American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
However, due to secessions caused by the issue of slavery and by the fact that New School Presbyterian-affiliated missionaries had begun to support the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, after 1870 the ABCFM became a Congregationalist body.
At the Haystack Prayer Meeting, they came to the common conviction that "the field is the world" and inspired the creation of the ABCFM four years later.
Between 1812 and 1840, they were followed by missionaries to the following people and places: Tennessee to the Cherokee Indians, India (the Bombay area), northern Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka), the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii); east Asia: China, Singapore and Siam (Thailand); the Middle East: (Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, the Holy Land and Persia (Iran)); and Africa: Western Africa—Cape Palmas—and Southern Africa—among the Zulus.
[24] Evarts led the organization's efforts to place missionaries with American Indian tribes in the Southeastern United States.
To help the missionaries find wives, they maintained a list of women who were "missionary-minded": "young, pious, educated, fit and reasonably good-looking.
His legacy included administrative gifts, setting of policy, visiting around the world, and chronicling the work of the ABCFM in books.
At home and abroad, the Board and its supporters undertook every effort to exhort the evangelical community, to train a cadre of agents, and to send forth laborers into the mission field.
As a leader in the United Front and early federal American voluntary associations, the Board influenced the nineteenth-century mission movement.
[29] The January 1855 issue of the Missionary Herald[30] listed the Current missions of the Board as follow: [31] Orthodox, Trinitarian and evangelical in their theology, speakers to the annual meetings of the Board challenged their audiences to give of their time, talent and treasure in moving forward the global project of spreading Christianity.
Once the missionaries entered the field, optimism remained yet was tempered by the realities of pioneering mission work in a different milieu.
Many of the Board agents sought—through eclectic dialogue and opportunities as they presented themselves, as well as itinerant preaching—to bring the cultures they met, observed, and lived in to bear upon the message they shared.
Indigenous preachers associated with the Board proclaimed an orthodox message, but they further modified the presentation beyond how the missionaries had developed subtle differences with the home leaders.
Drawing upon the positive and negative aspects of their own cultures, the native evangelists steeped their messages in Biblical texts and themes.
The act of translating the Scriptures into a mother tongue reflected a sensitivity to culture and a desire to work within the host society.
Similarly, the press runs and literacy presentations contributed significantly to the social involvement exhibited by the Board.
To a greater or lesser extent, education, medicine, and social concerns supplemented the preaching efforts by missionaries.
These were Fuzhou, in connection with which were fifteen churches; North China, embracing Beijing, Kalgan, Tianjin, Tengzhou, and Baoding, with smaller stations in the various districts of the center missions; Hong Kong; and Shanxi, with two stations in the midst of districts filled with opium cultivation and staffed by missionaries of the Oberlin Band of Oberlin College.
John Livingstone Nevius and Hunter Corbett (1862–1918) co-operated in this latter work, by giving a theological education to candidates for ministry during a portion of each year at Yantai.
At its principal stations in China, the Society maintained large medical dispensaries and hospitals, boarding schools for boys and girls, colleges for native students, and other agencies for effecting the purposes of the mission.
