Full Text for Church History 3 - Volume 19 - Examples of Mission Societies (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-019 PROFESSOR LAWRENCE REST PROFESSOR WILL SCHUMACHER Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> NICK: Thank you for that answer. Can you give me some concrete examples of these early mission societies? >> SPEAKER: Sure, Nick. I'd be happy to. We've already mentioned several of them: obviously, the granddaddy of them all William Carey�s Particular Baptist Society 1792, the London Missionary Society established in 1795, the Church Missionary Society, which was an Anglican society, 1799, and the China Inland Mission, 1865, formed by Hudson Taylor. But there were many, many others of these societies that were established in the early 19th century. We could spend the next two or three hours going over all of them. We won't do that. Let me give you just a few examples to give you a sample of this. In 1804, the British and Foreign Bible Society was organized. This was sort of the prototype for all the other Bible societies that exist today. Intentionally as a nondenominational mission society with a specific purpose, that is the production and distribution of Bibles around the world, so one aspect of mission work but done cooperatively by various Protestant groups. In 1815, what is probably the first continental mission society, not in England, the Basel Mission was organized, and this was a joint organization between Lutherans and Reformed based in Basel, Switzerland. The Berlin Mission was organized in 1824. The theological climate at that time meant that the Berlin Mission was organized by the Prussian Union churches, that is a union of Lutheran and Reformed which meant that the mission society was also Lutheran and Reformed and conducted its work in a way that was a cooperation between two differing confessions. If we go to the American side of the Atlantic, the first and perhaps most important missionary society in America in the early 19th century was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sometimes just referred to as the American Board, founded in 1810 as a nondenominational mission but heavily influenced and heavily supported by Congregationalists so that much of their work in the course of the 19th century came to be more associated with Congregationalist churches than with other denomination, but really intended as a nondenominational mission. As I said, there were dozens of these. Once the idea of a missionary society was developed, it caught hold. This seemed to be the right idea at the right time. And dozens and dozens of these societies sprang up and began to engage the task of world mission, each society taking up a slightly different focus, some of them appealing to donors from different churches, some of them identifying a particular area of the world as the place where they would work. But these are some examples of the early ones that became influential throughout the 19th century. ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *****