Christian mission
The Apostle Paul was an early proponent of this expansion, and contextualized the Christian message for the Greek and Roman cultures, allowing it to reach beyond its Hebrew and Jewish roots.
Monasteries followed disciplines and supported missions, libraries, and practical research, all of which were perceived as works to reduce human misery and suffering and glorify the Christian God.
During the Middle Ages, Christian monasteries and missionaries such as Saint Patrick, and Adalbert of Prague propagated learning and religion beyond the boundaries of the old Roman Empire.
In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Franciscans such as William of Rubruck, John of Montecorvino, and Giovanni ed' Magnolia were sent as missionaries to the Near and Far East.
[9] In the centuries that followed, Protestant churches began sending out missionaries in increasing numbers, spreading the proclamation of the Christian message to previously unreached people.
In North America, missionaries to the Native Americans included Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the well-known preacher of the Great Awakening (c. 1731–1755), who in his later years retired from the very public life of his early career.
After spending time in the newly formed United States of America strengthening the infant Methodist Church alongside Episcopal colleague Francis Asbury, the British-born Coke left for mission work.
Taylor was later supported by Henry Grattan Guinness (1835–1910) who founded (1883) Cliff College, which continues as of 2014[update] to train and equip for local and global mission.
Many early SVM missionaries traveling to areas with endemic tropical diseases left with their belongings packed in a coffin, aware that 80% of them would die within two years.
By 1894 the newer Protestant mission effort supported over 1300 missionaries, mainly British and American, and maintained some 500 stations-each with a church, residences, street chapels, and usually a small school and possibly a hospital or dispensary-in about 350 different cities and towns.
Yet they had made fewer than 60,000 Chinese Christian converts.There was limited success in terms of converts and establishing schools in a nation of about 400 million people, but there was escalating anger at the threat of cultural imperialism.
In general, colonial officials were much more comfortable with working with the established local leadership, including the native religions, rather than introducing the divisive force of Christianity.
[32] By the 1870s, Protestant missions around the world generally acknowledged the long-term material goal was the formation of independent, self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches.
The rise of nationalism in the Third World provoked challenges from critics who complained that the missionaries were teaching Western ways, and ignoring the indigenous culture.
[39] Theologically conservative evangelical, Pentecostal, Adventist and Mormon missionaries typically avoid cultural imperialism, and focus on spreading the gospel and translating the Bible.
Cross-cultural missionaries are persons who accept church-planting duties to evangelize people outside their culture, as Christ commanded in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20, Mark 16:15–18).
As a matter of strategy, many evangelical Christians around the world now focus on what they call the "10/40 window", a band of countries between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude and reaching from western Africa through Asia.
Christian missions strategist Luis Bush pinpointed the need for a major focus of evangelism in the "10/40 Window", a phrase he coined in his presentation at the missionary conference Lausanne 1989 in Manila.
Modern mission techniques are sufficiently refined that within ten to fifteen years, most indigenous churches are locally pastored, managed, taught, self-supporting and evangelizing.
When combined with training in discipleship, church planting and other modern missionary doctrine, the result is an accelerating, self-propelled conversion of large portions of the culture.
Bible translation not only speeds a church's growth by aiding self-training, but it also assures that Christian information becomes a permanent part of the native culture and literature.
It pains me to have to say that the Christian missionaries as a body, with honorable exceptions, have actively supported a system which has impoverished, enervated and demoralized a people considered to be among the gentlest and most civilized on earth.
[58][59]In India, Hindu organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh assert that most conversions undertaken by zealous evangelicals occur due to compulsion, inducement or fraud.
[63]In an interview with Outlook magazine, Sadhvi Vrnda Chaitanya said "If the Vatican could understand that every religious and spiritual tradition is as sacred as Christianity, and that they have a right to exist without being denigrated or extinguished, it will greatly serve the interests of dialogue, mutual respect, and peaceful coexistence.
Yet, for the period between the 1770s and the 1840s, trading vessels were the main agents of disease, creating in the Pacific what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has called a "paroxysm" of the "microbian unification of the world".
In an interview, Yohannan said his 14,500 "native missionaries" in India, Sri Lanka and the Andaman Islands are giving survivors Bibles and booklets about "how to find hope in this time through the word of God."
[69]The Christian Science Monitor echoes these concerns: "'I think evangelists do this out of the best intentions, but there is a responsibility to try to understand other faith groups and their culture,' says Vince Isner, director of FaithfulAmerica.org, a program of the National Council of Churches USA.
But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed series of executive orders – a policy change that cleared the way for religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional government funding.
It also helped change the message American aid workers bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to touting the healing powers of the Christian God.
[77][78][79][80][81][82][83] Political scientist Robert Woodberry claims that conversionary Protestants were a crucial catalyst in spreading religious liberty, education, and democracy.
