Missionary

A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.

[9] Buddhism was spread among the Turkic people during the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE into modern-day Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, eastern and coastal Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

Seong of Baekje, known as a great patron of Buddhism in Korea, built many temples and welcomed priests bringing Buddhist texts directly from India.

[11] Padmasambhava, The Lotus Born, was a sage guru from Oḍḍiyāna who is said to have transmitted Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan and Tibet and neighbouring countries in the 8th century.

Today Buddhists make a decent proportion of several countries in the West such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and the United States.

In Canada, the immense popularity and goodwill ushered in by Tibet's Dalai Lama (who has been made honorary Canadian citizen) put Buddhism in a favourable light in the country.

During the Middle Ages, the Christian monasteries and missionaries such as Saint Patrick (5th century), and Adalbert of Prague (c. 956–997) propagated learning and religion beyond the European boundaries of the old Roman Empire.

During the Age of Discovery, the Catholic Church established a number of missions in the Americas and in other Western colonies through the Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans to spread Christianity in the New World and[22] to convert the Native Americans and other indigenous people.

About the same time, missionaries such as Francis Xavier (1506–1552) as well as other Jesuits, Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans reached Asia and the Far East, and the Portuguese sent missions into Africa.

Much contemporary Catholic missionary work has undergone profound change since the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965, with an increased push for indigenization and inculturation, along with social justice issues as a constitutive part of preaching the Gospel.

As the Catholic Church normally organizes itself along territorial lines and had the human and material resources, religious orders, some even specializing in it, undertook most missionary work, especially in the era after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.

Just as the Bishop of Rome had jurisdiction also in territories later considered to be in the Eastern sphere, so the missionary efforts of the two 9th-century saints Cyril and Methodius were largely conducted in relation to the West rather than the East, though the field of activity was central Europe.

Under the Russian Empire of the 19th century, missionaries such as Nicholas Ilminsky (1822–1891) moved into the subject lands and propagated Orthodoxy, including through Belarus, Latvia, Moldova, Finland, Estonia, Ukraine, and China.

When he returned to Herrnhut in Saxony, he inspired the inhabitants of the village – it had fewer than thirty houses then – to send out "messengers" to the slaves in the West Indies and to the Moravian missions in Greenland.

While this effort has not been completed, increased attention has brought larger numbers of people distributing Bibles, Jesus videos, and establishing evangelical churches in more remote areas.

The London Missionary Society was an evangelical organisation, bringing together from its inception both Anglicans and Nonconformists; it was founded in England in 1795 with missions in Africa and the islands of the South Pacific.

The Colonial Missionary Society was created in 1836, and directed its efforts towards promoting Congregationalist forms of Christianity among "British or other European settlers" rather than indigenous peoples.

[36] Many native-born Canadians of various ethnicities have converted during the last 50 years through the actions of the Ramakrishna Mission, ISKCON, Arya Samaj and other missionary organizations as well as due to the visits and guidance of Indian gurus such as Guru Maharaj, Sai Baba, and Rajneesh.

)[42] Education and women's welfare The service activities of this section founded in 1963 are focused on:[43] Dawah means to "invite" (in Arabic, literally "calling") to Islam, which is the second largest religion with 2.0 billion members.

[44] From the 7th century, it spread rapidly from the Arabian Peninsula to the rest of the world through the initial Muslim conquests and subsequently with traders and explorers after the death of Muhammad.

The missionary movement peaked during the Islamic Golden Age, with the expansion of foreign trade routes, primarily into the Indo-Pacific and as far south as the isle of Zanzibar as well as the Southeastern shores of Africa.

During the Ottoman presence in the Balkans, missionary movements were taken up by people from aristocratic families hailing from the region, who had been educated in Constantinople or other major city within the Empire such as the famed madrassahs and kulliyes.

The Mali Empire, consisting predominantly of African and Berber tribes, stands as a strong example of the early Islamic conversion of the Sub-Saharan region.

[45] The spread, although at first introduced through Arab Muslim traders, continued to saturate through the Indonesian people as local rulers and royalty began to adopt the religion subsequently leading their subjects to mirror their conversion.

[50] This fact is corroborated, by J. Sturrock in his South Kanara and Madras Districts Manuals,[51] and also by Haridas Bhattacharya in Cultural Heritage of India Vol.

Reaching Nairobi at the close of the 19th century, he led a group of other Muslims, and enthusiastic missionaries from the coast to establish a "Swahili village" in present-day Pumwani.

Modern missionary work in the United States has increased greatly in the last one hundred years, with much of the recent demographic growth driven by conversion.

However, in the 4th century BCE, they gained strength and spread from Bihar to Orissa, then so South India and westwards to Gujarat and the Punjab, where Jain communities became firmly established, particularly among the mercantile classes.

Historically, various Jewish sects and movements have been consistent in avoiding or even forbidding proselytization (religion-to-religion conversion propaganda) to convert gentiles (non-Jews).

"[97] A 2016 study found that regions in Sub-Saharan Africa that Protestant missionaries brought printing presses to are today "associated with higher newspaper readership, trust, education, and political participation.