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Month: August 2020

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Review of Gary Holloway, A Global Fellowship: A Concise History of the World Convention of Churches of Christ

Gary Holloway. A Global Fellowship: A Concise History of the World Convention of Churches of Christ. Nashville: Gary Holloway, 2017. 146 pp. Paperback. $10.00.

Gary Holloway, executive director of the World Convention (WC), formerly dean of the College of Bible and Ministry at Lipscomb University, states in his introduction that his self-published book, “although concise, attempts to give a fuller account of the World Convention of Churches of Christ that also gives these churches a seat at the table with other Christian World Communions, praying and working to fulfil the prayer of Jesus that all who believe may be one so that the world may believe” (5). A Global Fellowship is meant for those interested in understanding the Stone-Campbell Movement and its quest for unity in the ecumenical circles. The author divides his book into eleven chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion.

Chapter one delineates the genesis of the Stone-Campbell Movement (SCM) and the circumstances and doctrinal differences that led to its division into three “denominations”: Christian Churches, Churches of Christ, and Disciples of Christ. Holloway does not include the International Churches of Christ, the fourth group that came from SCM during the last quarter of the twentieth century. By 1930, these churches had spread to “over thirty countries on every continent” through evangelism, thus creating the necessity of a worldwide conference. As a result, the World Convention of Churches of Christ—the brainchild of Jesse Moran Bader (1886–1963)—was established that year. Bader was appointed the first secretary general during the first convention in Washington, DC, in 1930, when around 6,300 people attended despite the ripple effects of the Great Depression. Although the SCM has been plagued by divisions, Bader worked indefatigably, convinced that the “convention [took] in all our people without reference to shades of theology, geography, color, or language . . . [it was] not controlled by any group, it [was] not held in ignorance of any group, and [was] not for the propaganda of any group. It [was] a great fellowship for mutual helpfulness and acquaintance” (15).

After narrating the historical background of the SCM in chapter one, Holloway describes each of the conventions in the following ten chapters. Chapter two deals with the third convention held in Leicester, United Kingdom, in 1935; chapter three, Buffalo, New York (1947), and Melbourne, Australia (1952); chapter four, Toronto, Canada (1955), and Edinburgh, United Kingdom (1960); chapter five, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1965); chapter six, Adelaide, Australia (1970), and Mexico City, Mexico (1975); chapter seven, Honolulu, Hawaii (1980); Kingston, Jamaica (1984) and Auckland, New Zealand (1988); chapter eight, Long Beach, California (1992), and Calgary, Canada (1996); chapter nine, Brisbane, Australia (2000), and Brighton, England (2004). Chapter ten deals with the Nashville convention in 2008 and the events that led the next two conventions to switch locations. The 2012 meeting had been slated for Zimbabwe; unfortunately the economic meltdown in that country, precipitated by jingoistic political decisions, compelled the organizers to move it to Goiânia, Brazil. South Korea was scheduled to host the 2016 meeting, but it was cancelled after Kang Lee, the WC President, “led a protest in Busan [South Korea, in 2013] against the World Council of Churches” (110). The meeting was held in Damoh, central India, in January 2017.The next meeting will be in Manzini, Swaziland. Interestingly, the continent of Africa was called “The Dark Continent” during the first WC meeting in 1930. Now missiologists and church planters are forecasting that by 2050 Africa will have close to one billion Christians.

Holloway argues that the WC has cherished ecumenism since its inception, encouraging and accepting delegates from other Christian fellowships. However, it took thirty-five years from its inception before a member of the a cappella Churches of Christ spoke at the WC. Carl Ketcherside was the first person from this fellowship to speak at the WC in 1965 at San Juan. He was known for his conservative views of the Bible, yet at that meeting he said, “The Christian concept is not one of Jesus pointing to a book but of a book pointing to Jesus” (58). Leroy Garrett, another member of the Churches of Christ, participated in the 1992 meeting. Rubel Shelley, then minister for the Woodmont Hills Church of Christ in Nashville, delivered a lesson on Christian unity at the 1996 convention. Shelley said, “Unity is not ours to create but ours to receive as God’s gift” (91).

High profile politicians have also graced WC meetings. Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first President of the USA, “hosted about 5,000 convention delegates at tea on the White House lawn. This . . . reflects Hoover’s Quaker spirituality, the simplicity of the times in 1930 (with few worries about Presidential security), and the significance of the Disciples [SCM] and other Christian denominations as a political force” (19). In 1955, “Lester B. Pearson, Canadian Secretary of State, who later would win Nobel Prize for Peace and became Prime Minister of Canada” addressed WC delegates in Toronto (43). Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a keynote address at San Juan (1965).

I found Holloway’s discussion about the Bader Lectures fascinating. These lectures, named in honour of Bader’s thirty-three years of WC leadership, have been given by outstanding academics irrespective of denominational affiliation, color, or gender. At the 1984 meeting, Eugene A. Nida of the United Bible Societies, whom Holloway describes as “the foremost authority on Bible translation, . . . enthralled the audience with many examples of the difficulty of translation [and concluded by saying] ‘There’s enough gospel preaching in one week to save the whole world, just not enough gospel living”’ (78). Fred B. Craddock, professor of New Testament and preaching at Emory University, delivered the Bader lectures at the Long Beach Conference in 1992. In 2004, Musa Dube, a feminist theologian from the University of Botswana addressed delegates at the sixteenth assembly in Brighton, England, arguing for reconciling God’s people for mission. Holloway argues that the WC is the only institution that gives the SCM a voice at global ecumenical meetings. Its past and present secretaries general (or executive directors, as they are now called) have attended meetings hosted by the World Council of Churches, the Second Vatican Council, and Secretaries of Christian World Communions, to mention a few.

A Global Fellowship is an indispensable historical account of a pivotal institution whose mission resonates with that of the chief architects of the Stone-Campbell Movement. It is accessible while filling a gap in academic study on this topic. It is central in understanding the SCM in the twenty-first century as the majority of its members are gradually shedding sectarianism and embracing ecumenism. Although the SCM is now global, just like any evangelical group, it is grappling to grow numerically in the Majority World because of failing to contextualize its theology, an area I expected Holloway to briefly discuss in this little informative book.

Paul S. Chimhungwe

African Christian College

Manzini, Swaziland

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Review of Michael J. Gorman, Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission

MICHAEL J. GORMAN. Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission. The Gospel and Our Culture Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015. 351 pp. Paperback. $28.00.

Michael J. Gorman is professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University (Baltimore, MD) and has authored several works on Paul, participation, and mission. This volume builds upon the theological groundwork laid in two previous works1 to argue that participation in the character of God cannot be separated from participation in the mission of God. In short, being cannot be separated from action, so that such participation is “the starting point of mission and is, in fact, its proper theological framework” (4).

To argue his central thesis that the apostle Paul “wanted the communities he addressed not merely to believe the gospel but to become the gospel” (2), Gorman begins (chs. 1 and 2) by considering Paul’s view of the missio Dei as bringing salvation to the community of faith, humanity, and ultimately the cosmos. Such an expanded view of “salvation” invites (or demands) missional participation as reflected in seven features of Paul’s letters, such as his “co-” language (Greek: syn-). The difficulty, however, with asserting the missional nature of Paul’s teaching arises from the apostle himself in that direct commands to evangelize are rare in the Pauline letters. Nonetheless, it is clear that Paul expects his churches to embody the mission of God because, though not all are called to become “evangelists” of the gospel, all are expected to become the gospel (42–45). Gorman argues that biblical reading must be shaped by a missional hermeneutic which broadens our conception of mission and evangelism to include participation in the character and mission of God.

After establishing the conceptual and theological framework of his thesis, Gorman turns to demonstrate how this missional participation unfolds in the Pauline letters. First Thessalonians presents the Pauline triad of faith(fulness), love, and hope, which manifest as virtues of the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and Paul, their apostle (ch. 3). The Thessalonians are called, then, to embody these same characteristics found in these exemplars (90). This embodiment means expressing virtue through action, so that the church becomes “public, holy, and full of faithfulness, love, and hope” (102). In his letter to the Philippians (ch. 4), Paul appeals to the “master story” in his recounting of the Christ hymn (Phil 2:6–11), which serves as “a missional Christology for a missional people” (109, 116, 121) and encourages them to continue striving in the face of suffering. The kenotic example of Christ serves as the foundation of their faith and the paradigm for their present and public action.

From here, Gorman turns to examine a less explored, though no less significant, aspect of Paul’s theology: peace. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the Pauline corpus, where peacemaking creates communities of reconciliation and provides a missional imperative. This concept is more fully explored in Ephesians (ch. 6), a letter which centers around peace and nearly transforms the Pauline triad to faith, peace, and love in its final prayer (Eph 6:23; on authorship see 183). This letter reveals a community that has been shaped by the peacemaking work of Christ and is called to enact this mission in the world so as to become “the gospel of peace” (6:15).

Chapter 7 shifts to justice, a prominent concern in the prophetic tradition, to ask whether Paul’s use of dikaiosynē speaks primarily of justification or of justice. This question is explored through various reflections of justice in Pauline thought, culminating in an abbreviated analysis of the Corinthian correspondence. The reader is reminded that for Paul, “God is the God of justice, and the church is a community of justice; justice is both a divine trait and an ecclesial practice” (258). Chapter 8 takes up a topic explored in previous works by Gorman, which argue that theosis—“becoming like God by participating in the life of God” (261)—is the focal point of Romans. Glory is presented as a divine attribute in which the church, “as the missional community, sought out for salvation by God and sharing that salvation with others” (285), is able to participate. Each chapter above concludes with a brief look at practical examples from modern communities who are creatively enacting such missional participation.

Gorman’s writing throughout is clear and his arguments plainly presented. The work aims to be accessible to scholars, pastors, and leaders (10), and the book provides material for each. The main body cogently introduces Gorman’s primary arguments while the ample footnotes offer resources for further engagement, and the extensive indices aid in locating subjects, authors, and specific texts. The volume’s greatest strength is its theological foundation, as it is through-and-through a theological exposition on the missional calling of the Christian community. As such, for those seeking practical or strategic advice, it is lacking, as Gorman himself admits: this book “is not a handbook for mission but a foundation and a stimulus for it” (15). Additionally, it may be noted that while the participatory nature of Paul’s theology is well supported, the author at times (unnecessarily) pushes his reading of periphery texts too far (e.g., his argument that Paul’s anxiety for his converts evinces their public participation in mission; see 75 and elsewhere). The presentation would be strengthened by allowing the principal texts to stand on their own strength and by not coercing less amenable passages as secondary evidence.

Gorman’s volume provides a broad theological interpretation of the Pauline letters which produces the seemingly simple thesis that, “because the cross reveals a missional God, the church saved and shaped by the cross will be a missional people” (9). As Paul’s own letters attest, this was not a simple task for the earliest recipients of this message, and it remains just as challenging for the church today. Gorman helpfully reminds us that being a “missional” people means more than “winning souls,” but instead becoming a people who enact the missio Dei in our individual and corporate lives.

Zane B. McGee

PhD Student, New Testament

Emory University

Atlanta, GA, USA

1 Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

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When Having a Bad Leader is Good: Processing a Negative Experience and Applying Leadership Lessons from the Kings

After years under the authority of a toxic church leader, a network of congregations in Mozambique finally escaped his influence. The author followed up on the negative leadership experience by interviewing local church leaders to glean their observations in order to create a culturally appropriate forum to process together as a group. Since the traditional leadership structure of the Makua-Metto people is that of kings and chiefs, the author shares how leadership lessons from the kings in Scripture can encourage these church leaders not to fall back into familiar, yet destructive, patterns.

I watched as my friend, Brad, cut a piece of metal with an electric saw. When it fell to the ground, his young son reached down to grab it, but thinking better of it, he quickly pulled his hand back instead. “Why did you change your mind about touching that piece of metal?” asked Brad knowingly.

“Oh, I remembered that a few days ago my older brother grabbed a piece just like that and it burned him,” his son answered.

“Good job,” Brad smiled, “that was very smart of you to be observant and learn from your brother’s mistake.”

That story of Brad and his son was the way I introduced a sensitive topic to the group of church leaders gathered together for our regular meeting. It had been over a year since their fellowship of churches had finally separated from a toxic leader that we’ll call Marcelino. Marcelino is a charismatic and talented Mozambican who transferred from his home culture in another province of the country to plant churches among the unreached Makua-Metto people. His large personality and evangelistic fervor attracted many people to him initially, but his character and leadership flaws severely limited his potential. Our mission team began working with him in 2004 and was often able to find ways around his issues, but eventually the problems spilled over in destructive ways. Marcelino tried to keep church authority to himself and steadfastly refused to recognize the leadership chosen by local congregations. In a relatively short span of time multiple reports of moral and financial indiscretions came to light. Additionally, when our team of foreign missionaries refused to continue working with him, he spread lies and attempted to get us expelled from the country.

In the year after officially separating from him, the church leadership enjoyed a fruitful season of growth, adding over twenty congregations and seeing hundreds of baptisms while still handling the distraction of Marcelino’s continued efforts to worm his way back into power. It was now time to process this experience as a group. I traveled around the province and met with eleven different Mozambican church leaders to collect their observations about this negative experience. I was convinced that, as in the story of Brad’s son above, being intentionally observant could help us avoid making the same mistakes as “our older brother.” This dynamic is seen in the biblical narrative as well. Could it be that one of the reasons King David became a great leader for God’s people was that during his time at court with Saul he was able to observe his predecessor’s disastrous style of leadership? Between dodging spears lobbed in his direction (1 Sam 18:10; 19:10), what if David was internalizing convictions about how to lead well?

“What did we learn?”: Processing the Interviews

I asked each of the church leaders: “What did you learn from the negative example of Marcelino?” All but one of the interviewees had an immediate answer to my question and had already begun to consider the positive lessons they were taking away from the negative experience. Afterward, I sifted through the interviews and presented the most common responses and observations about the dangers of Marcelino’s example to the larger group of church leaders in five different categories:

The Heart – the danger of pride in contrast with the blessings of humility

Marcelino would often use the phrase “I am” as part of his prideful rhetoric, constantly referring to his role and his achievements, but leaders noted that, in reality, this kind of title belongs to God alone. This “sickness of I am” made Marcelino trust in his own judgments of people more than the assessments of their local communities. He would often appoint someone as a local leader who was chosen not because he was a person of character, but because he was someone Marcelino could control. His pride also got in the way of really listening to others. Marcelino, as a couple of the church leaders put it, “only wanted other people around to stamp his ideas for approval.”

The Tongue – the danger of an untamed tongue in contrast with speaking the truth in love

Marcelino was known for preaching extremely long sermons (even by African standards!), but he would not practice what he preached. He was often sharp and severe in the way he criticized others. Almost all of the interviewees commented on how these were bad strategies for motivating people and proved to be much more destructive than constructive.

The Hand – the danger of being greedy with money in contrast with being generous and a good manager of church resources

Corruption is common in our area, and Marcelino would take advantage of his position to pad his own pocketbook.1 A number of the leaders commented on how, in contrast to the recommendations of Jesus, there were examples of when Marcelino gave money in order to be seen by others (cf. Matt 6:1–4).

The Head – the danger of greedily holding onto power in contrast with sharing power with others

It was observed that Marcelino was following the path of Diotrophes, who “loved to be first” (3 John 9–10). Instead of empowering qualified Makua-Metto people for leadership, he tended to set up a weak leader and then tear them down whenever they showed any initiative. One prime example referenced by many was a gathering in which Marcelino was confronted and asked when any local believers would be qualified to lead in his opinion, and he did not have an answer. It was then that they realized that he had no intention of relinquishing control. One interviewee commented that “according to Ephesians 3, it is Christ who gives gifts. It should not be the evangelist or pastor who passes them out and uses authority to label people. Our job as leaders is to help discern the gifts that people have and empower them to use those gifts effectively.”

The Body – the difference between negative/destructive meetings and gatherings of the Body of Christ that are positive/constructive

Under Marcelino’s leadership, problems and arguments broke out at nearly every church conference or meeting, but a common observation was that since separating from him, conflict-dominated gatherings had all but gone away. Almost all of the interviewees mentioned how they used to dread coming to church meetings, but now they enjoy participating because they can expect to leave encouraged. One common refrain was that Marcelino’s way of interacting with other people was the root of the problem: “He acted like a critical father instead of our brother in Christ.” They noted that Marcelino would not follow Jesus’s counsel in Matthew 18, and even after problems were “resolved” he was known for gossiping about the other party. Also, when he did not get his way in a conflict with the foreign missionaries, he took the issue to the government (against the recommendation of 1 Cor 6:1–8), which only served to make things worse.

Although reliving and remembering these negative experiences could potentially cause an emerging leader to despair, instead we found it helpful to create a forum for critical reflection on these events in order to consider ways to respond in a more faithful and healthy manner. After the leaders presented their own observations gleaned from this negative experience, I offered some suggestions as a way to jumpstart our processing together as a group.

Rethinking What It Means to be a King

When leaders are under stress, they tend to revert back to the patterns of behavior with which they are most familiar.2 Although a group of Christians may talk about the ideal kind of leadership they want to practice (servant leadership), when times are difficult there is a pull to go back to what they have actually seen and really experienced (in this case, Marcelino). In the Makua-Metto context the default, traditional leadership structure is a system of kings and chiefs. So, in an effort to help them “at least be good kings,” in a different setting, I led most of these church leaders through a series of lessons on leadership taken from Israel’s monarchy. The following are the king-sized texts and topics we explored:

  • “Weak leaders let fear paralyze them” – In 1 Sam 13–14, there is a contrast between the way King Saul and his son, Jonathan, respond to conflict.
  • “Weak leaders find it difficult to stand up for what is right and will often drive off talented people” – In 1 Sam 15, Saul takes the easy path and follows the will of the crowd instead of the will of the Lord. Then in 1 Sam 24 and 26, Saul ends up driving away David, a man of high capacity and high conviction. David, on the other hand, attracts and empowers talented people to his cause, and his willingness to stand up to his followers at the right times actually served to increase their loyalty to him (2 Sam 23).
  • “Strong leaders are humble, listen well, and are quick to repent” – The story of stubborn Uzziah provides a helpful foil for David, who repented when the prophet Nathan confronted him (2 Chron 26 and 2 Sam 11–12).
  • “Strong leaders focus on God’s legacy, not their own” – David’s gratefulness to God leads him to want to build the temple, but instead the Lord reaffirms his own promise to build up the “house of David” (2 Sam 7). Even though David is prohibited from building the temple, he worked to organize all the plans and materials for this massive endeavor, setting up his son for success (1 Chron 28-29). Surprisingly, even though David was the one who did so much to provide for Israel’s center of worship, the building was eventually known as the “Temple of Solomon.” It is easy to imagine, is it not, that this label would not have bothered David in the least? His focus on God’s legacy is a powerful reminder of the true orientation of godly leadership.
  • “Leading God’s people today as elders and shepherds” – While the examples of the kings can certainly be instructive, especially in Makua-Metto culture, it is important to remember that there is only one true king, and those who lead Christ’s followers have a different set of titles and roles. John 10, Acts 20, and the Pastoral Epistles were texts that helped shift the discussion from kings and chiefs to elders and shepherds.

The studies of the kings were an attempt to take seriously the tendency to fall back on familiar patterns. They helped reinterpret and reformat the culturally given perspective on what it means to be a king, reshaping it in ways that fit the call to godly leadership in Scripture.

Two Competing Pyramids

Since servant leadership is so difficult to teach in this context, our forum used two leadership diagrams to help us explore and contrast the negative example of Marcelino. The first picture was a leadership pyramid made with a smug stick figure standing at the top. Stacked below him were rows and rows of sad and frustrated faces. We discussed how even though the leader was clearly at the top, he did not feel secure. He was restlessly looking over his shoulder, worried that someone would come and steal his position and authority. Perry Shaw notes that as “long as leadership is perceived in terms of power and status, the fear of training the next generation to leadership will persist, lest ‘my’ position and status is taken by another. It takes a servant attitude to be willing not merely to train leaders for future replacement of my own ministry, but to rejoice when another is able more effectively now to take my position of leadership and do my job.”3

We held that picture of leadership in contrast with an upside-down pyramid where the leader was both sweating (leading is still hard work) and smiling (leading this way brings more joy) as he holds up the people in his charge. This leader welcomed other co-leaders to work together in bearing the weight of the congregation. As Shaw observes, “the scriptural model is not one of studious oversight and control, but one in which those in leadership first delegate to those who are gifted and then seek to empower them to do the tasks for which God has gifted them—and all for the good of the whole body of Christ.”4

Two Challenging Promises

Our group of Makua-Metto church leaders and missionaries (both Mozambican and American) also made two mutual promises. The first was a commitment to step in and correct each other when any of us returned to the methods we had seen in the life and ministry of Marcelino. The second promise was for each of us to cultivate a humble heart. We recognized that even if we were successful in sidestepping all of the errors we had seen in Marcelino, there would still be different ways that we would fail as leaders in the future. So, the takeaway was not that if we avoid Marcelino’s failures we will be perfect leaders but instead that being humble and having open ears for each other’s counsel not only helps us learn from Marcelino’s mistakes but also sets us up to learn from our own failures in the future.

Observations on the Missionary’s Role in Processing a Negative Leadership Experience

Reflecting on the interviews and the group discussion, I have come to recognize how my status as an informed foreigner played a helpful part in processing the “Marcelino experience.” Because of Makua-Metto cultural values and expectations, it would have been difficult for one of the Mozambican church leaders to spearhead this kind of discussion. As a resident alien, I was able to play dumb and break the taboos, asking questions that opened a release valve for group processing in a way that would not cause blame or shame to fall on any of them. Also, since I, too, had been deeply hurt by Marcelino, I had the necessary credibility to initiate and participate in the discussion.

A second observation was that in preparing for this forum, when I searched for resources and examples of those who have collectively processed a negative church leadership experience, I was surprised by the lack of published materials. One of my American teammates observed that being able to process such a traumatic experience communally is likely uncommon because it is rare for a group to endure such a destructive leader without splintering apart.5 It is unfortunate that resources for these situations are equally scarce. Our team found that creating a forum to process the negative leadership experience provided fertile ground and ample material for the task of leadership formation. This kind of processing of a real life case study could be especially helpful for those working cross-culturally.

Thirdly, it is important to remember that leadership expectations are profoundly influenced by culture. One’s background shapes a “preference for vertical or horizontal patterns of power, for autocracy or democracy.”6 It has been a challenge to ensure that the leadership patterns of my home culture and the church authority structure we share with our Mozambican brothers and sisters intersect in a healthy way with the leadership expectations among the Makua-Metto people. Even though it is primarily geared towards a Western audience, Don Armour and Michael Browning’s book Systems-Sensitive Leadership has personally been an indispensable resource for interpreting, appreciating, and engaging different social expectations for leaders.7

Conclusion

A Christian leader is “a servant who uses his or her credibility and capacities to influence people in a particular context to pursue their God given direction.”8 Although the finer points of how that type of leadership appears in a given context may vary, certainly the broader strokes of that picture or pattern of Christlike leadership will be consistent across the globe. Roger Mitchell has coined the term kenarchy, a word formed from the Greek words keno (empty) and arche (power or rule), which “signifies the emptying out of power on behalf of others in contrast with exercising power over others.”9 Kenarchy, then, “is the ‘new politics’ of love that Jesus introduces with a kingdom made up of servants who renounce power over others.”10

In Jesus’s own day, there was a plethora of negative leadership examples. The leadership style exhibited in his ministry provided a positive contrast to the destructive practices of both the Jews and the Romans. His kingship (or kenarchy) displayed a different kind of authority, one that did not conform to the patterns of our world but instead focused on blessing and empowering others. Christ’s leadership style veered away from the mistakes of the human leaders of his day and cleared the path of servant leadership for us to follow.

Our forum for processing a negative leadership experience, and seeing how having a bad leader can be good, was an important step in recognizing how God is redeeming a broken situation in the Makua-Metto church. It has been helpful in encouraging the churches in our part of Mozambique to learn from the mistakes of their “older brother,” Marcelino, as well as in pointing all of us toward the example of our older brother (Heb 2:10–11) and king, Jesus, whose positive example calls us to live and lead well.

Alan Howell, his wife Rachel, and their three daughters live in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. Alan is a graduate of Harding School of Theology. The Howells have lived in Mozambique since 2003 and are part of a team serving among the Makua-Metto people.

1 The popular expression “the goat eats where it is tethered” is commonly attributed to former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and is often mentioned to explain the country’s culture of corruption, prevalent in both public and private institutions.

2 My thanks to Evertt W. Huffard for this important observation.

3 Perry W. H. Shaw, “Vulnerable Authority: A Theological Approach to Leadership and Teamwork,” Christian Education Journal 3, no. 1 (2006): 128.

4 Ibid., 129.

5 My thanks to Jeremy Smith for this keen insight.

6 Shaw, 122.

7 Don Armour and Michael Browning, Systems-Sensitive Leadership: Empowering Diversity without Polarizing the Church, 2nd ed. (Joplin, MO: College Press, 2000).

8 Aubrey Malphurs and William Mancini, Building Leaders: Blueprints for Developing Leadership at Every Level of Your Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 20.

9 Roger Mitchell, The Fall of the Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 7.

10 Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 141.

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Youth Outreach and Missional Ecclesiology: Listening to Those at the Church’s Boundaries

The practice of listening to people with whom the church is missionally engaged is a valuable missional practice. This article presents a case study of such listening in the context of the church of Christ at Cedar Lane in Tullahoma, Tennessee, outlining findings of a set of interviews with teenagers involved in the church’s outreach program to children and youth. The article interprets these findings through a lens of missional theology.

A Young Theologian

Danielle, a church member at Cedar Lane, told a story about Amanda, a participant in the church’s youth outreach program. Amanda came into the office where Danielle works, talking with a friend. Danielle overheard Amanda say, “You should come to my church—Cedar Lane.” It is the kind of thing you expect a twelve-year old to flippantly say to a friend. But I have often wondered about that story. What exactly does Amanda mean when she calls Cedar Lane her church? This is a girl who, despite being an “outsider,” has a way of thinking about the nature of the church, its mission, and her own relationship to a particular church. She has an ecclesiology.

Christians commonly understand their own experiences as a source of theological reflection. In this paper, I explore how the experiences of outsiders,1 specifically a group of young people, can also contribute to the church’s ecclesiology, providing insight we would not have access to without their perspective. The assumption of the congregation is that Amanda and her friends need to be taught by the church, and this is true—but it is not the only truth. The church also needs to be taught, and these young outsiders provide a unique opportunity for the church’s formation. This paper explores what these young people might have to teach the church by presenting findings of a study in which seventeen of the youth participated in semi-structured interviews about their understanding of the church and their experiences with it.

A Missional Turn and the Emergence of a Youth Outreach Ministry

Cedar Lane is a medium-sized church in Tullahoma, Tennessee.2 Like many rural communities, Tullahoma is comprised of two economic worlds with the poorer class of the city largely unseen by the professional class, who live on the other side of a social and economic gulf. This gulf has been reflected in the church—at least in the case of Cedar Lane. While performing acts of service, the church remained disconnected from its poor neighbors relationally. In the opening decade of this century, the church set out on a course toward bridging that divide.

Via a series of experiences and through the influence of missionally minded persons, Cedar Lane leaned toward a new trajectory informed by, if not conforming to, missional theology. Missional language began to show up in church classes, in conversations among the leadership, in the sorts of books members read. Disciples sought out missional practices. Cedar Lane took a missional turn—we were beginning to think and speak in the language of mission. That theological vocabulary found expression in an outreach ministry to children.

In the fall of 2009, an elementary teacher began bringing a few of her students to church on Wednesday nights. The kids began showing up with their friends, and soon the number swelled from under ten to over fifty. The ministry became an expression of the church’s evolving understanding of its mission. However, it also brought new challenges. The ministry’s rapid growth surprised church leaders and strained ministry structures.

Deeper questions and challenges also began to emerge. Assumptions about order and structure were challenged. The church wrestled with how its ministries prioritized internal constituents and had to explore structures and processes that benefited outsiders.3 The boundaries that marked the church’s own self-understanding began to appear more ambiguous than before, as children perceived as outsiders continued to be present over months and then years. The church has largely approached questions about its processes and practices internally, evaluating its own experience with tools it was familiar with: long-held theological values, deeply-felt experiences of members, and well-worn interpretations of Scripture. Missional theology has provided a useful framework for wrestling with these questions. In this next section, I will sketch the framework of missional theology with which I approached the current study.

Missional Theology

Since the publication of Missional Church in 1998, missional language has been appropriated for a range of approaches to ecclesiology.4 One contributor to that seminal work, Craig Van Gelder, later writing with Dwight Zscheile, warns: “Those seeking to draw on this language should be aware of how this lack of precision and integration may impact their use of the language as well as their choices and actions.”5 Cedar Lane has increasingly used the term “missional” over the past decade, but as Van Gelder and Zscheile note, what “missional” means in this congregational context must be defined. To that end, I contend “missional” denotes the convergence of a theological shift, a sociological recognition, and an evolution of ecclesial practices.

At the core of missional theology is a shift in thinking about God, the Church, and mission. Although there is a constellation of ideas involved in this theological shift, I will confine the summary here to two emphases: the agency of God in mission and the reign of God. In response to a perception of missionary work as an activity the church carried out, the missional church has pivoted toward a “theocentric” understanding of mission: “We have come to see that mission is not primarily an activity of the church. Rather, mission is the result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal creation.”6 Thus, God is always at work bringing about God’s mission and sometimes in ways located outside the church’s activity or awareness. This suggests that the church might recognize God’s activity outside of itself but also elicits the great theological question: What is the mission of God?

In response, missional theologians commonly employ the language of the “reign of God” to describe God’s intent for creation and to connect it with the gospel of Jesus, a greater narrative arc within Scripture, and the identity of the church. The church is sent into the world as the servant and messenger for the kingdom of God and embodies the reign of God—though it is not the only embodiment as the God’s reign is manifest in surprising ways.7 The Church is both a foretaste of God’s kingdom and an agent of that community.8 Thus, mission is not simply an activity of the Church, but mission is a feature of its very nature.9 Mission is not confined to the pursuit of (distant) proselytes but is realized as life aligns with God’s will.

A second broad feature of the missional movement grows from an analysis of the social situation of the church in Western contexts, particularly in North America. The first paragraph of Missional Church signals this trajectory: “While modern missions have led to an expansion of world Christianity, Christianity in North America has moved (or been moved) away from its position of dominance as it has experienced the loss not only of numbers but of power and influence within society.”10 Various writers approach this claim with different emphases, often developing two themes: the loss of Christianity’s privileged status within society and a critique of the church’s engagement with the culture during Christendom.11

Third, missional writers propose a variety of ecclesial practices that embody their theology.12 Evaluating all of them is beyond the scope of this paper, however it will be helpful to consider a pair of these practices to demonstrate Cedar Lane’s relationship to the missional movement: incarnational ministry and hospitality.

An incarnational ministry is hinted at, though undeveloped, in Missional Church.13 This impulse found fuller expression in other works when paired with a foil, the attractional model of church, which brings outsiders into the church (or more accurately, into the church’s property) to receive ministry. Rather, an incarnational mode of ministry takes believers into the communities they serve and to which they bear witness. David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw write: “As opposed to the attractional model of the modern church in America, where a church puts on worship services and expects people to come, the incarnational model challenges us to be a people who inhabit neighborhoods, go where the people are, live among them and listen to them. . . . From this incarnational perspective, we are called to minister and proclaim the gospel while following the Spirit in specific circumstances.”14 Perhaps in tension with the incarnational impulse, the missional movement also values hospitality, the practice of making space for strangers.15 The missional church practices hospitality at every level, from the home table to the Eucharist.16 Missional disciples value the one to whom hospitality is extended, not simply as a potential convert but as someone who offers a blessing of understanding to the church—someone whose experiences and insights may help shape the church’s own understandings.17 The stranger is received as someone in whom the church may see Christ.18 Hospitality is thus not simply a fruit of discipleship but a means of its furtherance.19

A missional understanding of hospitality also emphasizes receiving hospitality as well as extending it. The church welcome strangers into its midst, but missional disciples also look for opportunities to accept hospitality from the stranger.20 This vulnerable act of receiving hospitality “changes the missionary encounter” and creates the circumstance by which “the stranger and the church are mutually transformed in the engagement.”21

These missional nuances to the Christian practice of hospitality share the common thread of reciprocity. This is in part because of the missional church’s theological orientation, which both allows for the possibility of God’s activity in the neighbor and necessitates respect in accord with the trajectory of the justice of God’s kingdom, in which each person is recognized as an image-bearer of God. Reciprocity, in hospitality and in other practices, ensures theological formation not only flows from the center of the church toward the margins, but from the margins toward the center as well.22

Research Methodology and Findings

Given this threefold description of missionality, how can Cedar Lane further develop along such a trajectory, embracing an understanding of God as missional, learning to live in this new sociological reality, and embracing practices that lead to fuller engagement with God’s mission? I have asserted that one source of theological learning is from people such as those involved in Cedar Lane’s youth outreach ministry. To explore how they might provide insight into the nature of the church and further its missional trajectory, a study was undertaken in which seventeen students were invited to participate in a series of semi-structured interviews regarding their ecclesiology.23 Analysis revealed multiple themes among their perspectives, such as the importance of hospitality and a sense of belonging, the church’s role in the community, and insights into the way the church’s staff and volunteer structures worked. Here, I will focus on one, the identification of “Learning about God” as the primary purpose of the church.24

Nearly all participants shared the perspective expressed starkly by P525: “[God] put the church on the world so people could go and learn more about him.”26 Initially, I interpreted this as immature religious cliché and thought they were saying what they thought I would want to hear. However, my presumptions were overcome as participants leaned further into this perspective, expressing frustration with disruptions in teaching moments and their preferences for environments in which learning was taken seriously.27 The perspective was highlighted by participants in the way they used “learning” language and in the way they expressed their faith to others. For example, P4 relayed this as a part of his exchange with a friend: “Well, I heard from a friend that church is bad because all they do is go there and you just hear the other person talk about whatever, then I said, “No, man, that’s wrong because you should go to church and learn about God because God wants to be in your heart. He loves you no matter what.” As this theme emerged, I probed further by asking interviewees about the specific content they had learned and what had made a difference to their lives. Some participants struggled to describe the connection between what they were learning at church and the rest of their lives, while others described how their faith filled their thoughts and shaped the way they lived.

P11 and P13 both expressed finding a life of prayer, and P14 described remembering a song from church while at school and having a sense of peace. Others described moments of loss and grief where they gained peace from their knowledge of God, while some described how their ethical lives were being shaped by the things they learned, such as taking responsibility for their actions and persistently trying to do the right thing. These teens expressed a belief that their theology was having a transformative role in their lives.

Other participants voiced a sense of separation similar to that voiced by P12: “Well sometimes, whenever you go on a youth trip or something, you have an all-church world, and then when you come back to your town, then you come back to the normal world. Where there’s not that much church, and there’s a couple days during the week when you go.” P9 described this sense of separation in even starker terms: “Well, I’m going to have to be honest. Whenever it comes to being outside of church, I don’t really think about what God would do, about what God would say.” Such descriptions were painful for me to hear as a pastor. While Cedar Lane’s youth are absorbing information about God, a significant number of them struggle to connect their theology to the rest of their lives.

Interpretation and Implications

These insights from the margins of the church have the capacity to further develop Cedar Lane’s missional trajectory. As described above, the core of the missional movement is a theological shift, a sociological recognition, and an evolution of ecclesial practices. Even confining the implications to the primary finding of the interviews regarding theological education, we can see several implications from the inquiry.

A Theological Shift

The missional movement has had at its core the connection between theology and praxis. How we understand God matters for how we live out our faith in God, and how we understand God’s mission shapes our participation in that mission. This is consistent with understanding among participants in this study that the church is a place where people “learn about God.” This simple language of “learning” that I heard from participants has caused me to reflect on the church’s role in theological education; the church is indeed given as a means by which people learn about God. While that conviction requires nuance to mature into a fuller ecclesiology, it may have too easily been nuanced away. Why is that? Why do we prefer to think about the church in terms other than as a community of theological education? Perhaps we have lost a vision of the role of theology in transforming people. Indeed, one of the more troublesome parts of the interviews was the frequency with which participants struggled to connect what they learned about God and the rest of their lives. The church must teach a transformative theology connected to the whole of life.

A Sociological Recognition

These conversations also create new possibilities for the church’s changing cultural situation—the missional sociological recognition. Alan Roxburgh describes the church’s new situation as liminal, as the church has entered a new transitional place in the world and has been relocated nearer the margin of society.28 Accordingly, the adolescents I interviewed are important conversation partners for Cedar Lane not despite their liminality but because of it. Their experiences of marginalization—even those experiences which have lamentably occurred within the church—can provide a church which may find itself as increasingly marginalized with resources for what it means to live faithful on the boundaries of society. Roxburgh sees such listening to those on the margins as a vital path for churches who perceive their influence to be waning: “The only meaningful way forward lies in understanding and embracing our liminal existence. . . . The continued assumption of cultural symbols of power and success will only produce an inauthentic church with little gospel, much religion, and no mission. Liminality requires listening again to the voices emanating from below or outside the perceived mainstream.”29

This suggests the possibility that learning from those at the margins will help the church live at the margins, a possibility that strikes at an important piece of Christian spirituality: humility. Consider how Luke’s gospel treats pride and humility.30 Luke depicts humility as the virtue of vulnerable people on the margins, in contrast to the powerful. Jesus responds with the rhetoric of reversal and invites the powerful and vulnerable alike to participate in God’s community—although the proud are often unwilling to do so. The church must ask if a previous social position of power infected it with a similar prideful presumption of privilege. In contrast, the practice of mutual learning with those at the margins both demonstrates and cultivates humility.31 The prideful presumption that learning only flows one way must yield to the reality that even the most mature believers have something to learn, and it might be at the hand of those who have been too easily relegated to outsider status. Practices of mutual learning and solidarity with these marginalized members of our community can help the church learn and embrace the sort of humility required for the church in its decentered post-Christendom status.

Ecclesial Practices

The final facet of the missional movement described above was a particular set of ecclesial practices—specifically, incarnational ministry and hospitality. One valid critique of Cedar Lane’s outreach ministry has been its attractional model—drawing teens and children out of their communities “to the church.” The situation has shifted; there is now a set of disciples embedded within the neighborhood. However, that incarnational presence has taken an astonishing form—adolescent disciples of Jesus, seeking how to make sense of God in their context. The church is present in these disciples—not merely in the longer established church members who have relationships with them. The challenge is helping these students faithfully embody the reign of God.

Regarding hospitality, the church’s intentions have been to extend a welcome to these children, and advocates have often invoked the story of Jesus welcoming little children. However, we might note that Jesus not only teaches his disciples to welcome the children so that the children might be blessed but implores the disciples themselves to become like the children. Disciples have long mused over what quality of children Jesus is lauding in the story. But perhaps the story invites us to enter into conversation not only about children, but with them. Perhaps the church can take a posture of readiness to learn from the children that it has previously been satisfied to teach. Valuable learning may move both ways.

In a similar way, the presence of outsiders may not only reflect a movement in the mission of God in the direction from the church to the community. Rather, the movement may indeed move both directions. It may be that at those points where the church engages people at its boundaries, God works to shape the church through its community, so that the church may more fully embody the kingdom of God. In honoring this possibility, the distinction between outsiders and insiders begins to lose its divisive potency.

These young disciples do indeed offer the church insight by their presence and shared perspectives. Relationships continue to emerge as the church shares life together—young and old, those formerly known as outsiders and insiders together. As the church embraces the validity of each perspective and learns to listen in a spirit of mutuality, such relationships provoke the church to greater faithfulness and refine its trajectory. Such relationships create the space in which “missional” is less a set of ambiguous ideas and more the lived experience of people who have been brought together into the kingdom of God.

Steven Hovater has been the Preaching and Outreach Minister at the church of Christ at Cedar Lane since 2010. He holds an MDiv from Harding School of Theology and a DMin from Columbia Theological Seminary. He writes about missional theology and practice, among other subjects, at http://stevenhovater.com.

†Adapted from a DMin project by the same name submitted at Columbia Theological Seminary in March of 2017, presented at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 7–9, 2017. See the full version of the project at http://stevenhovater.com/youth-outreach-and-ecclesiology.

1 I acknowledge that the term “outsiders” contains undesirable tones, and indeed the easy classification of people into “insider” and “outsider” groups is part of what I am pushing against in this paper. In the specific congregational context examined here, the church’s heritage in the Churches of Christ (American Restoration Movement) typically means that membership is conferred upon “placing membership,” an opportunity traditionally reserved for those who have received baptism as believers. However, “insider/outsider” status may also involve other factors, as demonstrated in this case among teenagers who are baptized and become members, but whose families are not a part of the congregation. Such a situation may result in teenagers who are seen as “outsiders”for some time after they have become “members.”

2 The average attendance at its weekly worship service is 390. About 90% of those people are white. For comparison, the United States Census Bureau reports that as of 2010, Tullahoma’s population is 88.1% “White alone”, with the next largest group being African American (7.0%). U. S. Bureau of the Census, “Quickfacts, Tullahoma City, Tennessee”, http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/4775320.

3 For example, previous curriculum choices assumed that children would generally progress through the entire program, with each grade’s materials assuming knowledge of previous years. However, adjusting to the new situation meant searching for approaches that ensured that children could enter the program at any given year or even week, and enter the learning process with much less prior knowledge assumed. Another example was the need to reevaluate the cost of trips and events for youth ministry participants, which presented a barrier to inclusivity.

4 Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

5 Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile, The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011) 3, 5.

6 Guder, 4. See also Van Gelder and Zscheile, 8, 21, 24.

7 Guder, 101–9.

8 Ibid., 101.

9 “God’s being and agency require us to attend first to the identity/nature of the church before seeking to address its purpose/mission—what the church is prior to what the church does” (Van Gelder and Zscheile, 9).

10 Guder, 1. Van Gelder and Zscheile, 49–50, describe the effort to make the case for this shift as the first of six movements within Missional Church.

11 Alan Roxburgh provides an example of the first theme, demonstrating how churches not only survived by becoming the caretakers of private faith, but for some period of time thrived as they continued to possess a religious monopoly on this private space. Alan J. Roxburgh, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International, 1997), 6-13. An example of the second theme may be found in Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, rev. and updated ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 29, 34.

12 The Gospel and Our Culture Network identifies twelve such hallmarks, while Frost and Hirsch, 25–26, add three different ones to this list. See also Lois Y. Barrett, et al., Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 159–72.

13 Guder, 11.

14 David E. Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw, Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 42–43.

15 Guder, 175–80. See also Barrett, 169–70, and Fitch and Holsclaw, 105–7.

16 Guder, 163–66.

17 Van Gelder and Zscheile, 132.

18 Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 67–72.

19 Guder, 178.

20 Van Gelder and Zscheile, 132.

21 Ibid., 133.

22 Van Gelder, 63–64.

23 This particular selection of participants is marginalized both within the congregation and in society for a number of reasons. First, they do not have adult family members who are also members of the congregation. Second, although it was not an explicit parameter for the selection of participants, each of the participants in this set lives within a family that has experienced poverty to an extent that has created instabilities such as housing issues or food insecurity. Finally, it is important to note that nearly all the participants interviewed are also affected by other marginalizing factors, such as home instability, legal or academic issues, disabilities, racial prejudices, and other factors.

24 In the broader study, other themes identified included the importance of a sense of belonging in the church, the significance of hospitality and places where it was perceived as limited, and the breadth and depth of intergenerational relationship.

25 To preserve anonymity for the minors interviewed in this project, each participant is referred to by a number: P1, P2, and so on.

26 In quotations of the interviews, I retain each participant’s original language, except where pronoun replacement or grammatical correction is needed for clarity. Non-inclusive language, particularly regarding the divine, has not been altered.

27 On one level, this theme is a predictable result from the engagement patterns of the participants. Most have been primarily involved in the church’s Wednesday evening programming, having attended the children’s ministry for several years before being promoted to the youth ministry in the sixth grade. The children’s ministry has been structured as a classroom setting, and there is significant time devoted to teaching in the youth ministry’s Wednesday night programming as well. It follows that these involvement points have formed the participants’ perspectives of the mission of the church. However, it is also important to note a possible selection bias at this point. It is likely that the church’s outreach ministry to youth has been effective in engaging people disposed to appreciate this sort of educational emphasis. It may be that those inclined to more service-oriented experiences, or who thirst for more time focused in worship, have simply not been retained over time.

28 Roxburgh, 46.

29 Ibid., 46–47.

30 In texts such as 1:46–55, 5:1–11, 14:7–14, and 18:9–14, Luke keenly portrays the inverted statuses of the kingdom of God—those who see themselves as high are brought low, and the humble are exalted.

31 This call to Lukan humility also provokes the church to recognize the real consequences of social and economic differences within the church. Those who live empowered lives must address the power and privilege differentials that exist. It will not do to only say, “We are all marginalized.” Rather, in our context of a community fractured across class lines, the church can build constructive friendships and walk toward the reconciled justice of the kingdom of God.

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Lawrence Wharton: Pioneer in Disciples Mission to the “Heathen” and Window into Nineteenth-Century Disciples’ Understanding of Cross-Cultural Missions

The North American Churches of Christ/Disciples of Christ had started missionary societies in 1849 and 1874, but their focus was chiefly on “Christian” nations. In 1875 the Foreign Christian Missionary Society was formed specifically to go out to the “heathen” in foreign lands. Green Lawrence Wharton (1847-1906) was sent to India in 1882 and became the pioneer in North American Disciples’ efforts to reach the “heathen.” He was exemplary in character and diligent in work. His twenty-three years of work reflected the Disciples’ understanding of cross-cultural evangelism at the time.

In the earliest days of the nineteenth-century North American Restoration effort, little was done in the way of what is now called “missions.”1 The chief concerns were in the evangelization of North America.2 The American Christian Missionary Society was formed in 1849 with the motto, “to promote the spread of the gospel in destitute places of our own and foreign lands.”3 Since Green Lawrence Wharton was not sent out until 1882, twenty-three years later, how can he be referred to as a “pioneer” in Disciples of Christ missions?4 The society sent J. T. Barclay to Jerusalem for seven years (1851–1854; 1858–1862),5 J. O. Bardslee to Jamaica (1858–1866; discontinued for lack of support), and Alexander Cross to Liberia (1854; died after a few months). Thus, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of that 1849 society (c. 1874) “the speaker of the occasion said that in the wide field destitute of the gospel, the Disciples of Christ do not have a single herald of the cross. Jerusalem and Jamaica had been deserted, Liberia had been forgotten. Calls were made for men to go to China, Africa, Norway, and Germany, but there were no responses. Year after year the society said, ‘Who will go for us? And whom shall we send?’ There was no man to say, ‘Here am I, send me.’ ”6

Although the ACMS of 1849 had largely failed in its first twenty-five years to attract sufficient interest in and workers for “heathen” lands, a renewed effort emerged to advance its work. The Disciples’ convention of 1874 unanimously adopted this resolution: “That we fully recognize the obligation to preach the gospel to every nation, and that we will by earnest prayer, exhortation and persistent appeals to the brotherhood, do all in our power to hasten the day when we shall renew our missionary effort in Foreign Lands.”7 That same year (1874) the Christian Women’s Board of Missions was organized, and by the following year a new missionary society was formed, designated as the Foreign Christian Missionary Society (1875). It is with this group (FCMS) that I am chiefly concerned because of its focused effort to reach the “heathen” in other lands, and because Green Lawrence Wharton was the first person sent out by that society to those they classed as “heathen.”

The ACMS had indeed sent out workers. H. S. Earl went to England where he enjoyed some success, but it was regarded as a “Christian” country already. A medical doctor, A. O. Holck, living in Cincinnati was asked to return to his native Denmark. He went but enjoyed very little success. Jules Delaunay and wife were asked to return to his native country, France, in 1877. He was a good man but unsuited for the task. An Armenian medical doctor, G. N. Shishmanian, was converted in Texas and attended the College of the Bible [Lexington, KY] for 2 years. He was sent to Turkey in 1879. Others were sent later, but eventually that work was abandoned. Francisco de Capdevila was sent from England to his native Mexico in 1880, but little came of that move. At that time the society operated on a seriously flawed principle: “whenever a [Christian] native of some foreign country was found, it was thought that he should be taken up and sent back as a missionary.” By 1919 McLean could report, “That notion prevails no longer.”8 Among other things, the FCMS learned that it was one thing to select people and ask them to go, but quite another to send people who volunteered. McLean wrote that “the Board has come to believe that the only persons fitted for the self-denial and holy consecration involved in true missionary work are the ones who offer themselves voluntarily to the Lord.”9 Trial and error was the method of operation by the FCMS. There was little sense of “missionary preparation.”

The new society (1874) sought the full cooperation of both the 1849 ACMS and the newly formed Women’s Board (1874) as it desired explicitly to focus on foreign fields. Several men were asked to go to India, Japan, Italy, and Germany, but none were sent. “At the close of the sixth year of the society’s existence there were twelve persons connected with the work in England, Denmark, France and Turkey,” all sent out, as noted, by the 1849 society. McLean, the corresponding secretary of the FCMS, felt that was a paltry performance for half a million Disciples.10 He pointed to several reasons for the slim performance during that time, among them a financial depression, apathetic churches, and lack of teaching on the subject. Initially, the society had funded itself by membership subscriptions, and “it was not until 1878 that the society decided to ask the churches for collections for foreign missions.”11 In order to address the apathy among the churches and their lack of concern for the heathen, the convention urged that preachers preach on the subject and that editors of the papers carry articles of promotion and teaching. That emphasis led to a new and more church-involved emphasis on global evangelizing.12

The 1880 convention sought to re-emphasize the need to reach pagans. A Report from that convention observed that

the work we are doing abroad, most of it at least, is not strictly foreign missionary work; it is not done for the Christianization of the heathen; its end is not the salvation of men and women from idolatry, with all its abominations. It is largely changing people from one Protestant faith to another; not attacking the strongholds of Satan in heathen and idolatrous countries, which is the one object for which foreign missionary societies should exist. We seem not to have had hitherto the true idea of foreign work, or, if had, to have departed from it largely in practice.13

It was observed that England was giving more to support missions to the heathen than any other country, “Yet we, with but a few thousand dollars for the maintenance each year of foreign missionary work, give the greater part of that to the support of men in England. How absurd!”14 Thus, in the 1881 convention emphasis was placed on a new mission to work on “distinctively heathen ground, either in Japan, or India, or China.” It was after this emphasis that Green Lawrence Wharton enters the picture.

Wharton’s Story

Like many young men born in 1847, Green Lawrence Wharton grew up on farms and had meager educational opportunities. His blended family consisted of parents and seventeen siblings, most of whom became Christians. Already before Wharton entered Bethany College in 1871 he had begun to preach in Carbondale, IL, while studying at a college there. At Bethany he studied under C. L. Loos, Robert Richardson, and W. K. Pendleton, and according to his wife he “deeply imbibed the spirit and genius of the Restoration movement.”15 In his junior year he met Emma Virginia Richardson, youngest daughter of Robert Richardson, whom he later married in 1878 and shared a delightful life with her. He graduated in June of 1876 and “accepted a call to become the pastor of the church in Buffalo, New York.”16

Emma claimed that during the years they were in Buffalo there was “a transition period, the time of missionary awakening, the church’s coming into consciousness of its obligations in regard to world-wide evangelization.” Of the earlier era she wrote: “At that time the interest of the church was altogether local; there were even few pastors who preached missionary sermons, and seldom was a public prayer offered in behalf of the perishing heathen. The harmony of fellowship had been disturbed by unprofitable controversy over means and methods but with the organization of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions in 1874, the church took on new life and growth.”17

Lawrence Wharton attended none of the conventions, but he read their reports and articles in the church papers, like the Christian Standard. He had preached missions sermons, however, and in Buffalo had been “privileged occasionally to meet and hear returned missionaries of other churches.” He preached a series of Sunday evening sermons on concrete cases of successful missionary efforts, “and he had remarked afterwards that the study had made at least one complete convert to foreign missions—and that was himself.”18 His wife was fully sympathetic with his interests since as a child she had read a number of biographies of missionaries in the children’s library—of people like Adoniram Judson.19 She heard her father pray “almost daily” that “the glory of the knowledge of the Lord might cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.”20

In the early fall of 1881, an important event occurred that added to Wharton’s already growing interest in missions. A former Methodist missionary to India, Albert Norton, came from his home in Richville, New York, to talk with Wharton about the Disciples. He had read an article by Wharton that appeared in the Christian Standard concerning the Disciples. Since “Norton’s views were already mainly in sympathy with that doctrine, he and his wife shortly afterwards became members of the church in Buffalo.” Isaac Errett wrote that Norton was an immersionist Methodist, “and his converts in India were immersed.”21 Many visits took place between the Whartons and Nortons, and they enjoyed Norton’s stories about India. “Very naturally this intercourse with one who had been on the field and expected to return aroused in them a deep interest in foreign missions, especially in India.”22 The FCMS put out a call for people to go to India, assuming that the Nortons would be sent by the society. The FCMS felt others needed to go with the Nortons to learn from them.

Wharton was thoughtfully prayerful about offering himself for service. After waiting for a while and learning that no one else had volunteered for work in India, he wrote to the FCMS, offering his services. He stated in his letter that “he felt disqualified in the matter of age (being thirty-four years old), that neither he nor his wife were robust physically, and felt themselves otherwise unfit to be pioneers of such a cause in a heathen country, but that if no more worthy candidates presented themselves, they were willing to go.”23

They were accepted, and in 1882 the Board passed a resolution indicating that the two couples would be sent to India as soon as funds could be raised. At the same time the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions had recruited and obligated itself to send along with Wharton and Norton four single women to work with them: Mary Graybiel, Laura Kinsey, Ada Boyd, and Mary Kingsbury. It was Norton who suggested that the young women go as “Bible readers,” which meant that they would serve as zenana workers,24 evangelists, teachers in the day schools and in the Sunday schools. They were to care for the orphans and for the dependent. Thus their work was mostly to be among women and children. The eight people left in September 1882 and arrived in Bombay the same year. “The society was seven years old, and now for the first time missionaries were sent into the non-Christian world.”25 There was much rejoicing among the churches, and the society received increased amounts of money.

The Disciples of Christ were latecomers to India.26 More than forty Protestant societies had preceded them, not to mention the legendary work of the Apostle Thomas, the incursions of the fifth-century Nestorians, and the Roman Catholics. One hundred seventy-seven years earlier two young German Pietists, Bartholomäus Zigenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, had been sent by the Danish mission to Tranquebar in July 1706.27 William Carey (1793), Alexander Duff (1830), and many others had broken ground.28 Apart from the previous missionary experience of Norton, the Disciples seemed to have no independent thought about location, preparation for the task, or methodology. To their credit, they wanted to preach Christ where he had not been named, so they settled in the Central Provinces where a population of about sixteen million (principally) Hindus and Muslims lived. Initially they settled in Harda “because of its accessibility and healthfulness, and because of the needs and disposition of the people.”29 Located 416 miles northeast from Bombay, they found no city in the area more suited as a base of missionary activity and operation.

About the time the group settled on Harda, Norton separated himself from the group because “he was conscientiously opposed to the idea of receiving a fixed salary,” and his temperament rendered him unable to work “pleasantly and effectively with his associates.”30 The group had no idea about what is today called “team building” and psychological screening. The chief qualification seems to have been a believer’s willingness to be sent. The society did not falter after Norton’s departure, however, though he was to be their guide in India mission; the following year they appointed and sent Morton D. Adams and wife to join the group to help with education.

McLean’s account of the work indicates they followed a “mission station” approach. That is, the missionaries lived in their compounds of homes, schools, and clinics, and went out from there to do other work. “The missionaries at all the stations employed the same methods,” claimed McLean. They strove initially to achieve a working knowledge of the language. As soon as they were able, they began preaching in the streets and bazaars, far and wide. Literature was produced and distributed. “They went out among the people and talked about sin and about salvation through Christ.”31 They cast their nets broadly—“touring,” they called it.32 They opened Sunday schools and day schools where the teaching was done in English. Wharton opened a bookstore on a busy street, and it proved to be a good place to meet people who would never attend a chapel. Several local people were hired to serve in different capacities, including the preaching of the word. In 1889, the first medical missionary, Dr. C. S. Durand, was sent to Harda, principally, but not exclusively, because the missionaries were otherwise sixty-eight miles from the nearest physician. A hospital was erected. Dr. Durand worked with lepers, and Wharton baptized a number of them and formed a congregation on the outskirts of town. In 1892, Bethany College graduate John G. McGavran was sent as an evangelist. Others were sent to work in education and medicine. In 1900, George William Brown and family were sent to India, he to serve as educational missionary. In 1893, a Bible training school was begun in Harda with eight students. Wharton was the president and the faculty.

Wharton had long dreamed of starting a training college for the training of a local ministry. Such a school opened in 1905 with eighteen students in Jubbulpore. Wharton planned to write a book on “modern missions” as a means of “creating an evangelistic spirit among native Christians.”33 Wharton gave himself to the school, but he would spend only one year with it. He died the following year, Nov. 4, 1906, after a long illness and was buried in Calcutta. Of his work, Archibald McLean wrote:

The Disciples of Christ owe much to this man of God. He led the first group of missionaries to India. Their going was an event in the history of this people. In addition to the work he did in India, he stirred the churches in Australasia and America as they have never been stirred. His burning eloquence led many to give of their money, and some to give their lives to the service of Christ in the regions beyond. Under his teaching many thousands were caused to see that the mission of the church is missions. His life has been written by his wife and has been widely read, and has perpetuated and increased his influence. He rests from his labors, and his works follow after him.34

Although he followed the methods employed by the Protestants of the era, he was indeed a “pioneer” among the Disciples in the sense that he was the first to go into what they regarded as “heathen” territory to do initial evangelization.

Assessing Disciples Missiology

Initially, it appears that Wharton and the four single women simply followed the methodology recommended by the former Methodist, Alfred Norton. In the twenty-three years Wharton worked in India, the methodology seems to have been the routine Protestant approach: broad preaching, literature production, schools, orphanages, leprosaria, and other medical work. Yet, by the time Wharton went to India, some constructive thinking regarding effective methods was taking place among Protestants. “As early as 1854, Henry Venn (1796–1873), the prescient Secretary of the Church Missionary Society in London, had spoken in terms of the aim of the mission as being the calling into existence of self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating Churches; and of the euthanasia of a mission.”35 He sensed that many of the missions’ works would collapse should foreign funds and foreign leadership be withdrawn or be forced out. Almost simultaneously, Congregationalist Rufus Anderson (1796–1880) of the USA reached the same conclusion for the same reasons, and he had written extensively about his concepts of missions long before Wharton and others went out.36 One insight that would have been relevant to the society’s work, for example, was that working among undifferentiated people and preaching “about sin and about salvation through Christ”37 was not a strategic approach to Hindus.

McLean was the secretary of the FCMS from 1882 until its end in 1920 and had a strong hand in the policies and implementation of the society, but his writings reveal minimal understanding of the missiological thought of that era. In 1897, he showed an awareness of the concept of churches that were self-supporting and self-governing,38 but if he gave a rationale for its practice I have not found it in his major books on missions.39 Interestingly, he seems not to have mentioned self-propagating. The mission station approach requires most of the effort to be on maintaining the various components of the work rather than focusing chiefly on the development of churches. Compassionate service was solidly joined with proclamation. It is not clear whether their approach was simply following what they saw among existing works or whether they made use of outside resources. In 1913, Mrs. Wharton showed an awareness of The Encyclopedia of Missions,40 which contained a discussion of methods as then understood.41 That encyclopedia article, however, does not interact with the seminal thought of Anderson and Venn, for example. Nor do I detect awareness among early Disciples of other cutting-edge resources, such as the Missionary Review of the World, which first appeared in the 1830s (its second series began in 1888) or the Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, which Gustaf Warnack and others began publishing in 1874 to discuss theology, world religions, and methods.

Indeed, there is little indication that the missionaries knew what to do among people of such different worldviews as Muslims, Hindus, and animists. Not until 1920 was a College of Missions established by the Disciples in Indianapolis by the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions, and then it was chiefly for women. Like the a cappella churches of that period, from whom J. M. McCaleb went to Japan in 1892, we must conclude provisionally that little attention was paid to an existing body of missions theory and practice.42 Their strengths were their theology of salvation by Christ and their concern for people who hurt. Historically, the Disciples had a stronger biblical ecclesiology than most Protestants of the era,43 but, curiously, they seem to have underplayed the importance of church planting and development as a missions priority. They rightly placed emphasis on learning the local languages. Apart from doctrinal differences with other groups on salvation and ecclesiology, however, the missionaries of that era tended to imitate the methodology they saw among fellow Protestants. More detailed understanding of their notion of methodology will involve sifting through many pages of contemporary periodicals like the Christian Standard, Christian-Evangelist, Missionary Intelligencer, Gospel Advocate, and others. All in all, though, Lawrence Wharton and his associates demonstrated little understanding of the dynamics involved in cross-cultural evangelizing and church growth. This provisional conclusion takes nothing away from the wholesome influence realized through their dedication to Christ and their hard work. Wharton was a pioneer chiefly in the sense that he led the first group of missionaries to what the Disciples regarded as “heathen.”

Post Script

Although serious rethinking of cross-cultural evangelizing was already in progress by several Protestant missions leaders, the Disciples did not know that they were on the cusp of a period of vigorous missiological thinking. The Edinburgh Missions Conference occurred in 1910, and out of that came the International Review of Missions and the Hartford Seminary Foundation in the USA. Roland Allen’s famous Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours appeared in 1912, eight years after Lawrence Wharton’s death. Allen’s Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: And the Causes that Hinder It came out in 1927. Even among the Disciples a reconsideration of mission methods and practices took place at that point.

John G. McGavran, a Bethany College graduate, joined the work in India in 1892, a decade after Wharton arrived. Eventually he and his wife had five children. Among them was a son whom they named Donald Anderson (1897). He was homeschooled into his middle school years, but graduated from high school in the USA. He moved forward with his education in the USA, earning an BA from Butler, an MA from the College of Missions in Indianapolis, a BD from Princeton, and eventually a PhD in Education from Columbia University. He returned to India to make his contribution to missions in the field of education. Through his research with Methodist Bishop J. Wascomb Pickett, McGavran was forced to raise many serious questions about his inherited missiology.44 While the Disciples were growing by only a few percentage points per year, other churches were growing by more than two-hundred percent. McGavran found it necessary to move away from the method of combining education, evangelism, medicine, and agriculture as the means of evangelizing. He developed, alternatively, a means of evangelizing people in groups, penetrating specific castes, and measuring durability of missions efforts by the number and strengths of churches. His missionary society did not accept his views and assigned him to work as an evangelist, rather than administrator, among the low-caste Satnami people (1935–1954). While he did not see a whole people movement come to Christ,, his teaching ministry brought about the conversion of a thousand people in fifteen churches, all without the trappings of the mission station.45 Out of that experience and the earlier research with J. W. Pickett, he wrote Bridges of God (1955), which affected mission strategy worldwide. McGavran eventually became a missiologist of international note and exercised an enormous influence on Protestant missionary endeavors, all because he was willing to go where the research lead. It was not a matter of changing the biblical message, but of making better ministry decisions.

Lawrence Wharton and his original team opened up work in the central part of India. In the same area, second-generation McGavran developed new methods that ideally called for serious revision in the efforts to establish viable, long-term effects. Initially, most of McGavran’s fellow missionaries did not accept his formulation, and he was given a new assignment in the society. As decades passed, however, his careful analysis of the Indian context and social structure proved to be a superior way of achieving the desired results.

C. Philip Slate is a missions consultant for Churches of Christ worldwide and an adjunct teacher at Harding School of Theology. He holds a DMiss from Fuller Theological Seminary and has authored and co-authored numerous popular and scholarly works. Dr. Slate was a missionary in Great Britain for over a decade. He has also served as the dean of Harding School of Theology and subsequently as chair of the department of missions at Abilene Christian University.

†Adapted from a presentation at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 7–9, 2017.

1 See Thomas Olbricht, “Missions and Evangelization Prior to 1848,” Discipliana 58 (Fall 1998): 67–79.

2 New religious movements often postpone global work. The fifth-century Nestorians were a glowing exception for understandable reasons. During the first two hundred years of Protestantism, little was done in global evangelism. The Moravians began global work from Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, but their spiritual heritage was rooted in the mid-sixteenth century. Oddly enough, and somewhat inaccurately, William Carey is often called the “father of modern Protestant missions,” though he worked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, almost three hundred years after Luther’s ninety-five theses were posted.

3 Archibald McLean, The History of The Foreign Christian Missionary Society (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1919), 22. This work makes the task of assessing the work of Lawrence Wharton much easier.

4 McLean wrote: “He led the first group of missionaries to India. Their going was an event in the history of this people.” McLean, History, 189; Emma Richardson Wharton, Life of G. L. Wharton (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1913), 43.

5 Thirty eight years later when McLean visited Jerusalem on his trip around the world he devoted two sentences to Barclay’s work: “Dr. Barclay spent three and a half years here. His great book is still regarded as one of the best on Jerusalem.” Archibald McLean, A Circuit of the Globe (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co., 1899), 316. For a substantive assessment of Barclay’s work see Clint Burnett, “A Missiological and Historical Reevaluation of James T. Barclay’s Jerusalem Mission,” Restoration Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2012):149–67.

6 McLean, History, 23.

7 Ibid., 33.

8 Ibid., 60.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 66.

11 Ibid., 70.

12 Emma Wharton described the late 1870s and 1880s as a new era in which the churches came to accept their responsibility for evangelizing. She reported that her husband’s reading Conference reports and articles in the Christian Standard helped to fuel his interest in missions. Wharton, Life, 39-41.

13 As reported in McLean, History, 79.

14 Ibid.

15 Wharton, Life, 31–32.

16 Ibid., 36.

17 Ibid., 38.

18 Ibid., 40.

19 The British in particular often wrote two versions of missionary biographies, one a more serious version for adults, and a smaller one for children. That was one way they had of building a missionary force in the future. Many who later became missionaries reflected that their initial interests were stirred by reading missionary biographies of William Carey, David Livingstone, John Paton, and many others.

20 Wharton, Life, 40–41.

21 Ibid., 42, quoting the Christian Standard, Jan. 21, 1882.

22 Wharton, Life, 41.

23 Ibid., 43.

24 A zenana is the private quarters of women in a household. “The women of the better classes never appear in any public assembly. If they are ever reached it must be in their own homes and by members of their own sex,” McLean wrote later. McLean, History, 149.

25 McLean, History, 84.

26 McLean rehearsed what had been done in India from the earliest days until the time of Wharton’s going out. McLean, Circuit, 212ff.

27 Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. 3, Three Centuries of Advance: A.D. 1500–A.D. 1800 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970): 278–82.

28 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginning to 1707 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: 1707–1858 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Sadly, Neill died before completing the third volume.

29 McLean, History, 85.

30 Ibid., 86.

31 McLean, History, 88.

32 Donald A. McGavran, The Satnami Story: A Thrilling Drama of Religious Change (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995), 25, 28.

33 Wharton, Life, 196.

34 McLean, History, 189.

35 Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Mission, The Pelican History of the Church 6 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964): 259–60.

36 See bibliography in “Anderson, Rufus,” Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International, 1998), 20; R. Pierce Beaver, ed., To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967). Anderson’s Outline of Missionary Policy (Boston: ABCFM) appeared in 1856.

37 McLean, History, 88.

38 McLean, Circuit, 99.

39 In addition to McLean, History, and McLean, Circuit, see Archibald McLean, Missionary Addresses (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co., 1895); Archibald McLean, The Primacy of the Missionary and other Addresses, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Christian Board of Publications, 1921).

40 Wharton, Life, 59. Her book appeared in 1913, so it is not clear whether she was referring to the first edition (New York : Funk & Wagnalls, 1891), edited by Edwin Munsell Bliss, or to the second edition (New York : Funk & Wagnalls, 1904), edited by Henry Otis Dwight, H. Allen Tupper, and Edwin Munsell Bliss.

41 See “Methods of Missionary Work,” Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 468–70.

42 See C. Philip Slate, Lest We Forget: Mini-Biographies of Missionaries From A Bygone Generation (Winona, MS: J. C. Choate Publications, 2010), 110–12, for information up to 1933.

43 Already, several decades of nondenominational missionary societies, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Missions and the London Missionary Society, had underplayed the place of the church. The influence of the Enlightenment produced an emphasis on ”converting individual persons.” David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Missions, American Society of Missiology Series 16 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 331. He quotes C. C. Carpenter as saying that societies influenced by the Evangelical Awakenings had been preaching “a gospel without a church.”

44 Much of this information is drawn from Gary L. McIntosh, “Celebrating Donald A. McGavran: A Life and Legacy,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 51, no. 4 (October 2015): 424–31, https://emqonline.com/Donald_mcGavran.

45 McGavran relates the story in his Satnami Story.

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Pan-Handle Preachers and the Pope: A Cross-Cultural Dialectic and Missionary Identity Formation of the Churches of Christ in Post-War Italy

Missiologist Janine Paden Morgan explores how the ideological environment of post-war Italy—tense church-state tensions, pressures from Communism, and Roman Catholic xenophobia—shaped the theological and ecclesiological emphases of Church of Christ missionaries from the United States. Through her reading of missionary public newsletters and Italian journal articles, Morgan investigates how opposition by the Roman Catholic Church influenced the identity formation among fledgling Churches of Christ to lasting effect. Although there have been a limited number of descriptive accounts of the events of these years, there has been little serious analysis of what those events mean historically and missiologically. For missiologists, historians of missions, and practitioners alike, the important question of how identity is shaped in a climate of strong opposition can have bearing on how missions is understood and carried out globally today.

My brother’s earliest memory is being fiercely shooed away from the window where he was watching a mob forming to burn down the orphanage where he lived with his parents. The mob was led by the village priest; the children’s home a place of refuge for World War II war orphans. The grievous issue was that “heretical” and “foreign” Protestants had not only established an orphanage but had established it in the stronghold of Roman Catholic papal power, not ten miles from the Vatican. My research explores how the ideological environment of post-war Italy—tense church-state tensions, pressures from Communism, and Roman Catholic xenophobia—shaped the theological and ecclesiological emphases of the planting of the Church of Christ in Italy by American missionaries. Through my reading of missionary public newsletters (principally the Frascati Orphan Home Paper) and Italian Church of Christ journal articles (Il Seme del Regno), I investigate how opposition by the Roman Catholic Church influenced the identity formation among fledgling Churches of Christ to lasting effect.

Since the time of Constantine, Rome has stood at the global center of Western Catholicism, its Papal See committed to exercising religious and political authority over the region, such that in the 1940s, when our story opens, close to one hundred percent of Italians were registered as Roman Catholic. Only in the late nineteenth century did Roman Catholic hegemonic power begin to falter during the Italian Risorgimento, a liberalizing movement that sought to separate church and state. At that time, some Protestant churches—Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists, and the Salvation Army—were accorded legal status. This opening, however, proved brief. Benito Mussolini himself, together with emissaries of Pope Pius XI, signed the Lateran Accords reinstating the Roman Catholic church as the official state religion in 1929. While previously recognized Protestant churches were grandfathered in, new groups seeking legal status found it near impossible and faced increasing pressure to disband under the fascist regime.1

After the war and the fall of fascism, the political landscape in Italy was in turmoil. On the heels of the Truman Doctrine, the Cold War, an ideological fight for the minds of its citizens, was also contested in Italy. On the right, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) emerged as the largest political party. Determined to incorporate the Lateran Accords into the post-war 1948 Constitution, they were committed to keeping the identity of Italy as Roman Catholic; consequently they viewed “foreign” Protestants as a threat to this goal. Roy Palmer Domenico cites one leader’s observation: “Italy was called by God to a glorious Catholic experiment.”2 Although freedom of worship was eventually guaranteed in the new Constitution, the Roman Catholic Church maintained its special privilege, so much so that to cast aspersions on the pope or Roman Catholicism itself constituted a criminal act.

Fiercely anti-clerical, on the far left in the political landscape were the Muscovite Communists, the Partito Comunista Italiana (PCI), who desired the “via italiana al socialismo” (“the Italian road to socialism”), which they termed a progressive form of democracy. In between these two influential parties lay a plethora of other parties seeking to fill the political vacuum, but this description gives a thumbnail sketch of the main stakeholders when a group of largely West Texan preachers arrived in 1949 on the scene.

Nothing could have been more welcome news to a tired and war-weary people than what a group of young Americans were espousing: a radically different form of Christianity than what they had known in the Roman Catholicism of the day. Twelve American Church of Christ missionaries sailed from New York and arrived in Italy in January 1949, joining Gordon and Ruth Linscott already in place. Three of these missionaries, including my father, Harold Paden, had felt the call to return to Italy to help the land that they had fought to liberate during World War II. Their strategy was (1) “Benevolence”: open a children’s home for war orphans and distribute food and clothing to those utterly devastated from the war;3 and (2) “Preach the Word”: teach the Bible, which would liberate people from oppressive Roman Catholicism and “again establish the Church of Christ on Italian soil” as it once had been established in Paul’s time.4 Prepared by their professors at Abilene Christian College and Pepperdine College to expect an arduous process before there were any converts, they were unprepared for what lay ahead. After their second church service, just three weeks after they arrived in Frascati, Cline Paden, the director of the children’s home and Harold’s older brother, reported:

We have evidently caught the Catholics unawares. . . . Many . . . have told us of announcements being made at all the schools and at Catholic services that no one is permitted to come for Bible study. . . . Sunday morning many of [the priests and nuns] ‘happened’ to be along the road leading from Frascati . . . telling people to turn back. We do not know how many turned back, but over 300 of them came! . . .We too have been caught unawares! The overwhelming response to our invitation for Bible study was not expected. Their pleas for Bibles, the eagerness with which they listen to Biblical discussions and the open defiance to the prevailing ecclesiastic authority has taken us all by surprise.5

In April 1949 the Corriere della Sera, a widely-distributed moderate pro-government newspaper, reported vast Protestant activity around Rome. By August, at the six-month mark, the team had distributed over 5000 packages of clothing, 100 packages of food, and 50 packages of medical supplies. According to Harold Paden, “response to this love” brought over 4,000 Italians to Bible classes, and by October 1949, over 130 people had been baptized into Christ.6

Such an overwhelming reaction did not go unnoticed by the Roman Catholic church and the Italian government led by DC politicians. Local priests began to encourage their communities to resist the Protestant incursion. Early converts were ostracized by their families and lost their jobs; several were physically threatened.7 At an open-air meeting at Monte Compatri, a mob led by the Azione Cattolica processed the Madonna through the streets and began throwing rocks through the windows where a house church met. On that occasion, a young boy had his hand blown off when he accidentally set off a landmine intended for the missionaries’ jeep. Cline Paden reported, “Riots and near riots have greeted the initial efforts in many of these communities where work is now beginning.”8 In November, a hostile throng assailed two jeep-loads of missionaries with clubs and rocks, spitting on them, rocking their jeeps with chants of “We want the Protestants’ bones.”9 A witness to that event, Rodolfo Berdini, later attested how he was “full of anger at this inhuman act” and complained to the Roman Catholic clergy at Castel Gondolfo. The priest answered that these actions were necessary so that the “protestants might be driven out of Italy” which led Berdini to a questioning of his own Roman Catholic faith. Berdini then describes how he went “to meet with the American missionaries who had been stoned before our eyes, and for the first time in my life, I took into my hands a complete Bible! For approximately three months, every day . . . we studied the Bible. . . . They have given us a gift greater, rarer, and more invaluable, than man has ever known—Jesus Christ and His gospel of love.”10

The harassment began to generate national and international media attention. The Settimana del Clero, a newspaper for Roman Catholic clergy, covered debates the missionaries held with Cappuccini monks, which inadvertently resulted in more Bible studies being requested by priests.11 Former priests began to be baptized; seven would eventually become theological leaders in the Churches of Christ.12 Rumors abounded on the one hand that the Protestant missionaries were Communist agents due to many communist-sympathizing converts. The Communist Party (PCI), after an initial look, in their paper, Il Paese, began denouncing the missionaries at best as American imperialists and at worst as agents of the CIA. Time Magazine13 and Life Magazine14 reported on the “beachhead” of Protestantism in Italy.

While the harassment of the missionaries and their converts was mostly confined at the local level, Mario Scelba, the interior minister of the government’s DC party, began to wage a war on Protestant missionaries at the macro level in order to keep Italy firmly Roman Catholic, considering it the glue to Italian core identity.15 Under Scelba’s recommendation, in December of 1949 the Italian government closed the orphanage and sent the boys away; the missionaries were denied visa extensions and threatened with expulsion from Italy. At first reluctant to jeopardize Italo-American relations, the US government finally began cautious involvement largely due to pressure from the Paden brothers’ fellow Texans: Congressmen Tom Connally (chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee), Sam Rayburn (speaker of the House of Representatives), Lyndon Johnson, Omar Burleson, and others.16 The editor of the Frascati Orphan Home Paper, Jimmy Wood, in a special issue dedicated to the closure of the children’s home, included a wire written to President Truman denouncing the action of the Italian government.17 Perhaps the largest concerted letter-writing campaign to Congress by the Churches of Christ occurred in early 1950, protesting the closure. By February 1950, three hundred congressmen were each allegedly receiving a thousand letters a week on the matter. A delegation of Church of Christ ministers and elders traveled to Washington to meet with their congressmen. Jimmy Wood, editor of the FOHP, left the meeting with the assurance that the congressmen stood “solidly behind us in our work.” Wood went on to write: “[I] want to assure each of you that your letters have done good.”18 The Americans were given a one-year extension and the children’s home reopened.

During the 1950s the legal battle for freedom of religion in Italy continued and was reported in dozens of newspaper articles. While Scelba backed down briefly regarding the American missionaries, he was vigilantly opposed to Italian evangelists. Services were banned. Churches of Christ in Rome, Veletri, Livorno, Florence, and Alessandria were raided by police and closed. Italian and American evangelists were arrested and given sentences for preaching. When Scelba succeeded as Prime Minister in 1954, his government expelled those “obstinate violators of Italian law,” with his sights firmly set on the gadfly, Cline Paden, the most outspoken and combative of the American missionaries.19 But the battle against the Protestants was not won. Although deported, Paden had found allies in Italy’s judiciary and initiated counter legal defense proceedings for other evangelists as well. The new Constitutional Court inaugurated in 1956 ruled that “government sanction was unnecessary for the establishment of churches in Italy.”20 While there was still action against Italian evangelists throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, courts continually acquitted the Protestants.

As to the ministry of the Churches of Christ in Italy in the 1950s, the Brownwood Church of Christ eldership closed down the Frascati Orphan Home in 1957, deeming it unsustainable due to decline of American financial support and the Italian government’s continued legal obstructions. The rationale was framed as a “redirection of efforts in Italy,” not as a withdrawal from the work there,21 though this move essentially extinguished the “benevolence” prong of the American missionary strategy. However, such “redirection” bore fruit for the second prong, “preach the word.” By the end of the 1950s, twenty-three Italian evangelists, along with a dozen American missionaries, established forty Churches of Christ communities in the principal cities of Italy. A publishing house widely distributed Bible correspondence courses, a monthly journal titled Il Seme del Regno, along with numerous doctrinal pamphlets all in Italian. A Bible school in Milan was begun, its director a former Catholic seminary theologian, Fausto Salvoni. While it was a decade of great oppression, it was also a decade of great activity that is the focus of this study. This history provides context for my research.

Research and Findings

Based on the historical context and ideological environment of post-war Italy, I postulate that if identity is forged in such a hostile environment, the tendency is to define oneself in relation to the “enemy” and not in relation to the central themes of the gospel. In his study of Latin American Protestantism in the early twentieth century, Mexican scholar Carlos Mondragón notes that consistent interaction with majoritarian (and often hostile) Roman Catholic ecclesial and cultural apparati resulted in Protestant identities characterized by reaction to that antagonism.22 This seems to bear truth also to the mid-twentieth-century Italian context as well. In this paper I explore how early Italian converts of the Churches of Christ conceived of their religious identity vis-à-vis the dominant Roman Catholic Church in order to understand its imprint on the Churches of Christ in Italy today. To do so, I have examined missionary public newsletters and Italian journal articles during a ten-year period in order to ascertain what foundational messages the Italian converts received from the American missionaries and what they in turn promulgated.23

Research Question #1: What foundational messages did Italian Church of Christ converts and leaders receive from the American missionaries and then themselves promulgate?

The data in Figure 1 reveals that the primary focus of articles in this ten-year period was what it means to be the New Testament Church (NTC) in relation to Roman Catholicism (RC) and to other Christian denominations (Den).

Figure 1: Topics of Seme del Regno Articles (1954–1963)

Over half of the articles in this time period, fifty-six percent to be exact, were devoted to polemical arguments related to what was considered the New Testament Church versus the Roman Catholic Church. Fifteen percent focused on Christian living, while only seven percent of the articles focused on the person of Jesus.

According to the SdR articles, biblical authority was the only basis on which one can study and know the difference between divine will and human invention. In addition to the New Testament Church (NTC) category, another sixteen percent of the articles focused on exegesis of various biblical texts, showing the primacy of the Bible in its arguments. Any given article I tallied in its first four months gave, on average, twelve biblical references. Such a high view of the Bible and high view of human ability to study it and know “the truth” is a hallmark of Churches of Christ. This proved consistent not only with what the earlier cited Berdini reflected but also with an interview I had with Marisa Sala in 2016. When I asked her about what attracted her to the Churches of Christ in the 1950s, Marisa recounted that for the first time in her life she held a Bible in her hands when a young preacher came to her family’s home. That in itself was astounding for that time. But what really moved her was when, upon reading a Bible passage together, that young preacher, Joe Gibbs, asked her what she understood by it. Sixty years later, Marisa was so moved remembering that moment, she was speechless.24 That she, a young girl, could have something of value to contribute was simply unheard of. Such a freedom for individuals to search for truth, free from human traditions to seek anew, caused the contemporary historian Nathan Hatch to say about the early Restorationists: “Protestants had always argued for sola Scriptura, but this kind of radical individualism set the Bible against the entire history of biblical interpretation.”25 Hughes and Hatch suggest that in so demanding a theology of the people and by the people, they contributed to a democratization of Christianity that had been mired in the professional hierarchies of national churches for centuries.

In the opening editorial for SdR, Corrazza announced that the purpose of the journal is “not to engage in polemics nor to combat any religious community,” but rather begins with “a sincere conviction that Christ is the only source of Christianity, who brings light where there is darkness, love where hate dominates, . . . faith in Christ where there was once idolatry and superstition.”26 In a later article that same year entitled “Return to Jerusalem,” referencing Luke 2:44–45, he used the metaphor of a “little caravan of Christianity that had lost its way from Jerusalem for 2000 years” that had gotten fat, loud, and misdirected. “We have looked inside each cart, but we haven’t found Jesus, the Master.”27 However, we see from the data in Figure 1 that the emphasis was not so much on Jesus, the Master, but what it means to be a New Testament church. And that brings its own polemics.

Research Question #2: How were the claims made to engage the Italian reader vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church?

The following figure shows the points of discussion, breaking down the data from the Figure 1 focus labeled “NTC/RC/Den.”

Figure 2: Topical Arguments

The data suggests that the dominating topics were the authority of the Roman Catholic Church (pope and church councils), with New Testament salvation (nineteen out of the forty-three articles were on New Testament baptism) and New Testament church given almost equal treatment, and biblical authority. A letter was written complaining that there was too much argumentation and polemics in the journal, creating “an obstacle to the calm meditation [of Scripture].”28 Corazza agreed wholeheartedly with the writer, stating that he wished to banish every polemic and drink from “the pure fountain of Christian teaching!” However, he goes on to say, “But unfortunately it is necessary to speak out and not remain silent because doing so would be an obstacle . . . to truth.” He assures the readership that “our battle . . . is not toward persons, but toward ideologies” and promises to be more positive in the future.29 Data in Figure 3, detailing the actual trajectory of topics over the course of ten years, allows us to verify whether Corrazza’s hope was realized.

Figure 3: Relative Focus on Topics by Year (1954–1963)

Research Question #3: Do the articles change focus over a period of time?

While there are small variations from year to year and a change in editors in 1959 (year 6), the focus of the journal remains on biblical patternism regarding the New Testament church in contrast to primarily Roman Catholic doctrine and practice. In 1962–1963, numerous articles in the SdR reported on Pope John XXIII’s convocation of the Vatican II Council (1962–1965), the reform movement that updated Roman Catholicism. While more examination is required over the reception of Vatican II, overall there was great delight that it confirmed much of what the Church of Christ emphasized, a need to return to the origins of the gospel. Pope John XXIII recommended that a Bible be found in every home, la Bibbia in ogni casa, which the Churches of Christ subsequently used as its slogan for the Bible correspondence course and for distribution of the first modern-day translation of the New Testament in Italian, translated from the Greek by the former priests Fausto Salvoni and Italo Minestrone.

Research Question #4: What effect did New Testament patternism have on the identity of the Churches of Christ in subsequent years?

One of the great positive legacies of the American missionaries, in addition to the high view of the Bible, was the development of local leadership. In the 1960s, the Churches of Christ continued to grow with new missionaries and Italian workers. A second Bible school was established in Florence (Gianfranco Sciotti, a child from the Frascati Orphan Home, was a teacher/director from 1970 to 1982). Fifty years after its inception, church communities existed in sixty Italian cities with approximately 1,500 members, and there had been over forty Italian evangelists throughout its history.30 But it never fulfilled its early promise due to what I believe are three factors.

First, Vatican II’s call for ecumenicity effected a sea change in attitudes among Italians. In addition to other things, it called for respectful cooperation with Protestants as “separated brothers” who are saved and bring others to salvation.31 The “enemy” had shifted positions and therefore was never as easy to combat, yet evidence in Church of Christ literature points to a continued waging of battle. Second, neo-humanism was sweeping Europe, and religion was increasingly marginalized. According to Gerald Paden, yet a third Paden brother, “Italy was entering the age of materialism . . . manifested by increased indifference . . . and almost total apathy . . . toward biblical issues.”32 Third, by the 1970s, the Church of Christ mission fell victim to sectarian divisions within its own denomination. The emphasis on having the correct New Testament pattern for its ecclesial structure, together with the notion of silence in the Bible as being prohibitive rather than giving freedom for practice, had the unintended consequence of a legalistic approach to the Bible, a problem with which its American counterparts suffered as well. One church would “disfellowship” another church; issues became divisive.

If the focus of the initial beachhead and following years had been on the central themes of the gospel, rather than a continual responding to the perceived threat vis-à-vis Roman Catholicism, an alternative story might have been written. To be sure, such hindsight is much easier from a distance than in the midst of such complex times. Be that as it may, there is a very real possibility that inchoate contextualization of the gospel was happening by certain Italian churches in healthy ways, but unfortunately critique from the American missionaries and the loss of financial support from American churches made these moves untenable.33 Many left the Churches of Christ at this time. If only Corrazza’s words in that first editorial had remained the touchstone of the Restoration Movement’s work in Italy, “not to engage in polemics nor to combat any religious community . . . but simply spread the word of love preached by Christ.”34 Yet, the historic tensions with the Roman Catholicism of the time dictated a different path.

My research journey began in 2001, with a conversation I had with a matriarch of the Milano Church of Christ, Enrica Salvoni. She expressed her concern that the Churches of Christ had lost their distinctiveness. At its inception, the Churches of Christ in Italy were defined as the ones who studied the Bible, taught the love of God, had fellowship (agape) meals together, shared communion around the table. “But now,” she lamented, “even the Catholics do that! So, who are we now?”35 This question still echoes in my mind as I consider this formative period of the Italian Churches of Christ.

Janine Paden Morgan, PhD, is a missiologist and instructor at Abilene Christian University’s College of Biblical Studies. A third culture kid, she has a lifelong interest in how cultures and Christianity interact, and she teaches courses that reflect that interest. She has been active in cross-cultural ministry throughout her life (Italy, Scotland, and Brazil) and most recently for nine years in international study abroad education (England, Germany). Her academic research focuses on the role of ritual in spiritually forming communities, contemporary ecclesiology and mission, and the World Christian Movement. Janine and her historian husband Ron enjoy traveling the world with curious and like-minded students on mission with God.

†Adapted from a presentation at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 7–9, 2017.

1 Roy Palmer Domenico, “ ‘For the Cause of Christ Here in Italy’: America’s Protestant Challenge in Italy and the Cultural Ambiguity of the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (2005): 632.

2 Ibid.

3 Joe Chisholm, “A General Report on the Italian Work,” in The Italian Lectures, ed. Jimmy Woods (Lubbock, TX: Dennis Brothers, 1950), 70.

4 Jack McPherson, “Workers Together with God,” in The Italian Lectures, ed. Jimmy Woods (Lubbock, TX: Dennis Brothers, 1950), 89.

5 Cline Paden, “313 Present for Second Service in Italy,” in The Italian Lectures, ed. Jimmy Woods (Lubbock, TX: Dennis Brothers, 1950), 96.

6 Harold Paden, “Eighteen Baptisms in July; 4000 Attend Classes,” in Frascati Orphan Home Paper 1, no. 8 (1949): 1.

7 Cline R. Paden, “Work Grows in Italy Despite Catholic Opposition,” in Frascati Orphan Home Paper 1, no. 12 (1949): 1.

8 Ibid.

9 Domenico, 637.

10 Rodolfo Berdini, “From Persecutor to Persecuted,” in Frascati Orphan Home Paper 2, no. 8 (1950): 2.

11 Cline Paden, “An Arch Priest Is Baptized in Italy,” in Frascati Orphan Home Paper 2, no. 1 (1950): 7.

12 Carl Mitchell, “Italy: Fifty Years of Progress (1949–1999)” (unpublished paper, copy in private Bobbie Paden collection 1999).

13 “Beachhead,” Time, January 23, 1950, 55.

14 “Italians Harass U.S. Evangelists,” Life Magazine, February 20, 1950, 95–99.

15 Domenico, 635.

16 Ibid., 642.

17 Jimmy Wood, “Italian Government Orders Orphanage Closed,” Frascati Orphan Home Paper 1, special issue (1949): 2.

18 Jimmy Wood, “Our Trip to Washington,” Frascati Orphan Home Paper 2, no. 2 (1950): 5.

19 Domenico, 651.

20 Ibid., 651.

21 Jimmy Wood, “Closure of Frascati Orphan Home” in Frascati Orphan Home Paper 9, no. 11 (1956): 1.

22 Carlos Mondragón, Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920–1950, trans. Daniel Miller and Ben Post (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 19–22.

23 My colleague Cindy Roper and I went to the Scuola Biblica di Firenze archives in Florence, Italy. Employing qualitative content analysis, we examined and coded the rhetoric used in journal articles in Il Seme del Regno (SdR, the seed of the kingdom), a monthly journal for Italian Churches of Christ, from its inception in 1954 through a ten-year period.

24 Marisa Sala, interview by Janine P. Morgan, May 9, 2016.

25 Nathan Hatch, “The Christian Movement,” in American Origins of Churches of Christ: Three Essays on Restoration History, by Richard Hughes, Nathan Hatch, and David Edwin Harrell Jr. (Abilene: ACU Press, 2000): 32.

26 Sandro Corrazza, “Editorial,” in Il Seme del Regno 1, no. 1 (1954): 1; translation mine.

27 Sandro Corrazza, “Editorial,” in Il Seme del Regno 1, no. 4 (1954): 2; translation mine.

28 “Letter to the Editor,” in Il Seme del Regno 2, no. 12 (1955): 2; translation mine.

29 Sandro Corrazza, “Editorial,” in Il Seme del Regno 2, no. 12 (1955): 2; translation mine.

30 Mitchell.

31 “Catholic Principles on Ecumenism,” in The Documents of Vatican II: All Sixteen Official Texts Promulgated by the Ecumenical Council, 1963–1965, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York: The America Press, 1966), section 3.

32 Domenico, 653.

33 I would like to continue further research on this question in the future.

34 Corrazza, “Editorial,” Il Seme del Regno 2, no. 12 (1955): 2; translation mine.

35 Enrica Salvoni, interview by Janine P. Morgan, July 8, 2001.

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Building an Intercultural Church in Imperial Japan: Yunosuke Hiratsuka and the Utilization of the Church of Christ and National Identities, 1897–1945

Christian missions have the potential of forming intercultural networks that affect the existing identities of those who are involved. In this paper I examine the story of Yunosuke Hiratsuka (1873–1953), a leading figure among the pre-World War II Japanese Churches of Christ, to show how he managed to honor two strong and developing identities of the time, the national identity of Imperial Japan and the Church of Christ identity. The discussion includes Hiratsuka’s family networks, the role of Bible women, the teaching of distinctive Church of Christ doctrines, relationships with other denominations, and the efforts of US Church of Christ missionaries.

As historian Andrew Walls says, the missionary movement has revitalized Christianity through the process of crossing cultural boundaries, as well as having dialogues with cultures.1 This process, in turn, has the potential of forming networks that destabilize or alter the existing cultural identities and creating new, often hybrid identities among those who are involved, as transnational studies have pointed out.2 Church of Christ missions in Japan from the end of the nineteenth century through World War II provide a good ground to investigate such issues of identity.

On the one hand, the Churches of Christ in this period were in the process of establishing their group identities with some distinctive church doctrines and practices.3 In general, the teachings of Church of Christ missionaries to Japan during this time certainly reflected this development in the Church of Christ identity. On the other hand, this period coincided with the period in which the people of Imperial Japan were developing their distinctive national identities centered on the Japanese emperor system. Imperial Japan embraced expansionism as she invaded East Asia, and she ultimately ended up attacking Pearl Harbor and engaging in warfare with the country from which the Church of Christ missionaries came. So, how did Japanese Church of Christ members understand, embrace, and balance Church of Christ and Imperial Japanese identities? What was it like for them to have a strong national identity on the one hand and a strong religious identity on the other hand?

In order to wrestle with these questions, I focus on the story of Yunosuke Hiratsuka (1873–1953). Hiratsuka was the minister at the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ in central Tokyo from 1903 through 1943 and a leading figure among the pre-World War II Japanese Churches of Christ. While the larger context of how Church of Christ missionaries launched missions in Japan and how the Kamitomizaka church grew under Hiratsuka’s leadership are important, my aim in this paper is to analyze how Hiratsuka wrestled with two strong and developing identities of the time, the national identity of Imperial Japan and the Church of Christ identity. I argue in this paper that Kamitomizaka church managed to honor both Imperial Japan’s national identity and Church of Christ identity at the same time. As such, Kamitomizaka church, perhaps beyond Hiratsuka’s intention, existed in a subtly hybrid position, exhibiting itself as an intercultural church that was distinct from more monolithic positions or churches that were dominated rigidly by either of the two otherwise robust identities.

Yunosuke Hiratsuka, Kamitomizaka Church, and Imperial Japan’s National Identity

Kiyoko Takeda, one of the leading interpreters of Protestant Christianity in Japan, has pointed out that there were three characteristics of the Japanese people during the Meiji period (1868–1912): (1) the Japanese people as the participants of the familial nationhood (the connection of familialism and patriotism); (2) filial piety and obedience to the head of a family; and (3) unconscious subordination to the emperor.4 Taken together, the characteristics led to a unified system of unconscious, obedient, and patriotic filial piety among the common people, with the emperor at the top of the totem pole. In other words, the national identity of the Japanese people during this era was characterized by their devotion to the Japanese emperor.

Kamitomizaka Church of Christ, with its influential leader Hiratsuka functioning as the figure of the head of a household, was also an integral part of pre-WWII Japan and its social system centered on the mentality of filial piety. Furthermore, Hiratsuka came from a culturally prestigious and conservative family background in which sincerely honoring the Japanese emperor was the norm.5

The pages of the Kamitomizaka Church diary certainly include the records of the church’s periodic expression of thanksgiving and devotion to the Japanese emperor during its regular meetings, a practice certainly not unique to this church.6 For example, at a Wednesday prayer meeting on February 15, 1911, the members of Kamitomizaka Church had a special time to express their deep gratitude for the special money they were given from the Emperor Meiji at the occasion of Kigensetsu (National Foundation Day, February 11). One of the Kamitomizaka elders, Tomeji Yokowo,7 gave thanksgiving remarks, and other important members such as Rokuemon Hori and Hirosuke Ishiguro led thanksgiving prayers, followed by Hiratsuka’s reading of a Scripture passage and a message about the occasion.8 Just as most other Christians of his time, Hiratsuka’s devotion to the emperor was unquestionable.9 Reflecting the cultural ethos of the time, the members of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ embraced the national identity centered on the Japanese emperor.

Hiratsuka’s Relationships with US Missionaries and His Life in the United States

Hiratsuka, an unashamed admirer of the Japanese Emperor, was also one whose ministerial life was characterized by his close relationships with Americans, especially missionaries. In 1895, Hiratsuka, before he became a Christian, went to an English school in Kanda Ward of Tokyo. His English teacher was J. M. McCaleb, a US Church of Christ missionary who had arrived in Japan in 1892. Hiratsuka then started attending McCaleb’s Kanda Chapel to hear McCaleb’s gospel message, and McCaleb baptized Hiratsuka shortly after.10 Hiratsuka’s connection with the Churches of Christ, however, was interrupted soon after the baptism, until he resumed the connection in 1903 and started serving at Kamitomizaka Church of Christ.

In fact, Hiratsuka was exposed to other Christian denominations, as well as a life in the United States soon after McCaleb baptized him. Hiratsuka soon stopped going to the English school McCaleb was teaching, because he was not satisfied with the level of instruction at the school. Hiratsuka then went to the night school held at the famous Ginza Church, a Methodist church in one of the busiest shopping districts of central Tokyo.11 At the Ginza Church Hiratsuka met Sho Nemoto, a noted Christian politician who was involved in such organizations as the Tokyo Temperance Union12 and the Japanese Colonization Society.13 Nemoto and Hiratsuka were from the same prefecture of Ibaraki, and Hiratsuka followed Nemoto’s path to go to the United States to study, as well as to prepare himself for an honorable career. In 1897, Hiratsuka arrived in San Francisco, and he went to a Japanese Presbyterian church there, as Sho Nemoto had written recommendation letters, addressed to the pastor of that church.14 At this Presbyterian church Hiratsuka met another American by the name of E. A. Sturge (1856–1934). Hiratsuka’s family members claimed that Hiratsuka admired Sturge as his spiritual mentor throughout his life.15 Sturge even spoke at Kamitomizaka Church of Christ in 1915 when Hiratsuka was serving as the minister of that church.16

Sturge, who had a PhD and an MD, was a former Presbyterian medical missionary to Thailand (1880–1885) and was the Superintendent of the Japanese Presbyterian Mission on the Pacific Coast from 1886 through 1922.17 In San Francisco, Sturge helped Hiratsuka not only as a missionary, but also as a medical doctor when Hiratsuka’s health was declining. Apparently, Hiratsuka was deeply involved in the mission Sturge was leading. Thus, Hiratsuka’s portrait was included in a special photo collage printed on a page of the book the mission produced. The collage was made up of a photo of Sturge and his wife, surrounded by the photos of twenty-two Japanese people who admired Sturge.18

Hiratsuka’s first ministry experience took place in this Presbyterian mission on the West Coast. In January 1901, Hiratsuka moved to Salinas, about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco, due to health concern and Sturge’s advice to stay away from the big city. The Japanese Presbyterian Mission in Salinas, served by the Japanese pastor Kenichi Inazawa, had about twenty to thirty members.19 After moving to Salinas, Hiratsuka’s health condition improved, and around the spring of 1902 Hiratsuka quit his previous manual labor and started helping Inazawa’s ministry. He was in charge of the Salinas mission while Inazawa was opening a mission in nearby Watsonville.20 Inazawa also asked Hiratsuka to help him with the translation of J. L. Hurlbut’s Studies in four Gospels. The translated book, with Sturge’s preface, was published in Japan the year Sturge was decorated by the emperor of Japan.21

During his stay in the United States, the Church of Christ identity did not mean much, if anything, to Hiratsuka, even though he had been baptized by McCaleb and had attended his chapel at least a while. A hint of how Hiratsuka might have understood his Church of Christ connection during his US days is indicated in the story of his encounter with Tomijiro Hosogai, a Japanese Disciples of Christ pastor who once worked alongside a cappella Church of Christ missionaries. Hosogai had left Japan in 1894 and was helping Sturge as an interpreter at the San Francisco mission when Hiratsuka arrived there.22 According to Hiratsuka’s Japanese autobiography, Hosogai told Hiratsuka when they met, “We are brothers from the same church, the Church of Christ.”23 Hosogai probably heard Hiratsuka’s self-introduction that included the name of J. M. McCaleb, who baptized Hiratsuka in 1895. Hiratsuka, however, did not quite understand what it meant when Hosogai said that they were from the “Church of Christ.” Nowhere in his English or Japanese autobiographies does Hiratsuka ever mention attending any worship services or meetings associated with the US Churches of Christ. Hiratsuka, however, did mention in his Japanese biography his experience of attending gospel meetings held by Dwight Moody and William Booth of the Salvation Army in San Francisco.24

Hiratsuka’s short transnational experience in the US did not mean abandoning his Japanese national identity, especially because Hiratsuka stayed basically within the community of Japanese immigrants and students, which was often a means of preserving the national identity of Japan.25 Still, his experience in the United States helped him to acquire non-Japanese ways of life, and, more importantly, the ability to speak and write English, which was certainly helpful in the next steps of his life, even as he went back to Japan. It should also be noted that Hiratsuka’s identification with the Church of Christ heritage was vague at best during his US days, from 1897 through 1903.

Returning to Japan and Serving at Kamitomizaka Church of Christ

Hiratsuka’s reconnection with the Church of Christ circle did not take place immediately after he returned to Japan in August 1903. About a week after his arrival back in Japan, Hiratsuka was married to Hanako Okushi, who later became a beloved minister’s wife at Kamitomizaka church. Hiratsuka was pressed to find a job, though he was reminded that he did not acquire any special job skills in the United States. This caused him great emotional distress, although he retained a spiritual strength to start teaching his new wife the Bible every day.26 One Sunday, he attended service at a nearby Presbyterian church and talked to the pastor there. The pastor was sympathetic but could not provide any job for Hiratsuka. A few weeks later, Hiratsuka “suddenly remembered” about the Church of Christ missionary J. M. McCaleb who had baptized him. “Come to think of it,” Hiratsuka wrote later, “I should have visited him soon after my return from the United States.”27 Although not mentioned in his English autobiography,28 Hiratsuka’s distress over his jobless situation and his failure to find a position through his Presbyterian network were part of the context that helped Hiratsuka reconnect with the work of the Churches of Christ in Japan.

As it turned out, Kamitomizaka Church of Christ, also called Koishikawa Chapel at that time, was a perfect fit for Hiratsuka, and vice versa. After visiting McCaleb, Hiratsuka “felt like he had been given a great hope.”29 The following Sunday, Hiratsuka met another US Church of Christ missionary, William Bishop, for the first time. Bishop had just started his work at Kamitomizaka and its printing office in February 1903.30 McCaleb was also part of the church, as he had closed down the Kanda Chapel.31 After a few weeks, Bishop asked Hiratsuka to help with the work of the mission. Hiratsuka, thinking to himself he did not have any other job and this might be God’s call, accepted the offer.32

Hiratsuka, Other Denominations, and the Church of Christ Identity

Hiratsuka was an elder and minister, as well as a leading figure for Kamitomizaka Church after William Bishop left Japan, due to illness, in January 1913. Under Hiratsuka’s leadership the church grew to be one of the most active and largest congregations among Japanese Churches of Christ before 1945. Whereas the US Churches of Christ continued to develop their distinctive sense of sectarian identity following the 1906 official division from the rest of the Stone-Campbell churches, Yunosuke Hiratsuka developed a somewhat different sense of identification with the distinctive Church of Christ doctrines and practices. It would be misleading, however, to suppose Hiratsuka was simply indifferent or antagonistic about the Church of Christ distinctiveness.

Certainly reflecting Hiratsuka’s prior experience with Presbyterian missions, Kamitomizaka church and its Japanese members were not reluctant to have fellowship with, or even work with, the members of other denominations. For example, Kamitomizaka Church of Christ participated in the nationwide and ecumenical (Protestant) evangelistic campaign in Japan, Zenkoku Kyodo Dendo (Cooperative Campaign of Evangelism), which lasted from spring of 1914 through fall of 1916. The idea was prompted by John R. Mott, who suggested, upon his visit to Japan in 1913, to launch such a campaign in the spirit of the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference that he chaired. Different types of gospel meetings were held throughout Japan, such as the gathering of three churches in one region, or a larger gathering at a larger hall such as Tokyo YMCA.33 According to the official report of the campaign, a total of 777,119 people attended 4,788 different meetings, and there were 27,350 respondents.34

Kamitomizaka Church opened its building to be used for this campaign, and during the three-year period a total of 388 people attended eight meetings at Kamitomizaka, and there were 46 respondents.35 While the numerical results may not be very impressive, these efforts accomplished one of the original purposes of the campaign, namely the ecumenical cooperation of local churches. All of the eight meetings were held at the Kamitomizaka church building, and for each meeting there were typically two preachers from two different denominations, such as Baptist, Methodist, Evangelical Church, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, and an independent church.

Despite his openness to work with the members of other denominations, Hiratsuka was also concerned about honoring the identity of the Churches of Christ and their distinctive doctrines and practices. Baptism by immersion, understood as being “for the remission of sins,” and the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper were two important practices among the Church of Christ heritage, and Hiratsuka embraced these doctrines. For example, Hiratsuka wrote in one of Kamitomizaka church’s monthly newsletters: “Some say one does not have to be baptized as long as you have faith. That is a great mistake, because it is taught [in the Bible] that being baptized is a necessary condition of salvation.”36 He taught the importance of baptism by explaining the sections of the Bible concerning Jesus’s baptism, Jesus’s encounter with Nicodemus, the so-called great commission in the Gospel of Matthew, and Peter’s sermon at Pentecost. He then cited Acts 2:38, the quintessential proof-text US Church of Christ members used to teach the importance of baptism.37 Hiratsuka’s similar teachings on baptism can also be found in the nationwide Japanese Church of Christ periodical, Michishirube.38

In the mid-1930s Hiratsuka also played a role in nationwide efforts among the leaders of the Japanese Churches of Christ to discuss how they should deal with distinctive doctrines and practices of the Church of Christ heritage. The minutes of one of those meetings held in 1935, as recorded in the pages of Kamitomizaka church diary, are very clear about the conclusions of some of the distinctively Church of Christ issues that were discussed in the meeting. Regarding baptism, the minutes state that nothing but immersion should be recognized as baptism. Singing during public worship must be a cappella, citing Eph 5:18–19 and Col 3:16.39

Hiratsuka even changed Kamitomizaka church’s prior practices in accordance with what was agreed among the Japanese Church of Christ leaders in the mid-1930s. From its early days, Kamitomizaka church had several “Bible women”40 who were active especially in teaching children. It had been common for the Kamitomizaka church to ask one of those Bible women to lead one of two prayers offered during the communion.41 Nonetheless, the minutes of the 1935 nationwide meeting of Japanese Church of Christ leaders also included the agreement to restrict women’s roles during worship services,42 in accordance with the standard practice of the US Churches of Christ of the day.43 After this meeting no names of women were recorded to lead prayers during Sunday worship services in the pages of the diary of the Kamitomizaka church.

In sum, it was not contradictory for Hiratsuka to have deep associations with the members of other denominations and to honor distinctive Church of Christ doctrines at the same time. As mentioned above, Hiratsuka had prior ministry experiences with Presbyterian missions, and he truly admired the Presbyterian missionary E. A. Sturge. At the same time, Hiratsuka always appreciated and acknowledged the work of US Church of Christ missionaries. Thus, when Hiratsuka wrote histories of the Kamitomizaka church, he was always conscious about recording who served at the early stages of the church, and he wrote words of appreciation for their service.44

Joining the United Church of Christ in Japan during World War II

The story of how Hiratsuka and Kamitomizaka church embraced the Church of Christ identity is further complicated when the church faced the wartime situation in Japan. In October 1940, fourteen months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United Church of Christ in Japan (UCCJ) was formed as a federation of most Protestant churches in Japan, established as a response to the Japanese government’s policy to control Japanese Christianity. Hiratsuka, along with other Japanese ministers, initially supported the idea of Japanese Churches of Christ joining the UCCJ.45 Some even claimed that joining the federation and conforming to the Japanese identity was in line with the Japanese spirit of self-sacrifice, to which Japanese Christians should also hold.46 Nevertheless, these Japanese leaders, after much discussion, decided to follow the US missionaries’ advice not to join UCCJ.47

Keeping the Church of Christ identity by not joining the UCCJ, however, did not last for the whole duration of the war. When the Pacific War began in December 1941, Hiratsuka was in charge of the ministry of two congregations in Tokyo, the Kamitomizaka church and the Zoshigaya church. J. M. McCaleb previously led Zoshigaya church, but Hiratsuka had taken over its responsibility after McCaleb went back to the United States just before the war began. Serving the two churches soon became quite difficult for Hiratsuka, who was in his late sixties and early seventies during that time. Thus, the two congregations were united as one congregation in 1943, and it joined the UCCJ.48

Hiratsuka’s ambivalence about joining the UCCJ during wartime is indicated in what he wrote in English after the war. Hiratsuka reclaimed his Church of Christ identity by leaving the UCCJ after the war, but he did not tell the members of US Churches of Christ the full or exact details of what happened during the war, when he reported the incident in the history of the Kamitomizaka church. When he wrote in English about the state of Japanese Churches of Christ during the war, he stated:

The war unfortunately started, to our great grief, in December 1941. We continued the work for two years in that way. However, we elders had a conference with the members of the two churches in September 1943. It was decided to unite those two churches, Kamitomizaka and Zoshigaya, naming it “Toshima Zoshigaya Church of Christ.” And we had a conference, also, to have Brother Suematsu SAITO as minister of that church.49

The English name of the new congregation, Toshima Zoshigaya Church of Christ, would seem to indicate that the congregation was part of the Churches of Christ. However, the correct name of the congregation was actually, “Nihon Kirisutokyodan Toshima Zoshigaya Kyokai,” which should be translated as “Toshima Zoshigaya Church of the United Church of Christ in Japan (UCCJ).” This slight alteration in the translation of the church’s name seems to show Hiratsuka’s struggle to identify himself with the US Church of Christ circle, as well as his knowledge of how the correct name might sound negatively in the context of doctrinal exclusivism most US Church of Christ members held to at that time.

Whatever Hiratsuka’s intention of changing the church’s name might have been, the occasion of the Kamitomizaka/Zoshigaya church joining the Japanese federation of Protestants points to the complexity of how Japanese members struggled with the Church of Christ identity. At a first glance, the initial decision of Japanese Church of Christ leaders to stay away from the UCCJ may seem to indicate their willingness to keep the purity of their denominational identity. If so, Hiratsuka’s alteration of the name of the new church in Tokyo, in his post-WWII report to US Churches of Christ, may be seen as his embarrassment over the defilement of the presumed Church of Christ purity. However, it must be noted here that the ways Kamitomizaka members kept their Church of Christ identity was different from the ways US Church of Christ members kept their group identity. Kamitomizaka church was part of the global Church of Christ fellowship and shared some of the fellowship’s core doctrinal beliefs. Kamitomizaka church, however, was unique in terms of the ways its members associated with the members of other denominations.

As such, it is possible to interpret that a defilement of the presumed purity of the global Church of Christ identity, or the expansion of the global Church of Christ identity of the time, took place when Japanese Churches of Christ did not join the UCCJ and stayed as an independent group. At that time, the Japanese Churches of Christ in a sense expressed their loyalty to US missionaries and affirmed their way of keeping the Church of Christ identity. The Japanese Churches of Christ’s reaffirmation of belonging to the (global) Church of Christ fellowship also meant that a rather unique doctrinal practice, namely the openness to and associations with the members of other denominations, entered into the (global) fellowship of the Churches of Christ. In other words, the nature of global Church of Christ fellowship was altered by having Japanese churches in the fellowship. Such alteration was a significant result of missionary interactions, or crossing of cultural boundaries across the Pacific.

Conclusions

The genius of the Kamitomizaka church lies in Hiratsuka’s effort to honor, in an exquisite balance, imperial Japan’s national identity and the distinctive Church of Christ identity. Hiratsuka and Kamitomizaka members shared the common understanding of the Japanese national identity centered on the Japanese emperor. Hiratsuka’s sense of national identity was also somewhat expanded as he acquired deeper awareness of US culture and better English skills. It is noteworthy that Hiratsuka’s transnational experience was at least partially prompted by his Christian commitment. In fact, both US Church of Christ missionaries and Hiratsuka crossed national and cultural boundaries, and the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ was a fruit of such interactions.

Hiratsuka dealt with the issues of the Church of Christ identity in ambivalent ways. His initial awareness of the Church of Christ identity was vague. One could argue that Hiratsuka found his ministerial position at the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ almost by chance or simply because he was trying to find a job. Also, the Kamitomizaka church was different from most US Churches of Christ of the day, as its members enjoyed a wider association with the members of other denominations. Nonetheless, Hiratsuka was also one who would honor the distinctive doctrines and practices of the Church of Christ heritage. The fact that Hiratsuka and the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ kept having a wider association with the members of other denominations can be interpreted as the expansion of the Church of Christ identity at a global level.

Yukikazu Obata is Assistant Professor of Christian Education at Ibaraki Christian University (Ibaraki, Japan). He has served as senior minister at Mito Church of Christ in Japan and has studied at Keio University, Abilene Christian University, Harding School of Theology, and Fuller Theological Seminary. He is contributor to Reconciliation Reconsidered: Advancing the National Conversation on Race in Churches of Christ (ACU Press, 2016).

†Adapted from a summary of ch. 4, “A Church Built at a Crossroads: US Missionaries, Yunosuke Hiratsuka, and the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ in Tokyo” in Yukikazu Obata, “Against the Odds: J. M. McCaleb’s Missionary Vision of Universality in the Context of Imperial Japan, 1892–1945” (PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 2016), presented at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 7–9, 2017.

1 Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), xvi; Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 32.

2 For the incorporation of transnational studies in the history of missions, see, for example, essays in Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad Skeie, eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Unto the Ends of the World (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

3 Thus, Robert Hooper names the period of 1906–1930 as “a search for direction” for the Churches of Christ. Gary Holloway and Douglas Foster characterize the period of 1906–1941 as a time when “the Churches of Christ develop an identity” and when “a distinctive church takes shape.” Robert E. Hooper, A Distinct People: A History of the Churches of Christ in the 20th Century (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing, 1993); Gary Holloway and Douglas A. Foster, Renewing God’s People: A Concise History of Churches of Christ, 2nd ed. (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2006).

4 Kiyoko Takeda, Ningenkan no Sokoku: Kindai Nihon no Shiso to Kirisutokyo [Conflicting vews of human nature] (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1959), 248–51.

5 Hiratsuka wrote autobiographies in English and in Japanese: Yunosuke Hiratsuka, The Autobiography of Yunosuke Hiratsuka: Evangelist of the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ in Tokyo, Japan (1952), Unpublished manuscript, William J. Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Brown Library, Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX; Yunosuke Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi [Living peacefully in God: autobiography of Yunosuke Hiratsuka], ed. Keiichi Hiratsuka (Tokyo: Yorudansha, [1933–1936] 1989).

6 For example, see Akio Dohi, Tenno to Kirisuto: Kin-gendai Tennosei to Kirisutokyo no Kyokaishiteki Kosatsu [Christ and the Emperor of Japan] (Tokyo: Shinkyo Shuppansha, 2012), 396.

7 Ishiguro later became the minister for the Japanese Church of Christ in Los Angeles, California, USA.

8 Kamitomizaka Kirisutokyokai Nisshi [The diary of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ, January 1905–March 1944], Special Collection, Ibaraki Christian University Library, Ibaraki, Japan, February 15, 1911.

9 See, for example, the case of Toyohiko Kagawa in Thomas John Hastings, Seeing All Things Whole: The Scientific Mysticism and Art of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015), 20.

10 J. M. McCaleb, Once Traveled Roads (Nashville: Gospel Advocate Company, 1934), 94; Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 41.

11 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 42, 56.

12 Another US Church of Christ missionary, Loduska Wirick, who was also involved in the work of Tokyo Temperance Union, had some connection with Nemoto, too. Nemoto even spoke at Wirick’s funeral, held in Tokyo in 1914. Fred Eugene Hagin, “Miss Loduska J. Wirick,” in The Christian Movement in Japan 1914, ed. John Lincoln Dearing (Tokyo: Conference of Federated Missions Japan, 1914), 361.

13 Nemoto Sho Kenshokai Chosaiinkai, ed., Nemoto Sho no Shogai [The life of Sho Nemoto] (Nakamachi, Ibaraki, Japan: Nemoto Sho Kenshokai, 2001).

14 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 62.

15 Masunori Hiratsuka, “Chichi oyobi Masakazu wo Shinobite [In rememberance of my father and Masakazu],” Jisenyoko [Reminiscences of Yunusuke and Hanako Hiratsuka], ed. Michio Hiratsuka and Masunori Hiratsuka (Chiba, Japan: Hiroike Gakuen Shuppanbu, 1967), 139–140; Tsuneo Komai, ed., Sohu Hiratsuka Yunosuke no Ashiato: Kenbunroku III [The footprints of grandfather Yunosuke Hiratsuka: Travel report III] (Sakura, Chiba, Japan: Kounsha, 2009).

16 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 175.

17 Michael J. Kimura Angevine and Ryo Yoshida, “Contexts for a History of Asian American Presbyterian Churches: A Case Study of the Early History of Japanese American Presbyterians,” The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 297.

18 The Committee of Presbyterian Japanese Missions on the Coast, ed., The Spirit of Japan, with Selected Poems and Addresses of Ernest Adolphus Sturge (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker, 1903), 130.

19 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 64.

20 Ibid., 83–101.

21 Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, Shihkuinsho Kenkyu [Studies in four Gospels], trans. Kenichi Inazawa and Yunosuke Hiratsuka (Tokyo: Chuyodo, 1904).

22 Hiratsuka, “Autobiography of Yunosuke Hiratsuka,” 16.

23 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 66 (my translation).

24 Ibid., 82–83.

25 Ryo Yoshida, “A Socio-historical Study of Racial/Ethnic Identity in the Inculturated Religious Expression of Japanese Christianity in San Francisco, 1877–1924” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological, Union, 1989). On E. A. Sturge’s admiration of Japanese culture, see: Ryo Yoshida, “Earnest A Sturge, the Japanese People, and Culture in California, 1885–1922,” American Presbyterians 74, no. 1 (1996): 17–29.

26 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 113–14.

27 Ibid., 114.

28 Hiratsuka, “Autobiography of Yunosuke Hiratsuka,” 24.

29 Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 115.

30 William J. Bishop, “Bishop-Hiratsuka Japan Mission,” Christian Leader and the Way (May 3, 1910): 4.

31 According to Hiratsuka, McCaleb preached at Kamitomizaka the first Sunday Hiratsuka visited, as well as other times around this period. Hiratsuka, Kami ni yorite Yasushi, 116, 119, 123.

32 Ibid., 116. The English narrative of this part is as follows: “‘Willingly,’ I answered, ‘It is a great favor of God, if I can help your work.’” Hiratsuka, “Autobiography of Yunosuke Hiratsuka,” 26.

33 Richard H. Drummond, A History of Christianity in Japan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 245; Tomobumi Kurokawa, Nihonshi ni okeru Kirisutokyosenkyo: Senkyokatsudo to Hito wo Chushin ni [Christian missions in the history of Japan: focused on mission activities and people] (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 2014), 218–35.

34 The total number included the result of meetings held in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and other parts of China. Zenkoku Kyodo Dendo Iin, ed., Sannen Keizoku Zenkoku Kyodo Dendo [Three-year cooperative campaign of evangelism] (Tokyo: Zenkoku Kyodo Dendo Iin, 1918), 62–63.

35 “Kamitomizaka Church Diary,” October 10-11, 1914; May 1-2, 1915; May 20-21, 1916; and November 1-2, 1916.

36 Yunosuke Hiratsuka, “Kirisutokyo no Nidaireiten [The two important sacraments of Christianity],” Kamitomizaka Kirisutokyokai Geppo [Monthly newsletter, Kamitomizaka Church of Christ], May 15, 1934, 1.

37 Ibid.

38 See, for example, June 1934, December 1936, and August 1938 issues.

39 “Kamitomizaka Church Diary,” January 16, 1935. Attendees (and their churches) were: Hiratsuka (Kamitomizaka church), Fujimori (Sawara), Aoki (Zoshigaya), Yanai (Musashino), Shigekuni (Ota church), Horiguchi (Omiya), Akutsu (Nagasawa), Kakinuma (Shizuoka), Takaboshi (Ohara), Tadamichi Fujimori (Sawara), Mio (Sawara), and Tsubaki (Sawara), along with two “observers,” Elder Tomeji Yokowo (Kamitomizaka) and missionary Lily Cypert (Musashino).

40 “Bible women” were local female Christians who helped evangelizing and ministering to other women and children on the mission field, particularly in East and South Asia. Mission historians have noted the significance of their service. See, for example, Ruth A. Tucker, “The Role of Bible Women in World Evangelism,” Missiology: An International Review 13, no. 2 (April 1985): 133–46.

41 See, for example, pages of September through October, 1917 in “Kamitomizaka Church Diary.”

42 “Kamitomizaka Church Diary,” January 16, 1935.

43 Debra B. Hull, Kathy J. Pulley, and Eleanor A. Daniel, “Women in Ministry,” in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 779. This is not to deny any possibility of exceptions. In fact, Daniel Sommer, an early twentieth century Church of Christ leader who was otherwise very conservative, allowed women to lead prayers. Newell D. Williams, Douglas A. Foster, and Paul M. Blowers, eds., The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2013), 73.

44 Yunosuke Hiratsuka, “History of the Church in Japan (History of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ), 1952,” Unpublished manuscript, William J. Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Brown Library, Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX; Takehiko Ueno and Michio Hiratsuka, eds., Kamitomizaka Kirisutokyokai Sanjunenshi [History of the thirty years of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ] (Tokyo: Kamitomiaza Kirisutokyokai, 1928).

45 McCaleb wrote, “Our Japanese brethren are much inclined to go into it [UCCJ]. . . . Brother Hiratsuka said they wanted to go into this federation to save the work for which I had given my life, but I replied that I had rather see every church building closed and the brethren remain true than have them remain open to teach error.” J. M. McCaleb, “Mine a Separated Life,” Gospel Advocate, January 2, 1942, 8.

46 Otoshige Fujimori, “Gisei to Shintaisei [The new order and our sacrifice],” Michishirube, May, 1941, 2–3.

47 Back in the US, McCaleb expressed his satisfaction over such decision. J. M. McCaleb, “Brother J. M. McCaleb’s Comment,” Christian Ledger, February 17, 1942, 3.

48 The process of joining UCCJ is recorded in Hiratsuka, “History of the Church in Japan (History of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ), 1952”; Ueno and Hiratsuka, Kamitomizaka Sanjunenshi [Thirty years of Kamitomizaka Church].

49 Hiratsuka, “History of the Church in Japan (History of Kamitomizaka Church of Christ), 1952,” 39.

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Early Twentieth-Century Unity among Stone-Campbell Movement Congregations in Southern Africa: Emphasizing the Gospel over Ecclesiastical Traditions

This article argues that when the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches, part of the Stone-Campbell Movement, were established in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, during the early nineteenth century, they worked harmoniously through the uniting efforts of John Sherriff, a stonemason-cum-missionary. His demise in 1935 and the influx of young Western missionaries, particularly North Americans from the a cappella branch of the Churches of Christ gradually brought the peripheral, supposedly doctrinal issues that since then have divided the movement in southern Africa.

Unity was the fulcrum of the Stone-Campbell Movement (SCM) from its genesis,1 as Hiram J. Lester notes:

For the several indigenous American reform movements that coalesced into this unique American reformation, especially for Thomas and Alexander Campbell (and Barton W. Stone), Christian union was the ‘polar star’ from the first . . . and TC’s [Thomas Campbell’s] Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington (1809) and Stone’s Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804)—are recognised as seminal documents in American ecumenism; each places heavy emphasis on Christian Unity.2

Unfortunately, the movement started showing seeds of division, which, according to David Edwin Harrell Jr., were realized around 1865 when “two distinct emphases emerged. One group conceived of Christianity in the denominational framework of practical religion, social and political activism, and, often, a nationalistic postmillennialism. A second group emphasized the sectarian tradition of Biblical legalism, a fanatical disposition, and uncompromising separation from the world.”3

This paper argues that, historically, when John Sherriff, who identified with the first group, brought the SCM from New Zealand to the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1897, he worked harmoniously with missionaries from the two groups.4 Sherriff’s evangelistic methodology included cooperating physically and spiritually with missionaries from all the branches of the SCM and even other Christian fellowships. He was pragmatic, convinced that the ecclesiastical traditions in the SCM which were gradually elevated to doctrines were an obstruction and not fundamental to the autochthones’ quest for salvation. This was cultural baggage that impeded spiritual growth in indigenous Christians; hence, he worked with Western missionaries from the SCM irrespective of their country of origin or ecclesiastical differences.

The Genesis of Work in Southern Rhodesia

From 1897 to 1935, all churches in Southern Rhodesia that identified with the Stone-Campbell Movement—Church of Christ–Non-Instrumental and Church of Christ–Instrumental (at times called the Christian Church)—originated from Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, where John Sherriff, a stonemason-cum-self-trained missionary, had established Forest Vale Mission (FVM) in 1907, which eventually became his base of operation. Sherriff was a native of New Zealand and a member of the Churches of Christ that came to South Africa in 1896 searching for new opportunities. These churches identified themselves as the Associated Churches of Christ of New Zealand (ACCNZ).5 His evangelistic work grew after establishing a night school for the indigenous workers whom he also taught the Bible.

Mission centres were in vogue as a nucleus for Christianity. Simon Gqubule argues, “Education and missionaries have always travelled together.”6 For Sherriff, the establishment of Christian schools was not his major mission to southern Africa, but serendipitously, it became his enduring legacy in the SCM. His life-changing experience came, as he explained it, when he was

strolling one dark night to the native Location where all natives had to live, about a mile out of town. ‘Methinks it was the Holy Spirit that led me to a dim light in a rough boarded school-house. Looking through the openings in the planks I saw a group of some twenty natives standing with slates and books in hand, writing and reading, while another boy stood in the middle holding up a small lantern which was their only light. As I watched them from the outer darkness my soul was stirred within me; I determined right there, that by God’s help and blessing I would try and help those natives. I bought some canvas and closed off a small corner of my Bachelor’s kaya, (room) and started school with one native and a candle, 7:30 P.M., and again my first scholar became my first convert, interpreter, teacher and preacher—now ‘Asleep in Jesus.’7

This was the defining moment in Sherriff’s life. His entire life was given to the fruition of this goal: educating indigenous Africans for the cause of Christ in southern Africa. He argued, modestly, “I am neither a writer nor preacher, but only a converted stone mason with a sincere desire to work at Christianity, that by all means I may bring some a knowledge of the truth, and to the dear Saviour I found.”8 Through educating the indigenous people, Sherriff was the catalytic agent in the SCM in southern Africa.

After analysing the indigene’s insatiable quest for education, Sherriff, who was not a qualified educator, wrote, “On Feb. 2, 1898, [barely six months after his arrival in Southern Rhodesia], I started my native school with one scholar, George McKenna, and on Feb. 9 got another scholar, Agrippa Mzozoiyana.”9

When the SCM started in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Sherriff was concerned with bringing people to Christ without paying close attention to the issues that divided the two groups. Writing to D. C. Jones in 1910, he observed: “Debating and quarrelling about the questionable methods some are using in doing the work, methinks, will not satisfy the Master when he comes and expects to find that work done.”10 This became Sherriff’s guiding principle in executing the SCM mission in southern Africa. He embraced the two groups for the sake of the gospel.

Sherriff’s Work Supported by All Branches of the SCM

When Sherriff settled in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, that city became the de facto “head-office” for the emerging SCM. He received financial support from SCM churches based in the USA, New Zealand, and on a limited scale from Britain and Australia.11 These churches had diverse theologies of mission, but Sherriff was not concerned with polemics and peripheral issues. He believed in accomplishing the Lord’s work; therefore, he accepted anyone who identified with the SCM.

For example, in 1906 he welcomed Francis Leslie Hadfield, the first missionary commissioned to Zimbabwe by the Churches of Christ in New Zealand. Sherriff described Hadfield as a young man who “was born in London [England] and brought up in New Zealand, before giving himself up wholly to the Lord’s work. [He was] a mechanic in the cycle [repairing] business.”12 Hadfield mainly worked with churches and institutions that received financial support from missionary societies, autonomous congregations, and individuals who identified with the ACCNZ.13 W. N. Short and his family were the first missionaries commissioned by the non-instrumental branch of the SCM to Africa—Zambia to be precise. Short’s family was followed by the Dow Merritt family; these were the “dew breakers”14 for the non-instrumental branch, yet they were all acclimatized into the mission field by Sherriff, a man who had roots in the ACCNZ.

Sherriff also worked comfortably with missionaries from other Christian churches that did not share the same theological views with some branches of the SCM, especially the non-instrumental branch, which was known for disparaging, if not demonizing, other Christian fellowships.15 On paper, Sherriff slightly agreed with this practice, but on the ground, he was practically accommodative. Bulawayo, the location of FVM, if not the whole of Matabeleland, receives little rains when compared to other parts of Zimbabwe. Consequently, Sherriff constructed an underground water tank with the assistance of missionaries from the Brethren In Christ Church (BICC). In 1908 they also assisted him in ploughing FVM fields resulting in having an abundant harvest, which Sherriff acknowledged when he wrote Brother Brown: “The good Matopo missionaries (known as ‘Brethren in Christ’) came in thirty miles each way, brought a big plow, and plowed up several acres for me . . . and helped me fix up the guttering and spouting round the house connecting it with the tank. ‘God bless them for the labour of love.’ ”16

Getting assistance from or cooperating with other Christian fellowships is the hallmark of ecumenism that Sherriff exemplified by commending the BICC and asking God’s rich blessings upon their labours. Such statements came from a visionary leader, who, after analyzing his situation, concluded that the SCM could not work on its own without cooperating with other Christian churches. This irenic spirit evidenced in his own life and work was shared with his pioneer students, whom he called “mustard seeds.”17

The Deployment of “Mustard Seeds”

After the establishment of FVM, Sherriff’s indefatigable efforts saw the fellowship spreading into three other southern African countries: Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), and the northern parts of the Union of South Africa, in particular the Roodeport area. Sherriff did plant the seed in southern Africa, but it was his “scholars,” or “boys,” who opened schools and churches. Unfortunately, they did not have financial resources to make those institutions flourish. When Western missionaries arrived on the scene with money, they became the “founders,” yet the indigene had started the work. This argument concurs with Terence Ranger’s point: “From the very beginning, African catechists and teachers bore the main burden of conversion. European missionaries were few. . . . In many places the first news of Christianity was brought by the African catechist; in nearly all places the continuing presence of Christian influence depended upon the resident catechist or teacher.”18 This is true of the SCM work in southern Africa, starting with the Zambian work that was pioneered by Peter Masiya.19

Peter Masiya the Founder of Zambian Work

Masiya, according to Sam Shewmaker, was originally from Mozambique and came to Southern Rhodesia as a cook after the Ndebele and Shona uprising (1896–97). He joined Sherriff and “then went down to Lovedale School in South Africa for three years.”20 Sherriff disclosed that Masiya was the first native missionary from FVM, who in 1913 “opened up a mission with the consent of the native commissioner and the Chief Makuni at Chief Makuni’s Kraal, seven miles out of Livingstone. [By 1913 he had] . . . fourteen converts.”21 Similarly, Sherriff wrote that Makuni was a “very promising mission started some seven miles out of Livingstone. . . . One of my best boys is in charge of it.”22 New Zealand was supporting Masiya with two pounds a month, and in 1916 he had twenty-eight church members.23 Peter Masiya, with the assistance of the local community, built Mujala School and had a good congregation meeting when Sherriff visited him along with a new missionary, W. N. Short, in 1922. Short returned with his family and others in 1923, “building Sinde Mission one mile from Mujala village where Peter was working.”24 Sinde Mission was “built” on Masiya’s influence and nurtured by Sherriff. Masiya was trained and deployed by Sherriff, a missionary from the instrumental branch, receiving financial support from this church, yet he worked harmoniously with Short, who was coming from the non-instrumental. This was the same situation in Malawi.

Elaton Kundago in Malawi

Mission historiography acknowledges that the work in Nyasaland (Malawi) was founded by Elaton Kundago, who was the “first preacher of the Churches of Christ in Malawi . . . [after he] became a Christian in Cape Town in 1906. Kundago returned to preach near Blantyre, Nyasaland.”25 After pointing out this fact, mission historiography pays attention to the Western missionaries’ achievements and not much is mentioned about Kundago. At any rate, Kundago, after working a few months, met Joseph Booth, an Australian pastor who was working with various denominations. Booth wrote on Kundago’s behalf to the British Churches of Christ to send a missionary to support the SCM work.26 George Hills and George Hubert Hollis came to Nyasaland in response to Booth’s letter. The Western missionaries came in to reinforce and build on the foundation that had been erected by the indigenous evangelist.27 Kundago worked with these missionaries and got moral and financial support from the British Churches of Christ.

Kundago, as Sherriff’s student and disciple, demonstrated his teacher’s all-inclusive spirit. Godi Karimanzira, who was baptized on February 8, 1925, at Wuyu Wuyu by Jack Mzirwa, confirmed that the divisions that existed overseas were not recognized in the mission field. He said, “When [John] Sherriff brought the Church of Christ into this country, he preached the gospel and many people were baptised, there were no divisions. . . between Dadaya [Mission] and Nhowe [Mission] we were one.”28 Therefore, according to Karimanzira, Sherriff was concerned with the cardinals of the gospel. Other issues were excess baggage.29

Jack Mzirwa in Mashonaland, Zimbabwe

Our last example is Jack Mzirwa of Macheke, Mashonaland, in Zimbabwe. The work in Mashonaland was championed by Mzirwa who was, just like Masiya and Kundago, a product of FVM, from where he was deployed initially to Northern Rhodesia in 1913. He worked for two years, opening Siyankobe Mission, which eventually closed its doors in 1915 due to inadequate funding. He went back home and started a school at Guyu, Macheke. In 1919, the British colonial government forcefully moved Guyu residents from their land to make way for the white commercial farmers. They were settled in tribal trust lands or reserves, which did not have fertile soils, as confirmed by Michael Bourdillon: “Many tribal areas are situated in rocky and hilly country with shallow sandy soils covering sparsely arable land. In some places, people were originally moved off better land to make way for white farmers and resettled in the less arable country of neighbouring chiefdoms.”30 This is exactly what happened to Mzirwa’s people, the VaNhowe, under Chief Mangwende, who settled in the Masunzwe and Wuyu Wuyu areas.31

Mzirwa opened a school in Wuyu Wuyu in 1919, although officially it was started in 1926 when Sherriff, in the company of Dow Merritt, met with the indigenous leadership and concluded that the patriarch missionary must seek permission from the Native Commissioner to formalize the nascent institution. Merritt had arrived in Bulawayo in 1926 on his way to Northern Rhodesia as a missionary under the non-instrumental branch, following in W. N. Short’s footsteps. Immediately after Merritt’s arrival, Sherriff told him that he wanted to visit Mzirwa, who was “teaching school and preaching in his community, in Mashonaland [Wuyu Wuyu], in a native reservation east of Salisbury, over 400 miles from Bulawayo.”32 On arrival, the spiritual and social ambience overwhelmed the two missionaries. Dow Merritt wrote, “There were about 300 in the congregation. Mr. Sherriff was both surprised and pleased. He reacted by saying, “It is time that we were taking care of these people!” He made up his mind then and there to establish a mission at Wuyu Wuyu.”33 At the missionaries’ arrival the Wuyu Wuyu congregation had constructed a pole and mud church building-cum-classroom.

In 1927, Sherriff moved from FVM to Wuyu Wuyu, erecting durable buildings including a church building that is still standing today. The mission closed its doors when Sherriff was on his deathbed. He wrote:

W. N. Short, who has been in charge of the Huyuyu Mission since I was compelled to leave it on account of my health breaking down, has now informed me that he has the mind of the brethren so far as he was able to get it, and their advice or instructions were to let the mission go and remove what he was able to do. So far as I know, he will now be pulling to pieces the buildings I and my family struggled to erect and over which I ruined my health. What I thought was the crowning and closing work of my life would now appear to be the biggest blunder and mistake I have made during my thirty-seven years’ experience in Rhodesia.34

Wuyu Wuyu Mission closed its doors in 1935 because W. N. Short insisted that students should use cash to pay school fees while parents wanted to use agricultural products. This led to a heated debate leading to the closure of the mission.

Separation Predicated on Different Missiologies

John Sherriff passed on in 1935, robbing the SCM in southern Africa of a forcefully uniting missionary. His death brought gradually the furtive division between the instrumental and non-instrumental branches to the surface. This was compounded by the arrival of young enthusiastic North American missionaries after the Second World War, particularly from the non-instrumental branch in the 1950s. It should be noted that Garfield Todd, the iconic missionary from the New Zealand Churches of Christ, had arrived in Southern Rhodesia in 1934. Throughout his life, Todd worked harmoniously with the two streams as a unifying force compared to his colleagues from North America.35 Gradually, the overt divisions seen overseas in the SCM became a common feature in southern Africa, because missionaries from the USA utilized different missiological strategies from those used by their New Zealand counterparts. The instrumental branch used a loosely hierarchical organizational structure that accepted missionary societies in supervising and funding its work. This branch was open to ecumenism denoting “the Mission of God that transcends denominations and cultures and that urges all the whole People of God to get involved in Mission.”36

Interestingly, as these young missionaries from the non-instrumental branch were zealously fomenting divisions, their theological landscape in North America was going through a metamorphosis. Douglas Foster contends: “Beginning in the late 1950s Carl Ketcherside . . . and Leroy Garret . . . of Churches of Christ called for a rejection of the exclusivism that had come to characterize the more conservative streams of the [Stone-Campbell] Movement. This call included acceptance of believers in all streams of the Movement as well as in other Christian bodies.”37

Although Sherriff and his students worked with other Christians from the denominational world, they openly recognized members of the SCM as their brothers and sisters. For example, Karimanzira said, “One of my sons was educated at Dadaya Mission, in Belingwe; this is one of our missions. We have the same roots and teaching. Of course, we differ on one area, the use of instruments, but otherwise we are one.”38 The indigene acknowledged this thriving fellowship, which was reciprocated by both missionaries and indigenous Christians from the instrumental branch. Although the spirit of inclusiveness was beginning to permeate in the non-instrumental branch in the USA, missionaries from this branch in southern Africa were still sectarian.

The Letter by Missionaries Who Saw Divisive Seeds

A typical example was the case of a controversial preacher from the non-instrumental branch who tried to join the instrumental branch. The board responsible for ministers at Dadaya Mission (instrumental branch) wrote a letter to the minister-in-charge at Nhowe Mission, part of which reads:

We wish to be informed about Mr . . . the man who was once minister in your Church but is now living in Salisbury. The above gentleman has applied for vacancy to minister in our Church. Thus we cannot assess his application fairly without the relevant information on him. We therefore ask you to bring us into light regarding Mr . . .’s qualification as minister; his character; his ability and any other aspect of his life which is relevant to ministering the Gospel.39

Whether Nhowe replied or not, two years after the controversial preacher’s application to join the instrumental branch, in response to a letter from a Church of Christ congregation in the USA where the preacher had gone to raise funds, a group of missionaries wrote: “BROTHER . . . IS NOT SOUND IN THE FAITH. About nine months before brother . . . left for the States, he applied to the Christian Church [instrumental branch] to work ‘as Minister’ for them. He was willing for money to promote false doctrine.”40

This correspondence shows the attitude of non-instrumental branch members concerning the theological views of those in the instrumental branch. Missionaries from the non-instrumental branch viewed those in the Christian Church (instrumental branch) as teaching false doctrine because they believed, among other issues, in having mission work funded and supervised by a missionary society. Ironically, the same North American missionaries (from the non-instrumental branch) who denounced a preacher from their branch who was applying for a job with the instrumental branch had, in 1969, approached Dadaya Mission, which is affiliated with the instrumental branch, for a qualified secondary school headmaster, since there was no qualified candidate in the non-instrumental branch. Graham Whaley was seconded to Nhowe Mission, as the first headmaster for the secondary school, where he groomed Jeremiah Masaraure (1939–2009) who had just graduated from the University College of Rhodesia with a BA in English.41

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper humbly calls upon all southern African members of the SCM, the Restoration Movement, particularly the indigenous leaders, to reconsider their ahistorical and exclusivist deportment and appropriate “ecumenical” lessons exemplified by their movement’s founders/mustard seeds: John Sherriff, Elaton Kundago, Peter Masiya and Jack Mzirwa. These leaders’ period, 1897–1935, if we can borrow from Mark Husbands’s analysis of the early church, constitutes “an incomparable source for the contemporary renewal”42 of unity in and between the Churches of Christ/Christian Church, Christian Church/Disciples of Christ, and Churches of Christ.43 These men led a movement that acknowledged “doctrinal” and methodological differences while uniting and participating in what God was accomplishing in southern Africa. It was the halcyon era of the SCM in southern Africa that led to the founding of iconic mission centers such as Sinde, Kabanga, Namwianga, Forest Vale Mission, Dadaya, Wuyu Wuyu, and Nhowe.44 This paper suggests that our founders pleaded for unity in the SCM while acknowledging diversity, yet that unity gradually eluded the SCM in southern Africa after the death of Sherriff in 1935. While after the end of World War II, the influx of young zealous North American missionaries sowed seeds of division, my hope is that today’s African church leaders can bear better fruit by choosing to follow an early generation’s lead by planting “mustard seeds” of unity in Christ.

Paul S. Chimhungwe received his PhD in Christian Theology (Church History) from McMaster Divinity College. He teaches at African Christian College in Manzini, Swaziland.

†Adapted from a presentation at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 7–9, 2017.

1 The Stone-Campbell Movement is made up of four major branches: the Disciples of Christ (the Christian Church), the Churches of Christ, the Churches of Christ/Christian Church—the four Cs—and finally the Boston Movement, now called the International Churches of Christ. Michael W. Casey and Douglas A. Foster argue that the Boston Movement is a “child of the Stone-Campbell tradition.” Michael W. Casey and Douglas A. Foster, “The Renaissance of Stone-Campbell Studies: An Assessment and New Directions,” in The Stone-Campbell Movement: An International Religious Tradition, ed. Michael W. Casey and Douglas A. Foster, 35, (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2002). On unity see Douglas A. Foster, “Unity, Christian,” in The Encyclopaedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 754–58.

2 Hiram J. Lester, “The Form and Function of the Declaration and Address,” in The Quest for Christian Unity, Peace, and Purity in Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address: Text and Studies, ed. Thomas H. Olbricht and Hans Rollmann (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2000), 173–92. Along the same lines, Lester argues that “the pervasive concern of the Address [Declaration and Address] is Christian unity, and most of its content is devoted to that goal or, more precisely, to the perniciousness of the sin of sectarian division.”

3 David Edwin Harrell Jr., A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, vol. 1, Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 60.

4 Sherriff came from the Associated Churches of Christ in New Zealand, which used instruments in public worship services and supported missionary efforts through missionary societies. These were the major issues that gradually divided the SCM in the USA beginning in 1849. The division was formalised in 1906. In Southern Rhodesia, the SCM was represented initially by the Church of Christ–Non-Instrumental and the Church of Christ–Instrumental, also known as the Christian Church, both of which sent missionaries to that country during the twentieth century. The Disciples were not represented in the Rhodesias or Nyasaland during the period under review.

5 The SCM came to New Zealand from Britain. See Lyndsay Jacobs, “New Zealand,” in The Encyclopaedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 563–66.

6 Simon Gqubule, “Theological Education in the Church of the Province of South Africa (CPSA),” in Archbishop Tutu: Prophetic Witness in South Africa, ed. Leonard Dugmore Hulley and Louise Kretzschmar (Johannesburg: Weaver, 1997), 211–21.

7 George Pepperdine, Information about Missionary Work of the Loyal Churches of Christ in Africa: The Dark Continent (Los Angeles: H. D. Armstrong, n.d.), 12–13.

8 John Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission: South Africa,” Christian Leader and the Way (9 August 1910): 2–3.

9 Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission: South Africa,” 2–3.

10 Ibid., 2–3.

11 See his audited financial statements: Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission: Eighth Annual Report,” Christian Leader (27 February 1917): 6.

12 Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission: South Africa,” 2–3. Hadfield became a successful businessperson and politician. In 1921 he became a member of the Southern Rhodesian Ruling Council representing the Bulawayo area. See L. H. Gann, A History of Southern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1934 (London: Longmans, 1958), 242, 255.

13 Murray J. Savage, Achievement: Fifty Years of Missionary Witness in Southern Rhodesia (Wellington, NZ: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1949), 10.

14 This expression refers to pioneer missionaries and was borrowed from Dow Merritt, The Dew Breakers (Nashville, TN: World Vision, 1971).

15 For example, Leroy Brownlow, after quoting Matthew 16:18 where Christ says, “And upon this rock I will build my church,” writes, “It is certain that no church can be the scriptural church unless it was founded by Christ. If a church was founded by Henry VIII, John Calvin, John Wesley, Joseph Smith, Jr., or any other human being, that church is unquestionably human.” Leroy Brownlow, Why I Am a Member of the Church of Christ (Fort Worth: Brownlow, 1973), 7.

16 John Sherriff, “South Africa: Forest Vale Mission, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, April 6, 1908,” Christian Leader and The Way (July 1908): 13.

17 Sam Shewmaker, ed., Great Light Dawning: Profiles of Christian Faith in Africa (Searcy, AR: Drumbeat), 114.

18 Terence O. Ranger, The African Churches of Tanzania, Historical Association of Tanzania Paper No. 5 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House: 1969): 1–29.

19 The SCM work in Zambia was championed by Peter Masiya and Jack Mzirwa from Zimbabwe. Mzirwa gave two years, 1914–15, to mission work before going back to Zimbabwe, where he finally founded Wuyu Wuyu Mission in Mrewa.

20 Shewmaker, Great Light Dawning, 15.

21 Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission, Bulawayo, Rhodesia/Fifth Annual Report,” Christian Leader and The Way (7 January 1913): 13.

22 Sherriff, “Forest Vale Mission, Bulawayo, Rhodesia, Nov. 29, 1915,” Christian Leader (18 January 1916): 13.

23 Ibid.

24 Shewmaker, Great Light Dawning, 16.

25 Paul A. Williams, Stanley E. Granberg, Paul M. Blowers, and Edgar J. Elliston, “Africa, Missions in,” in The Encyclopaedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 7–9.

26 Ibid.

27 Although Kundago later on left the SCM family, it is interesting to note that he was converted in Cape Town, though John Sherriff gave a different location. Sherriff wrote in 1909 that “Bro. Ellerton Kondago [sic] (who is a Bulawayo convert)” was shouldering the work in Nyasaland. John Sherriff, “South Africa: Forest Vale Mission,” The Christian Leader and Way (27 February 1909): 2.

28 Godi Karimanzira, interview by Paul S. Chimhungwe, 1 October 1991.

29 Nonetheless, Short gradually became divisive after the death of Sherriff. Merritt, who was based in Zambia, worked mainly within the confines of the non-instrumental branch, because the instrumental branch did not plant many churches during this period.

30 Michael F. C. Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples: An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to their Religion (Gweru: Mambo, 1976), 76.

31 This was not unique to Southern Rhodesia; it was occurring in South Africa as well. That is why Nelson Mandela once argued in court that “I am without land because the White minority has taken a lion’s share of my country and forced me to occupy poverty-stricken Reserves, over-populated and over-stocked. We are ravaged by starvation and disease.” Nelson Mandela, No Easy Walk to Freedom (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1973), 174.

32 Merritt, 15.

33 Ibid., 17.

34 John Sherriff, “A Foreign Mission Closed,” Gospel Advocate (6 December 1934): 117.

35 See Murray, Achievement.

36 Solomon Andriatsimialomanarivo, “The Missiological Dimensions of African Ecclesiology” (ThD diss., University of South Africa, 2001), 25.

37 Dougals A. Foster, “Unity, Christian,” in The Encyclopaedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 756.

38 Karimanzira, 1 October 1991.This was also confirmed by Samson Mhlanga, who was baptised on 27 March 1932 by Jack Mzirwa. Mhlanga, interview by Paul S. Chimhungwe, 1 October 1991. All interviews for this paper can be found at African Christian College Library, Manzini, Swaziland.

39 Rugara et al., to the Minister in Charge, Nhowe Mission, 16 May 1974. Out of respect, the name of the individual who was applying for the minister’s position has been left out. This letter is in the researcher’s possession.

40 Judd et al., to the Elders, Church of Christ, Irving. The minister’s name and dates have been left out, out of respect for this man and his family.

41 Nesta Molly Masaraure, wife of Jeremiah Masaraure, interview by Paul S. Chimhungwe, 15 October 2011.

42 Mark Husbands, “Introduction,” in Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future, ed. Mark Husbands and Jeffrey P. Greenman (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 11.

43 We should not forget the International Churches of Christ (formerly Boston Movement); it is part of the SCM.

44 The first three mission centres are in Zambia, while the rest are in Zimbabwe.

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Losing Our Religion: The Legacy of Mission Journal

Beginning publication in 1967, Mission was envisioned as “a journal of controversy” that would challenge the post-war rationalistic approach to theology that had developed within Churches of Christ in the 1950s and 1960s. With a younger, more worldly audience in mind, Mission operated at the intersection of Restoration theology, social evolution, and cultural diversity by addressing “grinding human needs” related to equity, poverty, peace, and political trust. Negative reactions to Mission’s direction highlighted the transition of Churches of Christ from a radical sect to a mainstream American religious institution. This process included a renewed appreciation for fundamentalism by conservative church leaders and the conflation of the political left with their theological opponents. In response to such criticisms, Mission turned from its original commitments to the “weightier matters” of social justice and instead exhausted its energies detailing more mainstream theological subjects.

In Mission’s September 1986 issue, public relations consultant and early Mission contributor, Walter E. Burch, reflected on what he called the journal’s “20-year odyssey.” Thinking out loud, he wondered how best to measure the importance of the publication’s voice within the Churches of Christ. Had Mission significantly influenced the fellowship? And if so, how? Had Mission advanced its proposals in a responsible manner? Was there enough depth to Mission’s original themes to sustain the enterprise? Should Mission itself become part of the mainstream institutional apparatus within the Churches of Christ?1

Unfortunately, with the publication of Mission’s final issue coming just fifteen months later, the opportunity for such a self-appraisal would not be fully realized. Still, for scholars, analysts, and other interested parties, Burch’s thoughts provide a practical framework through which to assess Mission’s legacy, especially regarding the sustainability of the journal’s initial features. While discussions touching on race relations, social justice, the anti-war movement, and political ideology received extensive coverage during Mission’s first several years, attention eventually shifted toward more traditional theological subjects and away from the “grinding human needs” of equality, poverty relief, world peace, and political trust.2

The apogee (or nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of Mission’s venture into questions surrounding such sociopolitical affairs was its March 1974 edition—“On Watergate.” The issue included a cover page editorial cartoon highlighting the personal corruption of Richard Nixon and that of his administration.

Figure 1: Cover of Mission (March 1974)

Perry C. Cotham, political science professor at David Lipscomb College (now Lipscomb University), referred to June 17, 1972—the date of the Watergate burglary—as possibly the “date of the death of both American public idealism and unwavering faith in her public institutions and officials.” Arguing that there was an inherent logical relationship between political action and its resulting moral implications, he encouraged Mission’s readers to “place [the Watergate] crisis in the context of genuine Biblical morality.” Cotham criticized both the Churches of Christ for the absence of such discussions in the fellowship’s publications and Nixon for moralizing on issues such as “faith, trust, belief, and spirit” that emphasized “pietism” over “Christian social ethics.” Worried that an uncritical reception of Nixon’s ‘theology’ by many Christians was “ ‘rendering unto Caesar’ more than [was] his due,” Cotham called for both a private morality (piety) and a public one (social ethics). He concluded, “Christian ethics are essentially social ethics—one cannot truly be in right relationship to God unless he is in right relationship to his fellowman.”3

Reader response was sharp. Thomas Langford, former Mission contributor, described the March cover as “tasteless,” “offensive,” and a violation of New Testament teachings about the relationship between the Christian and the government. While acknowledging that censure of Nixon’s behavior was warranted, Langford considered the issue’s cover to be “beneath the dignity” of what he called “redemptive Christian judgment.” One outspoken reader denied that the Nixon administration’s activities were “more sinister than anything previously encountered in this country” and chastised Cotham for going “to tasteless extremes to buttress [his] untenable position.” Still another, accusing Mission’s editors of participating in “a dishonest charade,” expressed grief “that [Mission] felt called upon to unleash [its] liberal political philosophy” on its diverse readership. Reflecting on first-century Christianity in a manner typically associated with twentieth-century restoration theology, one reader countered: “My gut level reaction to the whole political content of the issue is that we have come a long way, baby, since the time when Christians could fear God and honor the king—even when the king was Nero (or Nixon?).” Finally, one complained that she had just renewed her subscription for three years to what amounted to a “political propaganda sheet”—“We get that everywhere we turn, but we look to Mission for a change, for encouragement, to learn more about Jesus and to draw closer to God.”4

While the number of subscriptions to Mission had grown to over 3,000 by the end of its first year of publication and had risen steadily thereafter, the March 1974 issue would permanently marginalize the paper, beginning with an immediate decline in readership. Such a “negative response,” according to Robert Randolph, “indicated the shape of political sentiment in Churches of Christ.” While conservatives at large had never developed a significant taste for social justice, even progressive leaders had seemed to lose interest. Both had made themselves at home in an American subculture defined by conservative politics and a rejection of avant-garde activism. To survive in this prevailing environment, Mission turned aside from its roots of aggressive social commentary and instead focused on matters relating to so-called “Christian journalism.”5

These sorts of expectations for a more conventional approach to political theology would continue to gain traction within the fellowship in the years that followed. For example, two decades after the publication of Mission’s final issue, Church of Christ minister David A. Hester in his book Tampering with Truth: The New Left in the Lord’s Church6 argued for the favored status of conservative partisan politics within the Churches of Christ. While not representing a genuine theological cross-section of twenty-first-century thinking among the Churches of Christ, Hester’s approach nevertheless illustrates the influence that right-wing politics has held on the fellowship, especially in the American South.

Specifically, Hester linked leaders of what he called the “New Left” in the fellowship with the “extreme radical causes” of those on the political Left who had come of age in the 1960s. By conflating the two groups, he blurred the lines between theological matters and social ones, highlighting the extent to which many in the Churches of Christ had come to equate conservative politics with theological orthodoxy. Hester expressed this explicitly by describing what he saw as the uncanny resemblance between American political liberals and their theological counterparts in the Churches of Christ. In the process, he cataloged rather precise policy positions he deemed inappropriate for the faithful American Christian—opposition to the Vietnam War and support of black nationalism a generation earlier, as well as contemporary perspectives favoring more progressive social and economic policies than those that had been championed during the Reagan administration.7

Hester’s quarrel with “the New Left” extended to its historiography as well. He charged liberal scholars with practicing what he described as “revisionist history”—a supposed reinterpretation of the past in support of a so-called radical agenda. In the process, he also lauded conservative attempts to simply record, as he put it, “what actually happened.” His analysis revealed the incongruity of a conservative rejection of serious self-reflection within the Churches of Christ and Mission’s desire to create a culture of relevance in the fellowship by reassessing Scripture in view of ever-changing cultural dynamics.8

This friction is detected in Hester’s contempt for what he believed the Sixties had come to symbolize—namely, a departure from traditional civic and religious values. For example, he derided the attention given to the decade by historian Richard Hughes in Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America.9 “In his 448-page work, Hughes devoted three chapters to the decade of the 1960s!,” Hester complained. In criticizing even the title of the monograph, Hester wryly observed that Hughes had in fact done “the brotherhood an unwitting service” by chronicling its “history of radicalism.”10

However, it was not only conservative church leaders who had rejected such progressive social values. Ironically, even less conventional leaders left the task of Mission behind, as the Churches of Christ prepared to advance into the twenty-first century. For instance, while acknowledging the role of the Churches of Christ in helping to alleviate social challenges in American communities, C. Leonard Allen, Richard Hughes, and Michael Weed in The Worldly Church: A Call for Biblical Renewal expressed concern that “meeting contemporary ‘needs’ ha[d] all but crowded out biblical theology.”11 While Mission had encouraged direct political involvement as a means of accomplishing important theological ends, Allen, Hughes, and Weed, while reflecting fondly on an earlier “radical sectarianism,” warned about the development of “political activism [as] the vital center of Christian faith.”12

Similarly, Mission’s own trustees ultimately exchanged the journal’s original philosophy for temporary survival in a fellowship that had grown comfortable with its place in mainstream American culture. While perceived by its critics as merely an outlet for the “disloyal opposition,” Mission had imposed self-limitations as well, as it evolved from “a journal of controversy” to a publication focused on more customary theological issues.13 Eventually, in announcing Mission’s demise, board president Robert Randolph summarized the periodical’s quixotic struggle to help focus the Churches of Christ on the “weightier matters” envisioned by its original contributors: “The energy for Mission came out of a time of ferment and change. The situation today is different. Things have changed in Churches of Christ and we recognize that much more needs to change. The history of Mission seems to be baggage that hinders us from being part of that change. The initial impulse may well have spent itself in a righteous cause, but it has spent itself nevertheless.”14

While appraising Mission’s legacy, Walter Burch echoed Randolph’s sentiments by describing the cultural environment of the late 1960s as an era of “crisis and promise, of frustration and courage, of ferment and seething discontent, of protest and intransigence.” The notions of crisis and promise also characterized the work of Mission itself. Although the journal had failed to substantially alter the ethos of twentieth-century Churches of Christ, it had rightly called attention to the distinction between missions and mission, as it scrutinized the church’s function in the world at large. Likewise, present-day Churches of Christ find themselves in a time of “frustration” and “discontent,” but with a missional opportunity—to be a fresh, raw voice for faith, good news, optimism, and a healthy restlessness. And the stakes could not be higher. In the words of twentieth-century Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, a favorite of Burch’s: “Where there is no mission, there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.”15

Brad McKinnon is Associate Professor of History and Christian Ministry at Heritage Christian University (Florence, Alabama). He is contributor to Reconciliation Reconsidered: Advancing the National Conversation on Race in Churches of Christ (ACU Press, 2016) and the George Washington Digital Encyclopedia (http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia).

† Adapted from a presentation at the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars’ Conference, Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, June 8–10, 2016.

1 Walter E. Burch, “The Birth of Mission: Remembering the Way We Were,” Mission 20, no. 3 (September 1986): 10–11, 22.

2 Ibid., 10.

3 Perry C. Cotham, “Crisis in American Politics: Reflections on Watergate and the Rest of the Iceberg,” Mission 7, no. 9 (March 1974): 5–6, 11–12, 15.

4 “Forum,” Mission 8, no. 2 (Aug 1974): 28–30.

5 Robert M. Randolph, “Mission,” in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 533; “Forum,” 29.

6 David A. Hester, Tampering with Truth: The New Left in the Lord’s Church (Huntsville, AL: Publishing Designs, 2007).

7 Ibid., 6, 14–15.

8 Ibid., 89–90.

9 Richard T. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

10 Hester, 89–90.

11 C. Leonard Allen, Richard T. Hughes, and Michael R. Weed, The Worldly Church: A Call for Biblical Renewal (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 1996): 8.

12 Ibid, 15.

13 “Focus Group Analysis of Current Condition of Mission Journal,” Walter E. Burch Papers, 1956–2006, Center for Restoration Studies, Brown Library, Abilene Christian University.

14 Robert M. Randolph, “To the Readers of Mission Journal,” Mission 21, nos. 5 & 6 (Dec 1987/Jan 1988): 43.

15 Emil Brunner, The Word and the World (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1931): 108; quoted in Burch, 10.

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Missional Theology as Economic Enterprise

In this article, I aim to articulate missional theology as an economic enterprise wherein human agents seek to participate in God’s work in the world. I will first provide a brief conceptual framework for speaking of God’s economy. Next, I will discuss missional theology as prophetic economic practice. I will identify ways in which missional theology, as it has been consistent with the person of Jesus Christ, has embodied countercultural challenges to dominant imperial, colonial, and neo-liberal economic structures. In conclusion I will identify several prophetic economic possibilities for missional theology in service of churches in the present US context.

On Economies

On a basic etymological level economics is an ordering of the household, or the house (oikos) law (nomos)—the Greek roots of economic conceptualization. This definition, if it can be called that, demands that any conversation articulate the scope of the household and the process for determining proper order within the household. I find speaking of a “divine economy” problematic because of the basic ontological difference between humanity and God, and thus humanity’s limitations in attempts to understand “household” in the same way that God does—whether in a particular space, the world, or the Godhead. In accordance with the premise that all theological language is analogical, any discussion of divinity, whether in reference to a transcendent divine economy or divine mission, must begin with apophatic silence. We cannot speak definitively of divinity, but are rather at the mercy of God who has crossed the threshold into creation so that we might bear witness to the Spirit that inspires life within creation as created beings. Jesus Christ therefore serves as the image of God’s economy and God’s mission because he is the image of the invisible God—the embodiment of God’s work in a broken world. In other words, a missional economy is accessible through God’s work and revelation of the kingdom of God in and through the incarnation, as humanity receives the gift of the image of life fully lived by the Holy Spirit. Both economy and mission are relational terms that accentuate eccentric existence when applied to the person of Jesus.1 While recognizing our epistemic limitations, we can claim that Jesus is the embodiment of divine economy and mission and orients humanity to a particular way of relating to others, which enacts the kingdom of Heaven, unleashing life in this world.

The boundaries of kingdom articulated by Jesus throughout the Gospels are marked particularly by the use of power, the power involved in relating to another. A basic definition of kingdom of God for the purpose of this paper is wherever God reigns. And the interpretive mark of God’s reign and power is the image of Jesus Christ. Wherever the use of power toward another defies the way that Jesus uses his power, there economy and mission stand in opposition to the Kingdom of Heaven. The actions of war with another, hate for another, or suppression of another do not lie within the scope (household) of the boundaries of the kingdom of heaven. Definitions of economy and mission are subordinate to definitions of kingdom, and in order to be consistent with the kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels, economy and mission must also embody a process of relating to the other congruent with Jesus’ orientation to power. Coherence between mission and economy as embodied within Jesus Christ challenges traditional constructions of mission, economics, and politics in line with both state and individual contractual rights.

I believe this is the reason Wendell Berry identifies the appropriate scope for economics as the kingdom of God, applied in scale to the most particular of relationships.2 What we order is creation itself, gifted to humanity as stewards—stewards of the place and material that God has pronounced “good” and “blessed.” This pronouncement of the goodness and blessedness of creation can be identified not only as a theme in the Genesis creation account, but also as a theme throughout the prophets, the wisdom literature, and the actions of Jesus. As human agents we are part of that very blessed creation. As human agents each one of us enters into a particular history where others have formed institutions, alliances, governments, and markets. As human agents we do not get to choose the history into which we are born.

One contemporary approach to accessing a basic description of economic practice is through the art of dealing with limited (or scarce) resources amidst unlimited desire. This is a common definition that will hopefully raise concern among theologians and biblical scholars. Is individual desire unlimited? Is desire of the masses unlimited? Furthermore, are the resources truly limited? Which resources? What counts as a commodity subject to a market? If anything is unlimited it may be the examples of how human desire exceeds the limited resources to which we have access. Is human nature essentially competitive amidst scarce resources?

Capitalism is based on a creative turn, which aims to transform proclivity of individual discontent and greed into a social good. In other words, capitalism concedes the depravity of the individual. The contemporary “mission” of capitalism accepts individual vice and aims to achieve the unintended consequence of a greater good through structural organization of markets. The hope (and arguably, the illusion) of capitalism is that virtues of charity and justice, particularly as they emerge from a sense of compassion and sympathy for those who are suffering, might be employed to raise the condition of the poor and the suffering. Adam Smith, widely regarded as the father of modern capitalism, grounded his economic imagination in the fertile soil of virtue-ethics, wherein sympathy for another can be identified as a primary nutrient.3 Smith proposed that exchange between butcher, brewer, and baker (who nonetheless act according to self-interest) still exists in an environment where the sources of labor and production cannot be dehumanized without a detrimental effect on the economy. Yet, labor markets have become more mobile and transient power has not flowed in the direction of sympathy but of fear, trending toward self-justified consolidation of resources among the one percent. If selfishness is assumed and economic relationships are fundamentally competitive, the question of capitalism is how competition might lend itself to mutual benefit. And this is not a terrible question, given the premise. However, the world is now several hundred years into the experiment, and there is significant disagreement as to whether and for whom the capitalist mission is succeeding or failing.

Several theologians have pointed to language of God’s abundance in order to throw a wrench in the machine of capitalist ideology based on scarcity.4 I believe that this move requires additional attention, since God is not an equal economic player in our economic systems. On the one hand, God’s abundance is something attributable to God’s nature, as infinite and eternal, whereas humanity receives such gifts within and as finite creation. On the other hand, scarcity, particularly in this age of globalization, water crisis, and climate change, is a reality with which we must deal quite intentionally. The question at the heart of a missional economy is how God enters into situations of scarcity and how humanity might participate in such action as humans. Such a posture does not deny realities of scarcity, and it does not deny human complicity in economic and political relationships that have resulted in a lack of access to the most basic resources of food, water, shelter, and healthcare. However, this approach identifies a human capacity to live into created intent, not of competition with others in the created order, but mutual fulfillment by a Holy Spirit of love and grace.

Missional Theology as Economic Enterprise: A Proposal of Basic Principles

God, the giver of life, created the world to flourish through a particular relational power. This holy power, seen in creation, resurrection, and reconciliation, sets right that which is broken and destroyed by mundane powers of death. The mission, the telos, is life by the Spirit of God. The image of that life is Christ. In such an approach, value is determined within the particular relationship. This becomes quite complex within economies wherein the individual is largely disconnected from local markets. It is often cheaper to buy mechanically mass-produced produce from another country than produce raised with care and concern from within one’s own town. The marketing tactics involved in everything from selling a box of cereal to a new computer conceal power dynamics in global labor and production. Because economies of biblical contexts and present markets for even the most basic resources are so very different, one must be careful and precise when identifying points of contact between God’s mission and human participation. I believe that it is this tension, as much as any other, that reveals the need for a robust pneumatology in constructive theology.

I propose seven basic principles as an outline for missional theology as an economic enterprise:

  1. A holy conceptualization of mission begins with God’s work in and for creation.
  2. God’s mission is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. Humanity is empowered to participate in God’s mission by the Holy Spirit. In other words, Christian mission is to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
  3. Mission entails an economy, an ordering of a household, which requires consideration of the scope of the household and process of ordering the household.
  4. The household is the very kingdom of God, which encompasses all creation.
  5. We are not God, and therefore cannot participate in God’s economy with the world as God.
  6. Within creation, at any point in history there are myriad economies, all with points of confluence and resistance to God’s economy.
  7. Participation in God’s mission within history entails prophetic action—specifically working and speaking against the forces and spirits of domination and death, which stand in opposition to God’s Spirit of Life that creates, sustains, reconciles, and redeems.

This outline serves as an introductory proposal concerning the relationship between mission and economy that will hopefully lead to more discussion, contributions that fill in the gaps, and revision of the principles themselves. Whereas the paper up to this point has touched on the first six principles, remainder of the paper will address the seventh principle and the implication of living out these principles in the world today.

The Prophetic Nature of Mission as Economic Enterprise

I contend that theology is always economic, communicating values, dealing with scarcity and finite resources. Likewise, mission is a political and economic enterprise involving work and movement toward particular ends. Christian “mission” has been ambivalent in relation to imperial and colonial systems of domination from the early church until the present moment. Each system of power and conquest in which the Christian church has found itself has required churches to find a way to work either in collaboration, resistance, or alterity to the prevailing economic system. There are countless examples of Christian institutions and churches serving a dominating state, empire, or corporate ideology—Christian complicity in genocide and violent conquest in the name of mission is well-known enough not to require rehearsal here. However, in a neo-colonial age economic policy has been used to starve entire people groups, obstruct access to medicine and clean water, and exploit labor through language in service to the missions of nationalist democracy and the free market. Quite often, Christian complicity in global relationships marked by domination and exploitation can be difficult to identify when control of foreign policy happens indirectly through economic means instead of direct military occupation. Self-criticism based on an honest exploration of our own histories is critical for faithfulness and righteousness at this juncture.

It is possible to understand “mission” as an embodied economy within a given context. In this sense, mission is never unilateral, but a way of embodying values for humanity and creation within a given network of relationships. Mission is an economic enterprise because it engages value, production, distribution, labor, material within good creation, and information as relational constructions. When these constructions cohere with Christian confession, they are always embedded within locally, nationally, and globally constructed economies. There are many examples in history where Christian mission has served as a prophetic practice in opposition to imperial and imperialist domination. As we imagine how Christian mission might embody the prophetic economic alternative particularly within the United States and in global relationships we have many historical examples from which to draw.

I speak of a prophetic economy in the spirit of Abraham Heschel’s description of a prophetic theme, which he states, “is, first of all, the very life of a whole people, and [the prophet’s] identification lasts more than a moment. He is not only with what he says; he is involved with his people in what his words foreshadow. This is the secret of the prophet’s style: his life and soul are at stake in what he says and in what is going to happen to what he says.”5 To speak of a prophetic economy, and to identify those who embody economic practice that reflects Jesus, is to enter the perennial conversation of the relation of church and state, a question to which the field of Christian ethics has devoted itself. While I do not presume to solve the question, I do wish to orient the attention of this article to what kind of power is being used, and who benefits from the use of power. Scholars from Heschel to Walter Brueggemann to Nicholas Wolterstorff accentuate the prophetic theme of reminding political leaders that the success of the political body on every level (scope) is determined by how faithful the respective body is to the covenant. Success is therefore judged by the well-being of the poor, the sick, the widow, the orphan, and the alien. In each age Christianity has been challenged by prophets on political-economic matters.6

Prior to the Edict of Milan in 313, churches often embodied a prophetic economy due to the reality that Christians represented a minority and often gathered in secret or in resistance to imperial control. Whereas the response to Christian communities varied across the Roman Empire for the first three hundred years, from outright targeted persecution to disinterest to general acceptance as long as the Christians did not disturb the status quo, there are numerous examples of Christian action that communicate alternative values in the face of imperial practice. Central to economic practice of these early churches, in line with consistent prophetic attention to care for the widow, orphan, alien, and the sick, and in line with Jesus’ embodiment of this economic ethic, many early churches placed care for disenfranchised human persons at the center of their relational economy.

For instance, Paul’s description of the body (1 Cor 12:27–31, Eph 4:1–15) articulates an economy in which no part declares the other unnecessary. Paul’s metaphor of the body stands in direct contrast to hierarchical Greco-Roman political body metaphors that argue for complete bodily submission to the authority of the state, the elite, the educated, or the wealthy. Whereas Greek and Roman metaphors emphasize parts of the body playing hierarchical roles, Pauline invocations of the body metaphor allude to mutual flourishing, concern, and connectedness in service to Christ.

In fact, Christian churches have always existed within the tension of living into an imperial economy, which determines values and success according to the power structures of the empire, or living into a holy economic order, which operates according to the power of a Holy Spirit. In the epistles Paul presents an alternative language rife with challenges to imperial economics. Joerg Rieger points to the ambivalence of terms like ekklesia (church), euangellion (gospel), dikaiosunē (justice), eirēnē (peace), and kyrios (lord), which take on a spirit of resistance to an imperial order when used under the headship of Christ.7 Upon Constantine’s proclamation of Christianity as an accepted religion of the empire, the relationship between mission of the empire and mission of the church became more complex. Augustine’s City of God is largely a treatise on how Christians might engage this political-economic tension. From the East, at both a geographical and epochal crossroads for the church, John Chrysostom’s sermons provide an economic vision for wealth and poverty when the ruling authority is God:

For our money is the Lord’s however we may have gathered it. If we provide for those in need, we shall obtain great plenty. This is why God has allowed you to have more: not for you to waste on prostitutes, drink, fancy food, expensive clothes, and all other kinds of indolence, but for you to distribute to those in need. Just as an official in the imperial treasury, if he neglects to distribute where he is ordered, but spends instead on his own indolence, pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor.8

Basil the Great, who shared John Chrysostom’s conviction that holding great wealth while refusing to share with those in need was a form of stealing, established an institution to aid those who suffered from the drought and famine of 369. The painting of St. Francis kneeling before Pope Innocent III by Giotto de Bondone immortalizes economic tensions of power and authority within the church.9 In each and every context churches are confronted with a tension present among various spirits proclaiming life, whether a spirit of victory aligned with the Roman Empire, a spirit of civilizing mission throughout the colonial period, or a spirit of progress present within modernity.

Amidst the colonial scramble for Africa, particularly between 1876 and 1914, missionaries often faced an incredible tension between securely-funded promotion of a state-supporting gospel, or an economy of grace, love, and hope that served as a direct contrast to the colonial economic spirit that funded the mission. Numerous histories reveal churches standing against national institutional racism, churches standing for women’s equal rights, churches providing a safe haven for refugees, all because of an embodied economy that values the life and dignity of those crying out against the powers of death. The significant point is not simply that churches have aligned themselves with a particular human rights agenda, but that in situations where human life has been devalued, prophetic churches have identified an alternative vision consistent with the basic principles of a prophetic Christ-shaped economic participation in the Spirit of Life outlined above.

In each of these historical examples, Christian participation in the mission of God as an economic enterprise is not marked by a simple opposition to any given economic system, but by a positive exercise of power consistent with the work of the Holy Spirit. Power in the Spirit of God is distinct, holy, because it is creative and inspiring, giving fresh breath to those struggling with the greatest burdens and those facing the powers and cycles of death. Power of the Holy Spirit does not and cannot justify economic surplus built on the backs of the poor. Rather, divine power values the least of these, is manifest particularly through justice and charity for the poor, the sick, the rejected, and the outcast, and essentially stands against powers of domination in any form. Power is defined in ever expanding circles of influence that seek coherence among life for the individual in relation to family, neighbor, community, and world. The power of the Holy Spirit is about the life of the world that begins with reconciliation with the person in closest proximity.

Max Weber, the prominent sociologist and economist of the early 1900s, identified development of the “Spirit of Capitalism” with what he identified as a “Protestant Ethic.”10 In this work, Weber connects Protestant values of personal piety, a rising individualism, and personal responsibility of saving with increasing capital needed for the social structure of a capitalist economy. One of the values in Weber’s work lies in the simple suggestion that there is a “spirit” of economic systems. I propose that a central question of missional theology is how the spirit of any economic system stands in relation to the Spirit of God. Is the driving spirit of an economy one of competition or mutual fulfillment? Is it a spirit of love or a spirit of conquest? Is it a spirit that justifies collateral damage or a spirit that runs to those thrown to the side of the road? Our ultimate question as confessing Christians in the conversation of mission and economy is whether or not the Spirit that drives us is conforming us and those with whom we interact, trade, exchange to the image of Jesus Christ.

Christian mission, as it participates in the mission of God, forever lives in the economic tensions that demand discernment. Economic order is power. To learn from church complicity in oppressive regimes, colonial oppression, and nationalist domination means a continuous discernment on the part of the Christian body as to what will be resisted and what will be condoned through partnerships.

Mission for the Church Today

How is the Holy Spirit shaping relationships into conformity with the life of Christ in the midst of global capitalism? Again, to speak of the good news it is helpful to identify the bad news, the fractures, the sites of dislocation and relational brokenness among elements of creation that God has declared good. This is why mission as an economic enterprise is committed to social action—not because we as the church envision ourselves as a political or economic outlier able to act as an a-political unit. It is furthermore not because we as Christian missionaries, ministers, practitioners, and scholars will bring about the kingdom through our own action, as if we are the gods who speak light into the darkness and bring order from chaos. Missional theology is an economic enterprise because we are empowered and invited to participate in the cruciform and resurrection life that dives into individual and systemic processes of valuation and devaluation, pronouncing good the earth that has been exploited, the water that has been polluted, and the human lives that have been used as objects and means for economic gain.

If there is a connection between conceptions of mission and economic practice, the church cannot avoid dealing with the fractures within global capitalism. Mission is entwined in seeking out relational fractures and embodying life and good news in these places. Holy mission is conformity into the image of Christ in our particular places where individual benefit and competition has become a primary lens, where the virtues of love, faithfulness, and hope have been replaced by contractual deals that favor the wealthy and the powerful. Mission therefore turns attention to the housing crisis, the water crisis, the food crisis, the healthcare crisis, and the crisis of for-profit prisons. Mission is an economic enterprise consumed by the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned as much today as it was when Jesus declared in Matthew 25 that service to these groups is service to Christ.

Therefore missional theology does what it does best when located at the margins—the geographical margins at the edges of the economic empire. These margins consist of rural African villages, the border deserts in southwestern US, and the inner city barrios and slums. Missional economies work in the currency of love and justice with the given materials of a particular context. And missional economies are attuned to voices of those struggling for daily bread and water, speaking prophetic words of truth into our world. We therefore participate in God’s mission when we receive the prophetic words of hope that we too might be saved from exploits of competitive conquest, and that we too might live into an economy marked by justice, grace, and mutual flourishing.

Spencer is the Director of Program at The Water Project, and lives with his wife and two sons in Henniker, New Hampshire. Spencer was a missionary in the Busoga region of Uganda from 2004 until 2010 and holds a PhD in theology from Southern Methodist University.

1 I am borrowing the phrase “eccentric existence” from the title of David Kelsey’s two-volume work on theological anthropology. See David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009). Kelsey presents the correlative possibility for humanity to be postured toward the other like God, while maintaining the distinctions between God and creation: “Correlatively, as an enactment ad extra of the giving and receiving that constitute the triune God’s own life, God’s creative relating to reality other than God is a giving that is also at once God’s invitation to realities other than God to respond to God in ways that are appropriate to the manner in which God has related to them and God’s self opening to receive their response” (123).

2 Wendell Berry, “Two Economies,” in Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point, 1987).

3 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Text in the History of Philosphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

4 See M. Douglas Meeks, God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, Radical Orthodoxy (New York: Routledge, 2000); and William Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), for just a few examples of this turn.

5 Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, Perennial Classics (New York: Harper, 2001), 7.

6 Whereas it may make sense to talk about politics, economics, and religion as separate spheres now, in the biblical writings and throughout most of Christian history (and even currently in much of the world outside of the United States and Europe) political, economic, and religious aspects of life are so enmeshed and intertwined that to talk of one distinct from the others is incoherent and often inconceivable.

7 Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 31.

8 John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 50.

9 See Douglas John Hall, The Cross in our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 74.

10 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, rev. 1920 ed., trans. Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).