US Protestant Foreign Missions Enter A Time Of Upheaval
(ANALYSIS) These are turbulent times for U.S. Protestant foreign missions.
A year ago, World Mission Director Mienda Uriarte announced that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was shifting “to a more integrated and relational approach aimed at more effectively engaging with our changing world.”
Translation: After 188 years of illustrious efforts worldwide, the church’s foreign mission agency is disbanding, and the PCUSA would no longer dispatch a corps of career missionaries overseas, though it will continue to help international partners.
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Among many other things, U.S. Presbyterians made major investments of talent in China and in South Korea, where over the decades, 1,000 missionaries built thriving churches. Christianity Today reported in May that the PCUSA laid off 54 missionaries, virtually the entire staff that still existed. As recently as 2010, the denomination sponsored 200 missionaries.
By comparison, note two smaller denominations that broke away as the PCUSA moved leftward on theology and sexuality: The Presbyterian Church in America supports 509 career missionaries and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church has 141.
The PCUSA acted, in part, because annual expenses for foreign work have been running $1 million over budget. Also, it argued that the onetime missionary churches in the Global South are fully independent and becoming the statistical center of world Christianity. As a result, they no longer need outside helpers and even assign their own foreign missionaries to the former sending nations of the West.
In addition, mainline Protestants have become dubious about seeking religious conversions and concerned that, in the words of a Harvard University museum display, “mission work offered a thin veil for American cultural and political imperialism.”
Elsewhere, cross-cultural missionary activity remains robust. The “World Christian Encyclopedia” has statistics covering all branches of Christianity in all nations. In 1900, Europe produced nearly two-thirds of the world’s 60,000 missionaries. Today, North America sponsors the largest contingent, 143,000 of the 425,000 missionaries currently in the field even as 46,200 missionaries from other countries work in North America.
Among U.S. Protestants, non-denominational agencies are generally gaining more ground than denominational ones. An exception is the Southern Baptist Convention. Even though U.S. membership is declining, its International Mission Board still supports 3,600 missionaries. Last year, the board reported its largest field preparation class in a decade and the highest number of new missionary applicants in 15 years.
The PCUSA situation typifies the steady decline of foreign missionary enthusiasm and numbers in all the theologically flexible “mainline” Protestant denominations that once took such pride in global vocations. That story begins in 1810 when the Congregationalist forebears of today’s United Church of Christ founded the first U.S. Protestant foreign mission board. The movement was inspired by a 1806 prayer meeting pledge among five Williams College students to take the Gospel overseas.
Foreign mission agencies proliferated, and in 1886, members of various denominations joined in the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which invited U.S. college students to consider missionary careers and sign pledge cards. The eventual atrophy of that effort signified mainline decline.
Meanwhile, the same cause was undertaken by the emphatically evangelistic InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which, since 1946, has held periodic student conventions to promote missionary service. The most recent, in December, drew 7,000 attendees compared with a standing-room-only turnout of 20,000 in 2003, suggesting a slide in evangelical zeal.
Speaking of crowds, in 1900, mainline Protestants drew 180,000 enthusiasts to the largest missionary rally ever held. Demonstrating the cause’s cultural cachet, participants at this Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions in New York City included former President Benjamin Harrison, then-current President William McKinley and President-to-be Theodore Roosevelt.
That remarkable event was recalled in a thoroughgoing overview last November by a top executive, President Ted Esler of Missio Nexus, based in Wheaton, Illinois. This network of 351 agencies — with some 50,000 personnel — is a 2012 merger of the two major associations of U.S. evangelical mission boards, one launched in 1917 as part of a movement against theological “modernism” and the other founded by the National Association of Evangelicals in 1945.
Through much of the 20th century, Esler noted, liberal Protestantism “sought to redefine mission with a focus on social and political issues,” which turned missionizing into “social work” and, in the long run, “led to the near demise of missions among mainline churches” even as evangelicals expanded.
Esler said that the fundamentalist and evangelical missionaries were equally devoted to education, healthcare, relief, and social development, but they insisted on maintaining the Christian heritage of seeking converts and planting new churches. Esler also contended that, contrary to stereotypes, the conservatives were actually “not purveyors of Western civilization in the same way that the mainline denominations had been.”
Evangelical missions underwent a significant sea change in the 1970s, largely due to Ralph Winter, a onetime missionary to Guatemala who taught at Fuller Theological Seminary and later founded his own U.S. Center for World Mission (now called Frontier Ventures). Winter observed that most mission staffing and spending went to nations that already had numerous churches. Instead, he advocated an anthropological strategy of evangelizing myriad ethnic “unreached people groups” that lack a Christian presence.
Contrary to the mainline conclusion that the missionary days are over, this meant there was much left for cross-cultural workers to do. That approach is represented by the two U.S. non-denominational agencies with the biggest revenues, both headquartered in Florida: Pioneers and Ethnos360 (formerly New Tribes Mission). These agencies that seek to provide Bible translations in thousands of smaller languages are part of the campaign.
Esler’s chief concern right now is “a growing movement within evangelicalism that seeks to deconstruct missionary work” and overturn Winter-type thinking. One aspect is scholars like Fuller’s Soong-Chan Rah, who link U.S. foreign missions with white supremacy, international empire-building and the “doctrine of discovery” imposed upon Native Americans.
Esler embraces repentance for these past wrongs but fears it results in “opposing the need for conversionist missions.” In another approach, author Mekdes Haddis sees foreign missions as superfluous because God’s “general revelation” is already present in all cultures. These and other trends unite with the aversion toward Christian evangelism seen across American higher education.
For Esler, such challenges from the left are occurring simultaneously with “an equally dangerous form of deconstruction” from the right, in which “Christian nationalism” fuses an “America First missiology” with political fashions.
This, he added, “will produce a truncated gospel that communicates the wrong kingdom. Missionary work has been at its worst when combined with empire,” and at its best when obeying Jesus’s Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations” by empowering today’s indigenous churches everywhere.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.