JOHN ROBERTS THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE: MAWKLOT SHILLONG 09

Assignment

Course: History of Christianity

TOPIC: A detail study of the major events and issues of the modern
missionary movement.

Submitted to: Dr. Imo chujang Submitted by: M Thanggoulen Haokip

________________________________________________________
INTRODUCTION: In this paper we are going to discuss about “A detail study of the major events
and issues of the modern missionary movement” In which there are some sub-points

1. Modern historiography: Historiography refers to study of the methods used in the

development of history as an academic discipline, and by extension, anybody of historical work on a
certain subject. The historiography of a certain subject covers historians who have studied that topic
using source, techniques, and theoretical approaches.

Christian mission constantly has to wrestle with the question of handling the other, dealing with
the issue of difference, and ministering to people of diverse background. In the last fifty years,
Christian theologians have come with concepts such as indigenization; enculturation,
contextualization, and internationalization of the good news of the Bible, and numerous books have
been written on these notions. A comprehensive and historicized understanding of the other in relation
to the self’s missionizing efforts of that other has not yet been achieved. This lack only perpetuates
the urgent requisite for understanding God and his creation as we gain more knowledge and the
compelling need for discerning human history under a new light by each succeeding generation

The history of society and culture is, in large measure, a history of struggle with the endlessly
complex problems of differences and otherness. Never have the question posed by differences and
otherness been more pressing than they are today. For an era dominated by the struggle between,
among, and against various isms –communism, fascism, totalitarianism, capitalism, racism, sexism
etc.,-the issue of difference is undeniably political. Is difference tolerable? Are others to be
encouraged to express and cultivate their differences? Or is difference intolerable? Are others who are
different to converted, integrated, dominated, excluded, or repressed?

The mission historians of the nineteenth century devalued the social, religious and cultural values
of the colonized, east and wrote history from European imperialistic, colonial, and political
perspectives. As a result their written documents must be reexamined from post-colonial Indian
perspectives.

The Indian Christian historian recognizes the total inadequacy and cultural bias of the European
intellectual tradition in its attempt to provide the Indian church with Christian, universal, conceptual
and religious norms. Hence, the Indian Christian scholars insist that the native church must cut her off
from the cultural, theological, and spiritual moorings of western triumphalism, and build a healthy,
disciplined skepticism regarding Western appropriation of Indian church and her historic past.
 In my search for the European missionary motive, I recognized the European historiography has
been tainted by colonial epistemology and a racist hermeneutic that reinforced the superiority of
European culture and the normative character of English education as the role arbitrator of Christian
tradition. The distortion of truth can be confronted only through critical analyses of written document
and by unearthing the archaeology of knowledge constructed by European scholars. Hence in this
book I speak as post-colonial subject and attempt to bring out the buried and subjugated knowledge of
the native other which exists as an object.

An examination of nineteenth-century missionary work in India requires an analysis of the

mission work and its literatures and a reconstruction of the dominant political structure of that period
in order to interpret history against its backdrop of events. As I have posited in the introduction,
nineteen-century colonial mission was a cultural, political, and missiology fact. The literatures it
produced do not exist independent of any external constraints. The mission texts, like any other
literatures, were influenced by the dominant external political, cultural, and economic factors, which
said calls the fact of textually.

Modern mission historiography has created significant space for the tragic event of the
holocaust. If modern history has given such an importance to the tragic events of the holocaust, a
recent past, then the Amritsar Massacre of 1923 – the iron-fist rule of the colonizers that created
famine, poverty, mutiny and massacre in India – which were some of the tragic events of the distant
past, should be given a textual space too. Since they have not been assigned a place in the mission
texts, an appropriate place should be created. In order to do it, mission history has to be decolonized.
A dehegemonized history thus will bring out the colonized East’s muted history not as the other but as
the other but an alterity in its otherness. In other words, a historian’s task is to enable the other to exist
in its otherness without any reference to the west in its binary dependency.

Mission literatures were produced in an intellectual setting or British political and cultural
imperialism. For instance, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Macaulay, Charles Trevelyan, and Karl Marx
had set views on race and British administration in India. They made it explicit in their writings that
they had to set a different standard for the people of India as they were civilizational inferior.

The mission history has been written from the colonizer point of view by the Europeans, who
were visitors, missionaries, spectators, or supporters of Western hegemonic policies of the colonial
rule. Their philosophy of mission history has been constructed on the premise of India’s abasement:
the subordination of the nation to the Euro-evangelico-cultural order, which gives the appearance of
being the condition for the machinery’s functioning.

Now it has become rather urgent to question the solidarity between nineteenth-century
hegemonism and Euro-centric evangelical mission. It is a post-colonial imperative to challenge the
stability of the European mission structure that passed itself off as eternal and natural. This de-
Europeanizing or de-hegemonizing of the mission history will enable a historian to retell the history
differently and provide a true representation of the people, culture, and history colonized India.1

1
Jacob S. Dharmaraj, colonialism and Christian mission: Post-colonial reflections,-
Published by the Indian society for [promoting Christian knowledge (ISPCK), post box 1585,
kashmere gate, Delhi-110 006, p.1-10.
2. The missionary background of the modern ecumenical movement: Evangelical awakening and
the missionary movement: The immediate background of the modern protestant missionary
movement was the evangelical awakening in the protestant churches in the west in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The evangelical awakening had its roots in the
earlier German pietism. Pietism was a movement in the Lutheran church in Germany which
arose towards the end of the 17th century and continued in the first half of the 18th century as a
reaction to the sterility of the then prevailing Lutheran orthodox. Philip Jacob spener (1635-
1705) and Herman Franke (1663-1727) were progenitors of the movement and for them;
Christianity was far more a life than an intellectual assent to a doctrine. An insistence upon
the personal, individualistic and subjective element in religion was characteristic of their
teaching. Because they believed that the much needed reforms of the Lutheran church could
not come from those in authority, they recommended that in every congregation those who
were earnest about the soul’s salvation should from cells within the church for bible study,
for fellowship and Christian experience. One of the notable features of pietism was the zeal
for mission it aroused. Franke made the University of Halle in Germany the center for
missionary zeal and training. When Frederick IV of Denmark wanted to send the first
protestant missionaries to India in 1705, he found them among the students Halle. The
Moravian brethren provided pietism’s most effective missionary outreach. The remnants of
the persecuted Moravians built a village in Herrenhurt and Zinzendorf (1700-1760), a
Lutheran priest, who was educated at Halle, became their leader. Under his leadership
Herrenhurt became a hive of missionary activity. The Moravian church was the first among
the protestant churches to accept missionary work as being a responsibility of the church as a
whole, instead of leaving it to the societies of especially interested persons. The Moravians
were willing to any place in the world in the service of Christ. Their foreign mission was
started in 1732. Together with their families, they went abroad as self-supporting units a
within a decade the Moravian missionaries could be found from Greenland to the Cape of
Good Hope.2

The evangelical awakening: the founding of protestant mission in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries resulted largely from a movement of spiritual renewal known as the
evangelical awakening which began in North America. The movement spread to Germany
and Britain, and also to Scandinavia, and not only led to a mew growth in personal Christian
commitment, but also awaked people to need for social reform. Christian philanthropists
began to try to improve conditions in the prisons, to support legislation to protect workers and
chicken, and to put an end to the slave-trade and to slavery. Quakers as well as evangelicals
were active in this movement for reform. Some historians suggest that these reforms had little
to do with an awaked Christian social conscience. They wish to explain everything in
economic terms, and claim that people had realized it was more profitable to use machines
and properly paid workers than to use slave labor. Better working condition would result in
greater productivity, and there were so many slaves in the invited states already that there was
no any need to import more from Africa. An equally important result of the evangelical
awakening, and also of the German pietist movement that developed in the Lutheran church

2
See A.J. Lewis, Zinzendorf, the ecumenical pioneer, London, SCM press, 1962, pg.79.
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the new impulse they gave to Christian to
evangelize, both in their own countries and in other parts of the world.3

3. The modern missionary movement: The seventeenth century great was in terms of
pietistic movement in protestant Germany and Holland. The eighteenth century was great in
terms of revivals and awakening that happen simultaneously both in protestant Britain and
America. One cannot deny the fact that both pietism and evangelicalism have contributed to
the rise of modern missionary movement. It is in this century that one sees the greatest
expansion of Christianity in one century. Some protestants regard the sixteenth century as the
nineteenth century as the great century in terms of the worldwide.

Catholic missions: The catholic began missionary activity quite early in the sixteenth
century even when the protestant reformers were busy trying to grapple with their
reformation theology and therefore had no time for mission. The catholic foreign mission
began with Francis Xavier, a Jesuit missionary who went to India and japan. He had hoped to
evangelize china but died when trying to enter. Other Jesuits went to South America.
Missionaries from the different catholic orders quickly began to circle the globe with the
message of Christianity.

The great century: The later 18th century the 19th century was referred as the modern
missionary movement which is known as the great century from the perspective of Christian
missions as coined by the renowned historian Kenneth Scott latourette. It may also be called
the protestant century as protestant for the first time began to realize their role of
evangelizing and church planting in a big way.

The Baptist missionary society: William Carrey (1761-1834) the great name among many
great names is William Carrey, commonly referred to as the father of modern mission. A
Baptist shoemaker and lay preacher in the midlands of England, he was a man of vision. He
worked with a globe in front of him while he was at his desk or at his table where he repaired
shoes. The world was always before him. He persisted in his concern to see the English
church energized and active in worldwide evangelization despite some real discouragement.
There is a story of the Baptist deacon who told William Carrey to sit down. He said, sit down,
young man. When it is God’s time and will to save the heathen, he will do it without your
help and mine. From the Baptist beginning, other churches began to be inspired to do the
same thing. Different missionary society, church, church missionary society, American board
of commissioners for foreign missions (1810), etc.

Board of foreign missions of the Presbyterian Church (old school) (1837) the first especially
American Presbyterian mission board was formed by the old school Presbyterian Church in
1837. When the southern Presbyterian church broke away from the church in the north in
1861, its missionary leader was a south Carolinian, john Layton Wilson, who had served for a
number years in west Africa.

Louise pirouette, Christianity worldwide, first Published in 1989, SPCK holy trinity Church
3

Marylebone road, London NWI 4DU, p.1-2.

 Church missionary society: (1799) the church missionary society began in 1799. It was
organized by evangelicals within the Anglican Church in order to sense out Anglican
missionaries. One of the early Anglican who went out under the CMS was henry martin, a
young who was inspired by David Brainerd’s journal. During his brief missionary career,
martin wrote his own journal, which became one of the great devotional and missionary
books of the nineteenth century as Brainerd’s journal was in the eighteenth century.4

4. The background of nineteenth century mission: For protestant Christianity, the

nineteenth century was the missionary era par excellence and the great century for missions.
The mission history written during this period was, in fact, written with an air of romantic
notion. In addition, nineteenth-century mission history, which is mostly the denominational
history, was written from the European, colonizers point of view. The mission societies
considered the India missions. Their goal in mission was not only to convert the heathens to
Christianity but also to civilize them. While commenting on the motive of the European
mission in the nineteenth century, Klaus Knorr observes, viewed in retrospect, its essence
was an aggressive cultural imperialism, propaganda for the spread of European ideas over the
face of the globe. Moreover, nineteenth-century India mission history lacks coherence and
does not form a coherent whole. The mission work was carried out with the aid of European
colonizers with a view to civilizing and Christianizing. Indian historians such as T.V. Philip
and S.K. argue that the recorded mission history is incomplete, and that it has to be re-read
and re-written from the post-colonial perspective. An important point one has to keep in mind
in understand Indian church history is that the Indian church is made up of an insignificant
number of people and that the church itself is a weak church with a feeble voice in a country
inhabited by a vast majority of people of other faith. The church thrived, and mass
movements occurred in the last two centuries, mainly among the depressed caste people who
lived far away from the urban centers in areas where the colonial government was not
challenged by natives. Material benefits extended to the low-caste converts certainly did help
thee church achieve numerical growth.5

Conclusion: The modern missionary movement had a profound effect on global history and
culture, it involved Christian missionaries travelling to various parts of the world to spread
their faith, provide education and offer humanitarian aid. It also played a significant role in
shaping colonialism, cultural exchange and the spread of Western values. The modern
missionary movement even though it had a complex and multifaceted effect on global
history, ranging from various religious conversion to cultural exchange and education, its
legacy continues to influence societies around the world through its importance approach in
history with a nuanced understanding regardless of its positive and negative impacts.

4
M.Thongkhosei Haokip, history of Christianity (Delhi: Christian world print,2021) p.302-
310.
5
Jacob S. Dharmaraj, colonialism and Christian mission: Post-colonial reflection –Published
by the Indian society for promoting Christian knowledge (ISPCK), post box 1585, Kashmere
Gate, Delhi-110 006. P. 12-13.
 Bibliography

Jacob S. Dharmaraj, colonialism and Christian mission: Post-colonial reflections,-Published

by the Indian society for [promoting Christian knowledge (ISPCK), post box 1585, kashmere
gate, Delhi-110 006, p.1-10.

See A.J. Lewis, Zinzendorf, the ecumenical pioneer, London, SCM press, 1962, pg.79.

Louise pirouette, Christianity worldwide, first Published in 1989, SPCK holy trinity Church
Marylebone road, London NWI 4DU, p.1-2.

M.Thongkhosei Haokip, history of Christianity (Delhi: Christian world print,2021) p.302-

310.