Brian Stanley Archives - Bob on Books

The Missionary Movement from the West (Studies in the History of Christian Missions), Andrew F. Walls, edited by Brian Stanley, foreword by Gillian Mary Bediako. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023.

Summary: A history of the last five hundred years of Christian mission efforts from the Europe and North America.

Andrew F. Walls was perhaps the dean of mission scholars until his death in 2021. In this volume, we have his final work, a survey of mission efforts from Europe and North America over the past five hundred years. Missions historian Brian Stanley edited this work drawing upon recordings of Walls lectures, and one has the sense that we are listening to Andrew Walls.

The book is organized on a developmental theme from birth, marking the decline of Christendom, following European migrations to North America, Africa, and the East, to mid-life and the high water mark of the world Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, to old age following the Second World War, the end of colonial empires and the rise of world Christianity. He begins with tracing the transition from crusade to colonization, and with that the missions, both Catholic and Protestant that accompanied commercial efforts and European migrations. Gone was the conversion of whole peoples under Christendom but rather efforts of preaching and evangelization. Walls also sees these migrations as the beginning of an increasingly secularized Europe, signaling the death of “Christendom.”

In succeeding chapters, he covers the early mission efforts of Puritans and Pietists with native peoples in North America, focusing particularly on Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd. He recounts the rise of early missionary societies in England, the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, and the early efforts of William Carey in India. It was striking that many of the early workers were drawn from working classes, unlike the beginnings in North America in the university student movement that traces from the Haystack Prayer Meeting of 1806 at Williams College. Walls also notes the strong humanitarian impulse connected with Christian missions in this period, particularly the influence of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect on abolishing slavery and addressing other social reforms.

The second period Walls addresses might be called “early adulthood to midlife.” He looks at nineteenth century Bible reading and growing concerns around end time prophecy and how this mobilized missionary efforts toward world evangelization. He introduces many of us to the work of Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. We learn of the early vision from Henry Venn of the idea of the national church and the first expression of the Three Self Principle–that churches be self-governing, self supporting, and self propagating. Missions forced grappling with race, culture, and society, and led to the rise of language and culture studies, particularly in the context of African mission. This was likewise true in early mission efforts in China, where it was recognized that it was not enough for the missionary to get into China. China had to get into the missionary–sometimes to the disapproval of sending boards. Walls profiles Robert Morrison, a Scot who pioneered medical missions.

The third period is the “midlife crisis period. It begins on a triumphal note with the great missionary conference of 1910 at Edinburgh, a thorough-going effort to delineate what was entailed in the “evangelization of the world in our generation.” Access to nearly every country was possible–it was simply a matter of mobilizing a missions movement–still from the West. Then in just four years came the First World War. Nevertheless, many doors were open and medical missions led the way, but became increasingly costly to mission boards with advances in medical care. Walls then features the International Missionary Council in Tambaran, India, and the signs of rising indigenous churches and strainings to shed dependence on the West that would become full-blown following the Second World War.

The final part of the book covers the movement into Old Age, exploring in successive chapters the growth of the church in a time of transition from Western mission efforts in India, China, and Africa. The book concludes with the rise of world Christianity and the movement of Christians to the West, even as the West becomes increasingly secularized.

The narrative Walls provides traces a story arc that ties a number of developments into a fascinating account. Along the way, he introduces us to the contribution of key mission leaders. He offers a thoughtful account that recognizes both the ways the mission movement was implicated at times in colonialism and at times struggled against it in thoughtfully contextualized efforts designed to foster indigeneity.

I was surprised by the absence of treatment of the Lausanne movement which certainly represented a transition from western to global Christianity. Likewise, there was no coverage of efforts centered at Fuller Seminary around missions mobilization and church growth, nor was there coverage of more recent student missions movements continuing the tradition of the Student Volunteer Movement through the series of Urbana Missions Conventions beginning in Toronto in 1946. All of these reflected the changes in understanding of the role of the West in global Christianity–although not into senescence, perhaps, but into a new paradigm of new wineskins.

Nevertheless, this may be forgiven because Walls covers something less familiar to many Western Christians–the rise of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, and both South and East Asia, where he has traced developments throughout. Walls helps us understand the role of the West in reaching our present moment, offering inspiring models and salutary lessons worth heeding by global Christian leadership.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Christianity in the Twentieth Century, Brian Stanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Summary: A thematic account of the development of global Christianity during the twentieth century.

It is no small challenge to write a one volume history of Christianity in the twentieth century. The Christian faith has truly become a global faith, represented with indigenous churches on every continent, expressed and experienced in as many or more ways than there are countries in the world, and facing varied internal and external pressures leading to adaptation and change.

Brian Stanley has approached this task not by trying to write a series of chapters on regional histories, or denominational histories, or theological history, but by identifying fifteen themes running through Christian experience over the last hundred years. Each chapter develops a particular theme, sketching some of the global developments, and then offers two case studies, usually specific to two different countries or regions. In the course of this study, Stanley not only touches on fifteen critical themes or trends but also shows the development of Christian faith in every part of the world in its multiplex variety.

In brief, here are the themes covered:

Responses to World War I
Christianity and Nationalism
Prophetic movements
The Persecuted Church
Belonging and believing
Ecumenism
Christianity, Ethnic Hatred, and Genocide
Christianity in Islamic contexts
Christian mission in the modern world
Theologies of liberation
The church addresses human rights, racism, and indigenous peoples
Gender and sexuality
Pentecostalism
Eastern Orthodoxy
Migrant Churches

As mentioned above, each theme chapter is illustrated by two case studies. For example, in looking at Christian faith and nationalism, Stanley takes the contrasting cases of Protestant nationalism in Korea, and Catholic nationalism in Poland, developing the role of the church in the movements for national autonomy in each country, as well as the uneasy alliance of Christianity and nationalism more broadly. However, in the chapter on Christian mission, he considers first the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, and two contrasting gatherings of Protestants at Uppsala in 1968, focused more on the social dimensions of Christian faith, and Lausanne in 1974, focused more on the conversionist aspects of the faith, albeit with a strong witness for justice concerns by Christians from the majority world. I was somewhat surprised that little was said about the subsequent Lausanne movement or the efforts to identify and reach unreached people groups, a missiological development from this movement.

One of the observations I made while reading is that some themes felt like well-known territory, with names, issues and movements I was well familiar with. Other chapters, like the one on Orthodoxy, for example, surprised me as I learned of Orthodox movements in Africa, and how significant diasporas have been for the development of Orthodoxy in western Europe and the United States. I’ve recently become more aware of Ghanaian Pentecostalism in my own city and this book filled in context of the development of Ghanaian Christianity as well as Pentecostalism in other parts of the world. Numerous leaders of significant movements in twentieth century Christianity were mentioned that I had not heard of, conveying what a far-flung, diverse, and global movement Christianity has become.

The author opens and closes the book discussing the renaming of The Christian Oracle as The Christian Century. Was the twentieth century a “Christian century.” A simple answer to that question is not possible in the author’s estimate. In absolute numbers, no century has witness greater growth, and yet the world’s population has grown faster. In Europe, North America, and Australasia, the church has been in retreat, except for the immigrant churches that have come from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. Secularism and persecution have attempted to undermine the church, have made significant inroads, and yet not succeeded, and sometimes resulted in a resilient and more robust faith. Christians have both played pivotal roles in justice movements, and been inextricably involved in ethnic hatred and genocide. Great progress has occurred in some sectors toward Christian unity, even while indigenous and immigrant churches assert their own autonomy and major bodies are riven over questions about human sexuality.

Rather than offering a triumphalistic account, Stanley offers a cautionary tale inviting the reader to reflection, summarized in his closing question of “whether Christianity has converted indigenous religionists or whether indigenous religious and cultural perspectives–whether these be African, Asian, Latin American, or even white North American–have succeeded in converting Christianity.” In raising this question, I think he has identified one of the critical issues facing Christians in the early twenty first centuries, questions that ought send us to our knees, turn us to our Bibles, and challenge us to listen to the prophetic voices that speak the uncomfortable truths we need to hear.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.