American Protestant overseas missions really trace back to a bunch of young adults seeking God out of doors -- interesting, eh?
Called “The Haystack Movement” from a meeting in 1806 near Williams College, in the far northwest corner of Massachusetts, it was a group of college students caught out in the rain who took shelter under a haystack, and found themselves in prayer for the mission of Christianity around the world.
A debate over the theology of missionary service led to a fellowship meeting and ultimately the roots of the American Bible Society and other early missionary societies in the Congregationalist churches, now better known as the United Church of Christ (UCC), as well as the first overseas missionary from a Protestant body out of the United States, to India in 1812, all beginning in the shelter of that Massachusetts haystack.
When it comes to missions, homeland and overseas, the place of missionaries and their role in advancing evangelism seems to us a pretty obvious and necessary set of connections . . . but some associations don’t actually connect the way you might think.
Because for much of the early history of this country, missionary work was seen as somewhat in contradiction to orthodox Calvinist and Reformed theology. It’s a complicated question of the Protestant Reformation, esp. regarding the Reformed tradition: is revival even an option? For us today, living on the other side of Billy Sunday and Dwight Moody and Billy Graham, that sounds like a very odd question indeed. But in the early Reformation during the 1600s, and again in the later 1700s with the Wesleyan revival, preaching outside of church buildings, and converting sinners, was a deeply controversial question. Simeon and Whitefield and Wesley went round and round in the Eighteenth Century on whether grace meant a sinner could in any way be converted and choose to follow Jesus, which is today broadly known as the “Arminian” position, or if we are called to proclaim God’s glory and grace, both to those condemned to sin and perdition as well as to those whom Divine Providence has prepared to receive it, but without the believer really having any agency, any role in “accepting Christ” or taking hold of God’s grace for them, also known sweepingly as a more “Calvinist” stance. Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) and George Whitefield (who made a remarkable impression on Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, at least with the power of his voice) were Calvinists, whose belief in revivals was nuanced, to say the least. They believed God wanted them to happen, but what they believed was happening was quite different than how we regard revival today.
And even in the so-called “mission fields,” if you assume both evangelism and conversion were always present together, the historical record might surprise you. This also touches on an interesting debate within and around the question of colonialism, and the answers are not quite what you might think. In social media terms, “it’s complicated.”
In early America, Catholic Jesuit missionaries had traveled with trappers and traders up the Great Lakes and into the interior of the modern Midwest; later Moravian evangelists out of German Pietism came into the Ohio country; some efforts to share the Gospel with Native Americans were part of the nation’s early history in places like Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, or the College of William and Mary in Virginia, but . . .
Generally missions were more a function of the frontier than anything else, with new churches founded as a part of the spread of settlements. Certainly on the American frontier, churches weren’t established out ahead of the wave of settlement. Methodist circuit riders in the footsteps of John Wesley and later Francis Asbury made sure of the growth of that movement as they worked hard to keep up with the newly established villages and towns, but theirs was a movement following the pioneers less than a mission getting out ahead of the civic structures of the new nation. Presbyterians had a history from the Old Country of “the Holy Fair,” rooted in a once or twice a year celebration of the sacrament of communion, and on the frontier, they would draw together people to simplify the process done in Scottish kirks and parishes back home, working through the whole multi-day processes of ascertaining the status of communicants, and then sharing the elements in a very slow and stately fashion, even if with all the waiting something more less ceremonial started happening around the periphery.
This is all why the Cane Ridge Revival of August 1801 was so remarkable. Revivals were an urban thing at best, not accepted generally, and they still had relatively little support in terms of their purpose being to convert sinners to Christian faith. It was more thought of as a public way to identify and gather together those intended by God to be “the elect” in a community: mass meetings to create, to generate new churches as well as new Christians were not the norm of that time and place, and there was no thought given, really, to how to support and structure such events to spread and extend them.
Barton Stone sort of “backed into” putting on a revival, but the historical record makes it clear that whether you were looking at what happened from a Presbyterian view (Stone’s starting point) or Methodist position (James B. Finley would testify to this one) or Baptist (they become more prominent in these sorts of gatherings later), the Cane Ridge meetinghouse in that first week of August went from sacrament meeting and sort of “Holy Fair” to an out-and-out revival. And not only was it a mass gathering, extended meeting for sharing the Gospel in a way that brought people not members of churches previously into faith and commitment, it included ongoing preaching by multiple traditions. In fact, often on the grounds of the Cane Ridge church there were more than one person preaching at any given time, and not all of the same religious tradition.
This was new. Hence, figuring out how to do it again – who should organize something that wasn’t organized in the first place, for one thing – was new as well. But many of those present and powerfully influenced by the Cane Ridge revival believed that it should happen again, and wanted to experience that radical unity and hospitality within God’s grace again. A number of 1801 participants, many who weren’t clergy of any sort at that point, became evangelists and traveling preachers later on in their lives. “Spreading” the Gospel becomes a regular part of most Christian preaching and teaching in American Protestantism in a new way.
Also, new church establishment starts to become something a bit different than a spontaneous clustering of immigrants looking to recreate the church of their homeland in a new place. Church planting becomes more assertive, even a touch aggressive, and preaching for conversion is the new standard. Alexander Campbell’s noted practice of holding public debates starting in 1820 were a novel form of evangelism, with its own history in the Old World but that became a spectator event and a mass entertainment and a platform for conversion and new church establishment.
As an aside, imagine setting up today a five or seven or eight day debate, and what the reaction would be. If you told your community a minister of your tradition and a leader or teacher from another would be debating from after breakfast to supper time, with a break for lunch and most nights an extra session in the evening, would you fill a hall? It’s unlikely. This is where the complicated intersection of information, news, entertainment, and spiritual seeking feeds into how we answer the question of “what works?” Because what worked in 1829 isn’t going to work in 2021, just to spell out the obvious. And Walter Scott’s approach to children at play and putting on basically a giant sermon for three nights at the courthouse: brilliant use of community resources and opportunities and expectations in 1830, but today it would get him negative attention and very little effective outcome.
Scott did, however, establish at the very least dozens of churches – some say hundreds, and it’s entirely possible – and the combination, again not planned out, of Scott going town to town, and Campbell hitting the cities with widely publicized debates (1820, 1823, 1829, 1837, and 1843 being the most significant ones) resulting in what we’d call “major media market penetration” and follow-up publications, resulted in a rich mix of planned church starts and spontaneous local establishments all along the Ohio River corridor. Barton Stone traveled and preached from Kentucky to Missouri in an arc through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois where he ended up establishing a new home, not coincidentally out of the reach of the slave economy. His “Christian Messenger” publication from 1826 reached north and west as Campbell’s “Christian Baptist” from 1823 extended a message of simple New Testament church order and establishment in a more southerly direction, and west from there, with a significant overlap on both sides of the Ohio River until Stone’s passing in 1844. Campbell had already set aside attempts to maintain unity with formal Baptist structures by 1830 and his “Millennial Harbinger” of that year until his death in 1866 was central to bringing the movements together, but all three of those publications were effectively planting churches whether that was the original intention or not, even after the American Christian Missionary Society (ACMS) was formed to do so intentionally after 1849.
Between the call of Walter Scott as our first formal evangelist, and one could say missionary in the homeland sense, in 1827, and the launch of the ACMS a generation later, the influence of the Haystack Movement became formalized in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, more commonly the “American Board,” a largely Congregationalist organization, but hugely influential among Presbyterians and Baptists as the idea of foreign missions began to take root. The American Board was started in 1810, sent its first overseas missionaries in 1812, and only started to find its footing in terms of congregational relationships and funding support for missionaries in the 1820s. By the time Disciples of Christ were ready to work on organizing their state level church establishment and “missions” through state evangelists in 1849, foreign missions was a known but still controversial category.
The American Board, due to hazards and mortality and most likely cost (at least a bit) had intended to send only single people as overseas missionaries. James and Julia Barclay, of whom a whole book could and should be written, stepped forward in Cincinnati in 1849 to ask the ACMS to send them as a married couple, and “first to Jerusalem” calling on the Biblical example as Jesus says at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. They are called upon as our first missionaries, and they do go to Jerusalem, though they baptize no one there. The ACMS also begins to look into evangelism to Indian tribes and African American communities, and with the trends of the time sends their first African American missionary, named Alexander Cross, and his entire family to Africa to support the Liberian resettlement model then popular among abolitionists in the Midwest. Cross, sadly, dies very soon after his arrival. It would be more than 50 years later before the Disciples would send their next African American missionary to Africa, Jacob Kenoly in 1905. Between the Barclays and the demise of Cross, foreign missions don’t go very far in our Disciples of Christ awareness or activity up through the Civil War.
So when Caroline Neville Pearre (depicted above: http://www.therestorationmovement.com/_states/kentucky/cn_pearre.htm ) helped to birth the Christian Women’s Board of Missions (CWBM) in 1874, the concept of global missions was even then still a fairly new and still somewhat controversial idea in most quarters of the Restoration Movement. Neville Pearre and her associates were interested in sharing the Gospel, under the auspices of the Disciples of Christ, with women and children around the world -- and this was reflected in their missionary support as well, sending women in missions to Jamaica and India, along with doctors to China and Tibet. The work of the CWBM quickly caught the attention of the entire Restoration Movement . . . so the Foreign Christian Missionary Society began in 1874, because the men didn’t want to be left out, sending missionaries to England, Denmark, France, Sweden, Turkey, later on to Africa and the Philippines.
Parallel to all this, the missional project of educating Disciples leadership (intentionally not focused on ministerial education, but post-secondary education for all, including women and men) was drawing attention and support across the growing movement. Bacon College in Kentucky in 1835, Bethany College in (West) Virginia in 1840, Butler University (beginning as North Western Christian University) in Indiana and Eureka College in Illinois both chartered in 1855: all of these efforts and many more such were aimed at gathering support and students from the congregations of the Restoration Movement all over the United States. They were co-educational, often pioneers in endowing chairs for women professors, often abolitionist in aim and progressive in practices on the educational landscape.
With the passing of Alexander Campbell in 1866, the “Christian Standard” began as a publication which sought to become the voice of the movement following the deaths of the last of the founding generation; “The Christian-Evangelist” first published in 1882 (with roots back to 1863) and was a semi-official publication of the Disciples from 1911 and on in various forms as the predecessor of the “The Disciple” magazine, which ceased publication in 2002; in 1884 the “Christian Oracle” began in Iowa but soon became “The Christian Century” in Chicago, a Disciples publication until 1917 and from that year “An Undenominational Journal of Religion.”
Regardless, the point is to show where the multiplicity of missional causes at home and abroad were developing quickly after the “Founders’ era,” from 1866 onwards. On the state society level, the groups like the Ohio Christian Missionary Society were both jostled and accompanied by state Sunday School societies (incorporated into state societies at various points in the Twentieth Century) and organizations like Christian Endeavor societies for young adults which began in the 1880s across the country and became national organizations by 1900 or so.
It was into this context that the “Men and Millions” campaign burst like a directional flare over contested landscape. After 1913 and through the period around World War I, this first co-ordinated fundraising effort across the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) opened up new possibilities to more efficiently co-operate in mission efforts both at home, and globally. For the churches, the move to a more centrally co-ordinated mission structure simply meant not being bombarded by a dozen agencies, two dozen colleges, and hundreds of independent missionaries, let alone a number of publications and periodicals all competing for the time, attention, and support of both members and congregations for their product.
This was the intention behind the push to form the United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS) in 1919, a single unified clearinghouse for missional support and development work. There were desires spoken at Disciples conventions from 1874 shortly after the establishment of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society that they, the Christian Women’s Board of Missions, and the American Christian Missionary Society all form close alliances “in every practical way.” It took nearly fifty years to do so, and in the process, this unification led to a new split in the wider Disciples’ fellowship.