TL;DR:
Ralph Winter summarized Christian mission history in five approximate 400-year periods. Early missionaries like Patrick, Boniface, and Francis modeled courageous cross-cultural witness, while later figures such as Carey, Taylor, Townsend, and McGavran shaped modern Protestant mission efforts and focused attention on unreached peoples. Factors that have aided the global spread of Christianity include Bible translation, contextualization, trade and travel, influential converts, humanitarian outreach, political and colonial expansion, and even persecution, which has sometimes strengthened believers’ witness.
Question: I hate history classes with all of those dates and names and garbage like that. Will this be another boring lecture stuffed with that kind of material?
I could overwhelm you with thousands of missionary names, hundreds of significant dates, and numerous trends that help explain the worldwide spread of the gospel. Instead, I’ll resist the temptation to swamp you with information.
I hope you'll devour and internalize Ralph Winter's wonderful encapsulation of world missions history in his 5 epochs of redemption history. Make this oversimplified historical summary the one thing you take away from this week's study:
Remember that these 400-year periods are very rough approximations. Winter is not using them to pinpoint things precisely. He came up with them as a memory device. (See my presentation slides (PDF) on this theme.)
The March 17 celebration of St. Patrick's Day shouldn't be about leprechauns and green beer and rainbows with pots of gold.
Patrick, who lived during the 400s, was a young man from Roman Britain who was captured by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland. While enslaved on a farm there, he was converted. Eventually, he escaped and went home. But Patrick felt called to return to his former pagan captors as a missionary. He returned and became a major figure in the spread of Christianity in Ireland.
According to a longstanding tradition, Patrick used the three-leaf clover to illustrate the Trinity. This story forever tied Patrick and Ireland to the shamrock. Sadly, the shamrock
that's sometimes used in decorating for St. Patrick's Day is the four-leaf kind.
Next time March 17 rolls around and you see leprechauns, pots of gold, and four-leaf clovers, think how disgusted Patrick would be at what we've made of his life.
Reflecting on the tradition of Patrick’s shamrock illustration, one student wrote:
"Patrick saw God's fingerprint in the three-leafed clover and used the three-leaf clover to try to explain the Trinity to the Irish. Patrick not only saw God's fingerprint, he became God's fingerprint through his life and the people he influenced." — Veronica Roesley, Northwest Nazarene University graduate student
Another of my heroes of that period is Boniface, who dared to enter a forest in what is now Germany one day and defy the pagan gods by chopping down a huge sacred oak tree. In a further act of defiance, this missionary to some of my ancestors used wood from that fallen tree to build a chapel.
Francis is traditionally associated with preaching to birds. However, the prayer about being an instrument of peace was written centuries after his death and later attributed to him. Francis and Ramon Llull were two of the few people during that bloody period of the Crusades who tried to witness to Muslims. Francis actually went to Egypt, met with the Sultan, and talked to him about Christ. Llull devoted many years to evangelizing Muslims and reportedly died from injuries sustained after being stoned in North Africa.
"To read of Ramon Llull's willingness to leave nobility to reach the Muslims ("the Fool of Love") should challenge each of us to ask if we are that willing to be of use by God." — Kevin Bottjen, Northwest Nazarene University graduate student
William Carey served for seven years before he had his first convert in India. Adoniram Judson worked in Burma for almost the same period of time before he had his first convert.
What about Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, who labored for 25 years and had fewer than a dozen converts?
Or what about Ansgar, the Apostle of the North, who gave his life to preaching the gospel to the Vikings without any visible long-lasting results?
What about the missionaries to East Africa who shipped their belongings in coffins because they knew disease or violent opposition might take their lives during their first term?
What about Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, and three other missionaries who were martyred on an Amazon tributary sandbar in Ecuador as they made the first attempts to reach the Waorani indigenous tribal people with the gospel?
I stand in awe of these pioneer missionaries. Many of them died without seeing great results. Yet, many of the outposts they planted eventually flourished as the gospel took root in culture after culture.
It does. Our denomination was born at the turn of the twentieth century and traces its official anniversary to 1908. Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette called the period from 1815 to 1914 “The Great Century” of Christian expansion. Large-scale overseas Protestant missionary movements developed more slowly than the Reformation itself. During this later period, Protestant missionary activity expanded dramatically.
At the end of the 1700s, Christianity’s greatest concentrations were in Europe and the Americas, although historic Christian communities also remained in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. During the nineteenth century, Christianity’s geographic reach expanded substantially.
I think the fact that we were born in that atmosphere of enthusiasm for world evangelism contributed much to the missionary spirit of our denomination.
Let's come back to Ralph Winter's explanation of three eras of Protestant missions associated with four influential figures. There's a poignant phrase attached to three of the personalities involved:
As for Donald McGavran, he was deeply concerned with several convictions. Among them:
Here's a question for reflection: Were these people whom I've mentioned, as well as others you encountered in your reading, spiritual giants? Did they reach a level of spirituality that is out of reach for you and me?
"May thy grace, O Lord, make that possible to me which is impossible by nature." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, chapter 19
— Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
Several factors have contributed to the worldwide spread of Christianity. Here are nine of them:
"My previous education regarding church history focused on notable theological developments and controversies, important figures in the intellectual history of the church, and various schisms, but not the geographical and cultural spread of the church." — Scott Powell, Nazarene Bible College student
Note: The course web pages on the official Nazarene Bible College site will contain expanded written instructions for each of the assignments.
