This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways.
After 57 years of service involving Asia, Africa and Latin America, a veteran missionary is calling for a reformation in the way foreign missionary work is done. Bob Finley advocates the withdrawal of all American missionaries from foreign countries, and recommends supporting indigenous missions instead. He contends that there is no precedent formodern missions in the New Testament, no mention of apostles going to work in foreign countries, or anyone else being sent to serve where he did not know the local language.This book is a must read for pastors,missions committee members, professors of missions, and all other Christians who are interested in foreign missionary activities of American evangelicals.
Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, many thousands of American Protestant missionaries were sent to live throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the people they encountered, but those foreign people ended up transforming the missionaries. Their experience abroad made many of these missionaries and their children critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy. When they returned home, they brought new liberal values back to their own society. Protestants Abroad reveals the untold story of how these missionary-connected individuals left an enduring mark on American public life as writers, diplomats, academics, church officials, publishers, foundation executives, and social activists. --
In China in the 1920s and 1930s, foreigners were frequently at risk of being captured by bandits and held for ransom. The phenomenon became so common that foreigners who were captured were called "foreign tickets" (yang piao). Because of their unique status in China due to extraterritoriality, foreign captives were more prized than Chinese victims. Successive CCP leaders in various Soviet areas also in the 1920s and 1930s greatly valued the "foreign tickets" they captured. In 1930 there were an estimated twenty-five missionaries in China being held by Communist groups. The foreigners suffered great deprivations in captivity; some were tortured and a small number were killed. The CCP plundered their personal and church possessions and even took funds intended for relief efforts. However, it must be said, that the CCP, like Chinese bandits, tended to treat foreigners slightly better than they did Chinese captives, whose lives were held very cheap. It is in this context that A Foreign Missionary on the Long March, a previously unpublished eyewitness account of the Chinese Communist Party's epoch Long March, so resonates. The author, a New Zealand-born missionary for the China Inland Mission from 1913 to 1945 was captured and held hostage for 413 days by the CCP's Sixth Army from 1934 to 1935. Hayman's grim account of the Red Army in retreat gives a new perspective on the historic Long March, as well as a glimpse of the CCP in the time before Mao came to prominence. It also blurs the line between the Communists and common bandits. CCP historiography has turned the Long March into the founding myth of the PRC. Hayman's memoirs offer a fresh perspective on this crucial period of CCP history and implicitly, in the role it plays in the CCP's current hold on power.
The year 1810 marks the start of the North American foreign missions movement -- a movement begun with typical American enthusiasm and vigor but in need of practical grounding. This volume explores important facets of the development of North American foreign missions, paying particular attention to the role agencies like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) played in shaping the theology, theory, and policy of evangelistic activities overseas. Written by leading experts on missions and religious history, this volume is distinguished by its focus on key events taking place at the home base rather than on happenings in the foreign mission field. In doing so, these insightful studies shed light on important yet neglected topics, including the impact of debates about slavery on foreign missions, the emergence of distinctive mission strategies for women, the role of the social gospel as a missionary ideology, and the contribution of foreign missions to the creation of a global evangelical network. Contributors: Alvyn AustinRuth Compton Brouwer, Wendy J. Diechmann Edwards, Janet F. Fishburn, Paul Harris, David W. Kling, Charles A. Maxfield III, Susan Wilds McArver, John F. Piper Jr., Dana L. Robert, Richard Lee Rogers, Wilbert R. Shenk, Carol Ann Vaughn. bThis excellent volume will command widespread attention not only for its display of scholarly expertise but for the fresh and revealing light it throws on the principal landmarks and major themes in the history of missionary expansion overseas.b -- Andrew Porter Kingbs College London
"Except for minor editorial changes the pamphlet is identical with the address that Mrs. Buck delivered before a large audience of Presbyterian women at New York City on December 2, 1932. That address, containing as it did sharp criticism and analysis of Christian missions and a clear call for a higher type of missionary, attracted wide attention. It is to supply a demand from supporters of missions and from missionaries in all parts of the world that the address is now issued in this form."--Jacket flap
Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men and women were joined by hundreds more American missionaries at stations all over the globe. Emily Conroy-Krutz shows the surprising extent of the early missionary impulse and demonstrates that American evangelical Protestants of the early nineteenth century were motivated by Christian imperialism—an understanding of international relations that asserted the duty of supposedly Christian nations, such as the United States and Britain, to use their colonial and commercial power to spread Christianity. In describing how American missionaries interacted with a range of foreign locations (including India, Liberia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, North America, and Singapore) and imperial contexts, Christian Imperialism provides a new perspective on how Americans thought of their country’s role in the world. While in the early republican period many were engaged in territorial expansion in the west, missionary supporters looked east and across the seas toward Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Conroy-Krutz’s history of the mission movement reveals that strong Anglo-American and global connections persisted through the early republic. Considering Britain and its empire to be models for their work, the missionaries of the American Board attempted to convert the globe into the image of Anglo-American civilization.
