Perspectives7

Week 7 - Eras of Mission History

2022-09-28

New Pioneers Leading the Way in the Final Era

Yvonne Wood Huneycutt

	1st Era	2nd Era	3rd Era
Focus	Coastlands	Inland Areas	Unreached people groups
Key Leaders	William Carey	Hudson Taylor	Cameron Townsend, Donald McGavran, Ralph Winter
Primary Sending Region	England	United States	Majority World (non-Western)

• Widening mission vs. Narrowing mission? Do we prioritize reaching those within its national borders and peoples before rachingthose further than their own people?

Three Mission Eras

Ralph D. Winter

FIRST ERA

• Protestant missions began about the time Catholics pulled back for other reasons. By roughly 1800 the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath left Europe in shambles, cutting the roots of the global European commercial and Catholic missionary exploits. What saved both England and America from the European fate was the powerful, earlier, transatlantic Evangelical Awakening (in America called “The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies”). (266)

• By 1800, nonreligious multitudes were aggressive on on college campuses naming themselves after French Revolutionists. It was to the point where Yale students could only find a safe place to pray inside Timothy Dwight’s office (Jonathan Edwards’ grandson). Because campus was too hostile, the Haystack prayer meeting in 1806 happened outdoors.
• The poor conditions of the working class in London by 1850 prompted Friedrich Engel to publish The Condition of the Working Classin England in 1844 which undergirded Communism. He was a friend of Karl Marx.
• Sylvester Graham was a pastor who advocated for eating God’s whole-wheat flour. He invented Graham crackers—what we eat with s’mores today.
• Leaders arose who would go on to start off-shoot Christian sects which some later became cults. William Miller preached on Christ’s imminent return (predicted 1843 to be the Second Coming) and gave roots for the Seventh-Day Adventists whose leader, Mary Ellen White, arose in this time. Joseph Smith also arose and believed God was calling out “Latter-Day Saints.” Mary Baker Patterson and Glover Eddy invented Christian Science. Presbyterians had a denomination split in 1837.
• Hong Xiuquan arose in China believing himself to be God’s Other Son and started the Taiping rebellion. This resulted in nearly 30 million deaths.
• The Second Great Awakening influenced the nation to believe alcohol to be a personal and social vice. Yet, the Scottish Presbyterians considered brewing whiskey as a way of life.
• Since Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists were largely untouched by European immigrants, they still retain much of the characteristics depicting Evangelicals in that era.
• Kellogg’s was inspired and started by Seventh-Day Adventists. Adventists also have hospitals all around the world.
• Because the Civil War killed off many men, women started colleges “for the exclusive purpose of training women as foreign missionaries” (271).

SECOND ERA

• There was polarization between the “civilizing and evangelizing” perspective of First Era leaders like William Carey and the “emphasizing only evangelism” perspective from Hudson Taylor.
• Donald McGavran founded Fuller School of World Mission.
• While in 1925, as mentioned, the missionaries who were being sent out by the mainline denominations still constituted 75% of the total from America, by 1975 they were less than 5% of the total. The concept of Kingdom Mission was dead or dying. (273)

THIRD ERA

• This recalls the Jesus Movement for the early 1970s that swept many into an earnestly pursued but simplistic theology which, for example, acknowledged only one specific translation of the Bible (NASB) to be trustworthy. (276)
• Sadly, the goal of planting the Church in every people group, of merely extending Christianity, whether in the USA or around the world, is the most common understanding of the extent of God’s purpose in our world. There is little room for a concept, apart from professional church-related ministry, of a “full-time Christian.” But when every believer is expected to be consciously and deliberately “in mission,” does that then mean nothing is mission? No, it just means there are different types of mission. There will always be the fearsomely difficult cross-cultural pioneer mission. But those of us who have been championing that as the highest priority have no power to reserve the world mission for that urgent type of mission… Today, those tempted to glory in an artificially simple approach to Bible and missions are mainly either a fundamentalist residue or a brand new hyper-charismatic fringe … What does “full-time Christian” mean? It means that the mission to promote the Kingdom, or Kingdom Mission, involves or should involve every move a lay person makes in his forty-hour week of work in addition to what he may do for the church “after hours” in Church Mission. (277)
• From The World Evangelical Alliance: Integral Mission or holistic transformation [as] the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. it is not simply that evangelism and social action are to be done alongside each other. (278)
• COPY all of page 278 LOL

The New Macedonia

Ralph D. Winter

• Takeaways
• People blindness: a failure to notice the sub-groups within a country.