PART 3
Profound changes were occurring in the world as the nineteenth century came to a close. The “European century throughout world history”1 was over. The colonialism and imperialism unleashed by Western powers were being resisted and challenged, and the era of relative world peace was coming to an abrupt end. As the twentieth century opened, there were rumblings of war in Asia, and by 1904 Russia and Japan were battling each other in armed conflict. The outcome was a victory for Japan, and on a larger scale for Asia. No longer could the Western nations assume they were the only military powers in a rapidly expanding world.
The real break in international stability did not come until a decade later when, in the words of Stephen Neill, “The European nations, with their loud-voiced claims to a monopoly on Christianity and civilization … rushed blindly and confusedly into a civil war which was to leave them economically impoverished and without a shred of virtue.” And, “the second world war,” he continues, “only finished off what the first had already accomplished. The moral pretensions of the West were shown to be a sham.”2
If Christianity was not the answer to the world’s problems, then what was? To many people in Europe it was Marxism. The revolutionary ferment that had erupted periodically during the nineteenth century had not been purged, and the disillusionment resulting from World War I only added to the dissatisfaction with capitalism and its class-oriented structure of society. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was just one manifestation of this discontent, but it was a significant one. With a solid foothold in Russia, Marxism was on its way to becoming a grave threat to Western capitalism. This turn of events brought an added incentive to twentieth-century missionaries, many of whom viewed their mission as one of disseminating a combined philosophy of Christianity and capitalism to combat atheistic Marxism.
Along with the threat of Marxism came an anti-Western sentiment that was seen in much of the third world. Nationalism was on the rise and there was a growing movement toward independence. Westerners, though armed with advanced technology and social programs, were associated with economic exploitation. The white man was seen as both a “deliverer and destroyer,” according to Neill, and “the missionary, too, would come to be regarded as both friend and foe.”3
Western society itself was undergoing major social changes. In the United States, the late nineteenth century had seen growing discontent among farmers and laborers. The Populist movement championed a wide variety of rural causes, and William Jennings Bryan became a symbol of rural radicalism. In the cities, labor unions were on the upswing and strikes were numerous and violent. The Progressive Movement was the middle class expression of social concern, out of which came a variety of legislative reforms, including antitrust laws, child labor prohibition, and laws to protect industrial workers. In the churches, the social gospel was gaining momentum with less emphasis on an individual’s inner relationship with God and more of a focus on broad human social needs in the here and now.
One of the most far-reaching social concerns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries related to women’s rights. The suffrage movement that had begun decades earlier climaxed in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth amendment. But the women’s movement involved much more than suffrage. World War I had created a vacuum in the labor force, and women more than ever before were entering the workplace in large numbers. With the close of the war, young women began dreaming of professional careers, and more and more were enrolling in the nation’s colleges and universities.
This new liberation had a direct impact on overseas missions. As in other professions, women began entering the field in vast numbers. When the nineteenth century opened, missionaries were men. Many of these men had wives, and the wives served faithfully alongside their husbands, but they were not generally viewed as missionaries in their own right. By the close of the century, however, the situation was vastly different. Single women in large numbers began volunteering for missionary service, and married women were beginning to assume a more active role.
The social changes taking place in society were accompanied by intellectual changes, most noticeably in the fields of philosophy and religion. By the twentieth century the theological liberalism so prominent in Germany had begun to draw a wide following in America. Higher criticism—based on rationalism and the scientific method—was in vogue, and much of traditional Christianity was being stripped of its essential beliefs. “In essence, it stripped Christianity of its supernatural elements,” writes Robert Linder, “especially its miracles and the deity of Christ. It taught instead what it considered to be the essential Christian virtues of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the necessity of living in love. The Bible, historically the authority for faith and practice in the Protestant churches, was no longer considered trustworthy, but embracing errors and contradictions.”4
All this had a profound effect on missions. Virtually all Protestant missionaries during most of the nineteenth century were evangelicals who held the authority of Scripture and staunchly defended the cardinal doctrines of the faith. But by the end of the century, carrying the title of missionary was no guarantee that an individual was orthodox in his Christian beliefs. The fallout from higher criticism, the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the social gospel was beginning to be felt on the mission field.
This trend toward theological liberalism at home and abroad, however, did not go unchallenged. In Europe, Neoorthodoxy was the answer for many. The teachings and writings of Germany’s Karl Barth and his American counterpart, Reinhold Neibuhr, were widely respected by Protestant intellectuals as a compromise between the old orthodoxy and the new liberalism. In America, the reaction was much more conservative. Neoorthodoxy gained a wide following, but the more prominent opposing force was Fundamentalism. “For nearly a generation,” writes Linder, “Christians fought an exhausting war for the minds and souls of American church members. When the smoke of battle cleared, every major denomination had been affected and a number of them split by the quarrel.”5
The new breed had no qualms about evangelizing “nominal” Christians, and areas regarded as already evangelized were not off limits.
In part as a reaction to this trend, another new breed of missionaries emerged, not necessarily so different from their forebears, but intensely determined to keep the faith pure and to trust God only for their needs. They were largely Bible institute and Christian college graduates, and they founded and filled the ranks of the new faith mission societies that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike a certain few of their predecessors, they had no qualms about evangelizing “nominal” Christians; and areas of the world traditionally regarded as already evangelized were not off limits, Latin America and Europe being prime examples.
One of the most significant changes in Protestant missions during the first half of the twentieth century related to the nationality of the missionaries themselves. After the turn of the century, the home base of missions shifted from England to North America. Although thousands of missionaries continued to pour out of England, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Scandinavian countries (Norway and Finland sent out an amazing number in proportion to their Christian population), North America took the lead. This was due in part to the active role the United States began playing in international affairs. “American imperial expansion,” writes Winthrop Hudson, “was accompanied by a mounting enthusiasm among the churches for overseas missions.”6 Foreign policy was in some cases justified in the name of world evangelism. In regard to the acquisition of the Philippines, President McKinley explained, “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died.”7
By the third decade of the twentieth century mainline mission outreach was on the wane. The number of students volunteering for foreign missions, according to the Foreign Missionary Conference report, also fell drastically—from 2,700 in 1920 to only around 250 in 1928. Even the very philosophical basis for missions came under fire as William E. Hocking and his colleagues, who compiled the Laymen’s Inquirey, warned against “conscious and direct evangelism.”
But what seemed apparent in statistics and publicized reports failed to tell the whole story. In fundamentalist-evangelical circles the missionary spirit had never died, and during the 1930s, despite the woes of the Depression, there was a conscious and growing movement to speed the pace of world evangelism with whatever means were available. It was during that decade that Clarence Jones and others initiated missionary radio broadcasts, that William Cameron Townsend began training missionary linguists, and that many medical ventures were launched, while still others were testing the practicality of aviation services for missionaries. World War II, however, frustrated the plans of many of these missionary activists, and it was not until the end of the war that the real thrust of missionary specialization got underway.
The emphasis on specialization in missions, coming largely as a response to technological, political, social, and religious changes during the twentieth century, included not only medicine, translation work, radio, but also dozens of other areas such as education, literature, and agriculture. One of the factors influencing the growth of such specialized ministries has been the increase in the number of Christian liberal arts colleges, many growing out of one-time Bible institutes and Bible colleges. Graduates from these schools, often through the aid of INTERCRISTO (a computerized Christian placement service) have discovered countless opportunities to utilize their education and skills on the foreign field.
The ministry of Christian literature alone expanded many times over during the course of the twentieth century. In 1921, a survey of contemporary missionary trends concluded that “one hundred and sixty presses are conducted by the Protestant missions boards in various parts of the world, and they issue annually about four hundred million pages of Christian literature.”8 After World War II, that number vastly increased as specialized ministries were launched, such as the Christian Literature Crusade, the World Literature Crusade, Operation Mobilization, the Evangelical Literature League, the Pocket Testament League, and Evangelical Literature Overseas. One of the largest literature organizations was the Moody Literature Mission, which distributed literature in nearly two hundred languages.
By the middle of the twentieth century the United States had become the missionary “sender” of the world. Who were these Americans, and why were they so willing to leave the luxuries of the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? Their profile had changed in some significant respects. They were different in many ways from their missionary forebears. They were women in increasing numbers, and they were better educated with stronger theological views—university-educated student volunteers, avowed Fundamentalists, and everything in between. Like their predecessors, they were hardy individualists, tempered by waves of revivals and spurred on by a pioneering spirit, but along with that pioneering spirit, they often brought a specialty—and the latest technology—to advance the gospel.