Elka of the Wai Wai
THIRD WORLD MISSIONS:
YOUNGER CHURCHES REACH OUT
Korean Christians evangelizing their own people and reaching out to others across the ocean. This is a scenario that has continued for many decades and is being repeated the world over. The era of the Western missionary is not over, but the burden of world evangelism is now being carried to a large extent by Christians from outside the Western world. Historically, Western missionaries depended heavily on native converts to serve as assistants in carrying on the ministry, but during the twentieth century the “younger churches” came of age and the situation was reversed, with Western missionaries serving as assistants at the invitation of the national church leaders.
This turnaround in missions has been underscored by mission leaders in various places on the world scene. From an Asian perspective, Theodore Williams, the head of the Indian Evangelical Mission, observed in 1978 that the rise of indigenous missionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America was a “significant development” indicating that “we are in an exciting period of mission history.” He went on to acknowledge that “Third World missions have just made a beginning.”1
In the decades since Williams spoke of “Third World” missions, the terminology has changed. A major news magazine used the term in 1975 within an economic framework to describe “have not” nations, still undeveloped, “whose interests don’t jibe with those of developed nations in the other two worlds—that is, the communist and the non-communist world.”2 In more recent times, the term “Two-Thirds World” has been used in the mission context to designate areas outside the so-called Western world.
Although much of the non-Western world is not underdeveloped or economically depressed, the churches in this region, on the average, have far fewer financial resources than do churches in the West. Indeed, according to Williams, “Missions in the Two-Thirds World are missions within a context of poverty.”3Yet, Williams and others argue, despite poverty, missions is a responsibility of this region of the world. Observing the mission scene in 1990, Luis Bush wrote:
Missionaries from the Two Thirds World? Just a few years ago the idea would have seemed unthinkable. But not now! Today the rapidly growing Two Thirds World mission force is one of the most remarkable factors in world evangelism…. This vital resource has the potential to reach the whole world with the Gospel. The consequences could be incalculable.
However, unless this enterprise is adequately financed, the whole opportunity could be lost.4
Luis Bush himself has been a key figure in the expansion role of the non-Western church in cross-cultural missions. Born in Argentina, the son of an English businessman, he later moved with his family to Brazil. Like his father, he was headed for a career in business until his life took a sharp turn. He went to seminary in Texas, where he studied theology. After graduating, Bush and his wife moved to San Salvador, where he served as the pastor of Iglesia Nazaret, a mission-oriented church that in seven years grew to more than a thousand, supporting some three dozen missionaries and planting seven daughter churches. Then in 1986 he accepted a call to serve as the head of Partners International, a ministry that has brought Western churches and individuals into partnership with some seventy indigenous missions in fifty countries. During this time he also worked closely with COMIBAM, a consultation for thousands of leaders from Latin America.
It was Bush who, at the Lausanne II Conference in Manila in 1989, coined the phrase “10/40 Window” to designate a rectangular area of Africa and Asia, from ten degrees latitude north of the equator to forty degrees latitude north of the equator, where most of the world’s “unreached peoples” lived. In more recent years, Bush took up the leadership of the AD2000 & Beyond Movement, with its goal, “A church for every people and the gospel for every person by AD 2000.”
Through all of his tireless activity, Bush has strong ties in both the Western and non-Western worlds, seeking to bring partnership in mission outreach. Speaking of his native land, he lamented that “for all the ambitions to send out missionaries, the economic realities facing Argentina are overwhelmingly difficult.” Its economic vitality has been depleted by a massive national debt and rampant inflation among other factors. Neighboring Brazil faces similar problems, as do most Two-Thirds World nations. Thus, partnership, he argues, is a necessity for the contemporary and coming generations of missions.
Most of the funds raised in the West for mission work are designated for the support of Western missionaries. This fact prompted a Seattle chiropractor, Dr. N. A. Jepson, in 1943 to found CNEC (Christian Nationals Evangelism Commission, since renamed Partners International), an organization committed to the support of Christian nationals. The support was limited to Chinese nationals in the early years, but by 1982 the organization was assisting more than a thousand nationals in thirty-six countries.
One such national Christian leader was Anand Chaudhari, the son of a high-caste Brahman priest. Following his conversion, he left his home in Goa to serve in Rajasthan, an area with virtually no Christian witness. Through decades of tireless work, thousands of Indians turned to Christianity. He founded the Rajasthan Bible Institute and began weekly radio broadcasts that are heard all over India. In 1978 he organized a team of more than thirty evangelists to spread out over India with Christian literature, and from that effort more than sixty thousand people requested correspondence courses on the Bible.
Because of his own background, Chaudhari has been able to effectively communicate with high-caste Hindus. Among those who became Christians was a high-caste political science professor and author—a man who initially kept his conversion a secret. Chaudhari understood this man’s fear, and he remembered well the painful ordeal of visiting his own family and telling them of his conversion. They would rather he had died. Soon after that visit he received word that his family, along with hundreds of others, had been killed by an elephant stampede during a Hindu festival. It was only his Christian faith that brought him through the crisis—a gripping testimony that reached the hearts of other Hindus.
In the Philippines, Partners International contributed to the support of the Philippines Missionary Fellowship, a locally controlled organization that has sponsored hundreds of missionaries, many of whom have been trained at the Philippines Missionary Institute, founded in 1961. By assisting in the support of such missions, Partners International was serving the cause of world missions by the most efficient means possible. Nationals living in their own country are far more cost-effective than foreign missionaries. They likewise are free of language and cultural barriers and are not barred from “closed” countries. The charge that Partners International is “spoiling” nationals and denying their own people the privilege of supporting them is not convincing, considering the fact that most of the organization’s financial aid supplements ministries that are already effective and that are being supported by nationals, as in the case of the Philippines Missionary Fellowship, which has been largely supported by Filipinos.
Bush insists that there still is a need for Western missionaries, though he concedes that the presence of North American missionaries in some areas is offensive and that “missionaries from other countries are often better able to fill” the need. “The role of the American Christian,” he emphasized in an interview in 2003, “continues to change to an increasingly partnership and servant role in support of nationals.”5
Partnership and servanthood have been complex issues in cross-cultural missions in recent decades. While Bush argues that “money should not be the central concern in missions,” money continues to command power, and that power belonged to North America during the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first—while at the same time the rapid growth of the church and the spiritual leadership was moving to the Two-Thirds World. The influential Christian leaders of that part of the globe who have played significant roles in mission and evangelistic outreach are far too numerous to designate, but their names are recognized worldwide. Luis Palau, born in Argentina in 1934, is widely regarded as one of the world’s premier evangelists. Known primarily for mass campaigns in large cities, his ministry has also focused on radio and print ministries, as well as church-planting.
From South Africa, the name Desmond Tutu is recognized worldwide—a Christian leader whose pivotal role in bringing an end to apartheid stands as a monument to effective Christian leadership. From Uganda, Festo Kivengere is remembered as a great Anglican bishop who helped bring peace to a war-torn country through a time of great religious revivals. David Cho (formerly Paul Yonggi), as the pastor of the world’s largest church, has an extensive ministry that reaches far beyond his homeland of Korea. And from China, mission leaders such as Jonathan Chao are having as great an impact in the West as in their homeland. These individuals and many more rise out of the heritage of great missionaries and mission leaders of past generations from the Two-Thirds World.
As the Christian faith took root in Asia and elsewhere around the globe, it was embodied by individuals who had very different perspectives on life than the perspectives brought by Western missionaries. This often led to conflict between East and West, while at the same time paving the way for a more authentic and culturally sensitive form of the gospel. Sometimes the differences were denied, as native converts attempted to become westernized, but in other instances the differences surfaced in painful personal disputes, as was the case with Pandita Ramabai and Sister Geraldine.
Ramabai was born in 1858, the daughter of a high caste Brahman scholar who believed that his wife and daughter should have the same opportunities for education that he had had. She began studying Sanskrit at age seven, and by the time she was twelve she had memorized thousands of the classical sayings. When she was still a young child, her father lost his wealth and began a religious pilgrimage—an intense search for God. After her parents died, she, accompanied by her brother, took up the search, ever grateful for her father’s influence and legacy: “I am a child of a man who had to suffer a great deal on account of advocating Female Education,” she wrote. “I consider it my duty, to the very end of my life, to maintain this cause, and to advocate the proper position of women in this land.”6
As she continued the pilgrimage her parents had begun, Ramabai discovered many things about her religious heritage that troubled her. Hindu belief was varied and inconsistent, but on one issue, she insisted, there was uniformity—“that women of high and low caste, as a class, were bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth” and that their only hope of being liberated from karma “was the worship of their husband”—the “woman’s god.”7
Determined to reform Hinduism, Ramabai began at age sixteen to lecture on women’s education. Her fame quickly spread. Within a few years she “was the news of the hour, and papers all over the country trumpeted her accomplishments,” writes John Seamands. “She was a woman of purest Brahman birth, twenty years old and unmarried, beautiful, and scholarly.” She spoke six languages and easily conversed with the country’s noted scholars.8
Following the death of her brother, Ramabai married a lawyer, but he was of the Shudra caste, and in the eyes of many people she had disgraced herself—a disgrace that was intensified when she was widowed soon after. Yet she continued her lectures and founded the Aryan Women’s Society for the purpose of banning child marriage and promoting women’s education.
During this time, Ramabai encountered Christians, and through their influence and her desire to further her education, she traveled to England. Before going, she made a vow to friends that she would never convert to Christianity, but while there she became acquainted with some Anglican nuns who encouraged her to read the Bible. Then, through the encouragement of Sister Geraldine, she made a profession of faith and was baptized into the Church of England—a denominational name that she recognized as offensive to her as an Indian. Indeed, she feared that she was betraying her heritage, as she expressed in a letter to Sister Geraldine:
I am, it is true, a member of the Church of Christ, but I am not bound to accept every word that falls down from the lips of priests or bishops…. I have just with great efforts freed myself from the yoke of the Indian priestly tribe, so I am not at present willing to place myself under another similar yoke by accepting everything which comes from the priests as authorized command of the Most High.9
Sister Geraldine was distressed by Ramabai’s independent spirit and her questioning Anglican doctrine. “I regret that I have been the cause of making you feel yourself wrong for the part you acted in my baptism,” she confessed to Sister Geraldine. “I wish I knew that your Church required a person to be quite perfect in faith, doubting nothing in the Athanasian Creed, so that he had left nothing to be learnt and inquired into the Bible after his baptism.” Sister Geraldine urged her to make a complete break from her Hindu heritage, insisting that her refusal to eat puddings made from eggs indicated that she was “clinging to caste prejudice which ought to have been thrown to the winds” when she became a Christian. Ramabai fired back:
You may, if you like, trace my pride in pies and puddings…. I confess I am not free from all my caste prejudices, as you are pleased to call them…. How would an Englishwoman like being called proud and prejudiced if she were to go and live among the Hindus for a time but did not think it necessary to alter her customs when they were not hurtful or necessary to her neighbors?10
For many missionaries and Western Christians, Ramabai’s refusal to completely separate from her Hindu heritage was a concern—particularly her insistence on referring to herself as a Hindu Christian. She maintained close friendships with Hindus and lectured at Hindu functions—and she continued to read from the Hindu scriptures. She was also very independent in her perspectives on matters relating to the education of girls, thus finding herself the target of criticism from all sides. But she was undaunted: “I am having a right good time in the story of public indignation that is raging over my head.”11
One of the specific reasons she was criticized was her open policy of permitting girls at her school to maintain caste rules and to read the Hindu scriptures, which were available along with the Bible. But the opposition was not limited to the Christian community. Hindus were upset that some students were requesting Christian baptism. So angry was the protest that twenty girls were removed from the school, but she continued on in her educational ministry—primarily with orphans and child widows.
During this time she also became involved in mission outreach. Her inspiration came from reading the biographies, as she later testified:
About twelve years ago, I read the inspiring books, “The Story of the China Inland Mission,” “The Lord’s Dealings with George Muller,” and the “Life of John G. Paton,” founder of the New Hebrides Mission. I was greatly impressed with the experiences of these three great men, Mr. Hudson Taylor, Mr. Muller and Mr. Paton, all of whom have gone to be with the Lord within a few years of each other. I wondered after reading their lives, if it were not possible to trust the Lord in India as in other countries. I wished very much that there were some missions founded in this country that would be a testimony to the Lord’s faithfulness to His people, and the truthfulness of what the Bible says, in a practical way.
I questioned in my mind over and over again, why some missionaries did not come forward to found faith missions in this country. Then the Lord said to me, “Why don’t you begin to do this yourself, instead of wishing for others to do it?”12
As time passed, she expanded her school and opened an orphanage and Rescue Home for “fallen girls,” at one point housing nearly two thousand girls at various locations, including a one-hundred-acre farm. There were many times of famine and privation, but the Mukti Mission, as it was known, carried on with the ministry. In 1900, during a severe drought, she wrote of God’s sustaining care:
Two of our large wells were quite dried up, and very little water left in our other two wells. Many of our friends were praying that God would give us water—and so He did. Although there was none for cultivating the vegetable garden, God gave water for all our people. More than 1,900 people, besides over one hundred cattle … required a great deal of water. Each of the two wells had all its contents used up every day; every evening one could see the bottom…. But there came a fresh supply in the morning to each well, and it lasted all day.13
Ramabai became known worldwide after a revival broke out at the Mukti Mission in 1905 that sparked another well-known revival, as Colin Melbourne writes:
Pandita is typically low key here about this remarkable revival at Mukti and beyond. She was encouraged by news of the 1904 Welsh revival to start the prayer circle she mentions. She requested supporting prayer of the annual Keswick convention, in England, and in 1905, the praying girls and women sparked a genuine Spirit-filled revival with signs, wonders, tongues, miracles, visions, deep repentance, and thousands of conversions between 1905–07….
The accounts of the Holy Spirit outpourings in the Welsh 1904 and Mukti 1905 revivals encouraged the believers at Azusa Street, Los Angeles, USA, to seek the Baptism, and they too received the Pentecostal experience in 1906. One of its leaders, Frank Bartleman, declared that the “revival was rocked in the cradle of little Wales” … “brought up” in India, and then became “full grown” at Azusa Street.14
Ramabai may have been one of the first mission leaders from the non-Western world to reverse roles and invite a Western missionary to serve as her assistant. Minnie Abrams, a Methodist who had grown up in Minnesota, had served in India for more than a decade before she became an administrative assistant at the Mukti Mission. Their ministries complemented each other, and the results were remarkable. “Shortly after the ‘fire fell’ [during the 1905 revival] at Mukti,” writes Gary McGee, “Abrams and her ‘praying bands’ of young women from the Mission carried the revival to various places of ministry. On a broader scale, 48 bands with 15 members each went out twice weekly to the surrounding countryside to preach in the villages. Mukti would do its part in preparing a contingent of the 100,000 female evangelists.”15
Amid all her other responsibilities, Ramabai took on the challenge of translating the Bible in Marathi, her own native tongue. The only translation available was stiff and formal, and she was determined to provide a translation that captured the energy and the personal dynamics of the book she so dearly loved. “Her aim was to produce a translation in pure but simple Marathi that even the common villager could understand.” After studying Greek and Hebrew, she devoted time every day for most of fifteen years before the enormous task was completed—only months before her death in 1922.16
There were many other Indian Christians who gave their lives to mission outreach. V. S. Azariah (1874–1945) was ordained in 1909 as the first Indian bishop in the Anglican church, but he is perhaps better remembered for his passion for indigenous mission work in India and beyond. He “was the most successful leader of grassroots movements of conversion to Christianity in South Asia,” writes Susan Billington Harper. “During the early twentieth century … he actively recruited Indians to serve as Christian missionaries in India,” challenging “his countrymen ever more insistently to evangelize their own land.”17
Another Indian mission leader’s story began in 1908 when Watkin Roberts from Wales came to preach the gospel among the Hmar tribe in the Indian state of Manipur. Government authorities forced him to leave only five days after he arrived, but during that time he had made five converts, including Chawnga, who followed him out of the region and became his disciple. Chawnga memorized the gospel of John and returned to his people and many became Christians. But the tribe had no Scriptures in its own language, and Chawnga was determined that his son, then ten years old, would one day accomplish the task of translating God’s word into the Hmar language.
In the decades that followed, his son, Rochunga Pudaite, not only translated the New Testament into Hmar, but he became the president of an evangelical denomination that has some three hundred churches with more than forty thousand members, a hospital, dozens of village schools, and four high schools. But his influence had reached far beyond the Hmar tribe. In 1971 his vision expanded to the whole of India—and to the whole world. He founded Bibles for the World, a ministry whose goal is that of reaching all the people listed in the phone books in India and beyond. Since that time more than 14 million copies of the New Testament have been mailed to people in more than one hundred countries, and supporting the mailings are short radio programs that offer gospel messages in drama and storytelling, and personal interviews. Pudaite’s journey from the jungle in northeast India to a missionary statesman to the world is told in a musical sung by India Children’s Choir, “Headhunters to Heart Hunters.”
K. P. Yohannan, founder and president of Gospel for Asia, has also made an imprint on missions in India and beyond. Born into a poor family in a remote village in South India, he credits his spiritual development and call to missions to the prayers of his mother. As a child he was so shy and timid that he “trembled when asked to recite in class.” But after listening to a powerful missions challenge from George Verwer of Operation Mobilization, he was convinced that God wanted him to devote his life to bringing the gospel to his people.
In 1978, after completing biblical studies and serving in a pastorate, Yohannan founded the mission organization that became Gospel for Asia, which in the next quarter-century planted more than twenty thousand churches and mission stations and trained thousands of evangelists in its dozens of Bible schools. But Yohannan was convinced that the task of evangelizing the Two-Thirds World was one that belonged to the whole world—the West included. In his book The Coming Revolution in World Missions, he strongly challenged Christians in the West to join in the privilege of financially supporting the Christian workers in developing countries.
He “flashed like a meteor through parts of West Africa.” Known as a prophet, William Wade Harris was described by a Western missionary as “Africa’s most successful evangelist [who] gathered in a few months a host of converts exceeding in number the total church membership of all the mission in Nyasaland now after fifty years of work.” In less than two years, more than one hundred thousand Africans were baptized as a result of his ministry that challenged his followers to prepare to be discipled by the “white man with the Book.” His influence in Africa has been compared to that of Albert Schweitzer.18
The son of a Methodist mother and “heathen” father, Harris was born in Liberia around 1860 and professed faith as a young adult. According to his testimony, “The Holy Ghost came upon me. The very year of my conversion I started preaching.”19 He served first as a Methodist lay minister and later as a teacher and evangelist supported for some fifteen years by the Episcopal mission, which was actively working among his own Glebo people. “Tragically, this period was marked by intensive conflict between indigenous and immigrant Americanized blacks,” writes David Shank. “If at the beginning Harris was committed to the ‘civilizing’ pressures of the Episcopal Church and the foreign patterns of the Liberian republic, it is also quite clear that halfway through the period a major shift in his loyalties was starting to take place.”20
Harris joined with others in political involvement, seeking to turn Liberia into a British protectorate. For a time, in fact, he threatened local chiefs with violence and occult curses in an effort to procure their support. In 1909, after a failed coup, he was tried, convicted of treason, fined, imprisoned, and paroled, only to be imprisoned again after breaking the terms of his parole by preaching against the ruling regime.
While he was in prison, he testified to a visionary experience—a visitation from the angel Gabriel who told him that he would be the prophetic voice of the end times. He was instructed to forsake his fetishes and his Western fashions and shoes and become a wandering barefoot prophet wearing a white robe and preaching Christian baptism. Harris was eclectic in his preaching and prophecy, drawing primarily from Scripture and his Methodist and Episcopal background—especially in his emphasis on the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed. But he was thoroughly African in his outlook, and communing with the spirits of those who had gone before—whether Moses, Elijah, or Jesus—was a natural aspect of his spirituality. Nor did he limit his sources of knowledge to mainstream teachings. His eschatology was influenced by Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he viewed World War I as a pivotal time in history to be followed by a seven-year period of tribulation.
He initiated his ministry in 1910, beginning along the Liberian coast and later extending his travels to the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast. He “dressed in a white cassock and turban with a cross-topped staff in one hand and a Bible and baptismal bowl in the other,” according to Shank. He was a “striking and original figure” in his ministry of assailing demonic powers. “In response, all the village people would bring their religious artifacts to be burned; then they would kneel for baptism while grasping the cross, and receive a tap of confirmation with the prophet’s Bible.” He was sometimes criticized for baptizing people who had not been instructed properly and did not understand even the basics of Christian belief, but that very factor has also been suggested as one of the primary reasons for his effectiveness in making converts and keeping “people from returning to the old powers.” For him, baptism was “a preventative measure.”21
His reputation for performing signs and wonders quickly spread, and people often sought him out—fearing God’s wrath if they did not. Although certain government officials testified to his leaving behind a higher moral and ethical climate than when he had entered the area, he was nevertheless perceived by many as he traveled the Gold Coast to be a troublemaker. In 1915 he and three women singers (who some said were his wives) were arrested and beaten and then sent back to Liberia. His repeated attempts to return to the Ivory Coast were thwarted by authorities; nevertheless, he continued his preaching in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Despite the revival that followed in the wake of his preaching, most missionaries distanced themselves from him because of his refusal to condemn polygamy. Yet he continued to have a tenuous relationship with the Methodists to the end of his life, and when he died in 1928, an Episcopalian minister officiated at his funeral.
The legacy of William Wade Harris on the West Coast of Africa was enormous. He left behind an indigenous Christian church largely free of ritual sacrifice and fetishism, with converts affiliating with not only the Methodist and Episcopal churches but also Baptists, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Catholic Church. Indeed, here in Africa was one of the remarkable instances of mission history when a religious figure was “prophet” to both Protestants and Catholics. He was regarded by Catholics as the instrument used for the “salvation of the Ivory Coast.” This was true also in Ghana, where revival among Catholics was described as “divine fire lit by the grace of the divine Master.” Likewise, in Liberia, Father Ogè reported in 1920 that the Catholic mission was growing “by leaps and bounds” because “the pagans, deprived of their old gods, stream to our churches and ask for religious instruction.” All this he credited to the teachings of the “famous prophet Harris.”22
Harris also left behind in the Ivory Coast the Èglise Harriste. This church was formed when there were no mission churches close by. After he had baptized converts and given basic instruction in Christian beliefs, he appointed twelve apostles to lead the new church, and many of these churches thrived in the years that followed. This African movement reported some 200,000 members by the late twentieth century; and since his death, other “prophets”—both male and female—have come to the fore, claiming comparable authority. Summing up this “Pentecost in Africa,” Frederick Price wrote: “Many of these people may be members of the invisible church of Christ even though we cannot admit them into full membership in the local assembly.”23
Harris’s message was simple and was given to all who would listen without the expectation of reward or recognition. “He was not teaching a gospel other than that he had learnt from the missionaries,” writes Adrian Hastings. “It was rather that his visions had provided the biblical message with a greater immediacy. He believed himself, indeed, to be an Elijah, a John the Baptist, but he expected his converts to become Methodists or Roman Catholics, and many of them did.”24 He died a poor man, and no denomination or indigenous movement could claim him as distinctly their own.
Most missionaries from the non-Western world, like the vast majority of those from the Western world, lived and died in relative obscurity, with no great revivals during their lifetime and with no legacies of achievement that commanded later biographies. This was true of Semisi Nau (c. 1866–1927), who served faithfully as one among more than a thousand Pacific Island missionaries. “The difficulties involved in recovering Semisi Nau’s story underscores the problems of missionary invisibility,” writes Allan Davidson. “Yet our understanding of mission history is incomplete while we are unable to take into account the contribution of all those involved. It highlights the danger of writing only ‘from above,’ from the perspective of the missionary society, its board, administration, supporters, and European staff.”25 What is most remarkable about Semisi is that he left behind an autobiography that was not published until some seventy years after he died.
Semisi was born in Fiji, the son of a Methodist minister and missionary. He prepared for his missionary training at Tupou College in Tonga and then volunteered to do mission work in New Guinea, but he was not deemed suitable as a single man. Following his marriage, he again pleaded for an opportunity to serve in missions no matter how lowly the position—“If it is only to chop wood or carry water in the service of God, I want to go.” He had come through “a time of great difficulty and darkness,” having mourned the deaths of three of his four children. This time the Methodist mission agreed to commission him, and in 1905 he sailed to the Solomon Islands to serve under John Goldie, who had begun work there three years earlier.
It was an extremely difficult assignment from the very beginning. The native people on the remote coral ridge of Ontong Java refused to allow him and his Samoan partner to come ashore, so for more than three months the two men waited in a boat. “The endurance of the missionaries raises questions,” writes Davidson, “about the propriety of Goldie’s leaving the two men in such a precarious position and the wisdom of the missionaries remaining in a situation where they were clearly unwanted.”26
The vast majority of native missionaries were not independent leaders in their own right, as were Kanzo Uchimura, Pandita Ramabai, William Wade Harris, John Sung, and others. And in many respects, Semisi’s story illustrates the unfortunate circumstances of these evangelists and church planters under the authority of Western missionaries. After being stranded offshore, Semisi and his companion moved on to a rival village, where they were allowed to come ashore. Later he returned to the village where he was rebuffed, and after two more weeks of waiting, he was permitted to come ashore. His message was one the chief could understand. He offered a Spirit more powerful than the spirits they worshipped. There was no concept of individual salvation. The question was: “Do you want the Lotu to come to this place?—Lotu meaning the Christian way of worship, replacing traditional spirit worship.” Through “power encounter” and Semisi’s persuasion, “a people movement followed with a ready acceptance of the Christian Lotu or way of worship.”27
But the mass movement became entwined with local and international religion and politics. The local chief whose conversion was influenced by the expectation of power became convinced that there was more to gain with a European missionary and threatened to switch his allegiance to the Catholics unless Semisi was replaced. Thus, he was exchanged for an inexperienced Australian missionary, who “quickly alienated the chief and the traditional priests with his heavy-handed, confrontational approach.”28 The anticipated mass movement to Christianity never came to fruition.
In the meantime, Semisi was sent to another area in the Solomon Islands, only to be replaced once more—this time by native missionaries. Though he remained devoted to Goldie, it is perhaps not surprising that in his autobiography he expressed some resentment for how his own calling and concerns had often been disregarded by the mission from the very beginning. Yet there were times of great satisfaction in his ministry, particularly when he returned to Tonga; and through his enthusiastic preaching for missions, more than one hundred people volunteered for missionary service—though only two of those were actually received into service.
Semisi later returned to Ontong Java to try to reconstitute the people movement left in ruins by the Australian missionary, but he was never able to return to the days when hundreds of people were attending church. In 1918, after little more than a dozen years of missionary service, he returned to Tonga, where he settled into pastoral ministry until his death less than a decade later.
Like many other church and mission leaders in the non-Western world, John Sung (1901–44) often found himself in conflict with Western missionaries, whose influence dominated Chinese Christianity during his lifetime. He was the sixth child of a Methodist minister from the Hinghwa district of South-east China. His mother had been an ardent Buddhist until she nearly died giving birth to her fifth child—a frightening experience that led to her conversion. His own conversion occurred when he was nine years old during a revival known as the “Hinghwa Pentecost,” when thousands in this Buddhist stronghold made profession of faith. Soon after that he began traveling with his father, sometimes preaching himself and often referred to as the “little pastor” of Hinghwa.
After completing secondary school, Sung received an offer from an American woman to fund his education at Ohio Wesleyan University. In 1923, after three years of undergraduate studies in physics and chemistry, he graduated with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Although he was awarded scholarships at Harvard and other universities, he continued his studies at Ohio State University, earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1926. So remarkable were his achievements that his story appeared in newspapers around the country, and there were invitations to teach at prestigious universities. But despite the opportunities and accolades, he felt unfulfilled, remembering the call to ministry he had sensed as a child. He was determined to continue his education—turning from science to seminary. At the advice of a friend, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he studied under Henry Sloan Coffin, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and other notable liberal scholars.
Instead of preparing him for ministry, the courses he took caused him to question the very foundations of the Christian faith. The Bible, he was taught, was one of many sacred texts of the world’s great religions—not God’s special revelation. As such, it made no sense to seek to convert people to Christianity. He questioned his own conversion, and in desperation, he began studying the religion of his ancestors and chanting Buddhist scriptures. “My soul wandered in a wilderness,” he later confessed. “I could neither sleep nor eat. My faith was like a leaking, storm-driven ship without captain or compass. My heart was filled with the deepest unhappiness.”29
During this time of depression and doubt, Sung was invited to attend Calvary Baptist Church to hear a visiting scholar—with the hope that the scholar might have answers to counteract the scholars at Union Seminary. But the night he attended, the scholar was unable to speak, and in his place was a fifteen-year-old evangelist, Uldine Utley. Like he had been, she was a “little preacher,” and he was captivated by her message. He returned for the following four nights to hear her, vowing that he would pray until God gave him the same power to preach that this girl had. His life was transformed, and in the weeks and months that followed, he spent his time reading the Bible and Christian biographies and testifying of his newly reclaimed faith. When he was given a gift of a globe by a stranger, he took it as a sign from God that he would one day preach the gospel around the world. Instead of chanting Buddhist scriptures, he began singing hymns as he walked the halls of the seminary—behavior that was viewed by some of the seminary officials as a sign of mental instability.
Sung’s life was transformed, and in the months that followed, he spent his time reading the Bible and Christian biographies and testifying of his newly reclaimed faith.
Sung was ordered to submit to psychological exams and then was confined, against his will, to the psychiatric ward of Bloomingdale Hospital. During this time he testified of his faith to other patients and read through the Bible forty times, later referring to the hospital and this time of confinement as his real theological seminary. With the help of the Chinese consul, he was released in the summer of 1927 and returned to China to preach the gospel—turning away opportunities to teach science at Chinese universities.
In the years that followed, Sung worked with the Bethel Mission as an itinerant evangelist, sometimes speaking more than five times a day. During a six-month period some fourteen thousand people made professions of faith, and nearly three thousand of them volunteered to serve in evangelistic teams—forming some seven hundred, which were named Bethel Bands.
In 1930 Sung became an evangelist for the Hinghwa Conference of the Methodist Church. By this time his reputation was preceding him, and people were coming from great distances to hear him preach. He held evangelistic campaigns in most of the major cities of China, including Shanghai, Nanking, Tenghsien, and Amoy. In Amoy, when the crowds overflowed the largest church, “a special mat-shed was erected to accommodate twenty-five hundred people.” On another occasion, five thousand people came to a campaign that was held at a football field.30
Sung was an animated preacher, often pacing back and forth across the platform, and is sometimes compared with Billy Sunday. Those who were moved by his preaching often wept openly and confessed their sins. It was through his ministry that the “Holy Ghost revivals of 1933–36” broke out. But along with success came criticism—particularly from missionaries and Chinese leaders, who blamed him for speaking ill of the Western missionaries. In his book I Remember John Sung, William Schubert writes of this animosity:
Then I went to the missionary, who was a friend of mine, and I asked, “Why do you oppose Dr. Sung?” He replied: “Because he criticizes us missionaries; he stands up there and says, ‘You hypocrites of missionaries on the back seat.’” I told him, “Now Frank, I’ll tell you what to do: You sit in front of me, and whatever you can’t take, you throw it over your shoulder to me; I need it.”31
Sung did not limit his ministry to China. In the years that followed his great revivals in China, he traveled to Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand—in some cases returning several times. Everywhere he went there were conversions and churches were planted. His demands and expectations were high. When he visited Java on his third missionary journey to Indonesia in 1939, he announced to the congregation at Surabaja that he had twenty-two messages to give during his one-week visit, insisting that people attend three meetings a day. Shops were closed, and children were taken out of schools to attend the meetings. But attendance was only one aspect of the week-long training. Adults and youth were expected to go out in teams and evangelize neighboring villages.
Sung was an evangelist and missionary, but perhaps even more than this outward ministry, he was known as a man of prayer. David Smithers writes of this aspect of his life:
When John Sung was not actively preaching or organizing a new evangelistic team, he usually could be found writing in his diary or adding to his ever growing prayer list. He carefully prayed over an extensive list of people’s needs, which was accompanied by dozens of small photographs…. Everywhere he went, he urged the people to give themselves to prayer…. John Sung made it his regular habit to be up every morning at 5 A.M. to pray for two or three hours. “Prayer for John Sung was like a battle. He prayed until the sweat poured down his face.” At times he would literally collapse upon his bed and uncontrollably weep and sob under the burden of travailing prayer. John Sung believed that prayer was the most important work of the believer. He defined faith as watching God work while on your knees.32
In the midst of his hectic schedule, Sung sought to fulfill his duties as a husband and father. His marriage had been arranged before he returned to China, but according to Seamands, the marriage proved quite successful, and Mrs. Sung became John’s faithful companion through all their eighteen years of life together. They had three daughters and two sons who, in addition to their Chinese names, were given “biblical” names: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Joshua.
Sung died of cancer and related causes before he reached his forty-third birthday, but his legacy lives on as one of China’s greatest missionary evangelists.
Certain celebrities are known by only one name. So it was with Elka, one of the most celebrated witchdoctors and chiefs of the Wai Wai people of British Guiana and far beyond in the Amazon jungle. A witchdoctor might seem like an unlikely candidate for conversion to Christianity. But Elka had been drawn to spiritual things from the time he was a child—receiving dreams from the spirit of a pig telling him that Kworokyam, the god of the Wai Wai, wanted him to sing his songs and be his servant.
“While Elka dreamed of pigs controlled by evil spirits,” writes Homer Dowdy, “hundreds of miles away three brothers with another vision were planning a move that would bring them face to face with the Wai Wai.” Neill Hawkins, the oldest brother at thirty-three, and his two younger brothers, Rader and Bob, had grown up in the “old-time religion” of a Christian home in Texas, and their mother was determined to one day send her three sons off as missionaries. They all joined the Unevangelized Fields Mission to serve in South America—in Brazil and British Guiana.33
When Neill and Bob Hawkins began their work among the Wai Wai in 1949, they were the first white men that many of the people had ever seen, and they were initially thought to be enemies who had come to kill the people. But they slowly settled into the tribe, hired men to build a runway, and brought in their wives and children on what the native people referred to as the canoe from the sky. Elka, the chief and witchdoctor, quickly became fascinated with “God’s paper,” the Bible that had written words about God, and he eagerly agreed to serve as a language informant for Bible translation into his yet unwritten language. He had often felt insecure about the messages he was getting from the spirits and the Wai Wai god, but here the words were on paper, and he was learning to decipher that message himself.
Elka did more than try to make the strange scratches on paper talk back to him. He was not content until he knew what the scratches said—not just what they said out loud, but what they spoke to his mind. In the Sunday lessons, in the reading classes, and in the long language-informant periods with Bahm [Bob Hawkins] he learned about God and his Son, Jesus Christ.
Most of his people were slow to learn. But Elka had a yearning to know that made him awake each morning eager for another session…. Bahm had once thought he was presenting God to Elka in a spiritual vacuum. He was wrong. Elka believed in the spirit world with more conviction than he did in the physical…. It was not hard for him to believe that God was a spirit.34
But Elka was not ready to forsake his role as witchdoctor for the Wai Wai people. He wanted to believe what the missionaries were teaching without having to give up Kworokyam, the god of his people. Initially, the tension between the two belief systems stimulated his thinking and brought excitement into his life, but as time passed, the tension was “fought in the pit of his stomach,” “brought despondency,” and “worried Elka constantly.” When he was told that “God’s paper said he could not serve both God and Kworokyam,” he knew he would have to make a choice. Finally, after a long struggle, he recognized what God wanted him to do—how God wanted him to serve his people. He made his decision—to be “Christ’s witchdoctor.”35
Being Christ’s witchdoctor, however, meant that Elka would no longer use his charms to heal the sick and drive away evil spirits. This caused great distress among the tribal elders, who insisted that he could “walk with Jesus” and use his charms at the same time. In the midst of this tribal conflict, most of the people continued coming to the Sunday services, and Bahm taught Bible classes to some of the men in small groups.
As Elka studied the Bible every day, he spent more time with the missionaries and visited their homes. And “seeing the tools of the white man’s culture, he developed an appetite for the things they had.” He wanted a high chair to keep his baby off the floor, even as they had for their baby. He wanted an outboard motor for his canoe as they had, and he wanted a light in his house at night. “He wanted to exchange his loincloth for shorts.”These were difficult issues that had no easy answers, and the missionaries “tried to explain that they did not want to make the Wai Wai dependent on the white man’s world.” There was often strain between the two sides. “But this mood did not dominate his life,” writes Dowdy. “He lost no occasion … to be a witness for Christ.”36
The patient and persistent work of the missionaries, with the tribal leadership of Elka, resulted in a continual stream of conversions. Within a matter of years, the Sunday preaching was turned over to Wai Wai Christians, a practice that began when one of the Hawkins brothers lost his voice and Elka volunteered to fill in. His sermon on Daniel was a “revelation” of “Elka’s ability to speak with … a ring of conviction in his voice.”37
With the growing community of believers came a desire to reach out beyond their own clan. “Elka was concerned about the Wai Wai who still lived across the high mountains…. He wanted them to learn the way of Christ.” So as chief, he commissioned his brother to go to them and invite them to come back and learn God’s way. That was the beginning of mission outreach, and it continued as Elka commissioned others to go even farther with the message of God’s paper.
They made a start by inviting the Shedeu and the Mawayana, people very like themselves, to come and hear the Gospel. But there were strange tribes farther away, people they did not know or people they had always feared, who still lived without hope in fear and suspicion, hatred and killing….
For the Wai Wai it was a hard choice. They would have to leave their familiar land, travel … through strange towns of the white man’s civilization…. Who knew whether they would ever return?38
Among those who went to the regions beyond as a foreign missionary was Elka, who sent prayer letters back home telling of his experiences and encouraging the Wai Wai to remain faithful to God. While he and the other missionaries were away, others planted their fields and took care of their domestic needs. When he returned, Elka had colorful stories to tell about the natives’ customs—other tribes that were so different from their own, including tribes of white people who took their bath in a “shower.” He found the little community of believers among the Wai Wai to have grown, as outsiders came and joined the original group. The clan of 200 had grown to 350. But there were always the temptations of people going back to their old ways.
For Elka, there were new ways that he was obliged to adopt. His missionary work required contextualization: “The Waica men wanted us to cut off our pigtails and look like them,” he told his people. “At first we didn’t want to. It would take many rain seasons to grow long again. But then we felt it was no sacrifice at all, if by cutting off our hair we could make the Waica know that because of Jesus we loved them.”39
As the Wai Wai took over the leadership of their own church and reached out in mission, the two Hawkins families moved on in their ministry, Neill and his family to conduct mission work with the Trio Tribe in nearby Surinam, and Bob and his family to finish up the translation of the Wai Wai Scriptures. “By 1962 the Wai Wai had gone on as many missionary trips in as many directions as a man had fingers and toes,” writes Homer Dowdy. “A few of the trips were with the white missionaries. Most of them were on their own and by themselves…. Some Wai Wai travelers ran out of food. Others got sick on the trail.”40
These were the trials and tribulations of missionaries from the time of Jesus, and the Wai Wai were part of that tradition.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adhav, Shamsundar Manohar. Pandita Ramabai. Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1979.
Bush, Luis, and Lorry Lutz. Partnering in Ministry: The Direction of World Evangelism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990.
Davidson, Allan K., ed. Semisi Nau: The Story of My Life: The Autobiography of a Tongan Methodist Missionary Who Worked at Ontong Java in the Solomon Islands. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1996.
Dowdy, Homer. Christ’s Witchdoctor. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1973.
Dyler, Helen S. Pandita Ramabai: Her Vision, Her Mission and Her Triumph of Faith. London: Pickering & Inglis, n.d.
Harper, Susan Billington. In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Hefley, James, and Marti Hefley. God’s Tribesman: The Rochunga Pudaite Story. New York: Holman, 1974.
Keyes, Lawrence E. The Last Age of Missions: A Study of Third World Missionary Societies. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1983.
Lyall, Leslie T. Flame for God: John Sung and Revival in the Far East. London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1976.
Seamands, John T. Pioneers of the Younger Churches. Nashville: Abingdon, 1967.
Schubert, William E. I Remember John Sung. Singapore: Far Eastern Bible College Press, 1976.
Yohannan, K. P. The Coming Revolution in World Missions. Altamonte Springs, FL: Creation House, 1986.