Birth Of Missions In America

"In one blow this stout book replaces all previous vague, brief, and seriously erroneous summaries of the origins of missions in America . . . a definitive treatment." Ralph D. Winter "Contemporary Christian missions, desperately in need of a theology of mission, will benefit form a serious study of this book. Neglected episodes of missionary history are eruditely exploited to provide theological undergirding . . . Missiology . . . needs this stabilizing historical doctrinal emphasis." Justice C. Anderson "Charles Chaney makes an important contribution to the understanding of the development of the American missionary movement from its beginning . . . He demonstrates the unity and interaction of Indian, home and overseas missions in a single worldwide enterprise. Here is a wealth of knowledge organized and interpreted for our illumination which will give almost every reader an entirely new understanding of the mission of the American church." R. Pierce Beaver "I am writing to express my enthusiasm in view of the publication of The Birth of Missions in America. I shall be making use of it in my classes . . . a solid work in a neglected area and time period that will meet a need." Hugo H. Culpeper ". . . an immense volume . . . meticulously documented and representing exhaustive research. It presents the most excellent primary source material that this reviewer has seen in a long time." Helen E. Falls

With the extraordinary growth of Christianity in the global south has come the rise of "reverse missions," in which countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America send missionaries to re-evangelize the West. In The Spirit Moves West, Rebecca Kim uses South Korea as a case study of how non-Western missionaries target Americans, particularly white Americans. She draws on four years of interviews, participant observation, and surveys of South Korea's largest non-denominational missionary-sending agency, University Bible Fellowship, in order to provide an inside look at this growing phenomenon. Known as the "Asian Protestant Superpower," South Korea is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it sends abroad: approximately 22,000 in over 160 countries. Conducting her research both in the US and in South Korea, Kim studies the motivations and methods of these Korean evangelicals who have, since the 1970s, sought to "bring the gospel back" to America. By offering the first empirically-grounded examination of this much-discussed phenomenon, Kim explores what non-Western missions will mean to the future of Christianity in America and around the world.

The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from that of the longsuffering wife, characterized by the epitaph Died, given over to hospitality, to that of the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching heathen children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife and frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of the sterotypes is that missionary women were perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary women were noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of bringing the world to Jesus Christ.Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. The first American women to serve as foreign missionaries in 1812 were among the best-educated women of their time. Although barred from obtaining the college education or ministerial credentials of their husbands, the early missionary wives had read their Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Not only did they go abroad with particular theologies to share, but their identities as women caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early nineteenth-century women seldom wrote theologies of mission, but they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a thought world and set of assumptions about women's roles in the missionary task. The activities of missionary wives were not random: they were part of a mission strategy that gave women a particular role inthe advancement of the reign of God.By moving from mission field to mission field in chronological order of missionary presence, Robert charts missiological developments as they took place in dialogue with the urgent context of the day. Each case study marks the beginning of the mission theory. Baptist women in Burma, for example, are only considered in their first decades there and are not traced into the present. Robert believes that at this early stage of research into women's mission theory, integrity and analysis lies more in a succession of contextualized case studies than in gross generalizations.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.