The Mission Education Movement and the Rise of World Christianity, 1902-2002
Delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Mission Education Movement, NCCCUSA General Assembly, November 2002
We are here today to celebrate the centennial of the Mission Education Movement, one of the oldest constituents that formed the National Council of Churches in 1950. The century of its existence has coincided with one of the greatest demographic shifts in the history of Christianity-- a shift equal in importance to the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4 th century, and the conversion and creation of European Christendom in the Middle Ages. In the year 1902, when the Mission Education Movement began, 70% of the world's Christians were Europeans. Today, that percentage has dropped to 28%. In 1902, there were a mere eight and a half million Christians in Africa. Today, there are over 350 million, and the number stands to exceed 600 million by 2025. [1]The typical Christian at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a woman who lives in an urban slum in Latin America, or an African township. [2] While Christianity has remained the largest religion in the world, with one third of the world's population, its continued decline among ethnic Europeans, and growth among others, means that the face of faith in the twenty-first century belongs to the southern hemisphere.
Among the many reasons why we celebrate the Mission Education Movement today is that it links the Eurocentric Christianity of 1902 to the global community of 2002. The Mission Education Movement was the major way in which mainline Protestants, who numerically dominated North American missions until the late 1960s, taught ordinary churchgoers about the mission of the church. The study books produced each year put the needs of the world before American Christians, who responded by the millions to support missions. Despite its well-publicized faults, the missionary movement planted the seeds and cultivated the world church that exists today. The Mission Education Movement provided timely and prophetic guidance for both home and foreign missions. Even though the Mission Education Movement is no longer the dominant force it was during the peak of mainline involvement in cross-cultural mission, it is time for us to celebrate the harvest rather than to lament that the death of the seed is necessary for bringing forth new life.
In the few minutes I have with you today, I wish to examine several ways in which the Mission Education Movement was on the cutting edge of ecumenical commitment to world mission. Many of the ideals we take for granted in the ecumenical movement, like partnership, contextual theologies, and justice for minorities and women, were first popularized among ordinary Christians by the Mission Education Movement. Mission education was the way in which many denominations came to look beyond themselves to a grand vision of the kingdom in which all of Christ's people have a place at the table. I am not going to review a chronology of the movement. For key dates and developments you may consult your program. Rather, let us celebrate the ways in which the Mission Education Movement prepared for the emergence of the world church. And now it is the existence of this world church that provides our challenge and our agenda for the future.
Themes in the history of the Mission Education Movement
1 . Promotion of a Global Vision
The movement for mission education did not begin as the program of a particular denomination. Rather, it emerged from a groundswell of popular need for mission education in the late 1800s. Women's societies, student mission bands, the YMCA and Christian Endeavor, and seminary students were all seeking reliable and timely information about the progress and meaning of world missions. In 1900 mission societies convened the Ecumenical Conference of Foreign Missions in New York City. Two hundred thousand people streamed into Manhattan to hear the speakers and to see the ethnographic missionary exhibits. This conference was the first in modern times to use the term "ecumenical." The idea of interdenominational, ecumenical cooperation for world missions was an idea that gripped western Protestants at the dawn of the twentieth century. Out of the ecumenical conference came a Bureau of Missions to resource the growing missionary movement, and conversations about cooperative mission education.
Women's foreign missionary societies existed in forty American denominations. They founded a Central Committee with a rotating denominational representation, and published their first joint study in 1901. The next year the Young People's Missionary Movement was founded to launch a similar venture directed towards youth. Renamed the Missionary Education Movement in 1911, it eventually merged with the women's foreign mission study series, and the women's home mission study series. By cooperating to produce mission study literature, including books, plays, visual aids, and study guides, the Protestant denominations involved not only shared low-cost, high-quality materials, but they were enabled to sustain conversations about mission priorities and cutting-edge issues affecting all the churches.
The early mission materials were phenomenally successful and sold hundreds of thousands of copies annually. Riding on the wave of American excitement about global engagement, by 1918 the United States had replaced Great Britain as the country sending the most Protestant missionaries. While the target audience for the study materials was North America, the series stimulated a universal vision of bringing Jesus Christ to all the world. Accordingly, the series focused each year on the contexts for Christianity in a different region of the world, as well as major issues like the cultivation of leadership in so-called "younger churches," the treatment of women and children, and the role of missions in ending war.
When surveying the first thirty years of the mission education materials, one is amazed at how simultaneously optimistic and self-critical they were. On the one hand, missions were seen as central to cooperative, progressive work toward the reign of God, toward making the world a better place through education, medicine, social legislation, and other forms of Christian witness. In an age in which the drawbacks of globalization and "one world" ideologies are being heavily debated, it is hard for us to appreciate just how fresh and exciting was the ecumenical global vision that first captivated American churches. The materials published by the Mission Education Movement brought that grand vision down into the living rooms of small-town Christians across the country.
On the other hand, authors of the study books were painfully aware that western Christian nations did not themselves measure up to Christian ideals. Beginning in the 1920s, studies on war and on racism showed how the social sins of western Christians were themselves barriers to the spread of the Good News. What the Mission Education Movement did for American Christians, that nothing else could do, was to push us to separate our own culture from the biblical vision for peace and justice under the reign of Christ, without losing our faith in the Gospel message.
2. World Friendship
During the 1920s, a visible shift took place in the dominant mission theology of the mainline churches. The excesses of western power as evidenced in the world war caused a major rethinking of the purpose of missions. Reaction against western paternalism and domination gave rise to mission theories of partnership across genders, ethnicities, and nationalities. The horrors of war made peace among nations a top priority for a holistic approach to mission. Personal evangelism seemed inadequate to address the problems among nations, and the injustices within societies. The new mission theology of the mainline churches was expressed in the terms "world friendship" or "world fellowship." [3] Closely connected to the internationalism put forth by President Wilson's ideals of self-determination of all peoples, and the founding of the League of Nations, "world friendship" signified an attitude of missionary partnership and equality, rather than paternalism. Mission groups in colleges, children's study groups, and mission circles in churches began calling themselves "world friendship" groups. For example, in reference to its adoption by Methodist women as their mission focus for the 1920s, the historian stated, "World Friendship is a new name for what has been in the hearts of missionary women from the beginning." [4]
The Mission Education Movement was the leading voice for the new, ecumenical mission theology of world friendship. In describing the new kind of missionary needed, one of the mission study books for 1927 noted, "Before 1900 what was wanted was sacrifice on the part of the missionaries; after 1900 it was leadership; and now it is friendship." A missionary discussing this new theology of mission commented, "As I see it, the non-Christians do not need a doctrine nor a set of facts; they want friendship and encouragement and love and companionship just as we do, and if we cannot give it to them, how can we show them that Christ does?. . . But the miracle for us is, that in giving Him to them, we find Him in them. . . the non-Christian nations have gifts of their own to bring to the Kingdom." [5] As the chief popularizer of the post-war ecumenical theology of mission partnership, and a more open attitude toward the cultural and religious gifts of diverse groups of people, it is no wonder that in 1926 the Mission Education Movement adopted the imprint "Friendship Press."
3. Voices for the Voiceless
For historians of world Christianity, probably the most exciting feature of the Mission Education Movement was its effort to give voices to the voiceless. Although missionaries and western church leaders were usually the authors of the study texts, by the 1930s the movement was putting on paper the words of non-western Christians. The importance of this effort to let non-western Christians speak in their own voices, about their own interests, must not be underestimated. It was part of a larger mission movement toward the indigenization of Christian art, worship life, and literature that culminated in the International Missionary Council meeting in Madras, India, in 1938. During the 1930s, the model of the mission deputation was used by mission societies to bring outstanding nonwestern Christians to the United States so that Americans could hear people like Toyohiko Kagawa, Mina Soga, Timothy Lew, and other mission-educated Christian leaders speak for themselves. The best promotion for such ecumenical ventures as mission schools, hospitals, and human rights campaigns, was to hear about their worth from international Christian figures. . [6]
Let us examine a couple of examples of how the Mission Education Movement gave voices to the voiceless, and in so doing, had an impact both on the American church and on mission itself. In 1934, the first women's mission study book to be written by non-western Christians was entitled Japanese Women Speak: A Message from the Christian Women of Japan to the Christian Women of America , by Michi Kawai and Ochimi Kubushiro. The Japanese women told their American sisters that the time had come for missionary co-workers and friends, not bosses, as the Japanese searched for a "national Christian living." The book appeared at a time of growing strain between the United States and Japan because the Japanese had just invaded Manchuria in what was a prelude to the Second World War. Its authors explored how Christian girls' schools in Japan, with support from American women, were sources of peace sentiment in Japan itself. Kawai and Kubushiro described how Japanese Christian women were being persecuted for refusing Shinto worship, organizing labor unions, and calling for repentance against Japanese aggression in China. In a plea for unity with American women, the authors concluded, "Love cannot live alone; it calls for friendship and grows stronger and purer by unselfish service. Where love is, peace abides, and envy, fear, hatred, war, can never come within its citadel." [7]
Another way in which the Mission Education Movement gave voice to the voiceless was its support for the literacy campaign of Frank Laubach, longterm missionary to the Philippines who developed the "each one, teach one" method of literacy training. For how could Christians around the world speak in their own voices, and be heard by the world, unless they could master the tools of modernity, namely reading and writing? In his classic The Silent Billion Speak, published in the middle of World War II, Laubach described how he had developed an effective method for teaching the Muslim Moros of the Philippines how to read their own language. Their enthusiasm for literacy moved the Moros beyond the traditional Muslim-Christian hostility that had dominated relations with Christian groups for hundreds of years. Laubach traveled to India, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, and other countries, preaching the gospel of literacy and developing teaching materials as a way to tackle the poverty of rapidly-growing countries in South Asia and Africa. Wherever he went, local Christian leaders and progressive politicians of all religious backgrounds welcomed him and sponsored literacy campaigns. Laubach called literacy work "a realistic project in building world good will." [8] Literacy projects not only enabled young churches to thrive by teaching converts to read the Bible, but literacy promoted justice by giving the poor of the world valuable tools with which to challenge their oppressors. Not only did the Mission Education Movement give voices to the voiceless by letting non-western Christians speak for themselves in its study books, but the movement empowered the poor by promoting justice through literacy.
4. Prophetic Leadership from an International Perspective
When I read materials from the Mission Education Movement, I am often struck by how prophetic it was. Many of the study books were both timely, and ahead of their times. Their global perspective put American experience in its place, as only one part of a worldwide Christian community. This decentering of the United States had implications for missions such as seeing home and foreign missions as interconnected, and bringing constructive self-criticism into mission thought. One example of the prophetic nature of the books was the 1960 study by Daisuke Kitagawa, entitled Race Relations and Christian Mission. As a Japanese American, Kitagawa had been interned by the U.S. government during World War II. His internment gave him a global perspective on racism that transcended domestic black/white issues. For him, the missionary obligation to oppose racism was the same at home and abroad. In dialogue with blacks, whites, and Asians, he analyzed racial issues around the world
In a way that seems remarkably current to the twenty-first century context, Kitagawa showed how modern racial self-assertion was itself a product of a global mass culture. With his vision of a global church united under Jesus Christ, Kitagawa judged the churches for their inadequate response to racism; yet paradoxically, it was Christianity itself that allowed young black nationalists to be heard. He pointed to the interdependence of all peoples. Mission was not something westerners sent to others. Rather, the logic of the gospel demanded that we welcome others to be part of ourselves. [9] Kitagawa's discussion of the global in the local, and the local in the global, foreshadows current talk about globalization and identity politics. [10] He concluded that the task of churches in the USA was to converse with churches in new nations and together see how God was working through them in the world. [11]
Friendship Press exercised prophetic leadership from a global perspective when it acted as American distributor for the Peters Projection, a map that showed each continent in its proper area. While all maps contain distortions, the Peters Projection was a stark visual representation of how the United States and Europe were much smaller than Africa and Latin America. As soon as it appeared in the 1980s, the Peters Projection jolted Americans into seeing that our share of the world was disproportionate to our control of the world's resources. The map was unsurpassed as a ready instrument of conscientization for global justice issues.
Spreading a global vision, promoting world friendship, giving voices to the voiceless, and providing prophetic leadership from an international perspective-these are but a few of the ways in which the Mission Education Movement built a bridge from a Euro-American church to the non-western world in the twentieth century. It bore the good news of what God was doing in the world from the West, to the East, to the South, and back again. Like a good missionary, the Mission Education Movement has been a midwife for the church as a global fellowship.
Where do we go from here?
As we celebrate the first century of the Mission Education Movement, it is logical to ask where we go from here. In many ways, the Mission Education Movement has accomplished the important missionary task of working itself out of a job. The worldwide church is now a reality. There is ample literature available on mission issues, including comprehensive web sites that provide more information than people can absorb. We ask ourselves whether there will be a second century of this movement, for the context in which it functions has changed radically.
Clearly the first seventy-five years of the movement were its most successful. Starting around 1968, the number of missionaries from independent and evangelical missions surpassed those affiliated with the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches, a gap that has continued to widen since. As the membership of mainline churches fell precipitously, energy for mission also declined. Starting in 1975, the Mission Education Movement failed to break even, an unfortunate trend that continued for many years.
A problematic issue for envisioning the future is division over the meaning of mission that runs like a fault line down the middle of many of our denominations. Much of the evangelistic energy of mission has been separated from its ecclesiastical context into parachurch agencies, while the social justice agenda that used to characterize mainline missions has become the concern of the few rather than the many. Given these realities, should we just write up all the accomplishments of this grand movement and call it quits?
My own opinion as a missiologist is that while the changed context calls for a changed mandate, there is greater need for what the Mission Education Movement can provide than ever before. One reason why the Mission Education Movement has lost steam over the past quarter century is because people in our churches no longer see reasons to engage in holistic mission. Either they reject the idea of mission as a bygone relic of imperialistic thinking, or they define it narrowly as proclamation evangelism. Since the Mission Education Movement can no longer assume an educated consensus about mission in our churches, maybe we should go back to the basics. How many of our churches have a biblically and theologically-grounded basic study program on the meaning of mission in the context of Christianity as a world religion? Without a basic ecumenical consensus on the meaning of holistic mission in a pluralistic world, then the thematic approach of the past will not find a wide audience. I see few places in which Christians are being formed for a truly holistic mission that combines peace and proclamation, liberation and evangelism, service and salvation. While people can turn to many sources for information, formation for mission in a postmodern, pluralistic world is seriously lacking.
As the Mission Education Movement lives into the future, it moves in a context it helped to create but can no longer control. The naïve optimism of youth is gone. The global vision of the past has been replaced by a fear of the global. But as long as injustice and oppression remain, as long as people do not experience the power of the living Christ in their lives, as long as our people remain complacent about their obligation to work toward God's reign in the world, then we still need a Mission Education Movement. I want to close with the words uttered by the women's mission societies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1910, when they found their structures forcibly changed by the all-male denominational conference. Although the women saw their beloved mission societies taken away and reorganized, their commitment to mission remained. They said, "Grow we must, even if we outgrow all that we love."
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