ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-020 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: This is very interesting. Was there a commonality to the various societies? What was their theological or confessional profile? >> SPEAKER: Well, Nick, the missionary societies seem to be of great interest to you, and I appreciate that. You asked about commonalities. Let me answer that first. I think the only real common thread through the missionary societies was the fact that they were organized as societies, rather than directly as arms of the churches. There was a certain institutional independence in the missionary societies that was very important to the way they approached their work around the world and the way they also approached their supporters. There was a kind of enterprising initiative spirit in the missionary societies that they all had in common but all applied in slightly different ways. As far as theological or confessional profile, frankly, they were all over the map. Generally speaking, they were Protestant societies because remember, in the Roman Catholic side of missions, the role of society really was filled in their church structure by the various orders. So you had missionary orders that were doing in the Roman Catholic sphere of things, with these societies were doing in the Protestant side of missions. Some of the societies, of course, were denominational, the Anglican Church Mission Society, the various Lutheran societies and so forth. But even there the fact that they identified themselves with a particular denomination or confession didn't necessarily mean that they were really exclusive about that. For instance, the Church Missionary Society which was formed and intended to do Anglican mission work was more than happy to make use of non-Anglicans, and, in fact, most of the early missionaries of the Church Missionary Society were actually German Lutherans that had been recruited and sent out under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society to various parts of the world. Some of the so-called nondenominational missions became defacto arms of one denomination or another as they gained most of their support and recruited most of their missionaries from a particular denominational group. The example that comes to mind is the London Missionary Society which, really, over time became a Congregationalist mission although it maintained its institutional independence from these Congregational churches. Denominational or confessional differences between and among European churches or American churches were frequently seen obstacles to effective mission work by the organizers of these societies. In fact, one of the reasons that they would organize a society was they saw it as a way of bypassing the unhealthful divisions that had arisen in European and American Christianity. Some of the societies deliberately refused to be identified with those categories of denominations and confessions. Hudson Taylor�s China Inland Mission is the example I've mentioned a couple of times. It was based on the principle that missionaries would be recruited from any denomination, but that the control of the mission was to be in the hands of the missionaries themselves, not in the hands of a denomination, of one denomination or another. So Hudson Taylor really resisted the idea of identifying his mission work in any way with one of the existing confessions or denominations that was there in Europe. Now, it's not really possible to completely avoid the theological questions and distinctions that have defined much of the church�s history for almost 2000 years. And simply refusing to be identified with a denomination often means that you implicitly identify yourself with one denomination or another, one confession or another. You might be aware of nondenominational churches, so-called nondenominational churches, in your community. Those are very often implicitly basically Baptist in their orientation, as an example. So also nondenominational mission societies were sometimes implicitly associated with a denomination, even though officially and institutionally, they were not. Missionary societies, because they had an institutional independence from the churches, became an important way in which Christians of differing confessions or traditions could cooperate and work together. That is, take the example of the Basel Mission from Switzerland. Lutherans and Reformed supported this missionary society. The task was to spread the gospel to heathen countries, and the supporters of the mission felt that even without resolving all of the differences between Lutheran churches and Reformed churches, it was possible to cooperate and work together for the task of spreading the gospel in foreign lands. So missionary societies played an important role in offering a place where Christians of different confessions, different denominations, could actually work together. There is, of course, another stream of the missionary societies and that is the missionary societies which intentionally asserted a definite confessional profile. The Leipzig Mission, one of the early German societies, was organized in 1836. And that was formed by Lutherans who were no longer willing to support this joint work of the Basel Mission. So they felt that it was no longer practical for Lutherans and Reformed to cooperate in that mission. And many of the Lutherans withdrew their support from the Basel Mission and organized their own Lutheran Missionary Society, that is, a society that would draw its financial and personal support from Lutheran churches and, in turn, would also work toward the planting and establishment of churches that were theologically congruent with that. In other words, they would plant Lutheran churches in the countries where they were, and they wouldn't have to engage in this tension or debate about what kind of church will result from our mission work. So the Leipzig Mission was established that way. And numerous other explicitly and deliberately Lutheran societies were established in the 19th century partly connected with a revival of interest in the confessional identity of Lutherans during the same period. So as Lutherans became more conscious and aware of their own theological profile so their mission work began to reflect that and take on that more intentional Lutheran shape. But in general, I would say the missionary societies found that the theological or confessional profile of their supporting churches was not as important for the task of mission as a zeal for the gospel and a willingness to sacrifice and cooperate for the sake of spreading that gospel message. So the theological profile tended to be deemphasized in the work of the missionary societies. ***** 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. *****