The Century of Missions

The Spanish conquest of the Americas sparked a theological, political, and ethical debate about the use of military force to acquire control over foreign lands. This debate took place within the framework of a religious discourse that legitimized military conquest as a way to facilitate the conversion and salvation of indigenous peoples. The idea of a “civilizing mission” was by no means the invention of the British in the nineteenth century. The Spanish conquistadores and colonists explicitly justified their activities in the Americas in terms of a religious mission to bring Christianity to the native peoples. The Crusades provided the initial impetus for developing a legal doctrine that rationalized the conquest and possession of infidel lands. Whereas the Crusades were initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian lands that had been conquered by non-Christians, the resulting theoretical innovations played an important role in subsequent attempts to justify the conquest of the Americas. The core claim was that the “Petrine mandate” to care for the souls of Christ's human flock required Papal jurisdiction over temporal as well as spiritual matters, and this control extended to non-believers as well as believers.

Compare this to the Moravians.

In a letter to an English friend, Zinzendorf provided a summary of the early Moravian mission practice when he wrote:

You are not to aim at the conversion of whole nations; you must simply look for seekers after the truth who, like the Ethiopian eunuch, seem ready to welcome the Gospel. Second, you must go straight to the point and tell them about the life and death of Christ. Third, you must not stand aloof from the heathen, but humble yourself, mix with them, treat them as Brethren, and pray with them and for them. (Zinzendorf 1732, in Hutton 1922, 20)
 

Then comes the great 19th century.  CH Spurgeon, the great evangelistic pastor of the 19th Century once said, ‘Fervent lovers of souls do not wait till they are trained, they serve their Lord at once.’ Hudson Taylor was no exception to this rule of Christian leadership and immediately began sharing the gospel with those around him.

So what do we see in this great century of protestant missions. Ethnocentrism that leads to misunderstanding others. We falsely distort what is meaningful and functional to other peoples through our own tinted glasses. We see their ways in terms of our life experience, not their context. We do not understand that their ways have their own meanings and functions in life, just as our ways have for us.
 

Ralph Winter describes the forms that God's two redemptive structures, take in every human society, and have taken throughout history. His thesis has two major implications: (I) We must accept both structures, represented in the Christian church today by the local church and the mission society, as legitimate and necessary, and as part of God's People, the Church and (2) Non-Western churches must form and utilize mission societies if they are to exercise their missionary responsibility effectively. Such structures are not Western but Biblical.