November 01, 1989 by Ralph D. Winter

Part II: Positive Lessons from Our American Past

[Part I of this paper focused upon the general world scene during the last 4,000 years, from the time the Great Commission was given to Abraham. This part is focused on the American scene, not to ignore other parts of the world but to focus on the area where most of our readers live.]

The Specifically American Story

Let us take a closer look at the American story. Not long after King Philip’s war in the 1600s, in which a startlingly potent backlash of American Indians almost erased the English colonies in the Northeast, the Great Awakening provided the spiritual resources for widespread outreach to these native American peoples, but the same awakening not so helpfully generated 1) the self-confidence and self-government of an intercolonial Christian movement (which provided for the massive distraction of the Declaration of Independence and the ensuing American Revolutionary War), plus, 2) the most sudden departure in our whole history from Christian belief with a descent into deistic humanism. At that point, in the colleges (which were all “Christian”) those rare (if any) students willing to admit to Christian faith were a tiny minority. This explains why the little “Haystack” prayer group did not come in out of the rain, but took refuge under the edge of a haystack out in a field (the edges carved out by limits of the reach of the cows in the pasture). And that is why they went out in the woods to pray in the first place. That is why they wrote their devotional diaries in code, etc.

But revival came, and the War of 1812 finally secured the intent of the Revolution, and a bawdy, rambunctious nation of rebels and significantly irreligious people plowed its way Westward. Still again we were blessed by a whole series of revivals, which not only fueled the 1st Era of missions, but culminated in one of the most remarkable spiritual upheavals of all history, the Awakening of 1857, which swept the country and shook the nation to its core. Satan counterattacked once more with the massive distraction and incredible loss of life of the War Between the States, in which a higher percentage of the combatants died than in any war of comparable size in all history.

Historians are virtually silent on the extraordinary impact of this feminine movement on children, both male and female, that eventually grew up under this kind of home influence.

One mixed blessing of the otherwise horrifying War Between the States was a reduction of the male population in a wide span of ages that was so severe that the female population was forced to take over the businesses, the banks, and even found their own, exclusively women’s colleges. It became a bit clearer why young women should be allowed to learn to read! Even so, the only unlimited outlet for women was in the field of missions, and their long standing interest in missions truly flowered after the war ended in 1864.

In the very next year there appeared the first mission sending agency run entirely by and for women, the Women’s Union Missionary Society, which lasted more than 100 years, only recently to be merged with the BMMF (now InterServe). By 1900 over 40 national level women’s societies were in existence. Even by 1885 they were a major force.

But historians are virtually silent on the extraordinary impact of this feminine movement on children, both male and female, that eventually grew up under this kind of home influence. For example, we may never know the unmentioned involvement of mission-minded women in Moody’s decision to throw open one evening’s program in his huge Northfield Conference to an outside speaker on missions. Who knows but what the man who urged Moody to set aside such a special mission night was doing it to keep peace with his mission-minded wife! Women were both the concerned and the knowledgeable people on the subject of missions.

In any case, when that night came, it was A.T. Pierson who was given the platform, the man who had four years earlier, with no great effect, sounded a cry for evangelization of the world by the end of the century 20 years away. Now he had 1,000 key people for his audience, flanked by Moody himself. The Shanghai conference of 1877 had launched a version of Hudson Taylor’s own closure concept of a 1,000 missionaries evangelizing 50 Chinese per day for 1,000 days. Now Pierson would urgently propose that in the remaining 15 years before 1900, 10 million believers (one fortieth of the total number of people calling themselves Christians) would be activated. If each of these 10 million believers were to evangelize 100 non-Christians between 1885 and 1900, all the world would be evangelized. Pierson preached this with passion to this august audience.

Hearing these words, Moody, a fidgety person in any situation, certainly could not stay seated. He jumped to his feet, cutting Pierson off, and motioned to the audience, “How many of you believe this can be done?” The crowd roared its approval. Moody, a practical man of detail, appointed a committee of six, joining it himself, and this small group hammered out an eloquent document within three days, entitled “An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere,” which again was approved at a subsequent evening meeting by a massive voice vote of the same influencial audience.

Thus, for the first time the idea of the finishing of the task of global evangelism became publically understood as a feasible, reachable, do-able task. Doable, but would it be done? The same document called for a world-level conference at which global plans could be made. The following year, Pierson’s influential book, Crisis in Missions (by which he meant a crisis of opportunity), came off the press, and the brief, eloquent document “An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere” was duly placed in the appendix. Moody himself had already created a tidal wave of Gospel concern in Britain, so great that perhaps only Billy Graham’s recent campaign could be called a parallel. Some of the most illustrious families of highest society found this uneducated American from a tiny rural town capturing the souls of their finest university sons and daughters. Nothing in America paralleled the shock wave throughout England (January of 1885) of the sailing of the “Cambridge Seven”—somewhat like the Lakers team being decimated by half its players joining Operation Mobilization, or if Paul Newman were to join Frontiers as a candidate for field service in Morocco.

Later on in 1885, not only was a truly momentous womens missionary movement beginning to take place, but one of those finest young men, J.E.K.Studd (C.T. Studd’s older brother) came across the Atlantic at Moody’s invitation to this country to canvas college campuses as the Cambridge Seven had done in Britain before sailing. “The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions” was one result, building without any doubt on the home influences of the womens’ movement, plus the growing impact of the remarkable, church based, young peoples movement called Christian Endeavor (still the world’s largest evangelical young peoples movement), itself a product of the womens movement, with a strong missionary emphasis built into every local group.

J.E.K.Studd got to this country in time to be one of the six on that committee to draw up “An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere.” He went back to England and no doubt had a hand in the great world missionary conference three years later—London 1888—which might have appeared to be the global planning event for which the Northfield document had called. This Studd himself became mayor of London a little later.

Those were heady days, but the 1888 conference (already planned when the Northfield closure call had been drawn up) consisting as it did of a popular audience, church people and well wishers, did not lay plans for world evangelization. There was a distinct reticence in some British circles to speak of such things. The very existence of such a conference may have displaced the possibility of the kind of business-like conference called for by the document “An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere.”

The 1885 shock wave in England of the sailing of the “Cambridge Seven” was somewhat like half the Lakers team joining Operation Mobilization or Paul Newman candidating with Frontiers for field service in Morocco.

Yet many did respond. I challenge those who may not have a feel for the seriousness and quality of the concern among many leaders in those days to get a copy of the book, Countdown to 1900, by Todd Johnson, and read it a chapter a day. It will drive you to your knees. I do not doubt that what was proposed to be done by 1900 actually could have been done. It was doable back then even though it is much more doable today—world population has grown almost four times as large since then, but evangelical resources have grown over ten times as large, have shifted largely to the non-Western world, and are based now in every part of the globe.

In essence, however, three shattering blows destroyed the very real possibilities faced by those in 1890. There was mighty distraction in the public sector, as a newly confident America flexed its muscles, driving our border out to the Pacific by pushing four new states through the Senate in a single month—to get the jump on Canada. We reached out and took the Philippines, half of Western Samoa, and would have taken Cuba had things turned our right.

There was dissipation of resources. Those were the days historians call the gay nineties, for good reason. Parties in relative currency exceeding the type of Malcom Forbes parties we read of today, and evangelicals were involved in some of them.

And there was destruction of mission rationale. When distraction and dissipation have done their work there is nothing left but rationalization. As in the days of Noah, so was it to be in the days when the great challenge stood right before them.

Today we are warned, unnecessarily, that we must not set a date for Christ’s return. But those people who are talking of dates are not mission people. I know of no mission leader who is confused about the difference between the Return of Christ and the completion of the task. It is not for us to say precisely what the relation will bebetween these two nearing events, since we must not assume we know exactly what God has in mind for the completion of the task.

However, as no other generation, we find ourselves nearing rapidly the “blessing”of all the remaining peoples on the face of the earth. We happen at the same time to find ourselves nearing rapidly the end of the first millenium in history which has ever had a global awareness. Let me ask you, “In our concern to avoid setting a date for His Return must we give up the thought of setting any goals at all, until we have coasted safely past the 2000 mark? Is this the only decade in which we are not allowed to benefit by setting goals for prominent future dates?”

Actually the year 2000 as a completion date is not the most crucial goal. If we can learn anything from a century ago, we can learn that long before the end of this century, namely about 1995, the mobilization for the year 2000 will begin to look reasonable or not. How do we know this? It was about five years before the end of the 19th century when leaders began to realize that the crisis of opportunity had been lost. I shall never forget the words of A.T. Pierson, “We are compelled to give up the hope”—a statement made in 1895. But even so, by 1900 everyone was still in high spirits—enormous energies had been set in motion which would soon eclipse all previous attempts at mobilization.

Student Volunteers who could not sail for lack of support became business leaders who by 1904 had organized the Laymen’s Missionary Movement (a belated me-too response to the womens movment and the Young Peoples Society of Christian Endeavor) which in seven years quadrupled the giving in the collaborating denominations.

I fear I will be running out of time. I have tried to present the lessons from past calls to world evangelization in the context of the story itself. Many are embedded in the text of the previous material. Perhaps I can just pull out a few for highlighting.

Highlighting Some of the Key Points

1. The idea of a division of labor, of parcelling out the job, was well understood. In America, Canadian Societies were to be responsible for 40 million souls, the (U.S.) Congregationalists 75 million, Dutch Reformed 13 million, Northern Baptists 61 million, Northern Methodists 150 million, Northern Presbyterians 100 million, etc.
2. A hundred years ago the definition of the remaining task still revolved around simply theevangelizing and the converting of individuals. Groups were not part of strategic goal setting, and no doubt the significance of cultural diversity within countries was not sufficiently understood. The Latin America division of labor (see the Momentum Building paper, page 15) builds on peoples. This seems to be more realistic and specific than any plan that is geographical or based on so-many-individuals.

The nature of that final “testimony to all peoples” (Matt 24:14), especially if it involves the end of history, is a fundamental dilemma, due to our human theological framework. At any moment in history, babies are being born, children are emerging into accountability, older people have passed on without opportunity. There is no obviously neat concept of when it would be convenient for history to end.

The Student Volunteers, with more lengthy schooling than many of the experienced field missionaries, actually thought to some extent of missions in terms of the college education of the nations. “Yale in China” is one example. In our day many fields now reveal a similar emphasis on seminary training beyond college and thus impose an even more exaggerated and questionable American excess—one of the factors most inevitably impeding church growth.

I personally am unwilling to propose a definition for what constitutes the completion of the Great Commission or for what constitutes “World Evangelization.” However, the most satisfying suggestion of what constitutes the concept that within every people group there must be the blessing spoken of in Genesis 12:3, 18:18, 22:18, 26:18, and 28:14, seems to me to be the definition of reaching a people group as defined by the large meeting of mission leaders convened by Wade Coggins and Warren Webster under the sponsorship of the Lausanne Committee in March 1982. (See Momentum Building, pages 2- 3.)

An inevitable complication of defining the remaining task is the nature of the people we need to take into account. There are huge groups, like the Han Chinese, and smaller families of languages like the Cantonese, and still smaller groups with mutually unintellible languages (still in the millions) within the Cantonese sphere. See Momentum Building, page 8.

3. The London 1888 conference, as well as other conferences like New York 1900, were huge, popular meetings, and did not allow mission leaders to plan together. The Edinburgh 1910 Conference, following the pattern of field conferences of missionaries in Shanghai and Madras—taken note of by Mott—first pioneered that kind of mission-leaders-conference, and the International Missionary Council resulted, a planning body. (But the IMC was so closely tied to church leadership that it eventually suffered the maladies of liberalizing tendencies in the related bodies and was eventually totally merged, and essentially submerged into the general, non-missionary concerns of the World Council of Churches.) The lesson? Conferences of non-operational leaders are not going to generate operational strategies. This would tend to be true of most Lausanne Conferences, where the clear purpose is to attract church leaders to thoughts of more serious evangelization rather than to assist mission leaders to make plans together. A second conference similar in character to that of 1910 was the World Consultation on Frontier Missions, which was composed exclusvely, as in 1910, of the165 delegates of mission agencies, (more than in 1910) one third of which were what we call Two Thirds World mission agencies. Its contribution to the definition of a “reached people” is referred to in the Momentum Building paper, page 2.

4. There has been intergenerational alienation then and now. Kefa Sempagi’s book A Distant Grief tells about the young, college-grad Student Volunteers coming to Uganda and discovering that First Era missions had produced pastors without college education. The culture shock of this younger generation did not allow them to read the experience nor to hear out the quickly outnumbered older mission leaders who had understandably provided this kind of church leadership. Pastors were pushed out of their pulpits, new pastoral leaders were denied ordination, and in general, things were set back enormously. In our day many fields, perhaps most fields, except within the virile Pentecostal movement, now reveal a similar emphasis on seminary training beyond college, and thus impose an even more exaggerated and questionable American excess, which is one of the factors most inevitably impeding church growth. The Student Volunteers, many of them older and with more lengthy schooling than many of the experienced field missionaries, actually thought to some extent of missions in terms of the college education of the nations. “Yale in China,” is one example. The advanced education which missions brought to China (in many cases their science textbooks taken to China were more advanced than those in common use in the USA) was a genuine contribution to China but was not a substitute for the Gospel.

But, in general, heightened ideals of lengthened, specialized schooling tended to mean that men going to China could only teach men the Bible in a seminary mode, while women missionaries going to China, well-trained in the Bible themselves, had no such lofty aspirations—or handicaps—and this situation became a significant factor in the fact that in the modern church in China the Biblically literate “anchor man” is often a woman. It is reported that this is true for 19 out of 20 of the some 250,000 house churches.

The generation gap today is heightened by the even more extensive delay which unending years of schooling nowadays tend to impose on mission candidates. I believe that young people ought to be integrated into work on the field right after high school, continuing their college studies in tandem. Colleges can if they wish, conduct their work in such a way that six months every year is “on the field,” working with missionaries, while both work and study continue. Seminaries would be able to work with more mature students had they had this kind of undergraduate education. But, ifcolleges will not move in this direction, at least the seminaries can. This is not the place to spell this out, but the only university owned and operated by missionaries, the William Carey International University, related to the U.S. Center for World Mission seeks to pilot this kind of mutation. The key point is that only if young people begin to work with people older than themselves at an earlier age, as it used to be, can the polarization of the generations effectively be avoided.

Astonishing new conditions of opportunity pertain in both China and the Soviet Union, and in both countries there are multimillions of devout believers in Christ. We hear of things that are hard to believe—people being baptized 24 hours a day in a large city in Siberia, a governmental call from North Korea for 1,000 pastors to attend a Christian meeting, etc. There are now 36,000 Two-Thirds-World missionaries on the job!

I would imagine that this kind of a move to internationalize the educational process is more likely to be initiated by some of the new, explicitly mission-oriented seminaries such as the World Mission Seminary founded by Koreans in Los Angeles, or the Logos Evangelical Seminary founded by Taiwanese Christians in Highland Park, California, or the new Great Commission Theological Seminary being founded by a team headed by Thomas Wang.

5. The concept of a mobilization “window in time” arises from the fact that those who framed the 1885 Appeal for closure by 1900, really only had ten years in which the necessarily mobilization effort would have to be built. By about 1895 it became apparent even to A.T. Pierson that “we are compelled to abandon the hope,” one of the most poignant phrases in mission history, something that may well again need to be said in about 1995 (see Countdown to 1900, page 48). At this moment, in our case, on the eve of the nineties, we have only a few short months before it will become too late.

However, amazing, unexpected, unprecedented growth of the church around the world has taken place (the ratio of those who do not consider themselves Christians to those who would appear to be committee believers, has dropped from 27 to one in 1900 to 7 to one in 1989. The nine-year drop from 1980 to 1989 (from 11 to one, to 7 to one) is an equivalent drop in ratio to the drop between AD 100 and AD 1000 (from 360 to one, to 220 to one). Equally astonishing new conditions of opportunity pertain in both China and the Soviet Union, and in both countries there are multimillions of devout believers in Christ. We hear of things that are hard to believe—people being baptized 24 hours a day in a large city in Siberia, a governmental call from North Korea for 1,000 pastors to attend a Christian meeting in North Korea (on such short notice that it does not seem physically possible), etc. Now there are 36,000 Two-Thirds-World missionaries on the job. Both communication and transportation are almost infinitely easier than a century ago. Altogether, it seems irrefutable: we are in a vastly superior position to work toward completing the task as best we can define it, by the end of the century, and, specifically, in the “window of opportunity” just ahead of us.

Minor revisions have been made since the September meeting.