Missionaries

Missionaries seek to be credible to the people whom they try to influence with the message of the gospel. Although Christ first and foremost calls missionaries to be humble servants who love and serve him, empirical evidence from the behavioral sciences indicates that missionaries who are perceived as experts, who attract people to themselves, and, most importantly, who are trustworthy are most likely to be deemed credible. To be perceived as experts, missionaries need to demonstrate their knowledge of a topic and to speak with confidence. To be perceived as attractive to others, missionaries should have frequent contact with others, demonstrate appreciation to others, and take care with their physical appearance. To come across as trustworthy, missionaries need to demonstrate long-term integrity, trustworthiness, open communication, and concern for others.

The idea that certain iTaukei (formerly ‘Fijian’) clans are descended from the Jews, particularly through a Lost Tribe of Israel, is very strong among some contemporary clans and church groups in Fiji. The importance of the Lost Tribes was reinforced in the 1987 coups, when it formed part of the political rhetoric of the coup leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, who was also a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. In order to understand such claims, I review the historical record from 1835 to Cession in 1874 to evaluate when the idea of the Lost Tribes began to be used and, more broadly, the extent to which Christianity was the language for engagement and/or resistance between missionaries and Fijians. At the same time, I explore the developing missionary discourses and their relationship with newly emerging ideas about the science of origins. The evidence indicates that, as certain ideas became routinised around the time of Cession, Christianity and science together provided a grammar that enabled many Fijians to strongly identify with the Old Testament.

I propose  the peace-making efforts of the missionaries, the printing and distribution of Bible books in te reo (the Maori language) and the eagerness of many chiefs to embrace the example of Jesus Christ (Ihu Karaiti),  were pivotal in countering the 'Musket Wars' killing that wiped out up to 20 percent of the Maori population.

This is mainly an archival contribution whose purpose is to reassess the concrete phases of Nobili's education.  Here I demonstrate that, contrary to what previous historians repeated, Nobili's involvement with the College Romano was very short. Moreover, I have discovered that, before joining the Society of Jesus, he studied at the Seminario Romano. Nobili's school records are the earliest evidence on his life.
The article also hints at some possible implications that this specific Bildung had on Nobili's later missionary activity in India.

Many Christian missionaries either deliberately or are ignorant of the facts concerning Qur'an 19:27-28 where it says At length she brought the (babe) to her people, carrying him (in her arms). They said: "O Mary! truly an amazing thing hast thou brought! "O sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a man of evil, nor thy mother a woman unchaste.

Current Anthropology, Discussions and Criticism
Discussion between Søren Hvalkof and Claude E. Stipe on the missionary work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, based on recent (1984) critical publications.


... Reply by BENNETT BLUMENBERG Faculty of Sciences, Lesley College, Cambridge, Mass. 02237, USA 30 viii 83 Saban's supportive data for my model are most welcome. An appropriate circulatory support system is essential to maintain the physiological integrity of the brain. ...

This essay provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation were minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization

At first thought, the idea of British imperialism may include soldiers invading a region, claiming it as British territory, and forcing the indigenous peoples of the land to adopt British lifestyles. While this certainly occurred, there were more subtle representatives of the British Empire: missionaries. By the end of the 19th century, Britain had 10,000 missionaries scattered throughout 47 territories (Levine 113, 129). They “were often at the frontiers of British influence abroad” (Everill 790), and played an instrumental role in British presence throughout the world. Britain only had control over a few of the African territories (Sierra Leone, Nigeria, etc.) prior to the scramble for land by European colonial powers as a result of the Berlin Conference, and many British desired more land. Of course, this had to be justified to the public and media, and the idea of humanitarian missions to “civilize” African peoples softened the harsh concept of imperialism. While the British were unable to take formal control of territories in Africa prior to the Berlin Conference in 1884-5, missionaries were able to spread British ideals throughout the territories. British missionaries took part in cultural imperialism, “the purposeful aggression by one culture against the ideas and values of another… accompanied by political, economic, or military pressure” (Porter 367).  While missionaries failed to act as bridgeheads in expanding British presence in Africa, they were quite successful in spreading British culture and ideals, and thus were active agents of cultural imperialism.

This essay is an analytical study of Narayan Waman Tilak's life and its impact on Hindu-Christian interactions. Tilak was an Indian Christian from a Brahmin background who advocated Christ-Bhakti (a profound Indianised experience of Christ) as a more sensible approach to lead Indians into a relationship with Christ. The paper describes the various phases of Tilak's life and how they influenced his theology culminating in the development of the idea of Christ-bhakti and Darbar (a hybrid of Indian and Western forms of Christianity).

Phebe Hospital in Suakoko, Liberia operated continuously throughout the country's fourteen-year civil war due in part to the institution's religious affiliations. This paper examines the affect religious institutions and individual faith convictions had on the hospital's establishment and continued operation throughout times of extreme trial.

The Protestant missionary movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries has for some time now come under severe criticism both by many Western scholars and an increasing number of their African peers. Missionaries are charged with displacing indigenous cultures and supporting the political and economic colonisation on the African continent and other parts of the world. They were driven by an attitude of spiritual and ethno-cultural superiority, so the critics claim.

New Testament Church Structure – Paul and his Coworkers – An Alternativ Theological Education – A Critique of Catholic Canon Law

This volume contains the English translation of the chapter on the church structure from the author’s “Ethics” as well as essays on Catholic canon law, on the interaction of New Testament missionaries with one another and on theological education.

This book details the work of American Assemblies of God missionaries in the Philippines from 1926-2008. It discusses how God called and guided them to the Philippines, empowered them by the Holy Spirit, and led them in their work. It also takes an honest look at mistakes that were made in order that only God would receive the glory for the good that was done.

The Alawis or Alawites are a minority Muslim sect, predominantly based in Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. Over the course of the 19th century, they came increasingly under the attention of the ruling Ottoman authorities in their attempts to modernize the Empire, as well as Western Protestant missionaries.

Using Ottoman state archives and contemporary chronicles, this book explores the Ottoman government's attitudes and policies towards the Alawis, revealing how successive regimes sought to bring them into the Sunni mainstream fold for a combination of political, imperial and religious reasons. In the context of increasing Western interference in the empire's domains, Alkan reveals the origins of Ottoman attempts to 'civilize' the Alawis, from the Tanzimat period to the Young Turk Revolution. He compares Ottoman attitudes to Alawis against its treatment of other minorities, including Bektashis, Alevis, Yezidis and Iraqi Shi'a.

An important new contribution to the literature on the history of the Alawis and Ottoman policy towards minorities, this book will be essential reading for scholars of the late Ottoman Empire and minorities of the Middle East.

Texto contracubierta del libro: Este relato parte del éxito extraordinario que en el siglo XVI obtuvo la Historia del Gran Reino de la China, de fray Juan González de Mendoza, que alcanzó treinta ediciones y fue traducida a varios idiomas. El origen de esta obra se remonta al tiempo en que Felipe II, señor ya de un imperio que iba desde los dominios españoles en América hasta la India portuguesa, encargó a religiosos agustinos que se encontraran con el emperador de China y acordaran una alianza que debía convertir el Celeste Imperio en un paraíso cristiano bajo su protección. Para llevar a cabo la misión, González de Mendoza realizó una ingente labor de acopio de noticias sobre historia, geografía y tradiciones que le permitieran conocer la sofisticada complejidad de la civilización china. Con el presente libro, Diego Sola no solo reconstruye la biografía de González de Mendoza, que descubrió a Occidente cómo eran China y sus habitantes, sino que recupera la notable influencia que ejerció en los escritores españoles y europeos de su generación.

Several theses and dissertations have been written about the religious, political and cultural effects of the American missionary enterprise in the Middle East. This study lists the theses and dissertations which examine the missionary activities of the several American denominations and organizations including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Quakers and Methodists in the Middle East throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This article examines the rise of a "right-wing international" around contemporary Russia through the lens of the concept of "bad ecumenism," explored in conjunction with the author's philosophical views and personal experience of Orthodox-Protestant interaction. In contrast to "good ecumenism," which, broadly defined, seeks interconfessional dialogue and cooperation toward the common good in our pluralist world, bad ecumenism seeks interconfessional dialogue and collaborative efforts with the goal of dominating and coercing individuals and social groups that do not conform to so-called "traditional values." Hence Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate,  dubs hardline American Evangelical Franklin Graham and other Western Christians who oppose LGBTQ rights "confessors of the faith," and Graham is happy to receive his blessing. This works in part because the history of the US Christian Right is bound up with anti-Communism and an equation of secularism with Communism. Russian actors are now playing into this narrative, insisting that because they survived Communism, they can help US and European Christians resist the "new totalitarianism" of so-called "political correctness."

This article discusses the use of the English language on the mission field in Africa today. While the learning of indigenous African languages was a must for every missionary in the past, contemporary experience shows that more and more missionaries tend to operate only in English (or some other colonial language). This development, which can be observed especially among those missionaries who speak English as their first language, has proven to be problematic. Use of English as the sole language does not assist missionaries in overcoming the cultural gap between them and the African people they have come to serve. It rather conveys an attitude of insensitivity and superiority, which only serves to further cultural distance. Consequentially, missionaries, who insist on speaking English alone, face the danger of remaining cultural outsiders, and risk hindering the effectiveness of their ministries. If missionaries believe the Bible is God’s revelation in written form, they must then recognise how seriously God takes human language as a means of communication. Accordingly, the importance of sharing the gospel of Christ in the mother tongue of indigenous peoples, i.e. in their heart language, should again become a staple element of missionary practice today.

This paper examines the encounter between Protestant missionaries and the Jains in nineteenth-century Bombay. It focuses on three Scottish missionary-scholars—John Wilson (1804-1875), John Murray Mitchell (1815-1904), and John Stevenson (1798-1858)—who played a leading role in Orientalist and ethnographic scholarship coming out of Bombay and, more specifically, in the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter, Bombay Asiatic Society or Society). Of these three Scottish missionaries, only John Stevenson has been credited with a major contribution to Jain studies, notably his translations of the Kalpa Sutra and the Navatattava Prakarana, which were published in 1848 as the Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva: Two Works Illustrative of the Jain Religion and Philosophy. But John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell produced to a much greater degree and over a much longer period of time than Stevenson what is more valuable to the historian seeking to excavate nineteenth-century British ideas of Jains and Jainism: a record of over fifty years of contact with Jains living throughout western India.
There are a number of reasons why understanding how nineteenth-century Bombay-based Scottish Protestant missionaries (who were also esteemed Orientalists and ethnographers) conceptualized Jainism and understood the Jains gives us a fuller picture of the activities, ideas, and encounters of Christian missionaries and Orientalists in colonial India. First, the Jains and Jainism have been largely overlooked in the scholarship on British Orientalists in India. Second, the Jains and Jainism have received no attention whatsoever in the scholarship on British Protestant missionaries in India before the twentieth century. Third, scholars of British Orientalists and missionaries have paid comparatively little attention to Bombay Presidency. Fourth, the nineteenth century was a watershed period in the European study of the religions: it was the time when newly ‘discovered’ religions, such as Jainism, attained recognition as ‘religions’ and a new taxonomic regime of ‘world religions’ superseded the four-fold scheme—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Heathenism/Paganism—through which Europeans had conventionally parsed the religions of the world.
Rather than examining the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ accounts of the Jain religion and interactions with the Jains in isolation, this paper seeks to analyze and place the Christian missionary-Jain encounter within the larger nineteenth-century Bombay context in which the Scottish missionaries also interacted with other communities and produced accounts of other ‘religions’. One aim of this paper, then, is to highlight some of the ways in which Bombay missionaries represented Jains and Jainism as both similar to and distinct from other Indian communities and religions. One of the main arguments of this paper is that the state of Orientalist scholarship (and specifically ‘Jain studies’) in the first half of the nineteenth century, Bombay’s unparalleled religious diversity and large Jain population, and the particular importance Scottish missionaries placed on ‘discovering’ the authentic religions of Bombay’s peoples helped to establish the conditions that led to the early European reification of ‘the religion of the Jains’ into ‘Jainism’ and fostered the view that Jainism was an  ‘independent “religion’” distinct from Hinduism decades earlier than scholars have previously supposed.

Contributes simultaneously to both British imperial and Indian history. This work demonstrates that missionary understandings and interactions with India, rather than being party to imperial ideologies, often diverged from metropolitan and imperial norms.

This article was published without my permission in the "Journal of Christian Reconstruction," although a shorter version (also posted) had already been published in a book. The journal editor sent me a nice apology and $500 so I did not complain further. I was a poor Ph.D. student at the time, so was more than grateful. Since this unedited version is longer than the other, I decided I would post both versions on academia.

In the 1630s, a young traveller by the name of S ̣ägga Krәstos (1616-38) crisscrossed Italy and France, claiming to be the heir of the late Ethiopian Emperor Yaʿǝqob and pledging to return to Ethiopia at the helm of a Catholic mission. While in Rome, intent on convincing the papacy of his identity, he authored a lengthy autobiographical statement that included a precise dynastic claim, an account of his father's rise and demise, and an itinerary of his own journey from Ethiopia to Rome. Later, as he continued his journey, S ̣ägga Krәstos shared his statement with his European acquaintances; once in Paris, he published it, dedicating it to Anne of Austria, Queen of France. This article sketches the contours of S ̣ägga Krәstos's journey and identity and offers a comprehensive genealogy of the autobiographical statement's many extant versions. It also discusses the transfiguration that both his reputation and statement underwent after his death. S ̣ägga Krәstos's is the earliest known autobiography voluntarily written and published in Europe by an African-born author. Following this article is a complete annotated translationthe first in the English languageof what is likely to be the earliest extant version of the statement, followed by excerpts from later versions. A complete transcription of the source is available with the online supplementary materials published with this article.

Published in 2004 by Duke University Press (Worldwide) and Oxford University Press (South Asia), *Stitches on Time* was reviewed widely and appreciatively. It was a seriously thought-out yet playfully-rendered book. Does it require another reading, almost two decades after?

The study involves a well documented and common incident of piracy off the coast of Halkidiki in 1830 and the attempted abduction of a famous protestant missionary Joseph Wolff. The participants were local notables, Ottoman administrators, pirates and armatoles who, after a decade of warfare, social disintegration and dislocation, discuss the difficult –almost impossible-- transition to normal life with David Urquhart, a philhellene traveler working for the British Embassy and captured by the same crew. The variety of the available sources and the quality of information for an otherwise unimportant event give the necessary ground to turn this microhistory into a case study of Orientalism; i.e. a discussion of the conditions which would allow the decaying Ottoman Empire to recover and reform, to the extent that this was a feasible and desirable option. The key issue from the British point of view was the kind of leadership required to rehabilitate these seemingly uninterested, unmotivated, broken-hearted and bitterly disappointed Orientals, Christian and Muslims alike. Surprisingly but not inexplicably, the recipe for their progress was not Europeanisation but the restoration of Ottoman tradition.

Methodist work began in ‘the Southern World’ in 1811 with the preaching ministry of Edward Eagar in the colony of New South Wales and was reinforced in 1815 by the arrival of the first Wesleyan missionary Samuel Leigh. Early attempts to reach the Australian Aborigines by William Walker between 1821 and 1825 met with little success. The Maori people of New Zealand and the Pacific Islanders of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa proved much more open to Methodist missionary work so that a relatively strong Methodist work was established throughout many parts of the Pacific by the late nineteenth century. Wesleyans also established a successful mission to the Chinese people of the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. This paper will explicitly address Methodist missionary responses to the religious beliefs encountered in ‘the Southern World’ of the nineteenth century. It will seek to discover to what extent these religious beliefs were dismissed as pagan and superstitious and to what extent there was any attempt to understand these beliefs on their own terms. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to the Wesley and Methodist Historical Studies Working Group in its attempt to understand how ‘Methodist missionary enterprises represented and communicated with persons from other religious traditions and other cultures.’ It will also assist the broader project in which I am engaged, along with Professor Hilary Carey of the University of Newcastle (NSW) of publishing a new scholarly history of Methodism in Australia.

La historia de los misioneros anglicanos que llegan al Chaco argentino a principios de siglo XX dista de ser suficientemente conocida. A medida en que pasan los años, aparecen nuevas fuentes y materiales que nos permiten reconstruir poco a poco la experiencia anglicana y en particular su relación de tantos años con los pueblos indígenas chaqueños. Entre otros muchos emprendimientos exitosos de los religiosos anglicanos, este trabajo analiza la suerte efímera de la única misión con población pilagá, llamada justamente Misión Pilagá, abierta a fines de 1935 y cerrada en 1939. La estación fue epicentro de diversos conflictos entre los criollos vecinos y los pilagás, así como también de enfrentamientos entre los indígenas y las fuerzas militares tanto argentinas como paraguayas. Se analizan, en consecuencia, las razones del fracaso de la misión.