History of Missions: quotes from "Overturning Tables"
“The death of Jesus not only changed the location of salvation, but also clarified the nature of mission…Mission is no longer “coming” but “going” (Isaiah 19:23-25, Hebrews 13:13)
“We are all trapped in a mental and theological framework born out of a miniscule fragment of time and space. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century clergy and missionaries, along with the structures that supported them, were just as much prisoners of their culture and era as I am of mine. But they were also people of faith and courage, progeny of the “hall of faith” recounted in Hebrews 11.”
“Adding a marginalized community to the ranks of the church exposed the tendency for exclusionary systems to crop up even among the followers of Christ…Giving power to the margins and then experiencing revival at the margins brings tension. Both the Roman Empire and the Jewish religious empire opposed the emergence of a Gentile church. It was the exclusivity of Christ over state that offended the Roman Empire, and the inclusivity of Christ to save any prostitute, tax collector or criminal that offended the Jewish empire. The calcified structures of human empire cry out in pain as they are resisted by the pressures from the excluded.”
“(In the Bible) They were to plant themselves in local soil and survive off the local food and customs. In a sense, they were not to be owned and run by investors as in a corporate model, but they were to be locally owned and operated.”
“The earliest expression of mission was accomplished by loosely structured and minimally financed traveling wayfarers, as well as through the migration of Christians on the run from persecution. Both sorts of missionaries were significantly woven into local cultures and supported by local economies.”
“The bivocational option is standard fare for ethnic minority urban church pastors, but relatively unaccommodated and only marginally tolerated in the white parachurch ministry world. A more aggressive approach to defining ministry positions for bivocational ministers without burning them out could open the door for many. It also embeds ministers in local institutions, connecting them more personally to the economies, services and cultures of a local community.”
“Rather than producing new, smaller, more localized churches or missionary bands as they grew, the tendency was to consolidate money and power and to build monoliths. And so intimacy is sacrificed on the alter of efficiency, more becomes confused with better, and talented local leaders are lured away from smaller operations because of the clout that comes with working for an organization that commands popularity, possessions and pizzazz…Rather than fighting Goliath in Saul’s armor, our Majority world sisters and brothers are picking up five smooth stones and a sling. Perhaps we need to learn something from them.”
“In fact our word mission does not originate from Scriptures. While the term sent one was used to describe those disciples who intentionally traveled announcing good news, their work was not referred to as a mission. It is a word which comes from a sordid past and is about as helpful to the church today as the word crusade is for Christians working among Muslims. So mission was born out of the exploitative, sixteenth-century economic and political quest to acquire land, labor and raw materials, and to leverage them either for Catholic kings or Protestant investors.”
“British and Dutch Protestants each developed their own East India Companies as investment opportunities, vehicles for the rich to take advantages of the winds of trade that commercial shipping afforded. The Dutch East India Company was explicitly engaged in Christian mission, founding its own missionary training school and contracting missionaries to join their commercial ventures. Dutch missionaries were compensated by the East India Company for each baptism that they performed. English investors, by contrast, were at first opposed to combining mission with commerce, not because they had theological problems with the notion but because their efforts to control or exploit the populations where they had planted their flags might begin to appreciate the liberty afforded to all those made in God’s image and then exercise that liberty.”
“This structure required colonists willing to transplant themselves to a foreign country. To do this meant re-creating their European lives with as little disturbance as possible. So when European and American missionaries translated this organizational paradigm into their vision for expanding God’s kingdom, it took the shape of a mission society run by a board of mostly wealthy philanthropists and businessmen sending Western clergy and missionaries to lie within a missionary compound patterned after their homelands.”
(But, that doesn’t mean God wasn’t working:)“Where independent protestant missionaries had a significant presence, free democratic states emerged. The research suggests that powerfully democratizing elements such as literacy, education for women, robust nongovernmental associations and economic development were key catalysts for democracy and were either wholly generated or strongly promoted by these missionaries.”
“Carnegies, Vanderbilt’s, and the Morgan’s invested heavily in their Protestant churches and in domestic and foreign missions. These wealthy philanthropists were builders of the great educational institutions out of which most Protestant missionaries came, and promoted a positive attitude toward the corporate worldview within American Protestantism.”
“It is true that wealthy Christian benefactors do not always use their wealth as license to dictate mission, though some do. More often it is the fear of losing a benefactor’s contributions that shapes our decisions…The International mission board of the Southern Baptists say that the average cost of an individual missionary is $4,250 per month. The Evangelical free church in America places the cost of a missionary family in Germany at $10,338 per month.”
“It may be fair to say that the Judsons and their missionary colleagues were the first college-educated Americans sent out by a formal missions society on an oceangoing vessel, organized with the help of businessmen and invested with funds from charitable contributions. But if the story of spreading the good news about Jesus Christ belongs only to the highly educated and the highly financed sent by the highly structured, then a good many missionaries would be blotted out of church history, including the “ordinary and unschooled” followers of Jesus in the book of Acts, who started the church’s missionary enterprise two thousand years ago. The fact of the matter is that the mission of George and Hannah Leile (freed slaves that went to Jamaica themselves) had a lot more in common with the first disciples than did Adoniram and Ann Judson’s mission.” (it is all about who writes the history books☹)
“A faithful and yet nearly invisible form of Christian mission has been taking place for millennia on the backs of slaves of the empire. It has been advanced by people from the margins working quietly among their forgotten neighbors. Meanwhile the Christian-industrial complex has ballooned in size, but not in effectiveness. We have erected massive constructions accessible only by middle-class and rich missionaries, while absorbing into our bloated organizations poorer, local coworkers who are, in the words of the mission agency that sent Betsey Stockton (the first single woman missionary who was a freed slave and went as an indentured servant) “Regarded and treated neither as equals no servants.” This book represents an attempt to describe the mainstream Protestant mission world I find myself in—one born of a corporate, culturally white, individualist paradigm. This paradigm has achieved cultural dominance over most every human construct—political, economic and religious.”
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