ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-021 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. ***** >> JOSHUA: We've asked this question about the Roman Catholics so let me now make sure we know the same of the Protestants. Who were the great figures in early Protestant missions? Again, if you would, please share with us any comment you have regarding what is to be learned from such people for our own ministry. >> SPEAKER: Well, Joshua, a great question. As a matter of fact, there are so many great and important Protestant missionaries in the 19th century that it would really be difficult to even list them all. But let me try to pick out a few names that are of lasting value and are particularly important. I think it'll give us sort of a sampling of the caliber of these early Protestant missionaries. I'll start with a missionary who actually served in an area geographically close to the place I served myself in southern Africa. Robert Moffit had been an English gardener, that is not a man of much formal education who applied for service with the London Missionary Society when it was formed and was sent to South Africa. And he worked for more than 40 years among the Tswana people in South Africa establishing a very important mission station at a place called *Kurumon and a number of other surrounding churches as well. Moffit, in spite of the fact that he had little formal education, became convinced that the key to mission work among the Tswana people was to understand their language. So he embarked upon the daunting task of learning an unwritten African language that no linguistic had ever analyzed. He had no dictionary. He had no grammar to work from. All he had were people all around him who spoke this language, and with no formal training or linguistics background, he was able to learn Tswana and then to set about the task of translating the Bible. Now, remember, Moffit new know Hebrew or Greek so he wasn't translating the Bible from the original languages. He translated the Bible from the Bible he knew, the King James English version, into Tswana. He was translating an English Bible into a language of which he was not a native speaker. So this was a tremendously difficult task and took him years and years of work before he had a somewhat satisfactory result. But Moffit discovered that when he learned the language of the Tswana people, their attitude toward him changed dramatically, and suddenly, they were much more open to the message he was attempting to bring. Previously, he had to work through translators or, in some cases, through Afrikaans which is the Dutch dialect spoken by Dutch settlers in South Africa which was understood by some of the Tswana men. But once he learned Tswana and began to work in their language, and especially as he began to provide the scriptures in their language, their attitude changed, and they became much more open to the gospel. His work was really very fruitful and greatly blessed in spite of the fact that he didn't really have the educational background that most of us today would expect of someone tackling a task like that. From Moffit I'll move to a missionary closely associated with him who is probably even more well-known, and that is David Livingstone. This is the famous David Livingstone from the famous quote Dr. Livingstone I presume when Henry Stanley, the American newspaperman, had searched for Livingstone in the heart of Africa and finally found him. David Livingstone was actually Robert Moffit�s son-in-law and was a Scot who had been raised in very humble circumstances in Scotland and then got medical training before volunteering as a missionary with the London Mission Society and went initially to Kurumon where he worked with Robert Moffit and, of course, married his daughter. And then set off on his own career as a missionary and explorer. Livingstone�s great passion was to reach the interior of the African continent which was, at that time, virtually unknown to Europeans. So Livingstone when into areas and among peoples who had never seen a white man before, and he was always drawn, as he said it, by the smoke of 1,000 villages who had never seen or heard a missionary. Livingstone pressed on northward from South Africa. He explored from the west coast of Africa all the way to the east coast. He traced the Zambezi River, one of the great rivers of southern Africa, and discovered Victoria Falls, the first European to see Victoria Falls and named it after his queen, Queen Victoria. Livingstone was probably as much an explorer as a missionary, although he never lost sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of his work was to find opportunities for the gospel to take root in the heart of Africa. In fact, for Livingstone, three things came together and really couldn�t be separated in his mind. The first was Christianity, bringing the gospel to an unchristian continent. The second was civilization. Christianity and civilization, in his mind, went together. The Christian countries of Europe were civilized. The unchristian peoples of Africa were uncivilized. Because of that close connection between Christianity and civilization, Livingstone understood himself as a civilizer as well as a missionary. So he brought advances in modern medicine. He brought techniques for modern agriculture and other advances that he felt civilization offered to the lives of people. The third thing that was tied up with both of those was commerce. As an Englishman, as an explorer, as a supporter of the great project of empire that was being conducted at the time, David Livingstone brought together his passion for Christianity, for civilization, and for commerce. It was his goal to bring all three of these into the heart of the interior of Africa. He was a man of profound influence. When he published his travels and researches in southern Africa in 1857, this was a tremendous best seller in England and America and inspired numerous young people to volunteer for missionary service and go to Africa to follow in the steps on the path that Livingstone had traced into the interior of Africa. We can shift our attention away from Africa for just a moment and consider a couple of missionaries that worked predominately in Asia. One was Adoniram Judson, an American missionary who originally went under the American Board of Commissioners as a Congregationalist missionary, but on the ship over to Burma, he became persuaded by Baptist theology, resigned from the American Board of Commissioners, and accepted support then from Baptist mission societies. Judson worked his way into one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable for Christian missions. Burma was beyond the reach of colonial power and protection at the time so he was a stranger in a strange land working without the protection of a colonial government. He pressed his way into the interior preaching and teaching as he went in Burma and eventually was imprisoned under suspicion as a foreigner and spent a considerable time in prison under extremely harsh conditions and thus exhibiting this sense of self-sacrifice and dedication that I referred to before in Protestant missions. Henry Martin was a very well-educated Englishmen. He'd been to Cambridge and studied classical languages and was well-equipped as a linguist and went, initially, to India where he came into contact with William Carey and his associates and helped them in their Bible translation projects. He himself, Henry Martin, translated the Bible into Urdu in 1810 and was probably the most important early Protestant figure to work among Muslim peoples, a very resistant group. Martin was actually on his way back to England over land and had gotten as far as Persia when he died at the young age of 31. So by the time he died at the age of 31, he had already produced a groundbreaking Bible translation in the Urdu language and made a lasting imprint on Protestant missions to Muslims. And I'll mention just one more figure from this early period of Protestant missions. That is Henry Venn. Venn wasn't so important as a missionary himself. He was, in fact, the administrator, the secretary, of the Church Mission Society in England, and as such, was responsible for the planning and recruitment of missionaries and sort of setting the goals for that society in its work. And it was Venn, perhaps more than anyone, who thought through what the real goal of mission work was, and Venn understood that the goal of mission work is not just to convert individuals. The goal of mission work around the world is to plant churches and not just any kind of churches, churches that have a healthy independence, both from the missionary society that brings them into being, and from the church in the sending countries, so in his case, the Church of England. That is, the churches that are founded around the world, that are planted in various places, or not to be carbon copies and are certainly not to be dependent on the church in England. Then sum this up by talking about churches that were independent in three ways. First of all, they should be self-governing. The administration and governance of the church in a certain country should be in the hands of the local people themselves, self-governing churches. Secondly, they should be self-supporting. They shouldn't be depending for financial resources or for personnel on some European church to continually send them support and assistance. Finally, they should be self-extending, or self-propagating. This means that the church that gets planted is actually ready and able to carry on the work of preaching the gospel and extending the kingdom to their own neighbors and countryman, even if the missionaries and the mission society withdraws. Venn, in fact, envisioned the work of the missionary as leading to what he might refer to as the euthanasia of the mission, that is the mission, as a separate organization, would die out in a place after the church had been planted and that the missionaries could move on to other countries or other areas that were unevangelized, once a church that had been planted that was self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending. Venn�s influence still shapes the way we think about the goal of mission work, even today in terms of a healthy independence of new churches as they are planted. As I said, we could talk about dozens and dozens of Protestant missionaries in the 1800's, the 19th century. But I think the names of Robert Moffit, David Livingstone, Adoniram Judson, Henry Martin, and Henry Venn will be enough to remember. And they do give us some examples of how this early generation of missionaries shaped in a lasting way how Protestant missions go about their work. ***** 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. *****