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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| Wilbert R. Shenk, editor. North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy. (Studies in the History of Christian Missions.) Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans. 2004. Pp. xiv, 349. $45.00.
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| It is axiomatic in Hawaii that missionaries came to do good and stayed to do well. Arriving in 1820, missionaries sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) brought literacy and rudimentary medical care along with the Christian religion. Eventually, these missionaries and their descendants became prosperous businessmen and property owners, vanguards of American expansion into the Pacific region. Controversy began immediately over whether these missionaries intended to bring salvation, despoil native culture, plant the American flag, or all of the above. Could religion be shared without changing indigenous society? |
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This volume attempts to answer such questions as it traces the history of missionary endeavors from North America to Asia and the Sandwich Islands. Essays are drawn from two conferences sponsored by the North Atlantic Missiology Project (1996–1998) to study "the emergence and development of the modern mission" (p. 8) in North America. Although hardly exhaustive, the essays outline basic mission history in the United States and Canada in a concise and readable manner. Contributors are specialists in mission and church history; their approach is both academic and sympathetic to their subjects. |
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The volume opens with the theoretical foundation for mission work and discusses its early application, including David Brainerd, the inspiration for so many nineteenth-century missionaries. The first three essays by David W. Kling, Richard Lee Rogers, and Paul Harris are the strongest, using secondary sources in combination with primary texts to seamlessly narrate the early years of the New Divinity-inspired ABCFM, including Rufus Anderson's contributions to the theory and structure of missionary enterprise. By 1845, however, even Anderson could not avoid controversy over slavery, because missionary and abolitionist societies had too many common members. When slaveholding Cherokee and Choctaw converts applied for church membership, the issue became unavoidable. Charles A. Maxfield III covers new ground in his discussion of the organic sin debate over slavery, with its corollary question of whether evangelism or civilization should be the focus of missionary efforts. |
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The issues of race and previous conditions of servitude also pervade Susan Wilds McArver's essay on mission work in Liberia, the destination for manumitted American slaves. Here, Presbyterian missionaries encountered unexpected social complexity. "Colonists looked down on the natives, black missionaries looked down on the colonists, white missionaries looked down on both, and natives rejected all three in a hierarchy ... determined more by issues of status and education than by race" (p. 150). Given these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the field closed in 1894. |
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Mission work resumed after the Civil War, but the site of foreign missions changed. For many Americans, immigrant neighborhoods and the frontier were as foreign as India. Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards demonstrates how Josiah Strong, unabashed champion of the Anglo-Saxon race, outlined a strategy for home missions that Janet F. Fishburn connects with the American Social Gospel movement as articulated by Walter Rauschenbusch. Neither effort could have occurred without foreign missions. |
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