The modern missionary movement
Beginning with William Carey's call in 1792, Protestant missionaries spread across Asia, Africa and the Pacific, translating the Bible into hundreds of languages.
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity — Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press (2002)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
In 1792 William Carey, an English Baptist shoemaker, published An Enquiry urging Christians to take the gospel overseas; the next year he sailed for India, where he and his colleagues translated the Bible, or parts of it, into dozens of languages. Societies multiplied: the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, American boards. Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission (1865) sent missionaries in Chinese dress deep into the interior.
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
Local Christians were crucial. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, freed from a slave ship as a boy, became the first African Anglican bishop in 1864. By the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, Protestant missions reached most of the world, and that conference also launched the modern ecumenical movement.
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity — Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press (2002)
Missionaries obeyed Christ's command to make disciples of all nations, often at great personal cost, and their Bible translations, schools and clinics transformed lives.
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity — Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press (2002)
Missions often travelled with empire, treated local cultures as heathen and supported colonial rule. Yet historians such as Brian Stanley also stress that missionaries frequently clashed with colonial authorities and that Christianity spread most when Africans and Asians made it their own.
- The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — Brian Stanley, Apollos (1990)
- The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity — Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press (2002)
Why it matters today
Most Protestants now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the fruit of these missions and, even more, of the local evangelists who took the faith further. Missions also left schools, hospitals and written forms of many languages, but their entanglement with empire remains a sensitive subject, and African and Asian churches today send missionaries of their own.