Missionary Movement

Missionary Movement. Christian missionaries from several nations participated in the earliest European settlement of the Americas. Roman Catholic priests accompanied Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors in Latin America in their assaults on Indian populations, and evangelizing Jesuits and Franciscans in the eighteenth century established an Hispanic presence in present‐day California. In eastern North America, French Jesuits preceded French settlers into Indian territory. In the late seventeenth century, the Church of England sent Protestant missionaries to the Maryland Tidewater.

The English dissenters who settled Massachusetts, however, were not primarily missionaries. They focused less on evangelizing pagans than on establishing a godly community among themselves. Even during the First Great Awakening, which crested in the 1740s, revivalists stressed the conversion of sinners in their midst rather than the evangelizing of Indians or foreign heathen. The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, however, stimulated a missionary movement focused on converting heathen at home and abroad. A group of seminarians gained the support of both Presbyterian and Congregational parishes in organizing the long‐lived American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. In 1812, the ABCFM sent its first missionaries to India, among them Adoniram Judson. Becoming a Baptist, Judson played a key role in organizing a Baptist foreign missionary society. With denominationalism on the rise, the Presbyterians established their own Board of Foreign Missions in 1837, and many other denominations followed suit.

Although important to home congregations, the foreign missionary movement sent relatively few missionaries to such fields as India, Africa, and China prior to the Civil War. With the war's end, however, as missionary organizations increasingly targeted the American West and the foreign field, the numbers of missionaries increased to the thousands, their ranks augmented by women. For years wives had accompanied their missionary husbands as “assistant missionaries.” Confined largely to the domestic sphere, they had provided only limited ministry to indigenous women, who were frequently barred by social taboos from contact with foreign men. After the Civil War, however, churchwomen began to address the needs of “heathen” women by organizing separate boards to send single women to the field. “Woman's Work for Woman,” a Presbyterian periodical proclaimed. Soon single and married women missionaries outnumbered men by a ratio as high as two to one.

The appointment of women missionaries coincided with an expanding emphasis on lay work and the introduction of the Social Gospel to missions. Early missionaries had been ordained ministers eager to save souls. In the late nineteenth century, conditions in crowded urban slums persuaded home churches to supplement gospel preaching with needed social services. In Our Country (1885), home‐missionary Josiah Strong argued for a broadened mission, advocating the “Anglo‐Saxonizing” of the world. ABCFM missionaries had played a critical role in Christianizing and colonizing Hawai'i following their arrival in 1820, thereby contributing to the annexation of that territory in 1894. By 1900, both proponents and opponents of such American imperialism saw missionaries as vital to the dissemination of American cultural influence abroad.

Equally important to the reenergizing of late nineteenth‐century missions was the influence of a collegiate student movement that emerged from the revivalism of Dwight L. Moody. In 1886, Moody encouraged some one hundred students to volunteer as foreign missionaries, and they became the first recruits for an ecumenical revivalistic movement, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM, 1888), which attracted many campus leaders. Under the direction of Methodist John R. Mott and Presbyterian Robert E. Speer, the SVM linked a revivalistic call for “the evangelization of the world in this generation” with a patriotic and worldly zeal. This group of so‐called missionary statesmen exercised considerable influence in American and world affairs during the early twentieth century.

Even as missionary activity in the established Protestant denominations peaked in the 1920s, however, the movement was in crisis, racked by the fundamentalist controversy at home and challenges by indigenous nationalists abroad. One result was an extended self‐examination of the missionary movement funded by the wealthy Baptist layman John D. Rockefeller Jr. and supported by the major denominations. The resulting multi‐volume report, summarized as Re‐thinking Missions (1932), caused a furor within the missionary movement because it welcomed the contributions of the other world religions and searched for common spiritual ground. Thereafter, the liberal denominations officially encouraged indigenous leadership and strove to avoid charges of cultural imperialism.

The United States remained a Catholic mission field during much of the nineteenth century, with European societies contributing substantially to building the Catholic Church among Indians, western settlers, and nominally Catholic immigrant populations. Heroic, short‐lived efforts had earlier supported individual American Catholic missionaries in India, Hawai'i, and Africa, but sustained missionary outreach overseas awaited the founding of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, known as the Maryknoll Order, in 1911. The Maryknolls were especially active in China until expelled at the time of the Chinese Revolution. Beginning in the 1960s American Catholic orders, diocesan clergy, and lay workers turned more of their attention to Latin America, addressing the need for social and economic development. Catholic missionaries suffered persecution for their “liberation theology” and social activism, with occasional imprisonment and death at the hands of local political regimes.

In the later twentieth century, evangelical and conservative Protestant denominations, too, conducted fervent missionary activity abroad. During the 1990s, after decades of missionary activity, the Seventh‐day Adventist Church claimed seven million members worldwide, compared with 780,000 within the continental United States. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints (Mormons) sent many of its youth on missions abroad and by the late 1990s, nearly half its eight million members lived overseas. American Holiness and Pentecostal churches, too, won converts around the world, making especially significant inroads in traditionally Catholic Latin America.

At the close of the century, Christian missionaries played a critical and continuing role both in representing the United States abroad and in speaking for other nations and cultures back home.
See also Ecumenical Movement; Expansionism; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension; French Settlements in North America; Fundamentalist Movement; Great Awakening, First and Second; Immigration; Methodism; Mormonism; Pentecostalism; Protestantism; Religion; Revivalism; Roman Catholicism; Serra, Junipero; Seventh‐day Adventism; Spanish Settlements in North America; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Clifton Phillips , Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860, 1969.
Patricia R. Hill , The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Missions Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920, 1984.
William Hutchison , Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, 1987.
Joel A. Carpenter , Earthern Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, 1990.
Timothy Yates , Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century, 1994.
William J. Collinge, ed., Historical Dictionary of Catholicism, 1997.

Jane Hunter