis1846 embraced the pioneering years. It began with the arrival sion enclaves were established and medical care became more
of Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China. readily available, attrition rates, though still high, slowly began
During most of this time, Christian evangelism was illegal in to decline. The proportion of missionaries who lived to old age
China; it was illegal as well for Chinese citizens to convert to becomes significant for the first time.
Christianity. Quite a few missionaries worked among the Chinese
The fourth period, 1877–90, saw a rapid increase in Protestant
in Southeast Asia in anticipation of the opening of China, when missionaries arriving in China, and after 1890 the number grew
they would transfer their residence. It was only after China’s so large as to make the task of gathering statistics overwhelming.
defeat in the First Opium War, 1839–42, that China was forced Kenneth Scott Latourette gives 1,272 for the number of missionto grant tolerance to Christian evangelism and conversion. Even aries who arrived in China between 1888 and 1897, although he
then, Westerners were permitted to reside only in five treaty admits that it is difficult to determine precise numbers for the
24
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
second half of the nineteenth century.18 I have, therefore, ended my
study at 1890. During this fourth period, attrition rates declined
more rapidly, while careers lengthened. Increasing numbers lived
to old age or retirement. Fewer missionaries withdrew or resigned
because of the death or ill health of a spouse. I have statistics on
265 women and 293 men, for a total of 558.
The specific statistics in the tables give substance to the
above generalizations.
(6.2 percent) remained for 31 to 40 years (see table 3). Of the male
missionaries, five (3.2 percent) stayed on the field over 40 years,
while nine (5.7 percent) served 31 to 40 years. It was not until
the third period, 1861–76, that more than a few missionaries in
China lived to retire at a normal retirement age of 65. By the fourth
period, 1877–90, significant numbers were surviving for longer
periods: thirty women (11.3 percent) and thirty-four men (11.6
percent) served 31 to 40 years, while twenty-three women (8.6
percent) and thirty-one men (10.5 percent) were in China for over
40 years. It was also not until the fourth period that the number of
Differences in Attrition Rates
retirees became significant. There were a few exceptions, that is,
During the first period, 1807–46, almost 15 percent of the women missionaries who had relatively long careers that started before
and over 13 percent of the men died or left the field during 1860. Robert Morrison died in harness after a career of 27 years;
their first year of service while 44 percent of the women and Elijah Bridgman served for 31 years; the independent missionary
43 percent of the men remained in China for five years or less Karl Gützlaff was active for 23 years. But such long careers were
(see table 2). Well over half of the men (58.2 percent) and nearly unusual, and even so, Morrison and Gützlaff died in their early
two-thirds of the women (64.6 percent) served ten years or less. fifties, and Bridgman at the age of sixty.
If we correlate the length of service with the death rate and the
Noteworthy during the early periods is the dependence of
prevalence of health breakdown, it becomes clear that a high the women on their husband’s career. Between 1807 and 1846,
proportion of the missionaries left before they had become pro- thirty-four (30.0 percent) of the women left the field because
ficient in Chinese and could be effective evangelists. For those their husband retired, resigned, died, or was in poor health. Few
women remained in China after the death or departure of
Table 2. Percentage of Missionaries Serving Ten Years or Less
their husband. They had been in China for such a short period
before their loss that the West, not China, seemed like home.
Years Served
For males the same was not true. Only 7.3 percent of the males
0–1
>1–2
>2–5
>5–10
withdrew because of the poor health or death of their wife. If
the wife died, the husband was apt to find a second wife, and
Period 1, 1807–46
even third wives were not exceptional. Especially during the
early decades, the life of a widow or a single Western woman
Women
15.0
7.1
22.1
20.4
in China was not easy. She was not permitted to have a home
Cumulative
15.0
22.1
44.2
64.6
of her own; rather, she was expected to live with a married
Men
13.3
10.5
19.2
15.2
couple, compatible or not. Wives were not recognized as full
Cumulative
13.3
23.8
43.0
58.2
missionaries, and neither single women nor wives had a say
at mission conferences or church vestry meetings. Accord
Period 2, 1847–60
ing to Chinese mores, single women and wives were not
supposed to associate with males in public, nor could they
Women
17.1
7.6
18.5
18.4
travel freely in the countryside. As might be expected, there
Cumulative
17.1
24.7
43.2
61.6
were a few women who ignored the rules. Mary Aldersley,
Men
10.0
6.2
17.6
17.2
an independent missionary, operated a school in Ningbo for
Cumulative
10.0
16.2
33.8
51.0
almost twenty years, from 1843 to 1861. Lottie Moon of the
Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board evangelized in rural
Period 3, 1861–76
Shandong for almost forty years until her death in 1912. But
these women were unique until the late nineteenth century.
Women
9.9
4.4
11.9
17.8
Cumulative
9.9
14.3
26.2
44.0
By the 1870s, however, quite a few women had lived in China
long enough to feel at home, and some remained to continue
Men
7.0
7.0
7.7
24.2
their work even after the death of their husband. Also, the
Cumulative
7.0
14.0
21.7
45.9
restrictions on women lessened as mission boards began to
commission single women missionaries.
Period 4, 1877–90
Women
Cumulative
9.4
9.4
9.1
18.5
12.1
30.6
16.2
46.8
Men
Cumulative
5.5
5.5
11.4
16.9
12.0
28.9
16.6
45.5
who left before the age of forty, attrition was overwhelmingly
due to death or ill health of the missionary or of a spouse. Not
until the third period, 1877–90, did the attrition rate during the
first ten years fall below 50 percent (44.0 percent for women
and 45.9 percent for men).
During the first period, 1807–46, none of the women missionaries were on the field for 41 years or more, and only seven
January 2012
Reasons for Attrition
Other than for poor health and death, reasons for termination of service were relatively minor. A few men withdrew;
whether because of frustration over the difficulty of learning
the language or disillusionment over the paucity of converts is not stated. In one instance a man who had worked
in China for twenty-four years was dismissed because he had
never become proficient in Chinese. Even though friction in the
missionary community occurred and could become sharp when
matters of principle or doctrine were involved, only a small number left because of personal or doctrinal conflicts. In 1871 Jesse
Hartwell returned home to the United States from Tengchow,
in Northeast China, following the death of his wife, apparently
25
leaving the field clear for his longstanding sparring partner and
fellow Baptist missionary Tarleton Crawford. The following year,
however, he returned, having remarried, and the highly personal
conflict between the two men resumed.19 A number of missionaries left the CIM, although not China, because they had been
forbidden by the head of CIM, Hudson Taylor, to associate with
the liberal missionary Timothy Richard.20 Most of the others who
left because of personal conflict appear to have been Episcopal
missionaries working under Bishop William J. Boone, Jr., whose
paternalistic rule of his diocese was not appreciated by some of
the missionaries under him.21 During the American Civil War,
Southern mission boards were often strapped for funds, and as
a result some missionaries had to support themselves by other
employment. Others left the service.
A few former missionaries accepted employment with
the British, American, or Chinese government. For example,
Peter Parker became chargé d’affaires and then commissioner
plenipotentiary for the United States. Young J. Allen, who had
arrived in China in 1860, worked as a translator at the Jiangnan
Arsenal and published Wanguo gongbao (The globe magazine) to
promote China’s modernization. W. A. P. Martin became president
Table 3. Overall Length of Service
0–10
Years
11–20 21–30 31–40 41–50
Period 1, 1807–46
Women % 64.6
Men %
58.2
20.4
17.7
Women % 61.6
Men %
51.0
15.8
14.7
Women % 44.0
Men %
45.9
23.4
12.4
Women %
Men %
20.8
22.8
46.8
45.5
Inadequate
>50 data
6.2
7.6
6.2
5.7
0.0
3.2
0.0
0.0
2.7
8.2
Children and Families
Period 2, 1847–60
6.8
6.9
5.5
7.8
4.8
7.4
0.0
0.0
5.5
12.3
0.0
0.0
21.3
15.2
1.1
2.2
0.0
0.0
Period 3, 1861–76
9.2
10.2
1.4
7.5
0.0
9.0
Period 4, 1877–90
12.5
10.8
11.3
11.6
7.5
8.3
Note: Because of rounding, percentage totals in the rows may not equal 100.
of the Tongwenguan, China’s first Western-language school,
established in 1862, and subsequently was head of the Imperial
University. Joseph Edkins and Dr. Melancthon W. Fish joined the
Imperial Maritime Customs. S. Wells Williams resigned from the
ABCFM in 1857 and joined the U.S. legation in Beijing, where
he worked for over a decade. Numerous missionaries acted
temporarily as interpreters and advisers in treaty negotiations.
Asian studies in the West benefited from the early departure of certain missionaries. For example, Samuel Kidd, who
returned to Britain in 1832 after eight years in China, became the
first professor of Chinese language and literature at University
College, London. After three decades of service, James Legge
returned to Scotland in 1873 to continue his translation of the
Chinese classics and then in 1875 was appointed to teach Chinese at the University of Oxford. S. Wells Williams did have a
long career in China, first as a missionary and then as a foreign26
service officer, but after retiring from China in 1877, he became
professor of Chinese language and literature at Yale University.
His famous work The Middle Kingdom was the most widely
read introduction to China in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Later than the period covered in this study, Kenneth
Scott Latourette likewise served briefly in China (only 1910–12)
and then returned to the United States because of ill health. It
took him two years to recover sufficiently to accept a part-time
teaching position at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, but he
went on to become Sterling Professor of Missions and Oriental
History at Yale University. His History of Christian Missions in
China, published in 1929, was the standard work on the subject
for decades and is still useful as a reference work. Other returned
missionaries served as pastors in their homeland or accepted
positions on the boards of mission societies. A few went to Japan
to open mission work there.
Overall in China, the leading causes of death were dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid fever, respiratory diseases including
tuberculosis, and cancer. CIM evangelists apparently had a
somewhat higher death rate than missionaries of other societies. CIM missionaries did not receive a regular salary and were
expected to live frugally. Often they were traveling evangelists
who stayed at and ate in Chinese inns. After a CIM missionary
committed suicide, a member of the Oberlin Band who had
befriended her remarked: “I only wish they [CIM missionaries]
could have thought it their duty to live in more comfort, but
they lived just about as the poorer Chinese do. I feel sure if she
had taken better care of herself and lived in a more homelike
way with good nourishing food, she could have stood it much
longer here.”22
I have not attempted to include infants and children in this study
of attrition, even though the high death rate among children certainly affected the morale of the missionary community. Annie
Crombie, who had lost three babies, lamented: “I often feel the
grave to be very near indeed, yet many of the young and strong
have gone to rest, and I am here to suffer, or to stand still and
wait, not to do.”23 She was not alone. William Lennox in his Health
of Missionary Families in China: A Statistical Study focused much
of the discussion on children. Although his data come from a
later period, they are still useful for the study of attrition among
missionaries in China. In 1918–19 Lennox sent out questionnaires
to 2,200 missionaries and received 1,300 replies. Based on the
answers, he reported that the birth rate among China missionaries was higher than among college graduates in the United
States: 3.5 births per missionary woman, as compared with 2.2
per graduate of all-female Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Most of the women answering the questionnaire had suffered
at least one miscarriage. Mortality among missionary children
was less than one-third that of Chinese children, but three times
higher than among children in the English countryside. Major
causes of death were dysentery, diarrhea, and respiratory illnesses.
With the introduction of vaccines, other causes of death became
readily preventable: smallpox, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and
diphtheria, for example. The purpose of Lennox’s book was to
encourage missionary parents to take steps, especially vaccination and improved sanitation, that would reduce attrition among
their children.
The tables do not show as great a difference between
men and women in their rates of attrition as might have been
expected from the literature. This may be partially because
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
of the women missing from or passed over in silence in the
records. After a decline between the first and second periods,
the total percentages of men and women who left the service
because of either death or ill health did not diverge greatly.
The principal difference was that, in the first two periods, the
percentage of those who died was higher for women, while
the percentage of those who left China for health reasons was
greater for men throughout the century. In the case of women,
a significant source of attrition was departure after the death or
resignation of their husbands. By contrast, men often remained
on the field after the death of a wife. As for length of service,
the proportion who terminated their career during the first year
was higher for women than for men in all four periods; after
Notes
1. Before China was open to Christian evangelism, quite a few
missionaries went to the Straits Settlements, often to work among
the Chinese in southeast Asia. Many would transfer to China in the
1840s once it was open. I have included these missionaries in my
survey. I also wish to note my gratitude to Frederick H. Gregory for
help with the tables that accompany this article.
2. James Cannon, History of Southern Methodist Missions (Nashville:
Cokesbury Press, 1926), p. 97.
3. Alvyn Austin, China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing
Society, 1832–1905 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 136.
4. From “Report on the Return of Missionaries, 1838,” ABC Subcommittee Reports, no. 2, pp. 4–5, cited in Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker
and the Opening of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1973), p. 48.
5. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., East Asian Research Center, 1974),
p. 11.
6. Austin, China’s Millions, p. 275.
7. Alexander Wylie, Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese:
Giving a List of Their Publications and Obituary Notices of the Deceased,
with Copious Indexes (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press,
1867; new ed., Taipei: Ch’eng-wen Publishing, 1967), p. iv.
8. Austin, China’s Millions, p. 388.
9. William G. Lennox, The Health of Missionary Families in China:
A Statistical Study (Denver: Univ. of Denver, [1921?]), p. 95.
10. Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s
Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002),
pp. 48–49.
11. E. C. Bridgman, “What I Have Seen in Shanghai,” Chinese Repository
19 (June 1850): 338.
12. Jessie G. Lutz, Opening China: Karl F. A. Gützlaff and Sino-Western
Relations, 1827–1852 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 245–46.
13. Gulick, Peter Parker, pp. 68–69.
14. Bridgman, “What I Have Seen in Shanghai,” pp. 332, 335, and 337.
15. Cannon, History of Southern Methodist Missions, p. 97. In the period
Cannon is discussing, the pronoun “he” applies. Only males were
considered missionaries; wives did not count and there were very
few single female missionaries.
16. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, pp. 63–64.
17. “Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (South),” in A Century of Protestant
Missions in China, 1807–1907: Being the Centenary Conference Historical
Volume, ed. D. MacGillivray (Shanghai: American Presbyterian
Mission Press, 1907), p. 401. See also G. Thompson Brown, Earthen
Vessels and Transcendent Power: American Presbyterians in China,
1837–1952 (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997).
18. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China
(London: SPCK, 1929), p. 406.
19. The conflict between Hartwell and Crawford is examined in Irwin T.
Hyatt, Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American
January 2012
1861, however, the attrition percentiles at the end of ten years
on the field were almost identical for men and women.
By the fourth period both men and women were serving
longer in China. A significant minority of both sexes remained on
the field for between twenty-one and forty years, and there were
even a few who served over fifty years. Men consistently lived
longer than women, but women (17 percent) and men (nearly 25
percent) were increasingly living to old age. Despite the decline
in the rate of attrition between 1807 and 1890, however, that rate
still remained high. Even during the fourth period, the service
of over 45 percent of both the men and the women terminated
short of ten years, usually for health reasons or because of death.
Mission work in China remained a costly and risky career.24
Missionaries in East Shantung (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1976), pp. 12–58; for Hartwell’s departure and return, see
pp. 20 and 26.
20. Between 1881 and 1895 more than fifty CIM missionaries in Shanxi,
Richard’s home province, resigned; they either joined other societies
or became independent. See Austin, China’s Millions, p. 268.
21. Mei-mei Lin, “The Episcopalian Missionaries in China, 1835–1900”
(Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1994), pp. 85–156.
22. Eva Jane Price, China Journal, 1889–1900: An American Missionary
Family During the Boxer Rebellion (New York: Scribner ’s, 1989),
p. 69, cited in Austin, China’s Millions, p. 277.
23. Annie Crombie, cited in Austin, China’s Millions, p. 136.
24. In addition to the works already cited, much data on Protestant
missionary attrition in nineteenth-century China can be gathered from
the following works: Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary
of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Edward
Band, Working His Purpose Out: The History of the English Presbyterian
Mission, 1847–1947 (Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing,1972; original
ed., 1948); Alfred Bonn, Ein Jahrhundert Rheinische Mission (Barmen:
Verlag des Missionshauses, 1928); A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor
and China’s Open Century, 3 vols. (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1981–82); G. G. Findlay and W. W. Holdsworth, The History of the
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 5 vols. (London: J. A. Sharp,
1921–24); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women
Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1984); Thoralf Klein, Die Basler Mission in der Provinz Guangdong (Südchina), 1859–1931 (Munich: Iudicium, 2002); Walter N.
Lacy, A Hundred Years of China Methodism (New York: AbingdonCokesbury, 1948); Michael C. Lazick, E. C. Bridgman, 1801–1861:
America’s First Missionary to China (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 2000); Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary
Society, 1795–1895, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1899);
C. F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts: An Historical Account of the SPGFP, 1701–
1900 (London: SPGFP, 1901); Records of the General Conference of the
Protestant Missionaries in China Held at Shanghai, May 10–24, 1877
(Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1878); Wilhelm Schlatter,
Geschichte der Basler Mission, 1815–1915, vol. 2, Die Geschichte der Basler
Mission in Indien und China (Basel: Basler Missionsbuchhandlung,
1916); James Sibree, comp., London Missionary Society: A Register
of Missionaries, Deputations, etc. from 1796 to 1923, 4th ed. (London:
LMS, 1923); Milton T. Stauffer, ed., The Christian Occupation of
China (1922; repr., San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979);
Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its
Environment, Its Men, and Its Work, 4 vols. (London: CMS, 1899–1916);
Sophie B. Titterington, A Century of Baptist Missions (Philadelphia:
American Baptist Publication Society, 1891); so-called Vinton
Books, with short ABCFM biographies, www.archive.org/stream/
vintonbookafrica01vint#page/n95/mode/2up, pp. 28–78.
27
Christianity 2012: The 200th Anniversary of American Foreign
Missions
T
his two-page report is the twenty-eighth in an annual
series in the IBMR. The series began a few years after
the publication of the World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE, Oxford
Univ. Press, 1982). Its purpose was to lay out, in summary form
on a single page, an annual update of the most significant global
and regional statistics presented in the WCE. The WCE itself was
expanded into a second edition in 2001 and was accompanied
by an analytical volume, World Christian Trends (WCT, William
Carey Library, 2001). In 2003 an online database, World Christian
Database (WCD, later published by Brill), was launched, updating
most of the statistics in the WCE and WCT. The Atlas of Global
Christianity (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), based on these
data, was featured throughout 2010, most notably at the centennial celebrations of the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh
1910 (Tokyo in May, Edinburgh in June, Cape Town in October,
and Boston in November).
200 Years of American Foreign Missions
This year is the two-hundredth anniversary of the ordination
(February 5, 1812) and sailing (February 19), from Derby Wharf in
Salem, Massachusetts, of the first American foreign missionaries.
From February 5 to 20, 2012, a series of commemorative conferences are planned in and around Salem. Accordingly, we have
added data to the table for all categories for the year 1800. This
provides a two-hundred-year horizon for comparing statistics
related to Christian mission. For example, line 22 shows that 22.7
percent of the world was Christian in 1800, rising to 34.5 percent
by 1900. A closer examination of the data (country by country),
however, reveals that, in Kenneth Scott Latourette’s so-called
Great Century (1815–1914), the reason for the global growth of
Christianity was primarily its expansion in the Americas and
lower death rates among Christians in Europe. Ironically, it was
during the period in which the global percentage of Christians
was declining (to 32.5 percent by a.d. 2000) that the number and
proportion of Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America greatly
increased (but was not quite able to stem the tide of losses in
Europe). Early in the twenty-first century, growth of Christianity
in the Global South is exceeding the losses in the Global North.
By 2012 the percentage of Christians globally grew to 33 percent
and is expected to rise to over 34 percent by 2025 (and on to 36
percent by 2050). Today, American missionaries join a host of
others from nearly every country of the world, including many
from Burma/Myanmar—the eventual destination of those first
American missionaries in 1812!
Another interesting observation is that, in 1800, Christians
and Muslims together accounted for just under 33 percent of the
world’s population (lines 1, 10, and 11). By 1900 this figure had
increased to 47 percent, and by 2000 it was 53 percent. We project
it to be 58 percent by 2025, and it could rise to 66 percent by 2100.
This means that these two religions, which made up a third of
the world’s population in 1800, will likely make up two-thirds
This report was prepared by Todd M. Johnson, David B. Barrett†, and Peter
F. Crossing at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, GordonConwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Samples
from the Atlas of Global Christianity, as well as footnotes for the “Status
of Global Mission” table, can be found at www.globalchristianity.org.
28
by 2100. This is a compelling reason for Christian-Muslim relations to be at the top of missiological priorities in coming years.
ˇ
Missionary Deployment
Line 50 shows that in 2012 there are approximately 417,000 foreign
missionaries (i.e., missionaries working in a country other than their
own). When examined at the country level, our data (WCD) show
that the 42 least-evangelized countries in the world, comprising
958 million people, make up 14 percent of the world’s population
but receive only 3.5 percent of the world’s foreign missionaries
(fewer than 15,000). Similarly, the world’s 4,400 least-evangelized
peoples (1.7 billion, or 25 percent of the world’s population) receive
only about 7.5 percent of the world’s foreign missionaries (about
30,000). It should be noted that about the same proportion—7.5
percent—of national missionaries (those crossing cultural boundaries within their own countries) work among the least-evangelized
peoples, and a much lower portion (perhaps less than 1 percent) of
all national workers (Christians working among their own peoples)
work among these same least-evangelized groups.
One New Country
On July 9, 2011, Southern Sudan became an independent country, leaving the remainder of Sudan to consider itself a “second
republic.” Our team has produced detailed tables on the religious
demographics of the two new republics (see www.lausanne.org/
analysis). The first thing to notice is that Sudan (Northern) has been
at least 85 percent Muslim for the past 100 years. Over that same
period, animists (or ethnoreligionists) have declined from almost
15 percent to less than 3 percent. A significant Christian minority
exists in the North, mostly in Khartoum and the Nubia mountains,
consisting mainly of Roman Catholics and Anglicans, many of
them transplants from the South. Southern Sudan, in contrast,
was largely animistic in 1900 but gradually has become majority
Christian over the course of the century. The bulk of the growth
has been over the past forty years, even in the face of civil wars
and the deaths of perhaps as many as 2 million people in the South.
Despite the conflict, trials, and seemingly poor outlook of life
in Sudan, the church has made great gains there in recent decades.
Progress began during the nineteenth century when Christians,
with slave-trade guilt, began a mission in Sudan, though with few
converts to report. Roman Catholic work in Sudan began in 1842,
though much of it was focused on Khartoum. Anglicans started in
1899, also initially based in Khartoum. Christianity did not begin
to grow significantly until the twentieth century; all missionaries
were expelled in 1956 at the start of the First Sudanese Civil War,
followed by genocide and displacement. Despite the strife, the
church grew. The Episcopal Church of the Sudan is the fastestgrowing church in the Anglican Communion; this is apparent
even in refugee camps scattered throughout Southern Sudan.
Conflict will likely continue in the new context. The return of
refugees to an already underdeveloped country will undoubtedly
put great strain on the nation’s scant resources. In addition, the
situation in Southern Sudan is arguably one of the worst health
crises in the world. The nation has essentially no health-care
system and is home to a combination of deadly, untreatable,
and unique diseases.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Status of Global Mission, 2012, in the Context of AD 1800–2025
1800
1900
1970
mid-2000
Trend
24-hour
mid-2012
% p.a.
change
GLOBAL POPULATION
1. Total population
903,650,000 1,619,625,000 3,696,189,000 6,122,770,000
1.18
229,000 7,052,132,000
2. Urban dwellers (urbanites)
36,146,000
232,695,000 1,342,451,000 2,849,489,000
2.02
200,000 3,620,811,000
3. Rural dwellers
867,504,000 1,386,930,000 2,353,738,000 3,273,281,000
0.39
29,000 3,431,321,000
4. Adult population (over 15s)
619,000,000 1,073,646,000 2,312,042,000 4,272,601,000
1.61
228,000 5,175,954,000
5. Literates
123,800,000
296,153,000 1,476,151,000 3,275,110,000
2.17
252,000 4,238,241,000
6. Nonliterates
495,200,000
777,493,000
835,891,000
997,491,000
-0.51
-24,000
937,713,000
WORLDWIDE EXPANSION OF CITIES
7. Megacities (over 1 million population)
1
20
161
402
1.92
–
505
8. Urban poor
18 million
100 million
650 million 1,400 million
3.10
172,000 2,020 million
9. Urban slum dwellers
3 million
20 million
260 million
700 million
3.35
96,000 1040 million
GLOBAL POPULATION BY RELIGION
10. Christians (total all kinds) (=World C)
204,980,000
558,131,000 1,229,238,000 1,991,602,000
1.30
83,000 2,325,507,000
11. Muslims
90,500,000
199,818,000
577,039,000 1,279,859,000
1.79
78,000 1,583,783,000
12. Hindus
108,000,000
202,973,000
463,215,000
821,948,000
1.39
37,000
969,602,000
13. Nonreligious (agnostics)
300,000
3,029,000
542,632,000
666,060,000
-0.06
-1,100
661,288,000
14. Buddhists
69,400,000
126,956,000
235,095,000
418,963,000
1.03
13,400
473,818,000
15. Chinese folk-religionists
310,000,000
380,174,000
228,822,000
434,638,000
0.60
7,700
467,216,000
16. Ethnoreligionists
92,000,000
117,437,000
168,801,000
234,664,000
1.00
7,300
264,552,000
17. Atheists
10,000
226,000
165,506,000
140,001,000
-0.20
-800
136,642,000
18. New-Religionists (Neoreligionists)
0
5,986,000
39,382,000
61,321,000
0.25
400
63,220,000
19. Sikhs
1,800,000
2,962,000
10,678,000
20,542,000
1.51
1,000
24,585,000
20. Jews
9,000,000
12,292,000
15,045,000
13,744,000
0.69
300
14,921,000
21. Non-Christians (=Worlds A and B)
698,670,000 1,061,494,000 2,466,951,000 4,131,168,000
1.13
146,000 4,726,625,000
GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
22. Total Christians as % of world (=World C)
22.7
34.5
33.3
32.5
0.11
–
33.0
23. Affiliated Christians (church members)
195,680,000
521,683,000 1,119,824,000 1,886,698,000
1.33
80,000 2,209,645,000
24. Church attenders
180,100,000
469,303,000
885,777,000 1,359,420,000
1.04
44,000 1,539,066,000
25. Evangelicals
25,000,000
71,728,000
95,106,000
228,231,000
2.25
18,000
298,016,000
26. Great Commission Christians
21,000,000
77,924,000
276,680,000
603,989,000
1.20
23,000
697,089,000
27. Pentecostals/Charismatics/Neocharismatics
10,000
981,000
62,634,000
460,108,000
2.41
40,000
612,314,000
28. Christian martyrs per year (10-year average) 2,500
34,400
377,000
160,000
-3.84
270
100,000
MEMBERSHIP BY 6 ECCLESIASTICAL MEGABLOCS
29. Roman Catholics 106,430,000
266,566,000
664,987,000 1,043,333,000
1.09
35,000 1,187,637,000
30. Protestants
400,000
103,028,000
208,304,000
353,401,000
1.71
20,000
432,896,000
31. Independents
30,980,000
7,931,000
84,622,000
271,426,000
2.35
23,000
358,611,000
32. Orthodox
55,220,000
115,855,000
144,497,000
257,109,000
0.62
5,000
276,891,000
33. Anglicans
11,910,000
30,578,000
47,408,000
74,892,000
1.52
4,000
89,716,000
34. Marginal Christians
40,000
928,000
11,121,000
29,009,000
1.97
2,000
36,679,000
MEMBERSHIP BY 6 CONTINENTS, 21 UN REGIONS
35. Africa (5 regions)
4,330,000
8,736,000
115,879,000
357,109,000
2.61
35,000
486,695,000
36. Asia (4 regions)
8,350,000
20,774,000
91,330,000
274,792,000
2.26
22,000
359,373,000
37. Europe (including Russia; 4 regions)
171,700,000
368,254,000
466,987,000
547,998,000
0.21
3,000
562,087,000
38. Latin America (3 regions)
14,900,000
60,027,000
262,793,000
477,058,000
1.18
18,000
549,075,000
39. Northern America (1 region)
5,600,000
59,570,000
168,372,000
208,650,000
0.63
4,000
224,930,000
40. Oceania (4 regions)
100,000
4,323,000
14,464,000
21,092,000
1.21
1,000
24,356,000
CHRISTIAN ORGANIZATIONS
41. Denominations
500
1,600
18,700
34,100
1.95
2.3
43,000
42. Congregations (worship centers)
150,000
400,000
1,416,000
3,400,000
2.80
360
4,738,000
43. Service agencies
600
1,500
14,100
23,000
1.95
1.5
29,000
44. Foreign-mission sending agencies
200
600
2,200
4,000
1.71
0.2
4,900
CONCILIARISM: ONGOING COUNCILS OF CHURCHES
45. Confessional councils (CWCs, at world level)
20
40
150
310
1.25
–
360
46. National councils of churches
0
19
283
598
1.50
–
710
CHRISTIAN WORKERS (clergy, laypersons)
47. Nationals (citizens; all denominations)
900,000
2,100,000
4,600,000
10,900,000
0.98
328
12,249,000
48. Men
800,000
1,900,000
3,100,000
6,540,000
0.92
185
7,302,000
49. Women
100,000
200,000
1,500,000
4,360,000
1.06
143
4,947,000
50. Aliens (foreign missionaries)
25,000
62,000
240,000
420,000
-0.06
-1
417,000
CHRISTIAN FINANCE (in US$, per year)
51. Personal income of church members
40 billion
270 billion
4,100 billion 17,000 billion
5.38
87 billion 31,890 billion
52. Giving to Christian causes
1 billion
8 billion
70 billion
300 billion
5.47 1.6 billion
569 billion
53. Churches’ income
950 million
7 billion
50 billion
120 billion
5.44 620 million
227 billion
54. Parachurch and institutional income
50 million
1 billion
20 billion
180 billion
5.49 940 million
342 billion
55. Cost-effectiveness (cost per baptism)
7,500
17,500
128,000
330,000
7.22
151
762,000
56. Ecclesiastical crime
100,000
300,000
5 million
18 billion
5.87 100 million
35 billion
57. Income of global foreign missions
25 million
200 million
3 billion
17 billion
5.54 90 million
32 billion
58. Computers in Christian use (numbers)
0
0
1,000
328 million
5.45
93,000
620 million
CHRISTIAN LITERATURE (titles, not copies)
59. Books about Christianity
75,000
300,000
1,800,000
4,800,000
3.67
700
7,400,000
60. Christian periodicals
800
3,500
23,000
35,000
4.30
7
58,000
SCRIPTURE DISTRIBUTION (all sources, per year)
61. Bibles
500,000
5,452,600
25,000,000
53,700,000
2.91
207,000
75,800,000
62. Scriptures including gospels, selections
1,500,000
20 million
281 million 4,600 million
1.07 14 million 4,960 million
63. Bible density (copies in place)
20 million
108 million
443 million 1,400 million
1.97
96,000 1,770 million
CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING
64. Total monthly listeners/viewers
0
0
750,000,000 1,830,000,000
1.11
64,000 2,090,000,000
CHRISTIAN URBAN MISSION
65. Non-Christian megacities
1
5
65
226
1.08
–
257
66. New non-Christian urban dwellers per day
500
5,200
51,100
119,000
0.21
0.7
122,000
67. Urban Christians
5,500,000
159,600,000
660,800,000 1,230,131,000
1.62
66,300 1,492,262,000
GLOBAL EVANGELISM (per year)
68. Evangelism-hours
600 million
5 billion
25 billion
165 billion
0.02 450 million
165 billion
69. Hearer-hours (offers)
900 million
10 billion
99 billion
938 billion
1.92 3.2 billion 1,178 billion
70. Disciple-opportunities (offers) per capita
1
6
27
153
0.72
0.5
167
WORLD EVANGELIZATION
71. Unevangelized population (=World A)
674,350,000
880,122,000 1,653,168,000 1,832,151,000
1.01
57,000 2,066,504,000
72. Unevangelized as % of world
74.6
54.3
44.7
29.9
-0.17
–
29.3
73. World evangelization plans since AD 30
160
250
510
1,500
2.84
0.2
2,100
January 2012
2025
8,002,979,000
4,549,674,000
3,453,305,000
6,087,748,000
5,131,500,000
956,248,000
650
3,000 million
1,600 million
2,727,153,000
1,951,389,000
1,108,202,000
636,826,000
546,590,000
479,302,000
256,530,000
132,342,000
64,108,000
29,326,000
16,004,000
5,275,826,000
34.1
2,607,894,000
1,760,568,000
393,478,000
837,687,000
828,427,000
150,000
1,323,199,000
532,301,000
496,164,000
291,712,000
112,983,000
50,821,000
681,825,000
484,433,000
560,961,000
612,812,000
239,752,000
28,111,000
55,000
7,500,000
36,000
6,000
600
870
14,000,000
8,000,000
6,000,000
550,000
50,000 billion
890 billion
350 billion
540 billion
1,470,000
60 billion
50 billion
1,300 million
11,800,000
100,000
110,000,000
6,000 million
2,280 million
2,400,000,000
300
125,000
1,819,232,000
300 billion
3,000 billion
375
2,261,675,000
28.3
3,000
29
David B. Barrett: Missionary Statistician
Todd M. Johnson
I
n 1982 Time magazine called David Barrett (1927–2011) Union’s Missionary Research Library, with its 100,000 volumes
the “Linnaeus of religious taxonomy” and dubbed his and vast archives, Barrett earned his Ph.D. in 1965 in a joint
magnum opus “a miracle from Nairobi” and a “bench mark program between Union Theological Seminary and Columbia
in our understanding of the true religious state of the planet.”1 University. His two main faculty advisers were Marxists, but
Against all odds, for the prior fourteen years the Rev. Dr. David they supported his research into 6,000 schismatic movements
B. Barrett had traveled to nearly every country in the world, in Africa. Barrett’s dissertation was later published by Oxford
University Press and today is considered
compiling information on the religious status
one of the classics on the subject.2
of “every soul on earth.” The result was the
A confirmed bachelor until age fortyWorld Christian Encyclopedia (WCE), a thoufive, Barrett married fellow British missand-page oversized volume listing 20,000
sionary Pam Stubley in 1972. The new Mrs.
Christian denominations and recounting the
Barrett brought an outgoing and friendly
history of Christianity in every country from
hospitality to Barrett’s researcher persona.
the time of Christ to the present. Barrett also
She also helped her new husband organize
provided a detailed snapshot of the status of
his overwhelming collection of papers,
all religious affiliations, the first time such a
letters, maps, and photos piling up in the
comprehensive treatment had been achieved.
Nairobi office. Together they hosted hunIn the years that followed, the WCE was cited
dreds of Christian leaders in their home in
extensively in both Christian and secular
Africa and later in Virginia. They had three
publications. Consequently, Barrett is largely
children: Claire, Luke, and Timothy.
responsible for launching the modern field of
In 1985, after the WCE had been pubreligious demography.
lished, Barrett (still under appointment as an
David Brian Barrett was born on August
Anglican missionary) left Nairobi for Rich30, 1927, in Llandudno in northern Wales in the
mond, Virginia, and a position as a research
United Kingdom. As a teenager, Barrett cycled
consultant at the Foreign (now International)
with school friends around secret airfields,
David B. Barrett, 1982
Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Conmaking models of new wartime secret aircraft.
vention, where he remained until 1993. Until
Following receipt of his B.A. in aeronautics
from Cambridge University, Barrett began his career at Britain’s his death Barrett continued as an independent researcher of global
Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1948. (He would receive his M.A. Christianity through the World Evangelization Research Center
in Richmond and its successor, the Center for the Study of Global
from Cambridge in 1952.)
He was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1954 Christianity (established in 2003 by Todd Johnson at Gordonand a priest in 1955 and appointed as a missionary to Kenya Conwell Theological Seminary, in South Hamilton, Mass.).
Barrett’s contributions to the field of religious demography
through the Church Missionary Society in 1956. “Forget science
are extensive, and his published research continues to influence
completely,” his bishop advised. But Barrett could not.
Upon arrival in Kenya Barrett found that a massive ecclesi- both Christian missionary effort and secular understanding of
astical schism was under way and that it included the seven Luo religious adherence. He spent more than ten years compiling
priests with whom he was assigned to work. Although warned and serving as editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia (1982),
to have nothing to do with these schismatics, Barrett befriended which was followed in 2001 by a second edition (with coeditors
them and was given access to rare documents and interviews. George Kurian and Todd Johnson) and the companion volume
After learning Luo and Swahili, he began to compile the history World Christian Trends (coauthored with Johnson). He was also a
longtime contributor of statistics on global religious adherence
of their movement.
In 1962 Barrett was on leave in Britain, where he worked to the Britannica Book of the Year and the International Bulletin of
with famed Anglican evangelist Bryan Green. That same year Missionary Research. The reliability of his estimates was acknowlhe was invited to Union Theological Seminary in New York edged in 2008 by a group of Princeton scholars studying data on
as a fellow in a twenty-member ecumenical studies program religious affiliation.3
In one of the great ironies of Barrett’s career, it was his placewith Pitney Van Dusen, Kenneth Scott Latourette, and others.
He went on to take doctoral studies in the social-scientific ment as a missionary in Africa that helped him see significance
study of religion. There he discovered that his schism experi- in counting religionists. In the United States and Europe, leading
ence among the Luo was not unique. Working extensively in sociologists were predicting the imminent demise of religion,4
celebrating its passing as a sign of man’s ability to overcome
Todd M. Johnson is Associate Professor of Global superstition. Barrett, however, saw a different future and boldly
Christianity and Director of the Center for the Study set forth his own views in a seminal article in 1970 that projected
5
of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theologi- 350 million Christians in Africa by the year 2000.
Barrett had a dry but playful sense of humor. On one occacal Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He is
coeditor of the Atlas of Global Christianity (Edin- sion he was asked to address a crowd of wealthy donors on the
burgh University Press, 2010) and coauthor of World most effective means of evangelization. He had been studying
Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Christian martyrdom, so he presented the idea that martyrdom
Press, 2001).
—[email protected] might be the most effective means of evangelization. After an
30
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Asbury Seminary:
renewing our vision by
engaging the global Church!
“A well-balanced emphasis on
spiritual life & high academic
standards distinguishes the
quality of this scholarly
community . . .”
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a community called ... ASBURYSEMINARYEDU
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awkward pause, one of the donors ventured, “Dr. Barrett, what
is the second most effective means of evangelization?”
Barrett was very concerned with the use of Christian resources in evangelization. In the late 1980s he decided to investigate the
deployment of the missionary forces of various agencies—which
turned out to be one of his most unpopular projects. The results
showed that, while most agencies claimed to be evangelizing
the world, few had workers among the unevangelized.6 Like
so much of Barrett’s work, this analysis eventually produced
some remarkable results. Shortly after Barrett’s death in 2011,
the International Mission Board reported, “When David Barrett
came to the Foreign Mission Board as a consultant in 1985, less
than 3 percent of our mission force was deployed to this last
frontier. Today, as a result of Barrett’s prophetic push, more than
80 percent of the people groups our missionaries serve among
are unreached.”7
Perhaps David Barrett’s greatest achievement is that his
research continues after his death. He gathered younger scholars
around him and modeled an unbending commitment to pursue
this research whether or not it was popular in the academy or
among church leaders. Barrett treated younger colleagues as
equals, always interested in their ideas and perspectives and often
changing his own ideas as a result. He pioneered a “reconnaissance
perspective” in mission, in which research is seen as essential
for strategic planning. The impact of his methods and findings
reverberates around the world, as young researchers continue
to use and develop his much-treasured scientific and biblical
perspectives to understand and pursue world evangelization.
Selected Bibliography
An extensive collection of David Barrett’s correspondence, articles, and
books is housed at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, at
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
In addition, over one million documents collected by Barrett and his
colleagues documenting the global spread of Christianity are filed there.
The collection also includes thousands of photographs, drawings, maps,
and other forms of media.
Ten Seminal Books and Articles by David B. Barrett
1965­
1968
1970
1982
(with James S. Lawson and B. B. Ayam) The Evangelization of
West Africa Today: A Survey Across 21 Nations and 150 Tribes.
Yaoundé, Cameroon: DWME/AACC. 39 pp.
Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand
Contemporary Religious Movements. Nairobi: Oxford Univ. Press;
2nd printing, 1970. 363 pp., with foldout map. Resulted in
seventy book reviews, 1968–72.
“AD 2000: 350 Million Christians in Africa.” International
Review of Mission 59, no. 233 (January): 39–54. Issue “Sixty Years
After Edinburgh.” Background paper, in French and English,
for Abidjan Assembly, All Africa Conference of Churches,
September 1969.
World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches
and Religions in the Modern World, 1900–2000. Nairobi: Oxford
Notes
1. Richard Ostling and Alistair Matheson, “Counting Every Soul on
Earth: Miracle from Nairobi; The First Census of All Religions,” Time,
May 3, 1982.
2. Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary
Religious Movements (Nairobi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968).
3. See “Estimating the Religious Composition of All Nations: An
Empirical Assessment of the World Christian Database,” by Becky
Hsu, Amy Reynolds, Conrad Hackett, and James Gibbon, Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 4 (2008): 678–93.
4. See, for example, Peter Berger’s statement in April 1968 that by the
1983
1988
1989
1990
1995
2001
Univ. Press. 1,010 pp., 1,500 photographs, 24-page atlas.
Resulted in 350 book reviews. Second edition in 2001 with
George T. Kurian and Todd M. Johnson.
“Silver and Gold Have I None: Church of the Poor or Church
of the Rich?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 7, no. 4
(October): 146–51.
(with James W. Reapsome) Seven Hundred Plans to Evangelize the
World: The Rise of a Global Evangelization Movement. The AD 2000
Series. Birmingham, Ala.: New Hope. 123 pp.
(with T. John Padwick) Rise Up and Walk! Conciliarism and the
African Indigenous Churches, 1815–1987. Nairobi: Oxford Univ.
Press. 111 pp. A sequel to Schism and Renewal in Africa (1968).
(with Todd M. Johnson) Our Globe and How to Reach It: Seeing the
World Evangelized by AD 2000 and Beyond. The AD 2000 Series.
Birmingham, Ala.: New Hope. 136 pp. Official Data Book of
NARSC/Indianapolis 1990 and ICCOWE/Brighton 1991.
(ed., with Todd M. Johnson) AD 2000 Global Monitor: Keeping Track
of World Evangelization. Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library.
Consolidated volume, first forty monthly issues, 1990–94, with
extensive full index.
(with Todd M. Johnson) World Christian Trends, AD 30–AD 2200:
Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus. Pasadena, Calif.:
William Carey Library. 952 pp.
year 2000, “religious believers are likely to be found only in small
sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture” (“A
Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion,” New York Times, April 25, 1968,
p. 3).
5. “AD 2000: 350 Million Christians in Africa,” International Review of
Mission 59, no. 233 (January 1970): 39–54.
6. The results were first published in June 1991. See the consolidated
volume AD 2000 Global Monitor: Keeping Track of World Evangelization
(Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1995).
7. See www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=35901.
New Perspectives on Accountability in Mission
The Korean and English editions of Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies (© 2011
Word of Life Press and Wipf & Stock Publishers) were published in November 2011. This book is based
on case studies and presentations made at the Korean Global Mission Leadership Forum, February 10–14,
2011, at the Overseas Ministries Study Center. Edited by Jonathan J. Bonk and associate editors Geoffrey
W. Hahn, Sang-Cheol (Steve) Moon, A. Scott Moreau, Yong Kyu Park, and Nam Yong Sung, the 343-page
book (available from OMSC, Wipf & Stock, and Word of Life) includes Bible studies on Samuel and Paul
by Christopher J. H. Wright; a case study of the SaRang Community Church, Seoul, Korea, by Seung Kwan
(David) Yoo; an analysis of mission administration accountability by Jerry Rankin; and a conference summary by Sang–Cheol (Steve) Moon.
32
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Lydia Mary Fay and the Episcopal Church Mission in China
Ian Welch
L
ydia Mary Fay was born in Bennington, Vermont, in
1804 and died in Chefoo (today Yantai) in Shandong
Province, North China, in October 1878.1 Her death followed
a long series of age-related illnesses; from the mid-1860s she
required extended breaks from her work in Shanghai, which
she spent either in her room at the mission school or in foreign
sanatorium towns in China.2
Most of Mary Fay’s early life was spent in or within twenty
miles of Albany, New York, but her education and wide reading
gave her a Eurocentric literary worldview.3 Her life story exemplifies people who find purpose for their lives (i.e., a vocation)
in a teaching career underpinned by strong religious faith, a
combination that eventually took her to the mission field at the
age of forty-six, this in an era when the average age of new missionaries was about twenty-five. She had become a governess/
teacher in the 1820s, and by the time of her death she had worked
with young people for over fifty years.4 She was a missionary
for twenty-seven years when the average length of service by
American Episcopal missionaries in China was around five years.
Like so many people, she is at best a “shadowy figure in narrations of religious and general history.”5 As an ancient Hebrew
writer observed, “There are some who have no memorial, who
have perished as though they had not lived; they have become
as though they had not been born” (Sir. 44:9 RSV).
By the 1890s a majority of female English-speaking missionaries were single women undertaking traditional “female”
nurturing roles in education, health, and social welfare, while
men ran the ecclesiastical and mission administration at home
and abroad. Women found it almost impossible to overcome the
“cult of domesticity,” which, for women such as Lydia Mary Fay,
required home, husband, and family as evidence of a “normal”
female life.6
Focus
Missionary history has tended to overlook the personal lives
and deeper longings of missionaries, male or female, married
or single.7 Mary Fay described her life as a “path of loneliness
and lowliness of service.”8 At a function celebrating a quarter
of a century in China, Dr. John Macgowan, a contemporary,
declared, “Her life is sacrificed not for father, mother, husband,
friend, or even for her own people, but for a far off and ancient
people.”9 The emotional and social isolation indicated by Macgowan reflected her life in America and in China. Julia Emery
reported that Mary Fay’s letters were written from a “lonely
room.”10 The missionary who knew her best was Robert Nelson,
who observed that her prodigious appetite for learning was a
product of “many a lonely hour of day and night. (For, during a
large portion of her missionary life, she kept her solitary table;
Ian Welch, a former secondary school teacher, university lecturer, and senior public servant, worked
on Australian national curriculum programs. He is
now researching missionary history at the Australian
National University, Canberra.
—[email protected]
January 2012
and for the last year or two she was the only foreigner in the
house which she occupied.)”11
Mary Fay focused her affections on her students, whom she
invariably referred to as her “young ladies” or her “boys.” She
seems to have had no close friendships with other women of the
kind experienced by, for example, the Anglican women missionaries of Fujian Province or Catholic women’s orders.12 Toward the
end of her life she summed up her life’s work: “Teaching is my life
and my delight.”13 It is worth reflecting on the balance between
“delight” and necessity when assessing missionary idealism.14
Many teachers will identify with her fear of being forgotten by
her students. “I know [it] is the common lot of teachers, to spend
our lives, the best that we can give of our hearts and bodies for
those who have as little thought or concern, and think every debt
of gratitude is cancelled when our salaries are paid.”15
Preparation
Mary Fay’s initial employment in Virginia was as a governess
with the prominent Episcopalian Dulany family near Alexandria,
and she subsequently worked for the Carter family, with whom
the Dulanys were linked by marriage.16 Originally a Presbyterian, Mary Fay decided early in her stay in Virginia to become
an Episcopalian. On July 12, 1840, she was confirmed by Bishop
William Channing Moore in Christ Church, Alexandria. She had
taken her first Anglican Communion on March 8, four months
before her formal confirmation.17 An English minister, speaking
at her memorial service in Shanghai, described her Episcopalian
identity in these terms: “If I were to try and say what type our
late friend bore, I should say that her character was moulded
and fashioned in the Anglican pattern. Quiet, careful, reverent,
not caught up by passionate revivals and the gospel of hysterics,
but equable and calm and thoughtful. . . . Her letters were full of
quotations from the older and more learned Divines.”18
Mary Fay’s pastor at Christ Church, Alexandria, was
Charles B. Dana (rector 1834–61).19 Her very deep feelings for him
were revealed in many letters but most dramatically in a letter
in October 1847.20 In that year, after about eight years of work as
a governess in northern Virginia, she moved to Warrensburg, in
upstate New York, where an unchaperoned visit by Dana upset
her father.21 She had received six letters from Dr. Jefferson Minor
of Miller’s Tavern, Virginia, seeking her services for his Midway
Female Academy, opened a year or so earlier, in 1845 or 1846, and
some distance from Alexandria and Dana.22 Minor believed that
Mary Fay could provide the leadership the school needed, and
she finally accepted. It is obvious that she had nursed hopes of
marrying Charles Dana and that she decided to leave America
when that door closed.
Midway Female Academy was a small private girls’ school
near Miller’s Tavern, a village about thirteen miles from Tappahannock, Virginia.23 The academy enrolled forty girls as
boarders and day students, with at least two full-time teachers
in addition to Mary Fay. In 1848 an advertising leaflet named
Mary Fay as the principal, declaring that she is “so well and
favorably known and has given such general satisfaction as to
render comment or eulogy unnecessary.”24 Her only personal
visitors at the school from 1847 to 1850 were the local Episcopal
assistant minister (later rector) Henry Waring Latane Temple
33
and his wife, from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Miller’s Tavern.
Mary Fay wrote to Dana that “Mr. Temple’s sermons generally
put my mind out of frame” and that his services were dreary
and “Methodistical.”25 Her social environment in Virginia was
restricted, for the greater part, to relationships with parents,
some of whom openly rejected Christianity.26 Mary Fay was
not impressed with the almost pagan, hedonistic lifestyle of her
“young ladies” but did succeed in transforming the school’s
religious character.27 A religious education program centered
on an opening prayer and a “short Bible lesson each day.” It
was no easy task to “persuade the young ladies to twist up
their curls, cut them off, put on plain dresses, lay aside their
ornaments, and try and look and act a little more like school
girls, and when they are composed enough for quiet, patient
study, try to cultivate their taste for the really beautiful and
true, their love of science and of truth, as it is in nature and
revelation. But Oh! with tastes and feelings so perverted and
thrown away upon trifles how slow must such a work be, and
what patience, direction, discrimination, firmness and wisdom
does it require in a teacher.”28
Jocelyn Murray might have been describing Mary Fay when
she wrote the following of potential female missionaries: “She
should be ‘a sensible middle-aged person with strong decision
of character’; good health and good temper are ‘indispensible,’
and she should of course be ‘devoutly religious.’ A lady who
had been a governess would, if she had these attributes, ‘answer
extremely well.’”29
Devoted Service in China
When Mary Fay arrived in Shanghai in early 1851 there were
forty boys in the Boys’ Boarding School, established a few years
Noteworthy
Announcing
“Commemorating the Past—Embracing the Future” is the
theme for a daylong bicentennial missions celebration to be
held February 6, 2012, at Tabernacle Church, Salem, Massachusetts, and Park Street Church, Boston, to honor Adoniram Judson and the seven other missionaries who traveled
with him in 1812 from Salem to Burma. Judson and his party
were commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The program includes lectures by
Paul Borthwick (“Endurance Personified as Seen in the Life
of Adoniram Judson”), senior consultant for Development
Associates International, and Todd Johnson (“North American Missions from the Judsons to Global Christianity”),
director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity,
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The program concludes at Park Street Church with “Confessions at Midnight:
The Story of Adoniram Judson,” a dramatic monologue by
David Flynn, national director of Perspectives on the World
Christian Movement, U.S. Center for World Mission, Pasadena, California. For details, go to www.crossgloballink.org/
missionsbicentennial. Several other commemorations and
seminars will be held in the Boston area February 5–20, ending with a “Harbor-Sending Reenactment” at Salem Harbor.
Merged. CrossGlobal Link and The Mission Exchange,
by a resolution approved by their members, October 1, 2011,
at the annual business meeting of both mission associations,
the final day of the North American Mission Leaders Conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. The merger forms a body representing 35,000 evangelical missionaries deployed in every
country by more than 190 agencies and churches. Marv Newell, executive director of CrossGlobal Link, and Steve Moore,
president and CEO of The Mission Exchange, stated that a
new name for the agency will be announced in February at
the bicentennial missions celebration reported in the previous paragraph.
New York Theological Seminary (http://nyts.edu),
Joseph Ayo Babalola University (www.jabu.edu.ng/z/),
and the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in
the Americas and the Caribbean (http://web.gc.cuny.edu/
iradac) are sponsoring a conference on transnational formations in early African Pentecostalism to be held January
16–18, 2012, on the campus of Joseph Ayo Babalola University in Ikeji Arakeji, Osun State, Nigeria. With the theme
“The Wind Blows Where It Will: Transnational Formations
34
in Early African Pentecostalism,” the conference will bring
together scholars working on three continents to examine
“transnational dimensions of the origin and life of Christ
Apostolic Church in both Nigeria and Ghana.” According to
Dale T. Irvin, NYTS president and professor of world Christianity, the conference will advance understanding of global
Pentecostalism and transnational and diasporan African
church life. For details, contact [email protected].
The American Society of Missiology (www.asmweb.org)
will hold its 2012 annual meeting June 15–17 at Techny Towers, Techny, Illinois, with the theme, “Prophetic Dialogue:
Practice and Theology.” Roger Schroeder, S.V.D., professor
of intercultural studies and ministry at Catholic Theological
Union, Chicago, is ASM president. The deadline for proposals of papers for the meeting’s parallel-track sessions is February 1. E-mail a topic with an abstract (150–200 words) and
a brief biography to Robert J. Priest ([email protected]), professor of mission and intercultural studies, Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School, and ASM second vice president. The Association of Professors of Mission and the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education will conduct their annual
meetings in tandem with ASM.
The 2012 conference of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on
the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity will be held at the University of Edinburgh, June
28–30. “Religious Movements of Renewal, Revival, and Revitalization in the History of Missions and World Christianity”
is the theme. For details and the call for papers, go to www
.library.yale.edu/div/yale_edinburgh/2012theme.htm. The
Yale-Edinburgh conference is cosponsored by the Centre for
the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, Yale Divinity School, and the Overseas Ministries
Study Center.
The European Association for South Asian Studies
(www.easas.org) is sponsoring “Christians, Cultural Interactions, and South Asia’s Religious Traditions,” a panel at the
twenty-second European Conference on South Asian Studies,
to be held at ISCTE–Lisbon University Institute, July 25–28,
2012. Panel conveners Richard Fox Young, Princeton Theological Seminary ([email protected]), and Chad M.
Bauman, Butler University ([email protected]), encourage “intercultural studies scholars, mission studies scholars,
and religious studies scholars who address any of the many
phenomena associated with the historical emergence and
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
earlier by Bishop William Jones Boone, the first Episcopalian (and
Anglican) bishop in China.30 As had been the case in Virginia, her
tasks involved considerably more than classroom responsibilities:
“I have been engaged in teaching various English branches, in
a large boarding-school of Chinese boys, of which Mr. Points31
is now the superintendent and teacher of the first class; but the
‘maternal care’ of the school is divided between Miss Tenney and
myself; she has one half, and I the other, which accounts for the
expression, ‘my boys,’ whom I have taught when they were well,
nursed when they were sick—bought, and made, and mended
their clothes (though in this I have the assistance of a tailor).”32
In another letter she wrote: “The exhausting routine of duties is
essentially the same all the year round. . . . I consider [this school]
my family, and my greatest responsibility.”33
Her report to Bishop Boone covering the months of August
to November 1854 describes a school routine set by the clock.
contemporary character of South Asian Christianities” to
submit proposals for papers.
Personalia
Appointed. Andrew F. Walls as research professor of world
Christianity, Africa International University, on September
14, 2011, at the university’s campus in Karen, Nairobi, Kenya.
His installation address was “World Christianity: The Last
Five Hundred Years.” Walls, an IBMR contributing editor,
joined AIU’s Centre for World Christianity; he will guide
Ph.D. students for the school’s Intercultural Studies program. For details, see worldchristianityaiu.wordpress.com.
Appointed. Larry Miller, former general secretary of
the Mennonite World Conference (www.mwc-cmm.org),
as secretary of the Global Christian Forum (www.globalchr
istianforum.org), as of January 1, 2012. The GCF, formed
in 1998, is an initiative that seeks to bring leaders of all
Christian churches together to foster mutual respect and to
address common challenges. The MWC Executive Committee appointed César García of Bogotá, Colombia, as general secretary to succeed Miller. He was chair of the Iglesias
Hermanos Menonitas de Colombia (the Mennonite Brethren
Churches of Colombia) from 2002 to 2008, and he served as
secretary of the MWC Mission Commission.
Appointed. Titus L. Presler as principal of Edwardes
College, Peshawar, Pakistan, effective May 2011. Edwardes,
an undergraduate and graduate institution affiliated with
the Anglican Diocese of Peshawar, was started by the Church
Mission Society. Formerly president of the Seminary of the
Southwest, Austin, Texas (2002–5), and vice president of
General Theological Seminary, New York (2005–9), Presler
served as professor of mission and world Christianity at both
institutions. Raised in India, Presler was a missionary at Bonda in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. He is the author of Going Global
with God: Reconciling Mission in a World of Difference (2010).
Honored. Dana L. Robert on September 21, 2011, at the
dedication of her endowed chair as the Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission at Boston
University School of Theology. Robert is an IBMR contributing editor. Gerald H. Anderson, IBMR senior contributing
editor and BUSTh class of 1955, chaired the alumni committee for the celebration.
Honored. Lamin Sanneh, professor of missions and
world Christianity, Yale Divinity School, and an IBMR
January 2012
August 25. Rose at 5 o’clock. At 6.30 o’clock rang the bell for the
boys to commence their usual morning studies in Chinese. Dismissed them at 7 o’clock. At 8.15 o’clock the Bishop conducted
the morning prayers of the school, at which I am always present
with the pupils. At 8.15 o’clock went with them again to their
Chinese books. At 9 o’clock the Bishop visited and examined the
Second Department, while I recorded the progress each pupil
had made since his last visit, two weeks before. . . .
September 6. After the usual morning duties were over and the
pupils at their English lessons, went to my Chinese studies,
commenced the “Shoo-King,”34 or “Historical Classic.” . . . As it
is included in the course of studies pursued in our school, I am
anxious to read it before the larger boys commence studying it,
that I may better judge of their progress. . . .
September 25. Retired at 12 o’clock last night, and rose at 4 this
contributing editor, on September 1, 2011, with the annual
Marianist Award from the University of Dayton (Ohio). The
award honors “a Roman Catholic whose work has made a
major contribution to intellectual life.” The citation praised
Sanneh’s “work on world Christianity, helping an age-old
tradition to understand and embrace its present, and to move
confidently into the life and the future to which the Spirit is
inviting the Church.”
Died. Anthony Bellagamba, I.M.C., 84, Italian Catholic missionary, educator, and administrator, August 11, 2011,
in Nairobi, Kenya. Educated in Italy and the United States,
Bellagamba went to Kenya as a missionary in 1958; there he
became professor of pastoral theology at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Nairobi and later was regional
vice-superior of Consolata missionaries in Kenya. In 1974
he was appointed the executive director of the United States
Catholic Mission Council in Washington, D.C., which in 1981
became the U.S. Catholic Mission Association. In 1985 he
returned to Kenya, there serving as the first national director of the Pontifical Missionary Societies. In 1993 he was
elected regional superior of the Consolata missionaries in
North America. He then served as vice–general superior of
the Consolata missionaries in Rome from 1999 to 2005, when
he returned to Kenya.
Died. Cecil Richard Rutt, 85, missionary, Korean studies pioneer, Anglican bishop, Roman Catholic priest, July
27, 2011. Born in England, from 1954 Rutt served in Korea
as an Anglican priest, for many years living alone in remote
rural villages. In 1966 he was appointed assistant bishop in
the Diocese of Daejeon, and two years later he became bishop. In 1973, deciding that the time had come for Koreans to
take charge of their portion of the Anglican Communion,
Rutt offered his resignation. In 1974 he returned to England
and became suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Truro. Five
years later he was named bishop of Leicester and, as such, in
1985, was introduced into the House of Lords. Rutt retired in
1990 and moved to Falmouth, Cornwall. In 1994 he became
a Roman Catholic, and the following June he was ordained
a Catholic priest. In 2009 he was made a prelate of honor by
Pope Benedict XVI, and he was an honorary canon of the
Plymouth Cathedral of St. Mary and St. Boniface. A member
of the Association of Korean Studies in Europe and the British Association for Korean Studies, Rutt is coauthor of Korea:
A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (1999).
35
morning. Have spent the whole day and evening (with the exception of teaching two hours) in visiting and waiting upon the sick.35
Mary Fay was on duty around the clock. The “domestic” tasks
of the boarding school were undertaken with efficiency—and a
complete lack of enthusiasm. She wrote: “I fear I have little vocation. It is still a dragging, wearying duty, and I am . . . willing
at any time to give it up to a more competent person, or to any
one who may fancy the life of a missionary teacher is not one of
self-denial, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice.”36
We get occasional glimpses of the curriculum, which included
reading, spelling, writing, composition, geography, and theology, together with Bible reading and translation into English.37
Although St John’s University subsequently neglected Chinese
language skills, they were taught systematically when Mary Fay
was in charge.38
Linguistic Ability and Discipline
She proved to have exceptional skills in translating Chinese
written texts. As a proof of these qualities, Miss Fay is honorably
mentioned by a celebrated Chinese author, in his book called in
English “Pencil Sketches of Things Heard and Seen.” “She alone
of modern sinologues,” says the friend quoted above, “has been
thought worthy of notice by Chinese scholars.” Tsi-Wing, the
Chinese writer, discourses of Miss Fay as follows: “I am told,
by a learned friend, that there is a foreign lady named Fay, who
has a school in Hong Kew. She is of middle age, and unmarried,
yet with a face as fresh as a peach or an almond blossom, and a
nature cold as ice, and pure as the falling snow. She loves Chinese
books, and has the Scholar Tsang Chu-Kwei for her teacher. She
speaks Chinese, having mastered the tones and combinations
of sounds, daily increasing her knowledge by the study of the
‘Imperial Dictionary’ (Kanghi). Living thus, her pure nature and
love of study supersede all family ties and joys. This is a woman
to be reverenced. To this true lover of study, Lady Fay, praise can
add no more.”39 Late in her life her Chinese reading skills were
recognized when she was asked to edit the proof pages, with her
Chinese teacher Tsang Chu-Kwei, of Samuel Wells Williams’s
Syllabic Dictionary.40
Notes
1. The history of the Fay family in this article is indebted to the research
of Linda Fay Kaufman, a family historian.
2. This overview of Mary Fay’s contribution to Christian missions
in China is part of a wider study on the history of the Protestant
Episcopal Church Mission in China and the Chung Hua Sheng Kung
Hui (the Holy Catholic Church in China, formed 1912), which in 1930
became an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion.
3. Her full name was Lydia Mary Fay, but she used Mary as her everyday
name. In mission archival material she is invariably referred to as
Miss Fay.
4. Her fellow missionary Robert Nelson knew her when she first came to
Virginia and knew her own account of her early years and education
in Albany, N.Y. See Robert Nelson, “Letter,” Southern Churchman
(Alexandria, Va.) 44, no. 48 (November 28, 1878).
5. William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant
Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 2.
6. See discussion of the American Baptist missionary Ida Pruitt in
Marjorie King, “American Women’s Open Door to Chinese Women:
Which Way Does It Open?” Women’s Studies International Forum 11,
no. 4 (1999): 369–79. King highlights Pruitt’s mental and practical
separation from the everyday Chinese, who represented, in cultural
and physical terms, a continuing threat to her own and her family’s
36
From the outset of its work in China, the Episcopal Church
pursued the American commitment to higher education as the
best means of empowering individuals and inculcating ethical
and social responsibility. Almost half of all American missionaries in China worked in higher education, and their emphasis
was on the educational reconstruction of China rather than the
conversion of individuals. American universities brought Western
learning to wealthier young Chinese and, perhaps unconsciously,
laid a foundation for a challenge to China’s cultural tradition
and subsequently the role of foreigners in China, including missionaries.41 One of the most famous universities was St. John’s in
Shanghai, sponsored by the Protestant Episcopal Church.42 Mary
Fay was the key person in the Episcopal Boys’ Boarding School,
which later became Duane Hall (1876), a foundational element
of the later university.43
This brief survey of Mary Fay’s life and work must mention the
reordering of gender outlooks during the nineteenth century
as single women took active roles in missions parallel to those
of men.44 In 1860, after a decade of playing “second fiddle” to
males, Mary Fay indignantly resigned from the Boys’ Boarding
School because the bishop transferred the role of superintendent to a newly arrived and inexperienced male teacher; as
the bishop wrote, “I have always thought the school needs the
strong hand of a male superintendent.”45 From 1860 and for
seven years during the American Civil War, when funds from
America dried up and the Episcopal Mission nearly collapsed,
Mary Fay found work with the English Church Missionary
Society and preserved the Boys’ Boarding School by taking
the students with her into a school sponsored by the Church
Missionary Society. Her leadership was in no doubt when she
returned, with “her boys,” to the Episcopal Mission in 1867.46
After twenty-five years, however, the humiliation had not eased.
She wrote to Miss Julia Emery, the women’s secretary of the
Episcopal Mission, that an English clergyman said that “my
work seemed all granite . . . it seemed a man’s work done by a
woman!”47 Just two years before her death, the Boys’ Boarding
School became Duane Hall, a theological training center; it was
said that Miss Fay “now hands over her school to the Mission
she has served so well.”48
well-being. On the autonomy and work of single women, see Ian
Welch, “Women’s Work for Women” (2005), at http://anglicanhistory
.org/asia/china/welch2005.pdf, which describes experiences of
single women missionaries in Fujian Province, China, in the 1890s.
See also Carol Lasser, “‘Let us be sisters forever’: The Sororal Model
of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship,” Signs 14, no. 1 (Autumn
1988): 160.
7. For a typical missionary hagiography, see Mrs. J. T. Gracey [Annie
Ryder Gracey], Eminent Missionary Women (New York: Eaton &
Mains, 1898).
8. Lydia Mary Fay to William Jones Boone, Spirit of Missions 24
(October 1859): 469. Spirit of Missions was published by the Domestic
and Foreign Missions Committee of the Protestant Episcopal
Church. Personal loneliness is a characteristic of single missionary
correspondence. A male Australian working with the China Inland
Mission, the largest Protestant mission in China, wrote of “a regular
struggle against the feeling of loneliness” (Frank Burden, Sunday,
August 5, 1894, Papers of Frank R. Burden and Joanne Turner
Webster, 1887–1899, Mss, National Library of Australia). The subject
of missionary emotional isolation demands more attention.
9. J. MacGowan, “Address in Honor of Miss Fay on Inauguration of
Duane Hall (Divinity School), Shanghai, November 8, 1876,” Spirit
of Missions 42 (November 1877): 87.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
10. Julia A. Emery, “Miss Fay,” Spirit of Missions 44 (January 1879): 47.
11. Nelson, “Letter.”
12. See discussion of “sisterhood” friendship in Elsie Marshall, “For
His Sake”: A Record of a Life Consecrated to God and Devoted to China
(London: Religious Tract Society, 1903). See also Lasser, “Let us be
sisters forever,” p. 162.
13. Lydia Mary Fay, “The Chinese Teachers in Duane Hall,” Spirit of
Missions 42 (March 1877): 165.
14. For discussion of single women’s roles in early nineteenth-century
America and the light they shed on Fay’s dependence on Charles
Dana, discussed below, see Nancy F. Cott, “Young Women in the
Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies 3, nos.
1–2 (Autumn 1974): 15–29.
15. Lydia Mary Fay to Mary Ann De Butts Dulany, from Midway
Academy, Essex County, Va., n.d. (Mss1 D3545 a 419–475, item 415,
De Butts Family, Papers 1784–1962, sec. 12, Virginia Historical Society,
Richmond).
16. Ibid. See also Nelson, “Letter.”
17. Fay’s confirmation is recorded at Christ Church (Episcopal)
Alexandria, Parish Register, 1828–1845, p. 61, and her first Anglican
Communion is noted at p. 75 (courtesy of Julia Randle, Virginia
Theological Seminary Library, Alexandria).
18. Charles Henry Butcher, Church Missionary Society, Shanghai, Spirit
of Missions 44 (March 1879): 120.
19. John Frank Waukechon, “Charles B. Dana and Virginia Evangelical
Episcopalianism: His Family, Career, and Sermons, 1810–1860”
(M.A. thesis, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1992).
20. Lydia Mary Fay to Charles B. Dana, from Midway Academy, October 16, 1847; located in Dana (Charles Backus) Papers, 1802, 1820–
1881, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of
Texas; henceforth Fay to Dana, with location and date noted.
21. Ethan Allan Fay’s disapproval would have been greater still had he
known that his daughter was hoping to meet Dana, if only briefly, in
Washington before going to Midway Academy. She wrote to Dana,
“I shall have nothing to do but count the minutes or hours until I see
you, and do for once call up your gallantry or kindness or compassion
and not keep a lady waiting too long” (Fay to Dana, from Albany,
N.Y., September 27, 1847).
22. For a history of secondary education in neighboring counties, see
Russell Benjamin Gill, “Secondary Education in King and Queen
County, Virginia, 1691–1938” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Virginia, 1938);
Gill states that the school operated until about 1855.
23. Mary Virginia Haile, Biography of an Old Country Church, St. Paul’s,
1838–1971 (Privately printed, 1971), pp. 5, 7.
24. Richmond Enquirer, December 25, 1849 (Virginia Historical Society).
In personal correspondence, Lee Shepard of the Virginia Historical
Society suggests that Minor had previously run a tavern to augment
his income. See Shepard, A History of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
(Richmond: privately printed, 2001).
25. Fay to Dana, from Midway Academy, January 1, 1848. Henry Temple
and John McGuire, his predecessor and first rector at St. Paul’s, were
in the Low Church Anglican tradition and were influenced by the
Second Great Awakening.
26. Ibid., April 1849.
27. Ibid., October 16, 1847. See Richard D. Shiels, “The Second Great
Awakening in Connecticut: Critique of the Traditional Interpretation,” Church History 49, no. 4 (December 1980): 401; Fay to Dana,
from Midway Academy, All Saints Day and Thanksgiving Day
[November 22], 1849 (Univ. of Louisiana Library, Special Collections); Fay to Dana, from Midway Academy, January 6, 1848, and
May 26, 1848.
28. Fay to Dana, from Midway Academy, October 16, 1847.
29. Jocelyn Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies in
Great Britain: Their Use of Women as Missionaries from the Late
Eighteenth to the Late Nineteenth Century,” Exchange 21, no. 1 (April
1992): 12.
January 2012
30. The most comprehensive survey of Boone’s life is Muriel Boone,
The Seed of the Church in China (Philadelphia: United Church Press,
1973).
31. John T. Points was a schoolteacher from Staunton, Va. (see Charles
Jones Boone, Annual Report to Foreign Missions Committee,
February 13, 1849, in Foreign Committee of the Domestic and Foreign
Missions Committee of the Protestant Episcopal Church, An Historical
Sketch of the China Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the
U.S.A. [New York, Foreign Committee, 1885], p. 21). Points was one
of several males, in China short-term, whose appointment over Mary
Fay angered her.
32. Lydia Mary Fay, “Journal, August 25–November 5, 1855,” Spirit of
Missions 21 (April 1855): 225.
33. Lydia Rodman Church, “Life of Lydia Mary Fay,” in Gosley’s Book
and Magazine 99 (December 1879): 594.
34. The Shoo-King, later translated into English by Walter Gorn Old
under the title The Shu king; or, The Chinese Historical Classic (New
York: John Lane, 1904), compiled information on Chinese religion,
philosophy, customs, and government “from the earliest times.”
35. Lydia Mary Fay, “Journal from August 25th to November 5th, 1855,”
Spirit of Missions 21 (April 1855): 225–26, 227, 231–32.
36. Lydia Mary Fay to William J. Boone, Shanghai, March 4, 1858, Spirit
of Missions 23 (July 1858): 339–42, 396–97.
37. Lydia Mary Fay, “Journal, July 29, 1857,” Spirit of Missions 22 (June
1857): 279.
38. J. Liggins, “Letter, September 1, 1857,” Spirit of Missions 23 (February
1858): 87–88. See also Edward Yihua Su, “Liberal Arts Education in
English and Campus Culture at St. John’s University,” in China’s
Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900–1950, ed. Daniel
H. Bays and Ellen Widmer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press,
2009), pp. 107–24.
39. Church, “Life of Lydia Mary Fay,” p. 594.
40. S. Wells Williams, A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language
(Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1874).
41. On the impact of the social gospel in China, see Jun Xing and
Chun Hsing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social
Gospel and the YMCA in China (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh Univ. Press,
1996).
42. Xi Yuhua, “St John’s University, Shanghai, as an Evangelising Agency,”
Studies in World Christianity 12, no. 1 (2006): 23–49.
43. MacGowan, “Address in Honor of Miss Fay,” Spirit of Missions 42
(February 1877): 84. See Bays and Widmer, China’s Christian Colleges,
and Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum, ed., Yenching University and SinoAmerican Interactions, 1919–1952, special volume of the Journal of
American–East Asia Relations (14 [March 2009]). See also “Duane Hall
and Divinity School: A Quarter of a Century in China,” reprinted from
Shanghai Evening Courier, November 9, 1876 (Ian Welch Collection).
44. Jane Haggis, “‘A heart that has felt the love of God and longs for
others to know it’: Conventions of Gender, Tensions of Self, and
Constructions of Difference in Offering to Be a Lady Missionary,”
Women’s History Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 172.
45. Lydia Mary Fay to W. J. Boone, Shanghai, June 13, 1860; W. J. Boone
to L. M. Fay, Shanghai, August 7, 1860 (both letters in Virginia
Historical Society).
46. For an overview of the early 1850s through the eyes of one of the
American missionaries, see Edward W. Syle, “American Mission
in Shanghai,” Colonial Church Chronicle, and Missionary Journal 4
(July 1850): 20–25, repr. at http://anglicanhistory.org/asia/china/
syle_shanghai1850.html. On her transfer to the Church Missionary
Society, see Lydia Mary Fay, “Letter to Foreign Committee, Shanghai,
January 8, 1862,” Spirit of Missions 27 (April 1862): 122; 27 (May
1862): 149.
47. Lydia Mary Fay to Julia A. Emery, from Shanghai, January 28, 1876,
Spirit of Missions 41 (August 1876): 422–24.
48. Charles Henry Butcher (Anglican Church), Opening of Duane Hall,
Spirit of Missions 42 (February 1877): 86.
37
Eugene A. Nida: Theoretician of Translation
Philip C. Stine
W
Nida’s methods can be seen in translations such as the Good
hen the history of the church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Eugene Nida will figure News Bible, the French Français Courant, the German Die Gute
prominently. Nida brought about a revolution in the field of Bible Nachricht, and the Spanish Versión Popular, translations with
translation, which resulted in millions of people in hundreds of which he had some direct involvement. But most contemporary
languages gaining access to the Bible in an unprecedented way. translations such as the NRSV or NIV also show his influence.
Translators in hundreds of languages have
The resulting impact on the growth and
similarly produced Bibles that are easily
development of the church will continue to
understood throughout a language-speaking
be felt throughout this century.
area.
Born November 11, 1914, in Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma, Eugene A. Nida passed away
August 25, 2011, in Madrid. He is survived
Formation and Schooling
by his second wife, Dr. Elena FernandezAt the tender age of four, Nida acknowledged
Miranda, whom he married in 1997. His
a call to be a missionary. Later at the University
first wife, Althea, had passed away in 1993.
of California, Los Angeles, where he studied
Through his numerous books and pubGreek and Latin, he thought he might work
lications and extraordinary lecture schedule,
in Bible translation in Africa, so he studied
Nida was able to help scholars, translators,
the work of the linguists Edward Sapir and
and specialists in Christian missions find new
Leonard Bloomfield. He graduated in 1936
ways to think about effective communication.
summa cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa,
William Smalley noted, “The promotion of
earning one of the highest ratings or GPAs
professional expertise, the development
in the university’s history.
of translation theory and of translation
At a Bible club at UCLA he learned of
procedures based on such theory, began
the work of Cameron Townsend, founder
when Eugene A. Nida joined the American
of Wycliffe Bible Translators. In 1936 Nida
Bible Society staff in 1943.”1 For more than
Eugene A. Nida
studied and also taught at Townsend’s sumfifty years, Gene Nida was the leader of the
mer camp and then went briefly to Mexico to
translation program of the American Bible
Society, and subsequently the intellectual leader of the global undertake translation himself. Poor health forced him to return
program of the United Bible Societies, as well as consultant to to California, where in 1939 he completed a master’s degree at
the University of Southern California in New Testament Greek.
that organization.
Before Nida, Bible translations were primarily produced He subsequently studied linguistics under Charles C. Fries at the
by missionaries, whose approach was generally to produce a University of Michigan, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1943.
formally equivalent translation, sometimes based on the original His dissertation, “A Synopsis of English Syntax,” presented the
languages, but often based on translations available in European first full-scale analysis of any major language using a theory
languages such as English or French. Their work was sent to known as Immediate Constituent Analysis.
Also in 1943 Nida was ordained by the Southern California
London, Amsterdam, or New York for checking before being
Association of the Northern Baptist Convention, he married
published.
Nida realized that for readers and listeners to understand the Althea Lucille Sprague, and he joined the American Bible Society
Bible, they needed translations that, as much as possible, were translation department. Initially this appointment was part-time,
produced by native speakers; furthermore, he knew that these as he continued to spend every summer until 1953 teaching at
translations had to be checked in the field with the translators. the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
As he traveled and consulted with translators, using concepts
from linguistics, cultural studies, communication sciences, and Translation Secretary and Communicator
psychology, he developed a practical approach to translation that
he called dynamic equivalence or functional equivalence, the goal Nida was an extraordinarily effective communicator, and he
of which was to make the translation clear and understandable as trained many translators himself. All along he published prodiwell as accurate. In addition, he developed a pedagogic method giously. The most complete presentations of his theory are in his
so that translators from a wide range of educational backgrounds Toward a Science of Translating (1964) and, coauthored with Charles
Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969).
could learn how to apply the method.
“Good missionaries have always been good anthropologists,”
Philip C. Stine was director for translation, production, Nida wrote in the preface of Customs and Cultures. He realized
and distribution services for the United Bible Socie- that good translation, which after all was good communication,
ties (UBS) from 1992 to 1998. Previously he was the required a solid understanding of the culture of the people. In
UBS translation services coordinator (1984–92) and order to help missionaries work on their tasks more effectively,
served in Africa (1968–82). He is the author of Let Nida wrote Customs and Cultures (1954) and Message and Mission:
the Words Be Written: The Lasting Influence of The Communication of the Christian Faith (1960). In addition, in
1953 he helped found and edit the journal Practical AnthropolEugene A. Nida (Brill, 2005).
—[email protected] ogy. Through this journal, Nida and his Bible Society colleagues
38
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
demonstrated how important it is for the Gospel to be deeply
connected with the culture of a particular people. They showed
clearly that, when this connection takes place, the church is
bound to grow.
Nida, who recognized the need for translators to have the
very best base texts to work from, led major projects on both the
Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. He was
also responsible for a new approach to lexicography. By focusing on different meanings of words according to their varied
semantic contexts, the two-volume Greek-English Lexicon of the
New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains, which he prepared
with Johannes Louw, helped translators understand how best
to render words with multiple meanings.2
Notes
1. William A. Smalley, Translation as Mission: Bible Translation in the
Modern Missionary Movement (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 1991),
p. 28.
Nida’s theory and approach, valuable as they were, would
not have carried the day if he had not dedicated himself to
spreading these ideas through years of travel and teaching, and
through building up teams of consultants and teachers. He had
an amazing ability to inspire people, inspiration that came in
part from the convincing facts he presented, and in part from
the energy of his presentations and his skill as a communicator.
But what always drove him was a deep conviction that, if the
Scriptures were accessible to people, they would hear God’s voice
and have an encounter with Christ that would lead to transformation. Recognizing that his work had helped bring this about
was clearly what gave Gene the greatest joy.
2. Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, eds., Greek-English Lexicon
of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains, 2 vols. (New York:
United Bible Societies, 1988).
The Waning of Pagan Rome: A Review Essay
Alan Kreider
A
lan Cameron’s study The Last Pagans of Rome is a mas- Symmachus expressed an urbane, pliable perspective that was
sively authoritative book, the product of a lifetime of characteristic of the aristocrats’ approach to religion: “There must
study of fourth-century pagan and Christian literature. Cameron’s be more than one way to such a secret” (p. 37). The aristocrats’
interests range over the Roman Empire, but his central preoc- resistance reached a climax when the usurper Eugenius revolted
cupation is with the aristocrats of Rome. The paganism that he against the Christian emperor Theodosius I, who in 394 defeated
observes waning and, by the century’s end, virtually disappear- Eugenius at the Battle of the Frigidus and used force to implement
ing is the civic paganism of Rome, with
recent legislation. In this view Roman
its aristocrat-led sacrifices and festivals. The Last Pagans of Rome.
paganism ended suddenly, with a bang.
Cameron’s book is a response to
In Cameron’s view, this combatively
many scholars who argue that fourth- By Alan Cameron. New York:
durable paganism is a romantic myth. He
century Roman paganism was combat- Oxford Univ. Press, 2011.
devotes his book to a careful, leisurely
ively durable in the face of Christian Pp. xi, 878. $85 / £55.
study of the alleged components of the
advance. According to these scholars,
so-called pagan revival, and he finds
late in the century there was a pagan
repeatedly that these components lead
“revival” or “cultural offensive” that had
to different conclusions. For example,
numerous dimensions, three of which
he devotes 75 pages to an examination
were the correction and transmission of earlier pagan texts; the of the “correctors and critics” of pagan texts and concludes that
writing of new texts with pagan themes, notably Microbius’s the late antique preoccupation with the accuracy of the written
Saturnalia; and the commissioning of works of visual art using word had roots that were Christian, not pagan, and that most
pagan iconography. In this reading, a network of aristocrats of the scholars involved in textual transmission were Christians.
associated with the Roman senator Symmachus lay at the heart How about the showcase text of the pagan “cultural offensive,”
of pagan resistance to Christianity. Because of his influence and Macrobius’s Saturnalia? In Cameron’s view, it was not a fevered
widespread connections, Symmachus in 382 led a delegation to attempt in the 380s to advocate pagan practices; instead, it was a
Emperor Gratian I to appeal for the restoration of the Altar of relaxed antiquarian discussion of former pagan rites that a ChrisVictory, which had recently been removed from its customary tian wrote in the 430s. And late-fourth-century art that draws on
position in the Senate House in Rome. In his speech to Gratian, pagan myths? Cameron sees this not as part of a religiously driven
pagan reaction but as an aesthetically motivated appropriation of
Alan Kreider is Professor of Church History and traditional Roman themes by a nondogmatic aristocracy that was
Mission (retired), Associated Mennonite Biblical open to a “middle ground we now call secular” (p. 697). As to
Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana. His most recent book, Symmachus and the other aristocratic pagans, in Cameron’s view
which he wrote with Eleanor Kreider, is Worship and they were not “last ditch champions of the old order” (p. 377). To
Mission After Christendom (Herald Press, 2011). be sure, they did hold pagan priesthoods, but that was not the
—[email protected] heart of their identity; it was a part of their aristocratic lifestyle
(along with estate management, socializing, and politicking).
Their scholarship was unimpressive (Symmachus’s learning was
January 2012
39
grossly exaggerated by moderns), and they were not willing to
be seriously inconvenienced for their beliefs. Cameron points out
that in 385, after his unsuccessful appeal for the Altar of Victory,
Symmachus gave up the struggle, retired from public life, and
devoted himself to writing perfectly groomed, uncontroversial
letters to prominent correspondents. So from Cameron’s perspective, in the 390s, when Theodosius defeated Eugenius, the battle
was driven by personal ambition rather than religion (Eugenius
was probably a Christian). Indeed, by the 390s Roman paganism
had already lost the will to live. Most aristocrats gradually went
over to Christianity, not because of coercion and not because of
deep inner conviction, but because the church represented the
future, and the only way they could maintain their position in
society was by joining it. According to Cameron, Roman paganism petered out gradually, with a whimper.
Cameron’s case is formidable. His reading of the literary texts
of the fourth century is expert and exhaustive; it represents threefifths of his book’s almost 900 pages. Many of these pages are
primarily of interest to students of the literature of late antiquity,
but at significant points Cameron’s treatment addresses issues
that interest missiologists and students of the history of Christian
mission. I point to three of these issues.
First, the vulnerability of state-supported religion. As Cameron tells the story, the civic paganism of Rome was dependent
on its symbiotic relationship with the urban and imperial power
structures. So when imperial laws, beginning with the reign of
Constantine I, ordered the desecration of temples and the banning of public animal sacrifices, these measures (whether or not
they were always enforced) had a devastating effect on civic
paganism and the inner certainties of its aristocratic priests.
When Gratian in 382 prohibited the cults from receiving financial
subsidies, it was “the blow from which they never recovered”
(p. 245). Paganism, it seems, was vulnerable because it was a
“state church.” Roman paganism was not rooted in the convictions of communities of people that gave it resources to survive
when the state withdrew approval and subsidies. Indeed, its
traditions prepared its elite leaders to adapt to the emperor’s
new religion rather than to resist it. Christianity, in contrast, was
shaped in opposition, had a martyr tradition, and could draw
strength from the deep convictions of its socially diverse members, whose beliefs and practices were formed in catechesis. It is
Notes
1. Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), p. 201.
perhaps ironic, though Cameron did not note it as such, that by
the late fourth century, Christian leaders were developing forms
of symbiotic relationship between religion and imperial power
that were new to Christianity and that in due course would make
the church vulnerable to external pressure.
Second, the nature of conversion. Cameron traces the stories
of aristocrats from pagan families who went over to Christianity.
But he does not discuss the effects of these conversions on their
lives or on the church. To become a Christian seems to have had
a sociological cost: Cameron mentions Marinus Victorinus, who
delayed his “coming out” as a Christian because his elite culture
saw Christianity as socially disreputable. But were there other
places at which Christian catechesis clashed with traditional
aristocratic values? Cameron refers to Volusian, who almost
two decades after the Battle of the Frigidus told Augustine that
he hesitated to convert to Christianity because “baptism was
incompatible with the demands of a public career”(p. 196), (e.g.,
the use of military violence). Augustine reassured Volusian. And
this seems to have been the pattern: Christian leaders helped the
church inculturate itself in the social milieu of the aristocrats so
the aristocrats, in converting to Christianity, would not need
to change. As Cameron puts it, “Short of participation in the
old cults, most other aspects of the traditional aristocratic lifestyle had now been embraced by their Christian descendents”
(p. 204). It is possible that to some extent this, as Michele Salzman
has expressed it, “aristocratized” Christianity.1
Finally, the rapid spread and social breadth of Christianization. According to Cameron, the Roman population in the 390s
was “overwhelmingly Christian” (p. 204), but he provides no
evidence of this. If he had spent less time looking at the texts of
the elite and given more attention to the archaeology and artifacts
that betray the convictions of the Roman lower classes, he would
find that there were plebeian “last pagans” centuries after the
last aristocrats had submitted to baptism. As Ramsay MacMullen
has pointed out,2 in festivals, gestures, apotropaic rituals, and
tomb-side meals, paganism found a stubborn, subterranean life
that aristocratic bishops, no doubt like their aristocratic pagan
forbears, found it difficult to understand. If Cameron had focused
on the common Romans as well as the elite, he would have given
deeper meaning to “the last pagans.” He also would have written another book.
2. See Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to
Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997).
Worldwide Increase in Catholic Population, Deacons, Priests, and Bishops
According to the Statistical Yearbook of the Church, published
by the Vatican, the worldwide Catholic population increased
in 2009 by 15 million or 1.3 percent, slightly outpacing
the global population growth rate of 1.1 percent. Also
during 2009, Pope Benedict established ten new dioceses,
bringing to 2,956 the number of dioceses and church jurisdictions in the world. Some other statistics from the yearbook
include:
• The number of Catholics worldwide was 1.18 billion, up 15 million from the 1.16 billion reported a year
earlier.
• Only 13.6 percent of the world’s people, but 49.4 percent of all Catholics, live in the Americas.
• The number of bishops in the world increased to 5,065 from 5,002; the number of priests increased from
405,178 to 410,593.
• The number of permanent deacons reported—38,155—was an increase of more than 1,000 over the previous
year, with 98 percent of them living in the Americas or in Europe.
• The number of women in religious orders fell by almost 10,000 in 2009, despite increases in their numbers in
Asia and Africa, to a new total of 729,371 members.
40
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Twenty-Three Countries with Catholic Populations over 10 Million
Country
Brazil
Mexico
Philippines
United States
Italy
France
Spain
Colombia
Argentina
Congo, Democratic Republic
Poland
Peru
Germany
Venezuela
Nigeria
India
Canada
Uganda
Tanzania, Republic of
Ecuador
Chile
Guatemala
Kenya
Catholics
% Catholic
Priests
Parishes
164,900,000
98,831,000
75,370,000
69,609,000
57,434,000
46,875,000
42,470,000
42,456,000
37,203,000
36,807,000
36,640,000
25,132,000
25,118,000
24,923,000
23,039,000
18,573,000
14,594,000
13,475,000
12,826,000
12,788,000
12,532,000
11,376,000
10,530,000
84.5%
91.9%
81.8%
22.7%
95.4%
74.9%
92.5%
94.4%
92.7%
52.6%
96.0%
86.3%
30.7%
87.8%
15.5%
1.6%
43.3%
44.0%
30.6%
91.3%
74.0%
81.2%
26.7%
19,999
15,985
8,753
43,417
48,335
19,877
25,010
8,758
5,861
5,268
29,593
3,111
17,418
2,695
5,592
25,452
8,180
1,918
2,480
2,174
2,327
1,058
2,232
10,210
6,572
3,134
18,154
25,706
15,837
22,674
4,123
2,725
1,354
10,303
1,533
11,649
1,346
2,768
9,683
4,388
477
926
1,327
947
471
829
The Roman Catholic Church Worldwide (Changes from 2004 to 2009)
Region
2004
2009
Change
Africa
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
148,817,000
31,259
4,761
179,480,000
36,766
4,882
+20.6%
+17.6%
North America
(excluding Mexico)
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
80,400,000
55,371
1,452
84,218,000
51,608
1,632
+4.7%
-6.8%
Central America
(including Mexico
and Caribbean)
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
153,535,000
21,915
7,006
160,940,000
23,511
6,845
+4.8%
+7.3%
South America
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
315,003,000
44,378
7,098
336,854,000
47,448
7,099
+6.9%
+6.9%
Asia
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
113,489,000
48,222
2,353
125,860,000
55,441
2,270
+10.9%
+15.0%
Europe
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
278,736,000
199,978
1,394
284,030,000
191,055
1,487
+1.9%
-4.5%
Oceania
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
8,568,000
4,798
1,786
9,283,000
4,764
1,949
+8.3%
-0.7%
WORLDWIDE
Catholic population
Priests (diocesan and religious)
Catholics per Priest
1,098,366,000
405,891
2,706
1,180,665,000
410,573
2,876
+7.5%
+1.2%
Reprinted from The CARA Report 17, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 5, 7–8; used by permission.
January 2012
41
Book Reviews
Allah: A Christian Response.
By Miroslav Volf. New York: HarperOne, 2011.
Pp. 326. $25.99; paperback $15.99.
Anyone who works in the field of
Christian-Muslim relations knows that
the question “Do Christians and Muslims
worship the same God?” is asked with
great regularity. In this wise book, the fruit
of a lifetime’s experience but especially
of encounters, dialogue, and reflection
occasioned by the document “A Common
Word Between Us and You” (2007) and
its responses, Miroslav Volf tackles the
question head-on. After seeking insight
from the encounters with Islam of Nicholas
of Cusa and Martin Luther, Volf argues,
in precise, step-by-step fashion, that
Christian and Islamic descriptions of
God and God’s commands, while by no
means identical, are sufficiently similar to
allow the affirmation that Christians and
Muslims (at least, those who represent their
traditions well) do worship the same God.
(As Volf points out, the somewhat parallel
case of divergent Christian and Jewish
descriptions of God is instructive here.)
Furthermore, this result has important
consequences for Christians and Muslims:
it can allow for respectful, mutual witness
to their faith, as well as joint witness to
the true source of human flourishing;
it can encourage resistance to idolatries
associated with national and religious
identity; it can provide the possibility of
life together in politically plural societies;
and it can lead to a common struggle
against extremist violence. The real
differences between Christian and Islamic
God-discourse are not “deal-breakers” but
rather invitations to deeper reflection—
beautifully exemplified in Volf’s chapters
(8–9) on God’s mercy and “eternal and
unconditional love.”
This is an ambitious book that aims
to reflect on a wide range of difficult
issues in an inviting and accessible way.
Naturally, the discussion of some topics
could be expanded. Volf’s presentation
of the doctrine of the Trinity (chap. 7)
tends toward the formal and abstract,
while the complex political issues tackled
in chapter 12 (“Two Faiths, Common
God, Single Government”) could use a
book of their own. Readers of the IBMR
may be surprised by the suggestion that
serious attempts to address the “same
God” question are mostly a post–9/11
phenomenon, at least in the West (p. 111).
And I missed any acknowledgment of
Christianity and Chinese Culture.
Edited by Miikka Ruokanen and Paulos Huang.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Pp. xx, 384.
Paperback $40.
This timely book emerges from a 2003 symposium in Finland entitled “Christianity
and Chinese Culture: A Sino-Nordic Conference on Chinese Contextual Theology.” In it, Chinese academicians and
church leaders assess their efforts to
encourage postdenominational Chinese
Protestantism to “contribute more actively
and positively” to a “new spiritual
culture” in the search for a durable moral
compass for twenty-first-century China.
Contrary to Marxist expectations, China’s
growing prosperity in its globalizing
economy sees more, not fewer, Chinese
embracing religion. Today, forty years
after the Cultural Revolution, one in
three Chinese acknowledges a personal
religious inclination. Some eighty million
Protestants (compared with 750,000 in
1949) are the fastest-growing segment of
the estimated 200 million worshippers in
42
state-approved temples, mosques, and
churches. With two million baptisms a
year, China will soon surpass America as
the center of evangelical Protestantism.
During the past decade, a framework
called “Reconstruction of Theological
Thinking” (RTT) has guided “patriotic”
Three-Self Protestants in developing an
“authentic Chinese way of biblical interpretation” as they shed their missionary
origins and, in dialogue with resurgent
Chinese religions, address the life-altering
challenges of hypermodernization.
Supported by Three-Self leaders, academic
experts on religion, and the government’s
Religious Affairs Bureau, RTT seeks
to integrate China’s “moral ethics
of benevolence” with Christianity’s
“religious ethics of love” into the basis
of the country’s new moral foundation.
According to the editors, “Christians
the history of reflection on such issues in
connection with the missionary encounter
of Christians with Muslims—think of the
work of Kenneth Cragg and others—or in
the writings of Arabic-speaking Christians
who, already in the early Islamic centuries,
knew God as Allah and had to defend
their Trinitarian faith in an Islamic context.
But these are minor complaints about
a book from which I learned on every
page. With it, Volf has not only provided
a meticulous theological analysis; he has
given us a vision of a peaceful future in a
world that Christians share with Muslims.
Furthermore, he makes a very timely
appeal to his Western Christian readers
to be consistent disciples of Jesus, avoiding
the temptation to make religion into an
identity marker and heeding the command
to love one’s neighbor—including in our
theological analyses.
—Mark N. Swanson
Mark N. Swanson, the Harold S. Vogelaar Professor
of Christian-Muslim Studies and Interfaith Relations
at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, is
the author of The Coptic Papcy in Islamic Egypt,
641–1517 (American Univ. in Cairo Press, 2010).
are fostering the unity and healthy
development of the nation” (p. xvi).
This is no exaggeration. Across China’s
affluent cities, students, intellectuals,
professionals, and entrepreneurs are
embracing Protestantism in ever greater
numbers. They are using their newfound
wealth—a “gift from God”—to extend
Christian charity and pastoral training into
the still-impoverished countryside, even
as pseudo-Christian sects and non–ThreeSelf Christians preach millennial visions
of distributive justice, which foment
antigovernment unrest in many villages.
It is clear that RTT can succeed only
if the government continues its policy
of limited tolerance of the “patriotic”
church, while pursuing its two-thousandyear practice of subordinating religion
to the state and encouraging China’s
religions today to contribute to building
a “harmonious” society. (The conference
did not discuss the problematic relations
between the unregistered house churches
and the government.)
As headlong modernization exacts
an escalating toll on Chinese society, the
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
church’s challenge is to preach biblical
principles and exercise its prophetic voice,
even while remaining within the confines
of the state’s very narrow parameters of
religious freedom.
—P. Richard Bohr
P. Richard Bohr is Professor of History and Chair of
Asian Studies at the College of Saint Benedict and
Saint John’s University in Minnesota.
Missionary Scientists: Jesuit
Science in Spanish South America,
1570–1810.
outreach, which required the study of
Amerindian languages and ways of life.
From this engagement arose the concept
of reductions, which became the signature
Jesuit way of doing mission there, notably
in Paraguay (pp. 29–35). The reductions
also served as “contact zones” for exchange
of information about the natural world,
especially the medicinal properties of
plants and minerals, the intelligent use of
which by missionaries proved vital for the
success of their enterprise, since recourse
to shamanic treatment in cases of disease
January 2012
Christoffer H. Grundmann is the John R. Eckrich
University Professor in Religion and the Healing
Arts at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.
RECENT BOOKS from Eerdmans
FOR THE COMMUNION OF THE CHURCHES
By Andrés I. Prieto. Nashville: Vanderbilt
Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. x, 287. $59.95.
This book—though not a missiological
treatise proper—is a good read and
highly instructive for everyone interested
in the history and cultural impact of
Christian missions in Latin America, in
particular the scholarly and scientific
impact of Jesuit missionaries in the then
Spanish viceroyalty of Peru (at times
stretching down to what is today Chile,
Argentina, and Paraguay). The author,
professor of Spanish and Portuguese at
the University of Colorado at Boulder,
intends to document the neglected
“contributions to the study of nature
made by Jesuits working in the Spanish
American missions” (p. 2) until their
expulsion in 1767. Prieto first outlines the
development of Jesuit missionary work
on that continent (pp. 13–87) and then
describes the institutional network that
enabled the personal relationships that
sustained Jesuit missionaries in the pursuit of scientific quests, even when working
in remote areas (pp. 91–140). In part 3 he
compares seminal publications on the
(natural) history of the New World by
Jesuit authors of the period (pp. 143–220).
An epilogue (pp. 221–28) addresses the
active involvement of displaced Jesuits
from Latin America, notably from Chile.
While part 2 tells about the flow
of scientific information within the
Society of Jesus in those days and part
3 traces the arguments advanced in
explaining (strange) natural phenomena
by recourse to Aristotelian-informed
Thomistic theology, in which all Jesuits
were trained, it is part 1 that deserves the
special attention of missiologists. In it the
author explains the significant differences
between Jesuit missionary endeavors
in Spanish South America and those in
Europe. In general, Jesuits were to run
schools and institutions of higher learning
in urban areas. In the Spanish viceroyalty
of Peru, however, they were forced to do
parish work (doctrina) and missionary
or crisis was the main reason for relapses
by neophytes (pp. 36–61).
The strict focus on Jesuit missionary
scientists in Latin America is a strength
as well as a limitation of this study, which
cries out for comparison with like efforts
elsewhere, notably in China.
—Christoffer H. Grundmann
The Contribution of the Groupe des Dombes
Catherine E. Clifford, editor
“A useful resource for teaching, exploring ecumenical history, and
providing resources for church leaders in their response to Christ’s
prayer that they all may be one.”
— Jeffrey Gros, FSC
ISBN 978-0-8028-6532-8 · 231 pages · paperback · $30.00
CHRIST JESUS AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE TODAY
New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships
Philip A. Cunningham, Joseph Sievers, Mary C. Boys,
Hans Hermann Henrix, and Jesper Svartvik, editors
Foreword by Walter Cardinal Kasper
“This work is a bold step forward in Catholic searching for a closer
theological bond to Judaism without giving up the differences between
the two faiths. . . . Offers the cutting edge of Christian theological views
of Judaism.”
— Alan Brill
ISBN 978-0-8028-6624-0 · 334 pages · paperback · $36.00
WALK HUMBLY WITH THE LORD
Church and Mission Engaging Plurality
Viggo Mortensen and Andreas Østerlund Nielsen, editors
“A marvelous collection of reflections on mission that will be especially
helpful to Christians committed to living faithfully and missionally in
today’s pluralistic world.”
— Stephen Bevans, SVD
ISBN 978-0-8028-6630-1 · 322 pages · paperback · $45.00
CHRISTIANITY AND CHINESE CULTURE
Miikka Ruokanen and Paulos Huang, editors
“This is a most timely publication on the current issues and research
on Christianity and Chinese culture in the PRC. . . . This book should
be on the shelf of any scholar interested in the subject.”
— Edmond Tang
ISBN 978-0-8028-6556-4 · 404 pages · paperback · $40.00
At your bookstore,
or call 800-253-7521
www.eerdmans.com
1024
43
The History of the Catholic Church
in Latin America: From Conquest
to Revolution and Beyond.
By John Frederick Schwaller. New York: New
York Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. ix, 318. $35.
This volume traces the major themes and
issues in the history of the Catholic Church
in Latin America from Columbus to the
present, a difficult task for a region today
comprising eighteen nations, each with
its own distinctive history. Understanding
that he cannot be encyclopedic, John
Frederick Schwaller presents a “general
framework” designed to help readers
make sense of a long and complicated
history by paying particular attention to
the political and economic influence of
Catholicism in the region.
There is little doubt, argues Schwaller,
that the Catholic Church is the “central
institution” in the history of Latin
America. He demonstrates convincingly
that church-state relations have usually
been one of the most important issues,
if not the single most important issue, in
any given viceroyalty or nation. From a
priest’s rebellion against Cortés during
the conquest of Mexico, to the Bourbon
monarchs’ showdowns with the Jesuits,
to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s
confrontations with Cardinal Raúl Silva
Hénriquez, the relationship between
the church and secular powers has had
profound implications for the direction
and stability of Latin American society.
Given the centrality of the church in
Latin America, the ongoing struggle for
priestly vocations detailed throughout
the book strikes a slightly discordant
note. That a region heavily evangelized
in the sixteenth century still depended
heavily on foreign priests in the twentieth
century—with some countries still having
a majority of foreign priests—begs for more
explanation than Schwaller chooses to
give. Especially for readers interested in
the missionary aspects of Christianity, the
God’s Empire: Religion and
Colonialism in the British World,
c. 1801–1908.
By Hilary M. Carey. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. xviii, 421. £60 / $99.
“Why does the mere idea of empire
now attract division,” asks Hilary M.
Carey, “when over a hundred years ago,
imperial church gatherings . . . captivated
the London metropole?” (p. xiii). God’s
Empire traces the waxing and waning
in the cohesive strength of the “dense
imperial religious networks” developed by
the churches that ministered to the needs
of the British diaspora colonizing “Greater
Britain” during the nineteenth century
(p. 68). Empire created transnational
opportunities for the development of
religious missions to both the indigenous
and the colonizing peoples of the British
world, but Carey seeks to understand why
the former enterprise is still celebrated
today, while the latter has almost been
forgotten. Although her theoretical touch
is light, with only a passing mention
of hegemony or postcolonial theory,
the author explicitly focuses upon the
“Christian consensus which supported the
expansion of the British world through the
planting of religious institutions in every
conceivable corner of the Empire” (p. xiv).
This excellent book is organized in
four parts. The first discusses terms such
as “Greater Britain” and traces how the
44
“Protestant nation” expanded to become
a “Christian empire” over the course of
the nineteenth century (p. 40). The second
examines the objectives of the various
colonial missionary societies and the
planting of a sectarian network of churches
throughout Greater Britain. The third focuses
upon the nature of the colonial clergy and
notes that Parliament found questions
of their patriotic loyalty and theological
orthodoxy sufficiently irritating as to
legislate for their regulation in 1874. The final
part explores the “systematic” or religious
colonization, which sought to address the
late-Victorian debate over the morality of
colonization and its generally disastrous
results for the indigenous inhabitants of
colonized territories (p. 308).
Carey concludes that the colonial
Christian consensus was gradually
undermined by the centrifugal cultural
dynamics of religious sectarianism,
colonial nationalism, and internationalism.
By the turn of the century, it was the souls
of the heathen, rather than those of the
colonists, that occupied the metropolitan
missionary mind. This book provides an
honest answer to its author’s primary
question: even the colonization that was
weakness of the Latin American church in
producing its own clergy and in sending
missionaries to its unevangelized areas,
much less to other regions of the world,
will seem symptomatic of deeper problems, but the underlying disease is only
hinted at.
Another weakness of the book is its
treatment of the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal (CCR), which receives only
one paragraph of attention, compared to
several pages for recent progressive forms
of Catholicism such as liberation theology
and base ecclesial communities. As Andrew
Chesnut and Edward Cleary have shown,
the CCR is the fastest growing part of the
Catholic Church in Latin America and the
only movement within the church that
seems able to compete with the juggernaut
of Pentecostalism. Despite these lacunae,
this is a clear, fair, and intelligent treatment
of a complicated subject that would work
well in an introductory-level course on
Latin America or World Christianity.
—Todd Hartch
Todd Hartch teaches Latin American history at
Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Kentucky.
ecclesiastically organized, directed and
maintained, representing the culmination
of the colonial missions movement, was
“achieved only with the eradication of the
native population” (p. 370). God’s Empire
reminds us that empire building, even in
God’s name, was a divisive, disturbing
business.
—J. Edmund Heavens
J. Edmund Heavens teaches American history at
the University of Cambridge and the University
of East Anglia.
Korean Diaspora and Christian
Mission.
Edited by S. Hun Kim and Wonsuk Ma.
Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2011.
Pp. xviii, 339. £31.99 / $35.
With the growing interest in non-Western
mission movements in the past few decades, there has also emerged an awareness of the role of diaspora Christians
as both missionaries and subjects of
mission. Korean Christians present an
especially interesting example of how
the diaspora can be utilized in mission.
With the second-largest number of international missionaries in the world, South
Korean churches have a keen interest in
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
cross-cultural mission, although at times
it has been hindered by the monocultural
background of its missionaries. Outside of
South Korea, millions of Koreans dwell
in large numbers in such countries as the
United States, Japan, China, and Brazil.
The Korean diaspora communities have
been the subject of mission, but many
within them are now playing an active
role as missionaries.
Korean Diaspora and Christian Mission,
edited by S. Hun Kim and Wonsuk Ma, is
the first book to focus on this fascinating
and multidimensional subject. The
first part, “Foundations,” examines the
theological, historical, and social elements
of the Korean diaspora and the concept
of diaspora in general. The second
section, “Setting the Stage,” considers the
emergence of migrant mission and some of
the cultural barriers that inhibit the growth
of Korean cross-cultural evangelism. The
final part, “Korean Diaspora in Mission,”
delves into some existing and planned
projects set up for migrants in South Korea
and the Korean diaspora. Throughout the
work true enthusiasm is displayed about
the potential of Korean diaspora mission.
There is a disappointing lack of indepth examination of existing diaspora
ministries both within and outside of
South Korea, with some exceptions, such
as Steve Sang-cheol Moon’s “The Korean
Diaspora Models of a Missional Church”
and David Chul Han Jun’s “A South
Korean Case Study of Migrant Ministries.”
This shortcoming, however, follows from
the view of a number of authors within
the book that a fully functioning Korean
diaspora mission is still more of a vision
than a present reality.
While Korean Diaspora and Christian
Mission covers a wide variety of topics,
the reader will come away with a greater
awareness of the Korean diaspora and
migrant ministries within South Korea,
as well as an enhanced knowledge of the
Korean missionary movement.
—Amy Mormino
Amy Mormino is Professor of Missiology and Church
History at St. Petersburg Seminary in Florida.
A Living Man from Africa:
Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and
Missionary, and the Making of
Nineteenth-Century South Africa.
introduction to the life of Jan Tzatzoe,
who helped bring together the worlds of
Africa and Europe into a new South African
reality, and in its discussion of the crucial
roles of Africans as agents of cultural and
intellectual change in a world of swart
gevaar (Afrikaans for “black threat”) in
Xhosaland in the nineteenth century.
Divided into three well-crafted
parts, the book presents the geography,
history, politics, and lifestyle of the Xhosa
people and their interaction with the
European missionaries from the London
Missionary Society (LMS) and with
British colonial officers in the nineteenth
century. With creative imagination, Levine
tells the missionary story in Xhosaland
by exploring closely the life of Tzatzoe,
focusing on his success as “a religious,
linguistic, and intellectual innovator in the
regimented setting of European missions
and the more syncretic settings of various
Xhosa communities” (p. 5).
Roger Levine transcends the stereotypical narrative history of missionary
work in Africa. He argues that, because
Word Made Global
Stories of African Christianity in New York City
Foreword by Andrew F. Walls
Mark R. Gornik
Afterword by Emmanuel Katongole
“Mark Gornik’s fascinating, in-depth look at African Christianity
in New York City should be read by anyone concerned to
understand the future of the new, global Christianity, and
especially by those doing urban ministry. . . . This is the kind
of analysis sorely needed today.”
— Timothy Keller
“This unique and illuminating study, based on extensive religious
ethnography, is indeed a vital contribution to our understanding
of the dynamics, mission, and vitality of new African Christianity
in New York City. It will assume a significant reference point for
future research in a relatively nascent field. It is a must-read!”
— Afe Adogame
ISBN 978-0-8028-6448-2 · 368 pages · paperback · $30.00
By Roger S. Levine. New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 291. $30.
This book will doubtless be hailed as a
landmark in the study of Christianity
among the Xhosa people of South Africa.
It does double duty both as an excellent
January 2012
At your bookstore,
or call 800-253-7521
www.eerdmans.com
1047
45
Tzatzoe lived on the margins between
Christianity and his African roots, he had
credibility among both the missionaries
and his fellow Xhosa citizens. Tzatzoe was
a man of faith and an intermediary, and he
personified the hybrid nature of the new
self created by the colonial encounter with
Africans in South Africa.
A Living Man from Africa will strengthen mission scholarship, and its contributions to the production and dissemination of Christian knowledge in narrative
history of mission will be far-reaching.
The author has resurrected the story of
the missionary encounter with the Xhosa
people, showing a conflicted relationship
characterized by mutual acceptance and
rejection. The colonial authorities critiqued
but also adapted to and mobilized African
influences, while Africans in turn ignored,
acknowledged, absorbed, and confronted
European civilization. Tzatzoe traveled
back and forth between his African roots
and Christianity, which meant that he was
crossing vast political, cultural, spiritual,
and ideological chasms.
A Living Man from Africa is richly
researched and splendidly written. It is a
welcome and innovative addition to the
growing interest in narrative missionary
history.
—Caleb O. Oladipo
Caleb O. Oladipo is the Duke K. McCall Professor
of Mission and World Christianity at the Baptist
Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia.
Culture, Inculturation, and
Theologians: A Postmodern
Critique.
By Gerald A. Arbuckle. Collegeville, Minn.:
Liturgical Press, 2010. Pp. xxiv, 200.
Paperback $24.95.
In Culture, Inculturation, and Theologians,
the distinguished Marist anthropologist
Gerald Arbuckle returns to themes he
traced in his 1990 book Earthing the Gospel.
But where his former book was a practical
handbook to help missioners and pastoral
workers think about cultural systems
in their everyday work, Arbuckle’s
most recent book seeks to clarify our
situation today in which terms such as
“cultural” and “multicultural” have
become ubiquitous—without careful
attention being given to what they mean
in a rapidly changing world.
Arbuckle succeeds in clarifying the
field of anthropology and drawing out its
implications for understanding an almost
universal judgment by the educated,
namely, that “metanarratives” are tools to
dominate others. This is a profoundly theological book rooted in a biblical outlook, but
it shows great awareness that churches and
mission bodies are often guilty of passing
off particular, culturally derived principles
as biblical and universally mandatory.
Accordingly, the question that
underlies everything in this superb book
is, What use can churches make of the
welter of conflicting anthropological
insights? And even deeper, What is the
Gospel? As a Catholic, Arbuckle confronts
a clerical system whose approach to
culture resembles the McDonald approach
to nutrition. (This, by the way, is not
the problem of Protestant missiologists
and church leaders.) Arbuckle’s book is
nonetheless important for such readers,
because he knows that chaos—including
46
cultural hybridization and discontent—is
the nature of this universe. The Gospel does
not take us out of this world but orients us
in a life lived toward death, the ultimate
chaos. Given this chaos, in Arbuckle’s view,
the church’s role is one of helping human
beings embrace the paschal mystery of
death and life as Christ did, not to struggle to
restore or create an imaginary, pristine Eden.
God’s call is into an increasingly intercultural drama and to being light in darkness.
—William R. Burrows
William R. Burrows, a contributing editor of the
IBMR, is Research Professor of Missiology, Center for
World Christianity, New York Theological Seminary.
Christian Presence and Progress
in North-East Asia: Historical and
Comparative Studies.
Edited by Jan A. B. Jongeneel et al. Frankfurt:
Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. xiv, 242. SFr 70 / €44.70
/ £40.20 / US$69.95.
This book is a selection of papers originally
presented at the Seventh International
Conference of the North-East Asia
Council of Studies in the History of
Christianity, held in China in 2009. The
first two articles put into context the
discussion of the conference: Jan A. B.
Jongeneel surveys the impact of the
interdenominationalism of the Western
Protestant missionary movement on East
Asia in the pre-Edinburgh period, and
Xinping Zhuo argues that Christianity
in China has played an important role in
politics, although its sociocultural role
has been limited.
As regards China, John T. P. Lai
examines the Christian literature ministry
in China and Japan, highlighting the
different ways of distribution and policies
of self-support. Kevin Xiyi Yao argues that
fundamentalism in the region was a local
but international movement, showing
a marked variation: in China, it was
major and apolitical; in Korea, major and
political; and in Japan, minor. Peter Tze
Ming Ng and Yongguang Zhang explore
the impact of Christian education on
nationalism and modernization. In Japan
it was “an enemy”; in Korea, “a promoter”; and in China, “a mediating tool
for dialogue” between nationalism and
cosmopolitanism (pp. 71–72). According
to Jiafeng Liu, unlike in Japan, Christian
socialism in China was a minor and
short-lived movement. Comparing Sino
theology with the Mukyokai movement,
Pan-chiu Lai views it as “a cultural rather
than religious movement” (p. 103).
With reference to Japan, Thomas
G. Oey’s essay on John Liggins reveals
that resistance to Christianity forced this
pioneer to do mission work indirectly
rather than directly. Yuko Watanabe’s
article on the Chinese YMCA in Tokyo
sheds light on the internationalization of
missionary efforts in the early twentieth
century. Naoto Tsuji scrutinizes how
theological views, conservative and liberal,
dominated the landscape of Christian
education.
Concerning Korea, Chong-ku Paek’s
article on John Ross, a China missionary
working for China and Korea, shows how
missionary work in one nation could be
mobilized for a neighboring country.
Ji-il Tark investigates Canadian missions,
which worked in Japan, Manchuria, and
Korea but concentrated mainly on one
ethnic group, the Koreans. Examining
the Holiness mission and church in the
region, Jong-hyun Park investigates how
their seemingly apolitical doctrine of the
second coming of Christ was interpreted
politically by the indigenous governments.
Byung-tae Kim considers the effect of the
Korean War on the development of Chinese
and Korean churches, pro-Communist
versus anti-Communist, in the postbellum
years. In sum, as a collection of papers,
this book leads us through a kaleidoscopic
array of issues, all the while contributing
to our overall knowledge of this region
and its history.
—Kyo Seong Ahn
Kyo Seong Ahn is Assistant Professor of Historical
Theology, Presbyterian College and Theological
Seminary, Seoul, Korea.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Jesus and the Incarnation:
Reflections of Christians from
Islamic Contexts.
Edited by David Emmanuel Singh. Oxford:
Regnum Books, 2011. Pp. vii, 245. Paperback
£24.99.
Jesus and the Incarnation is a collection
of papers representing a wide range of
Christian voices and perspectives around
the themes of “The Word Made Flesh”
and “The Word Made Book” within the
context of global Muslim-Christian
encounters. After the introductory chapter
by David Singh, the book is divided
into three major sections: “The Word,”
“Community,” and “Witness.”
Instead of simply focusing on the old
polemics between Islam and Christianity
on the divisive topic of the Incarnation, this
collection is an attempt to “make way for
creative forms of conversation and debate”
(pp. 16–17) between the two faiths.
Some of the articles seem to be more
relevant to the stated theme of the book
than others. As always, Kenneth Cragg
brings out fresh and creative insights by
showing how, even within the Islamic
understanding of revelation, “if the eternal
is to enter into the temporal, there must
be a point of entry where the universal
has become the particular, the timeless
the time-old” (p. 24). Mark Beaumont’s
article is a helpful summary of some of the
classic disputes on the Incarnation in the
early centuries of the encounter between
Muslim and Christian theologians,
while Jonathan Culver introduces us
to the apologetic works of Hamran
Ambrie, an Indonesian Muslim convert
to Christianity.
Some other articles do not seem to
fit naturally within the stated aim of this
work. Mary Kay McVicker’s article on
the religious rituals of an Indian Shi‘ite
community or David Grafton’s presentation on the Van Dyck Arabic translation of the Bible fall in this category.
Some voices raise important
challenges to the church regarding
incarnational ministry among Muslims
(articles by Peter Riddell and Phil Parshall),
and others move beyond the boundaries
of historic orthodoxy in regard to Christology (Clinton Bennett).
I believe this book could have been
significantly enhanced if it had been more
focused on the theological themes around
the doctrine of the Incarnation and also if it
had presented more voices from Christian
writers who had come out of a Muslim
background.
—Sasan Tavassoli
Sasan Tavassoli, a former Shi‘ite Muslim from Iran,
serves as a missionary among Iranians.
January 2012
The In-Between People: A Reading
of David Bosch Through the Lens
of Mission History and
Contemporary Challenges in
Ethiopia.
By Girma Bekele. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock,
Pickwick Publications, 2011. Pp. xvi, 461.
Paperback $51.
Girma Bekele’s published Ph.D. thesis
from Wycliffe College (University of
Toronto) is a magisterial tome that
enhances the growing body of Ethiopian
scholarship. Prior to his Toronto graduate
studies, Girma was employed in the
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William a. NorgreN
“A narrative of an unrecorded part of the American
ecumenical story and an indispensable resource for
ecumenists and historians.”
— William G. Rusch
ISBN 978-0-8028-6599-1
103 pages • paperback • $20.00
MUHLENBERG’S MINISTERIUM,
BEN FRANKLIN’S DEISM,
AND THE CHURCHES OF THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Reflections on the 250th Anniversary of the
Oldest Lutheran Church Body in North America
JohN reumaNN, editor
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BRITISH MISSIONARIES
AND THE END OF EMPIRE
East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–64
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS SERIES
JohN Stuart
“Authoritatively and elegantly written, crackling
with insight, and drawing on a huge range of
archival sources, this book will be recognized as
indispensable in the study of both mission history
and decolonization.”
— John Darwin
ISBN 978-0-8028-6633-2
253 pages • paperback • $40.00
At your bookstore,
or call 800-253-7521
www.eerdmans.com
1527
Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Dr NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49505
47
development sector of the Ethiopian
Kale Heywet Church. He is to be
commended for his scholarly “double
listening” (credit to John Stott): first, to
South African missiologist/theologian
David Bosch through some eighty-six
articles, essays, letters, and books; and
second, both to historiographers of the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church (EOTC) and
to contemporary writers on the emerging
Ethiopian evangelical movement. Girma
may be the first historian to suggest a
creative partnership between the two
seemingly disparate Ethiopian church
traditions.
In part 1 Girma considers Bosch’s
sociotheological journey and transformation as a Reformed Afrikaner
struggling with state-sanctioned apartheid.
Part 2 presents Bosch’s key missiological
concepts as basically grounded in the New
Testament. In part 3 Girma focuses on
Ethiopia’s mission history and, through
the lens of Bosch’s various missiological
paradigms, describes the unique qualities
of the sixteen centuries of the EOTC,
the two large “mission churches” (Kale
Heywet and Mekane Yesus), and the
Ethiopian Pentecostal movement, which
has greatly altered the landscape of
Ethiopian evangelicalism. Part 4 expands
on how the church as an “alternative
community” (p. 278) must broaden its
quest for justice and social transformation
through missional involvement; in the
process he chides mission agencies for
separating evangelism and social justice.
In part 5 the author envisions a common
ecumenical cooperation within Ethiopia to
create an “in-between people,” a phrase
coined by Bosch (p. 266). The cooperating
Ethiopian church bodies are to be the
bridges within society, addressing the
issues of government-endorsed ethnicbased federalism (which could fragment
the nation), poverty in what is one of the
poorest countries of the world, and the
impact of globalization. The in-between
people themselves must first be “reconciled,
liberated and transformed” (p. 407).
This is a significant book (though the
editing/proofreading process could have
been more rigorous). In it Girma Bekele,
serving as Bosch’s “missiological dialogue
partner” (p. 408), challenges Ethiopian
Christianity (63 percent of Ethiopia’s
population), as well as the wider global
church, to live beyond a comfortable status
quo posture. This alternative community,
as the inaugurated kingdom of God, “is
in the world, but not of the world—for the
world [and] against the world” (p. 405).
We are indebted to Girma for being an
articulate spokesman for David Bosch,
who no longer walks among us.
—E. Paul Balisky
E. Paul Balisky, with his wife, Lila, served with SIM
(Serving in Mission) in Ethiopia from 1966 to 2006.
48
Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on
Christian Mission Today.
By Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder.
Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2011. Pp. xi,
194. Paperback $35.
Catholic Theological Union professors
Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder
have become well known for their wide
vistas on mission theology—seeing
their names on the book cover raises
expectations! This time they tackle the
issue of prophetic dialogue, the generally
accepted description of the nature of
mission in their religious order, the
Society of the Divine Word (SVD). This
issue became a compromise between
the context-affirming and the contextchallenging nature of Christian mission.
While all mission needs to be dialogical
and open to the other, it also needs to have
a challenging cutting edge.
The book consists of two parts (even
if the parts are not marked), starting
with constructive mission-theological
deliberations and ending with two
descriptive-analytical chapters. The
first contains reflections on mission as
prophetic dialogue from various perspectives. In these chapters, the authors
skillfully craft a progressive mainline
Roman Catholic position on mission. It
attempts to balance openness and clarity of theological position. One of the
preferred ways in which this position is
described in the book is David Bosch’s
famous phrase “bold humility.” Even if the
resulting mission theology builds largely
on Roman Catholic foundations and is
unmistakably Roman Catholic in tone,
there is a sufficient degree of ecumenical
openness.
The last two chapters of the book deal
with church/mission history and recent
Magisterial mission documents that the
authors consider to have contributed
toward a deepened understanding of
mission as prophetic dialogue. The
church-historical chapter reads like a fastforward version of two millennia from the
chosen point of view. The chapter on the
Magisterial documents is far more useful,
serving simultaneously as an analysis of
the documents from the given point of
view and as a condensed introduction to
these documents. This chapter is highly
valuable, especially for students.
Most of the chapters were originally
written as independent articles, and even
though they have been edited for this book,
the outcome hovers between a monograph
and an anthology. The downside is the
number of redundant quotations and
statements, as well as a certain lack of
progress in argumentation. The book
nevertheless makes for very enlightening
reading for anyone wishing to gain a
picture of where today’s mainline Roman
Catholic mission theology is on the way.
—Mika Vähäkangas
Mika Vähäkangas, a Finnish citizen, is Professor of
Mission Studies and Ecumenics at Lund University,
Sweden.
McDonaldisation, Masala
McGospel, and Om Economics:
Televangelism in Contemporary
India.
By Jonathan D. James. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010. Pp. xxvii, 232. Rs 595 / $15.
This book is set in the broad context
of “the changing shape and form of
Christian ministry” (p. xvii) in the Indian
church. The author, Jonathan D. James, is
convinced that in the Indian churches, the
pastoral techniques developed during the
colonial period are rapidly being replaced
by “techniques resembling the American
model” (p. xviii). In this context, the book
explores the American phenomenon of
televangelism in India, reviewing its
historical, cultural, religious, political, and
economic setting.
At the outset, the author discusses
the rather unusual title of the book.
He likens global televangelism to
“McDonaldisation” because of its
standardized, one-size-fits-all approach.
“Glocal” televangelism—the fusion of
American and Indian evangelism—James
refers to as Masala McGospel. And Hindu
televangelism, a consequence of satellite
technology and charismatic televangelism,
he characterizes as “om economics.”
Chapter 1 introduces the key metaphors used in the book and also outlines
the methodology and the historicalcomparative framework of this study.
In the second chapter James locates
charismatic televangelism in its global
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
context by tracing its roots to black
American Pentecostalism. Chapter 3
examines the data on the history of Indian
missions and relevant issues pertaining
to the social and cultural aspects of
Christianity in India. Chapter 4 discusses
the place that charismatic televangelism
has in contemporary India.
The relationship between charismatic
televangelism and Hindu televangelism
is explored in chapter 5, especially in
the way the Hindu channels exhibit the
practices of consumerism and marketing techniques used by charismatic televangelists. Chapters 6 and 7 analyze
the influence of both global and glocal
charismatic televangelism on the leaders
of the Protestant Church and the Hindu
community in urban India. In chapter 8
the author examines the intermediary role
that television plays in broadcasting the
Christian faith. The concluding chapter
summarizes the study, as well as analyzing
the findings and giving some broad
predictions of mediated faith in today’s
global world.
As a pioneering study of the role
and impact of televangelism in India, this
book is essential reading for all students of
religion and culture in pluralist societies.
—Jesudas M. Athyal
Jesudas M. Athyal is a Fellow at the Center for Global
Christianity and Mission, Boston University School
of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts.
namely, Abokobi, Accra, and Akuropon
(Akropong). Sill’s interpretation of a
broad range of archival evidence shows
an understanding of both Basel Mission
policies and the mind-set of its leaders.
The Basel context illustrates the historic
contradiction of Christianity as “a
religion embraced especially by women,”
but where ironically the initiatives for
women’s mission were controlled by men
(pp. 5–6).
Such gender issues in mission may
be a major focus of the book, but they do
New Mission Studies
Walking with
the Poor
Principles and Practices of
Transformational Development
Revised and Expanded Edition
BRYANT L. MYERS
Encounters in Quest of Christian
Womanhood: The Basel Mission in
Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana.
By Ulrike Sill. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xvii,
420. €130 / $185.
The Basel Mission work in the Gold Coast
in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century was established at great cost
of lives of its first missionaries. Once
the mission found a way to evade the
scourge of malaria in the safety of the
Akuapem hills, however, it was able to
settle down to the serious business of
evangelizing the people. Before long,
the arrival of missionaries’ wives and
a couple of single women missionaries
changed the perspective not just on the
role of women but, quite fundamentally,
on the definition and goal of “Christian
womanhood.”
Ulrike Sill’s discussion, an expansion
of her doctoral dissertation, draws widely
on archival sources, notably the Basel
Mission (now Mission 21) Archives.
Her work traces the paths traveled by
missionary pioneers and innovators in the
towns where the Basel Mission operated,
January 2012
not overly dominate the discussion. In a
prologue and nine chapters, Sill examines
the roots of women’s mission in the Basel
Mission context; the roles and status of
several generations of European and African missionary women, traditionalists,
and Christian nationals in nineteenthcentury Gold Coast; the socioeconomic
functions of “space,” “clothing,” and
schooling, and their appropriation by
women in both traditional and Christian
communities; the embodiment of Christian womanhood and femininity; and
Understanding
World Christianity
“A masterpiece of integration and
application that draws widely on
the best Christian and scientific
sources on development.”
The Vision and Work
of Andrew F. Walls
—from the Foreword by Paul G. Hiebert
978-1-57075-939-0
pbk $30.00
In place of the eurocentric
model of “Christendom,” a new
understanding has emerged
of Christianity as a “world”
movement. At the cornerstone of
this new perspective lies the work
of a remarkable scholar, Andrew
F. Walls. Understanding World
Christianity introduces Walls’ work
and explores its wide-ranging
implications for understanding
of history, mission, the formative
place of Africa in the Christian
story, and the cross-cultural
transmission of faith.
Transforming Mission
Paradigm Shifts in
Theology of Mission
20th Anniversary Edition
DAVID J. BOSCH
Foreword by William R. Burrows
With a new concluding chapter by
Darrell Guder and Martin Reppenhagen
“Unquestionably the most comprehensive and enlightened work
on mission models studied across
Christian traditions and mission
history.”—Louis Luzbetak, S.V.D.
978-1-57075-948-2
pbk $35.00
From your bookseller or direct
Follow us
www.maryknollmall.org
WILLIAM R. BURROWS,
MARK R. GORNIK, and
JANICE A. McLEAN, editors
978-1-57075-949-9
pbk $30.00
O R B I S B O O KS
Maryknoll, NY 10545
1-800-258-5838
49
women’s aspirations beyond the Basel
Mission context.
Sill writes from a sympathetic perspective, engaging with material from the
fields of African history, mission history,
missiology, Christian education, sociology,
and gender studies. The summary of main
issues at the end of each chapter, along with
an extensive bibliography and glossary of
Akan terms, makes Encounters a valuable
academic and historical resource.
The author of this very readable
volume maintains the reader’s interest,
even while presenting a wealth of
information. This study is a welcome and
significant addition to existing scholarship
on the Basel Mission in the Gold Coast,
which until now has focused primarily
on its male agents.
—Maureen Iheanacho
ANNOUNCING
My Habitat
for Humanity:
Maureen Iheanacho served for fifteen years as
executive assistant to the rector of the AkrofiChristaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and
Culture, Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana. She is
coauthor of By His Grace: Signs on a Ghanaian
Journey (Accra, 2004).
The (Mostly) Good
Old Days
David Johnson Rowe
Dr. Rowe, copastor of Greenfield Hill Congregational
Church, Fairfield, Connecticut, spent fourteen years with
Habitat for Humanity International as president, volunteer,
and staff. His new book, an intimate look at one of the world’s
great charities, takes the reader
deep into Habitat for the best
and worst of moments, from
bitterness to forgiveness, from
rural America to India, from homeowners to Jimmy Carter and
Millard Fuller. It is a celebration
of humble beginnings, great
expectations, and God’s grace.
Paperback, 142 pages
$12.50 including shipping
To order, send an e-mail to:
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50
Religion and the Making of
Modern East Asia.
By Thomas David DuBois. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 259.
£55 / $90; paperback £17.99 / $27.99.
This book is part of a series of introductory
textbooks that adopt “New Approaches
to Asian History,” the “new approach” in
this case being the role of religion in the
modern history of East Asia. After a brief
introduction, in which Thomas DuBois
emphasizes the similarities between
religions and compares the historical role
of religion in Asia to that of Christianity in
Europe, the author divides the book into
roughly parallel sections on China and
Japan. The first section on each country
contains a brief outline of its religious
background and early history, but the
focus is on events from the beginning of
the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368) and from
the closing stages of the Japanese civil war
period in the mid-sixteenth century. The
final chapters bring us to the end of the
twentieth century and the “globalization
of Asian religion.”
To cover so much ground so clearly
and entertainingly in such a limited number of pages is a tremendous achievement.
The achievement is the greater because
valuable space is, quite rightly, spent on
basic explanations of essential background
factors such as the differences between
Buddhism in South and East Asia and
the life of Confucius. This space is not
wasted, but it is presumably the main
reason why some important points were
left uncovered, or largely ignored.
First, there is hardly anything on
Korea. In fact, it would have been more
truthful to replace “East Asia” in the title
with “China and Japan.” Second, it is clear
from the introduction, which addresses
the organizational and intellectual aspects
of religion rather than the supernatural
or soteriological, that the emphasis will
be on the interaction between religion
and politics at the top levels of society.
Consideration of Buddhist views of the
self and enlightenment is postponed
until a section on Zen and the samurai
in chapter 5 (pp. 114–16), while belief is
not dealt with until chapter 6, when it is
examined in the rather extreme context
of millenarianism (pp. 123–31). There is
nothing about the role of the dead or about
the responsibility of family members, not
only to their living relatives, but also to
those who have passed away and those
who have yet to be born. There was also
no space to consider whether there was
any Weberian-type reason for the differing
speeds at which Japan and China adopted
the spirit of capitalism. Finally, the author,
a China specialist, is not always reliable
when it comes to Japan. The book begins
with a reference to the Catholic missionary
activity that began with Francis Xavier in
1549 and ended in bloodshed less than one
hundred years later. Even this, however,
is misleading and inaccurate.
I hope that lecturers who use this
textbook will be able to supplement its
flaws, and that the students who use it will
be inspired to read further for themselves,
both in English and in Asian languages.
—Helen Ballhatchet
Helen Ballhatchet, Professor in the Faculty of
Economics, Keio University, Tokyo, has published
studies of the intellectual history of Meiji Japan and
the History of Christianity in East Asia.
The Rise of Charismatic
Catholicism in Latin America.
By Edward L. Cleary. Gainesville: Univ. Press
of Florida, 2011. Pp. xiii, 309. $74.95.
In the last four decades significant changes
have taken place in Latin American
religion. In the 1970s and 1980s scholars of
Latin American Christianity devoted much
of their energy to analyzing the importance
of the new theology of liberation. In
the 1990s scholarly attention shifted to
the astonishing growth of Pentecostal
Protestantism, with some pundits
predicting that within a few decades
more Latin Americans would be Protes-
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
tant than Catholic. Now Edward Cleary,
a well-respected, seasoned commentator
on Latin American religion who has
been in the forefront in explaining both
liberation theology and Pentecostalism
to North American audiences, has broken
new ground with The Rise of Charismatic
Catholicism in Latin America.
Cleary points out that, while 35
million Latin Americans were turning to
Pentecostalism in the last few decades,
more than twice that number had joined
the ranks of the Catholic charismatic
movement. Indeed, so successful has this
movement been that today there are more
Catholic charismatics in Latin America
than in any other region of the world.
Thus it is no exaggeration to say that,
just as Pentecostalism has transformed
Latin American Protestantism, so the
charismatic movement is transforming
Latin American Catholicism.
Although the charismatic movement
has much in common with Pentecostalism,
Cleary points out that it is solidly
grounded in Catholic sacramental life
and traditional Marian devotion. He
further notes that there is no one model.
Some groups, for instance, are pietistic
and tend to be conservative, while others
incorporate social justice concerns into
their agenda. Most important in Cleary’s
mind, it is a grassroots, lay movement
that is committed to evangelization and
that has the potential to revitalize the
Catholic Church.
Cleary is puzzled that commentators
on Latin American religion have largely
overlooked the Catholic charismatic
movement. With the publication of this
book, however, it seems safe to predict
that they will now take notice.
—Edward T. Brett
less than 100 yards apart in Colonia
Alta Vista Alegre, a lower-class working
neighborhood in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
The work is divided into two parts.
The literature review, in part 1 (itself well
worth the price of the book), surveys the
development of CEBs and Pentecostals,
as well as the theoretical interpretations
emerging among scholars. In part 2, with
an eye to field-testing these theories,
Wingeier-Rayo presents the findings of his
yearlong ethnographic study of the two
groups. Organizing his research around
common themes, including testimonies,
group practices, leadership styles, and
social and political action, WingeierRayo found that, in comparison with the
Pentecostal congregation, members of
the CEB were older, better established
in the community, and more upwardly
mobile. The intellectual and rational
nature of their Bible studies, designed to
raise political awareness through biblical
reflection, contrasted with the enthusiastic and emotional worship services of the
Pentecostals, where sermons focused, for
Edward T. Brett is Professor of History at La Roche
College, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Where Are the Poor? A Comparison
of the Ecclesial Base Communities
and Pentecostalism—a Case Study
in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
By Philip D. Wingeier-Rayo. Eugene, Ore.:
Wipf & Stock, Pickwick Publications, 2011.
Pp. xi, 164. Paperback $20.
Why would some people living in the same
barrio opt to participate in an Ecclesial
Base Community (CEB) while others,
often members of the same family, join a
Pentecostal church? Philip Wingeier-Rayo
responds to this question by offering a
theoretical and empirical comparative
analysis of an ecclesial base community
and a Pentecostal congregation located
January 2012
51
Plan Your 2012
Summer Sabbatical
at OMSC
Efficiency to three-bedroom.
For summer rates and reservations,
e-mail a request with your choice
of dates to:
Judy C. Stebbins
Director of Finance and Housing
Overseas Ministries Study Center
[email protected]
www.OMSC.org/summer.html
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Editor: Jonathan J. Bonk, Overseas Ministries Study Center,
490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511. Senior Associate
Editor, Dwight P. Baker; Associate Editor, J. Nelson Jennings;
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52
the most part, on a spiritual encounter
with the divine. A woman functioning
as a teacher-facilitator led the CEB, while
the pastor of the Pentecostal congregation
was male, authoritative, and charismatic.
Members of both groups, especially
when the CEBs were compared with the
“small group” meetings of the Pentecostals, demonstrated a sense of ownership
that was participative, empowering,
and purposeful, albeit not always for
the same reasons. They both acquired
analytical, social, and communication
skills, essentials tools for coping with and
even overcoming personal poverty. Both
groups seemed to have the potential for
social action and thus participation in
democratization, although the sheer size
of the Pentecostal movement increased
exponentially its capacity for social change.
As this study demonstrates, CEBs and
Pentecostals are, at least in Colonia Alta
Vista Alegre and in spite of similar social
outcomes, more than two expressions
of the same essence. For the foreseeable
future, whatever the similarities and
differences, these grassroots groups will
impact the socioreligious landscape for
millions of Latin Americans.
—Douglas Petersen
Douglas Petersen is the Margaret S. Smith
Distinguished Professor of World Mission and
Intercultural Studies at Vanguard University, Costa
Mesa, California, and the former president of Latin
America ChildCare.
The Ethics of Evangelism:
A Philosophical Defense of
Proselytizing and Persuasion.
By Elmer John Thiessen. Downers Grove, Ill.:
IVP Academic, 2011. Pp. 285. Paperback $24.
This book is a great gift to all who are
reflective practitioners of mission and
evangelism. In the past half-century, the
Christian world has been sensitized to
ethical issues in evangelism by two things:
the historical link between missions and
colonialization, and (more narrowly)
the scandals around various evangelists
during the 1980s. Since then, however, a
bigger question has arisen in the secular
world: not whether proselytization is done
ethically or not, but whether it is ethical
to do it at all.
Elmer John Thiessen, research
professor of education at Tyndale
University College in Toronto, has
addressed both these issues in a way that
is careful, thorough, irenic, and ultimately
persuasive—to this reader’s mind at least.
He rightly takes on the bigger and more
recent issue first and, having concluded
that evangelism is a legitimate human
activity (indeed he argues that it is necessary
for human dignity!), moves on to suggest
fifteen criteria of what makes it either
ethical or unethical. In the process, he
engages a wide range of thinkers, from
John Locke to Lesslie Newbigin, and from
Aristotle to Noam Chomsky.
The book is explicitly aimed at both
Christian and non-Christian audiences.
Thus in arguing that human dignity must
be the cornerstone of all proselytization,
Thiessen appeals equally not only to
Scripture and theology but also to philosophers such as Kant. This is valuable,
because the discussion needs to involve
more than the Christian community. In a
delightful way, Thiessen’s “evangelizing”
of his non-Christian readers exemplifies
the respectful, dialogic approach he
commends for proselytizers. Thus, when
he says that “ethical proselytizing requires
coherence between the proselytizer’s
character and the message being conveyed”
(p. 196), it is a pleasure to report that he
practices what he preaches—making his
case all the more persuasive.
My only concern with the book is that
it is not one for the average reader. But
it is right that the debate should first be
engaged at this academic level. We need
now for Thiessen’s thinking to percolate
down to the general Christian public—
not least via preachers and teachers and
seminary professors—and beyond, to
the public square of cultural discourse.
The result would be Christians who are
more confident and more courteous in
their evangelism, and a world that is more
open to hearing the Gospel because it is
ethically conveyed.
—John P. Bowen
John P. Bowen is Professor of Evangelism and
Director of the Institute of Evangelism at Wycliffe
College, Toronto.
David J. Bosch: Prophetic Integrity,
Cruciform Praxis.
Compiled and written by J. N. J. (Klippies)
Kritzinger and W. Saayman. Pietermaritzburg:
Cluster Publications, 2011. Pp. x, 214.
Paperback R 85.
In this volume good friends, colleagues,
and the wife of David Bosch explain and
explore the meaning of Bosch—a type of
thick description of a remarkable Christian
man. Twelve different people tell about
their experiences and relationships with
David Bosch. The authors/compilers have
decided on an interpretive framework for
Bosch’s life, first expressed in the subtitle
and then expanded using the praxis
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
matrix of UNISA that was developed by
Bosch and others in the 1980s and 1990s.
The greater value of the book, however,
is seen in how the prophetic integrity of
his life and his commitment to cruciform
witness surfaced again and again.
The chapter by Bosch’s wife, Annemie,
is a sensitive and well-articulated presentation of Bosch the theologian, missionary,
and family man. We learn that Bosch
was forever a committed family man, an
avid farmer, an accomplished and gifted
linguist, and a deeply caring companion.
“What brought so much healing to hurting
people and situations was his astounding
ability to apply his mind, combined with
emotional intelligence and concern for
people, in an outstandingly creative way”
(p. 36). Reading between the lines, we see
that he was also aided by a bright and
gifted wife.
The book contains a section
“Recollections and Reflections” from
colleagues, friends, and students; chapters
on dimensions of his life (Afrikaner,
public intellectual, organic theologian
and missionary-missiologist, and practical
ecumenist); and a concluding chapter that
offers an interpretation of his life through
analyzing his mission praxis.
This reviewer was overwhelmed by
how important it was for his theological
development that Bosch studied in
German-speaking Basel rather than in the
Netherlands, by the consistent leadership
he provided resisting apartheid, by his
steady resis-tance to both revolutionary
responses and passive acceptance of
apartheid, and by his reasons for not
signing the Kairos Document. The authors
have published some new material from
Bosch’s papers. They have been both fair
and carefully critical. Bosch was a unique,
strong, creative, sensitive theologian
whose practice carved in bold relief his
own life of cruciform praxis. This is a
great read, filling in many of the gaps in
our understanding of Bosch.
—Scott W. Sunquist
Scott W. Sunquist is Professor of World Christianity
at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
“...the harvest is plentiful...”
Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies
Doctor of Missiology
Please beware of bogus renewal
notices. A genuine IBMR renewal
notice will have a return address
of Denville, NJ 07834 on the outer
envelope, and the address on the
reply envelope will go to PO Box
3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000.
Please e-mail [email protected]
or call (203) 624-6672, ext. 309, with
any questions. Thank you.
January 2012
Relocation not required • Accredited by the Association
of Theological Schools and Higher Learning Commission
www.agts.edu
800-467-AGTS
53
Dissertation Notices
Aydin, Edip.
“Comparing the Syriac Order
of Monastic Profession with the Order
of Baptism, both in External Structure
and in Theological Themes.”
Ph.D. Princeton: Princeton Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Jackson, William C.
“Breakthrough Dynamics in Acts and
Selected Vineyard Churches: Exploring
the Use of Conflict Criticism in Biblical
Interpretation.”
D.Miss. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Becker, David L.
“Leadership Theory in the Matrilineal
Culture of the Bemba: Cultural
Implications for Contextualized
Leadership Development in the
Pentecostal Holiness Church in
Zambia.”
Ph.D. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2010.
Kaoma, Kapya John.
“Ubuntu, Jesus, and Earth: Integrating
African Religion and Christianity in
Ecological Ethics.”
Th.D. Boston: Boston Univ. School
of Theology, 2010.
Bennett, Robert H.
“From Darkness into the Light:
The Events Surrounding Exorcism
and Conversion as Found in the
Fifohazana Movement of the
Malagasy Lutheran Church.”
Ph.D. Fort Wayne, Ind.: Concordia
Theological Seminary, 2011.
Carney, James Jay.
“From Democratization to Ethnic
Revolution: Catholic Politics in
Rwanda, 1950–1962.”
Ph.D. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ.
of America, 2011.
Clark, Paul L.
“German Pentecostal Church Planting,
1945–2005: Implications for Intentional
Mission in the Twenty-first Century.”
Ph.D. Springfield, Mo.: Assemblies of God
Theological Seminary, 2011.
Dominic, Trån Ngọ Đang.
“Inculturation in Missionary Format
According to the Federation of Asian
Bishops’ Conference Documents
(1970–2006), with a Special Reference
to the Mission in Vietnam.”
Ph.D. Rome: Pontifical Urbaniana Univ.,
Faculty of Missiology, 2009.
Fung, Lawrence Wing-Leung.
“A Phenomenological Study
of the Role of Pastoral Leadership in
Mobilizing Chinese Churches in the
San Francisco Bay Area for Global
Mission in the Twenty-first Century.”
D.Miss. Portland, Ore.: Western Seminary,
2011.
Harris, Esker Jerome.
“Aspects of Mission in African
American Churches: Factors That
Influence Missions Praxis.”
D.Miss.. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
54
The IBMR can list only a small sample of recent
dissertations. For OMSC’s free online database
of over 6,200 dissertations in English, compiled in cooperation with Yale Divinity School
Library, go to www.internationalbulletin.org/
resources.
Kirk, J. Andrew.
“Christian Mission as Dialogue:
Engaging the Current Epistemological
Predicament of the West.”
Ph.D. Nijmegen: Radboud Univ., 2011.
Lakawa, Septemmy Eucharistia.
“Risky Hospitality: Mission in the
Aftermath of Religious Communal
Violence in Indonesia.”
Th.D. Boston: Boston Univ. School
of Theology, 2011.
Mbam, Emmanuel.
“The Foundations of a Theology of
Healing for the Roman Catholic
Church in Nigeria.”
Ph.D. Toronto: Toronto School of Theology,
2010.
McDonald, Todd.
“The Story of Planting God’s Mission:
Practices of Leadership for the
Discovery of a Faithful New Future.”
D.Min. Toronto: Toronto School of Theology,
2010.
Mowry, Kathryn Lewis.
“Trusting in Resurrection:
Eschatological Imagination for
Churches Engaging Transitional
Neighborhoods.”
Ph.D. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Neumann, Peter Donald.
“Encountering the Spirit: Pentecostal
Mediated Experience of God in
Theological Context.”
Ph.D. Toronto: Toronto School of Theology,
2010.
Obiezu, Christian Emeka.
“A Theological Interpretation and
Assessment of the Participation of the
Roman Catholic Church and Roman
Catholic Church–Inspired NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs)
in the United Nations.”
Ph.D. Toronto: Toronto School of Theology,
2010.
Saidi, Farida.
“A Study of Current Leadership Styles
in the North African Church.”
Ph.D. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Schoenhals Martinez, Sara.
“A Journey into Kingdom
Christianity.”
D.Miss. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Silva, Karen Lynne.
“Arthur Burk’s Method of Healing by
Blessing the Human Spirit.”
D.Miss. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Suckau, Krishana Oxenford.
“Christian Witness on the Plateau
Vivarais-Lignon: Narrative,
Nonviolence, and the Formation of
Character.”
Th.D. Boston: Boston Univ. School of
Theology, 2011.
Szabo, Joseph Andrew.
“Planting International Churches as
a Strategy to Reach Immigrants and
Expatriates in Western Europe.”
Ph.D. Springfield, Mo.: Assemblies of God
Theological Seminary, 2011.
Thompson, Jonathan David.
“Releasing Prayer: A Biblical,
Historical, and Praxis Foundation for
a Deliverance Ministry at Carruthers
Creek Community Church.”
D.Miss. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
Walker, Daniel Okyere.
“The Concept of Holiness in the
Ghanaian Church of Pentecost.”
Ph.D. Birmingham, Eng.: Univ. of
Birmingham, 2010.
Waltrip, Blayne Cameron.
“Being Church in Contemporary
Western Europe: Eight Cases of FrenchSpeaking and German-Speaking
Fresh Expressions of Christian
Communities.”
Ph.D. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological
Seminary, 2011.
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 1
Seminars for
International
Church Leaders,
Missionaries,
Mission
Executives,
Pastors,
Educators,
Students, and
Lay Leaders
Strengthening the Christian World Mission
January 2–6, 2012
Missionaries in the Movies.
Dr. Dwight P. Baker, Overseas Ministries Study Center, draws upon
both video clips and full-length feature films to examine the way missionaries have been represented in the movies over the past century.
January 9–13
The Lion’s Roar: The Book of Amos Speaks to Our World.
Dr. M. Daniel Carroll R. (Rodas), Denver Seminary, Littleton, Colorado, explores the relevance for Christian mission and ethics today of
the call of Amos to perceive the hand of God in history, to establish
justice, and to practice acceptable worship.
January 16–20
Anthropological Insights for Diaspora Missiology.
Dr. Steven J. Ybarrola, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore,
Kentucky, applies insights from the anthropological study of
migration, urbanization, diasporas, and transnationalism to the
relatively recent field of diaspora missiology.
January 23–27
Ethnicity as Gift and Barrier: Human Identity and Christian
Mission.
Dr. Tite Tiénou, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, works from first-hand experience in Africa to identify the
“tribal” issues faced by the global church in mission. Cosponsored
by Africa Inland Mission and Trinity Baptist Church (New Haven).
February 27–March 2
Christian Mission, the Environment, and Culture.
Dr. Allison M. Howell, Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology,
Mission, and Culture, Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana, considers
Christian responses to climate change—something that is not new
in human history—and the catastrophes that often accompany climate change, so as to provide a framework for Christian mission
in facing new crises. Cosponsored by United Methodist General
Board of Global Ministries.
March 5–9
Contextualizing Theology for Mission in Asia.
Dr. Enoch Wan, Western Seminary, Portland, Oregon, unfolds a
Sino-Asian approach to theologizing that is strategically relevant
for mission to Asians.
March 19–23
Issues in Mission Theology.
Dr. Charles Van Engen, School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller
Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, surveys current theo-
logical challenges facing students of mission. Cosponsored by
First Korean Presbyterian Church of Greater Hartford (Manchester, Connecticut).
March 26–30
Pentecostal Spirituality, Mission, and Discipleship in Africa.
Dr. J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Trinity Theological Seminary,
Accra, Ghana, and senior mission scholar in residence at OMSC,
uses the lens of contemporary African Pentecostal/charismatic
Christianity to focus on mission as renewal and revitalization.
Cosponsored by Bay Area Community Church (Annapolis, Maryland).
April 9–13
Teaching and Preaching the Gospel of Peace: New Testament
Perspectives.
Dr. Willard M. Swartley, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary,
Elkhart, Indiana, presents the missing peace in New Testament theology and its implications for mission and ethics. Cosponsored by
Mennonite Central Committee.
April 23–27
Music and Mission.
Dr. James Krabill, Mennonite Mission Network, builds upon insights
from musicology and two decades of missionary experience in West
Africa to unfold the dynamic role of music in mission. Cosponsored
by United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries.
April 30–May 4
Transformational Leadership: An Entrepreneurial Approach.
Rev. George Kovoor, Trinity College, Bristol, United Kingdom,
brings wide ecclesiastical and international experience to evaluation of differing models of leadership for mission. Cosponsored by
Christian Reformed World Missions.
May 7–11
Spiritual Renewal in the Missionary Community.
Rev. Stanley W. Green, Mennonite Mission Network, and Dr. Christine Sine, Mustard Seed Associates, blend classroom instruction and
one-on-one sessions to offer counsel and spiritual direction for Christian workers. Cosponsored by Mennonite Mission Network.
O verseas M inistries s tudy C enter
490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511
All seminars cost $175
Register online at www.omsc.org/seminars.html
Book Notes
Agamben, Giorgio. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa.
The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
Government.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 303. $70; paperback $24.95.
Chilcote, Paul W., ed.
Making Disciples in a World Parish: Global Perspectives on Mission and
Evangelism.
Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, Pickwick Publications, 2011. Pp. xxiv, 327. Paperback $39.
Ihsanoglu, Ekmeleddin.
The Islamic World in the New Century: The Organisation of the Islamic
Conference, 1969–2009.
Tokyo: Univ. of Tokyo Press, distributed by Columbia Univ. Press, 2011. Pp. xii,
330. $65.
Krabill, James R., and Stuart Murray, eds.
Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom: The Legacy of Alan and
Eleanor Kreider.
Harrisonburg, Va., and Waterloo, Ont.: Herald Press, 2011. Pp., vii, 234. Paperback
$22.99.
Paas, Steven.
Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of God in Africa Before the Rise of Western
Colonialism.
Nürnberg: VTR Publications, 2011. Pp. 274. Paperback €19.80 / $29.95 / £18.45.
Pavey, Stephen C.
Theologies of Power and Crisis: Envisioning/Embodying Christianity in
Hong Kong.
Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, Pickwick Publications, 2011. Pp. xv, 131. Paperback $18.
Reynolds, Glenn, ed.
Images out of Africa: The Virginia Garner Diaries of the Africa Motion
Picture Project.
Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 2011. Pp. x, 260. $65; paperback $35.
Richard, H. L., ed.
Rethinking Hindu Ministry: Papers from the Rethinking Forum.
Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2011. Pp. viii, 152. Paperback $12.99.
Rodriguez, Daniel A.
A Future for the Latino Church: Models for Multilingual, Multigenerational
Hispanic Congregations.
Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011. Pp. 200. Paperback $19.
Selles, Kurt D.
A New Way of Belonging: Covenant Theology, China, and the Christian
Reformed Church, 1921–1951.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Pp. xv, 271. Paperback $28.
Steven, Hugh.
Translating Christ: The Memoirs of Herman Peter Aschmann, Wycliffe Bible
Translator.
Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2011. Pp. xi, 216. Paperback $13.99.
Volz, Stephen C.
African Teachers on the Colonial Frontier: Tswana Evangelists and Their
Communities During the Nineteenth Century.
New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. xii, 293. $74.95 / SFr 75 / €48.30 / £43.50.
Werbner, Richard.
Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana
(with DVD).
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 268. $60; paperback $24.95.
In Coming
Issues
Da‘wa: On the Nature of Mission in
Islam
Albrecht Hauser
Can Christianity Authentically Take
Root in China? Some Lessons from
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century
Missions
Andrew F. Walls
Obtaining Informed Consent in
Missiologically Sensitive Contexts
Johan Mostert and Marvin Gilbert
The Second Text: Missionary
Publishing and John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
David N. Dixon
The Use of Data in the Missiology of
Europe: Methodological Issues
Stefan Paas
A “New Breed of Missionaries”:
Assessing Attitudes Toward Western
Missions at the Nairobi Evangelical
Graduate School of Theology
F. Lionel Young III
Cultural Past, Symbols, and Images
in the Bemba Hymnal, United
Church of Zambia
Kuzipa Nalwamba
In our Series on the Legacy of
Outstanding Missionary Figures
of the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, articles about
Thomas Barclay
George Bowen
Carl Fredrik Hallencreutz
J. Philip Hogan
Arthur Walter Hughes
Thomas Patrick Hughes
Hannah Kilham
Lesslie Newbigin
Constance Padwick
Peter Parker
John Coleridge Patteson
James Howell Pyke
Pandita Ramabai
George Augustus Selwyn
Bakht Singh
James M. Thoburn
M. M. Thomas
Harold W. Turner
Johannes Verkuyl