The Free Church View of Missions

The Free Church View of Missions

by Franklin H. Littell

112Until fairly recently it was common practice for Protestant historians to present the history of Christianity and its expansion within the framework of a traditional and ethnocentric periodization. Thus, early church history would be discussed within the context of the Mediterranean matrix, shifting from the synagogues of the Diaspora to the Latin-speaking world of the Pax Romana. As centuries went by, the center of Christendom shifted from the Mediterranean area to the Holy Roman Empire. The shift to the north was confirmed and completed by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, Western Europe—and perhaps even the German Empire—was taken for granted as the center of Christendom.' Missions, when presented at all, were treated from the 113“center” outward. The missionary churches were handled as minor deposits of European church life.

Within the last few decades, however, church historians have been brought to the conclusion that the “younger churches” of America, Africa, Asia and the islands of the sea can no longer be discussed as provinces of European Christendom. There are several reasons for this return to more ecumenical and universal perspectives in the writing of church history. In two World Wars and two types of totalitarianism (Nazism and Communism), the self-satisfaction of the European religious establishments was thoroughly shaken and the disillusionment of the “new Christians” very great. Moreover, the disenchantment with European Christendom came at the end of the “Great Century” of the founding of new churches, at a time when the leaders of the “younger churches” were beginning to be aware of a certain self-consciousness and independence of white, West European cultural forms. Finally, it has been plain since the 1928 Interpretative Statistical Survey of the World Mission of the Christian Church² that the center of support for Christian expansion has shifted from Western Europe to the Free Churches. Not only are the large majority of Protestant missionaries supported by the Free Churches in Great Britain and America, with the latter widening the gap steadily, but the change of pace has been marked in Roman Catholicism and Judaism as well. The major proportion of support for Roman Catholic undertakings has come from the United States since before the First World War. The shift of Jewish culture and civilization to the New World was completed during Hitler’s control of the old centers of Christian civilization.

With the end of the nineteenth-century culture religion on the Continent, a new period of church history is at hand for Western Europe, the former center of world Christianity. It is frequently termed, especially by those who have made a study of totalitarian114ism in its various phases, the “post-Christian era” or the “‘postConstantinian period.” * The newer experiments in the disciplines of discipleship, lay movements which endeavor to capitalize on the lessons in discontinuity learned during the church struggle with Nazism,* have broken both in theology and educational method from the comfortable old identification of Western civilization with “the Christian religion.” In doing so, they have found a heartening response from the members of the churches of Asia and Africa. As instruments of evangelism, movements such as the Kirchentag and Evangelical Academies have been greeted by the leaders of the “younger churches” with an enthusiasm and fraternal warmth no longer accorded the traditional style of Western-controlled missions. In sum, there are many sections of the earth today where the planting of Christian churches is welcome if the Church be the ecclesia viatorum of the New Testament, but unwelcome if the Gospel be identified with the peculiarly Western style of corpus Christianum.

The old periodization of church history, which culminated in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, left the strong impression that the last four centuries have been a time of steady decline—at best but a sequel to the main act of the play. Yet the Protestant state churches were anything but missionary, and the real epoch of modern Christian universalism did not begin until the rise of Pietism on the Continent and the Evangelical Awakening in the British Isles. Most important of all for a new view of church history, the “Great Century” of the Christian movement was the nineteenth century.” During this period, to be bracketed generally from the 115Congress of Vienna (1815) to the beginning of the First World War (1914), more missionaries worked in the field, the Bible and basic Christian literature were translated into more tongues, the support of the Christian movement was spread over a broader base, more people were reached in more organized ways, than in any other period of church history. If a primary test of the Christian faith be its universality, the decades which preceded the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh (1910)—+the first of the great contemporary ecumenical conferences—were far more critical in shaping the Christian Church than those decades which culminated in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).

Certainly this is true for the “younger churches” of Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Wise observers have come in recent studies to compare their situation to that of the “younger churches” to which Paul addressed his pastoral letters. The new churches of these areas, planted or watered during the Great Century of expansion, are much nearer to the New Testament and early Church than they are to the style of coercive religion which dominated most of Christian Europe from the era of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian to the age of the French Revolution. “Christendom,” as defined in medieval political theory and reconfirmed in the teachings of the great Reformers, has been a concept ill-fitted to the situation and needs of the newer churches. From the perspective of the members of the “younger churches,” having of necessity no other weapons for their spiritual warfare than those ordained by Scripture, being totally dependent upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit for government and the voluntary giving of members for support, there is little real difference in effect between Martin Luther’s “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” (1520) and Richard Hooker’s “The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” (1594 ff.). The “younger churches” are “Free Churches,” and they belong to a different period of church history than do those which represent some coloration or other of establishment.⁶

116In a very real sense, the major issue now confronting the Ameri-

can churches can be summarized in this formulation of issues: Is Christianity in America to be understood as a province of European Christendom, with the cultural and ecclesiastical adjustments of the Old World awkwardly adapted to the cultural, religious, and legal pluralism of the New, or are the American churches in truth “younger churches”? At the present time the American churches are still uncertain as to the answer to that question. Indeed, the whole development of a self-conscious American style of churchmanship has been very slow, as indicated—among other things—by the fact that “American Church History” has been taught only recently in some theological faculties and is still largely neglected by the majority. As recently as 1956, the newly elected president of the American Society of Church History was moved to comment in his inaugural paper: “We cannot forever solve the problem of a right approach to church history by setting aside the experience of the American church as an anomaly.”

How shall the American churches understand the planting of God’s Word in the New World? For the first American theologians, the problem was relatively simple. The American churches, like the political entities, were but deposits of European culture and religious life. In the New England “standing order,” as well as in the colonies where the Church of England was established, religion was regarded as the capstone of culture and the cement of society. The Christian Indian villages of John Eliot (1604-90) were perhaps the most representative attempts in Puritan missionary statecraft, since the break of the converts from their tribal society was as complete as their religious transformation. Both transitions were conceived in vigorously theocratic terms, with fourteen towns of “Praying Indians” organized in terms of Exodus 18:21 ff. The words of the Covenant adopted at Natick, 1651, state clearly the blending of civil and religious affairs:

We doe give up ourselves and our children unto God, to be his people. He shall rule us in all our affairs, not only in our religion and affairs of the church, (these we desire as soon as we can, if God will.) but 117also in all our works and affairs of this world, God shall rule over us. The Lord is our Judge. The Lord is our Law-giver. The Lord is our King.⁸

The end of King Philip’s War (1675-76) found the Christian Indian villages desolated. Many hundreds shared the fate of their unbaptized fellow Indians, who were sold off as slaves in the West Indies when the “rebellion” was shattered. As later with the Christian Indian settlements of the Moravians (“Gnadenhiitten,” scene of a massacre of Christian Indians by white men, 1782), neither the Indian tribes who stayed pagan nor the white society which identified “Christian religion” with European civilization was able to understand and trust the members of these early Christian missionary villages.

When the colonial state churches collapsed at the time national independence was established (1776-89), church membership in America fell to its true proportion of the population. As customary with disestablished churches, which normally claim in their previous position of privilege to embrace practically the whole population, the sudden shift to a system of voluntary membership and support revealed the hollowness of the earlier claims to comprehension. Confronted by a mass exodus from the churches, once the compulsory feature was removed (as late as 1819 in Connecticut, and 1833 in Massachusetts), Christian leaders were confronted by a problem of home missions of major proportions. The answer was given by the development of those techniques of mass evangelism which have, more than anything else, given the characteristic stamp to American church life. The statistics tell the story: at the end of a century and a half of strenuous work in home missions, church membership on a voluntary basis, church attendance, church giving for all purposes, has reached the highest peak both absolutely and proportionately in the whole sweep of church history.⁹ Roman Catholicism and Judaism, as well as Protestantism, have had their whole style of religious association and life shaped by the emer118gence of a pattern of voluntaryism and pluralism utterly new in

religious history. This pattern, which the great church historian Philip Schaff saw

already emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century, is based on the separation of the civil covenant from the religious covenant(s). (The familiar terminology, “wall of separation of church and state,” is faulty.) As late as the struggle over the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1785), patriots as distinguished as George Washington and Patrick Henry argued that an established church was essential for a stable commonwealth. In many states, particularly among the former thirteen colonies, there are residual elements of Protestant privilege to this day. It is this factor which gives particular coloration to the tensions in the Southeastern states, where Protestantism has continued in its position of privilege and semiestablishment right into the twentieth century. Protestant compulsory chapel was maintained at the (state) University of South Carolina until the end of World War II, and the salary and office of the (Protestant) Chaplain are still maintained with state funds today. The dominant Protestant churches in the Southeast, socially if not always legally privileged, are today subject to strong temptation to adopt a “nativist’” line in opposition to Jews, Roman Catholics, immigrants generally. The volume of material flooding the area from the “Protestant underworld” is very great, and more respectable organizations such as “Protestants and Other Americans United” receive a response out of proportion to the merits of their case. A century ago, as industrialization was bringing cultural and religious pluralism to the New England and Middle Atlantic states, Abraham Lincoln wrote a friend his judgment on Protestant culture religion:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid as a nation. We began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.1°

119In terms of religious liberty, the “younger churches” of the United States are maturing into the conviction that that service only is pleasing to God which is voluntary and uncoerced. As Philip Schaff put it, “the glory of America is a free Christianity, independent of the secular government, and supported by the voluntary contributions of a free people.” He further declared that “this is one of the greatest facts in modern history.” 11 The next step beyond voluntaryism is, however, willingness to accept the implications of cultural and religious pluralism for the relations between fellow citizens, and for the style of the Christian mission.

Significantly enough, it has been in the area of the Great Plains that the frank acceptance of voluntaryism and pluralism has been institutionalized. From the University of Minnesota to the University of Oklahoma the religious concerns of the state universities are expressed in offices of Coordinators of Religious Activities or Directors of Religious Affairs, with multifaith patterns of group cooperation, counseling, “Religious Emphasis Weeks,” “Panel of Americans,” and so on. In a growing number of cities, Roundtables of Christians and Jews carry on the mutual concerns of American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants who have learned that they can be cordial fellow citizens and still worship at different altars. Although in the Atlantic coastline states (and especially in the Southeast) the old claims to Protestant privilege still hang on, and although on the west coast (particularly in California and Washington) there has been institutionalized some of the anticlericalism of the French Revolution and Tom Paine, in the area of the plains states a new and significant pattern of civil and religious cooperation is emerging. In terms of Protestant history, it is significant that this is the area where through the great revivals and mass evangelism the masses were won back to the churches on a purely voluntary basis.*?

120Will the dominant American churches come to understand their status as “younger churches,” with the large majority of their membership “new Christians,” or will they increasingly revert to the pretensions of white, privileged, culture religion? The answer to this question will determine whether they continue to use the form of address which Reinhold Niebuhr has condemned as “moralism.” “Moralism” is that style of preaching and proclamation in which the Protestant churches “speak to the world as though it were the church” (W. A. Visser’t Hooft). Those churches which conduct themselves in this way have an entirely different view of Christian missions than those which accept the whole world as their parish, which recognize the truth of the great statement by Hendrik Kraemer in The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World. Addressing himself to the crisis in Christendom of the old style, Professor Kraemer wrote:

Nothing can demonstrate more clearly that the Christian Church, religiously speaking, in the West as well as the East, is standing in a pagan, non-Christian world, and has again to consider the whole world its mission field, not in the rhetorical but in the literal sense of the

This is to return to the essential genius of the approach of the Free Churches to Christian missions. At a time when Protestant state churches still held to a territorial definition of Christian religion, nonmissionary in character, the forerunners of the modern Free Churches set out to restore church life patterned on the New Testament and early Church. Among their central teachings were lay initiative, voluntary discipline, and literal acceptance of the Great Commission as binding upon every baptized Christian. The “restitution” (Anabaptism) or “restoration” (Alexander Campbell) of the True Church, the Church before “the fall,” involved a basic rethinking of the whole missionary imperative.'* At a time when members of European state churches were selling Africans as slaves and maintaining that they had no souls, and shooting the natives of the South Sea islands for the sport of practicing on run121ning targets, “restitutionists’” (Quakers, Moravians, Baptists, and others of the “Left Wing of Protestantism”) were sending missionaries to the farthest lands of the earth and gathering in the “first fruits” of the peoples.

Whether or not the Free Church fathers were naive and nonhistorical in their effort to restore primitive Christianity, the fact is that their descendants in the “younger churches” find themselves today in a period of church history remarkably like that of the early Church. Mystery religions abound; Montanist and Gnostic sects are everywhere apparent; persecution of the Biblical faith is more widespread than ever before. Cast back into the early Church situation, the Gospel must go into the arena of public life and thought and triumph through the quality of its voluntary discipline, the power of its preaching and witness, the steadfastness of its discipleship. The political powers which so long served to suppress the opposition and support the Christian religion are either unfriendly or neutral. The “Constantinian era” is at an end.

For the Free Churches, and those who accept the implications of the present status of Christianity throughout the world, a new period of church history is at hand.

Tip: use the ← and → keys to move between chapters; press Ctrl K to search. Share any printed page with index.html?p=<page>.

↑ Back to top ⬇ Download the scanned PDF