Accidental Diplomats: Missionaries, Money, and the World (Episode 11)

It's easy to imagine American evangelicalism as a story that happens entirely inside the United States. In this episode, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra push past that bubble to explore evangelicals' long, tangled relationship with the rest of the world.

The episode opens with two stories drawn from recent scholarship. The first, from David Swartz's Facing West, complicates the founding myth of World Vision: American evangelist Bob Pierce is remembered as the organization's sole founder, but the humanitarian network he built on was already running under Korean pastor Kyung Chik Han. The second, from Philip Dow's Accidental Diplomats, follows Daniel Arap Moi from a ten-year-old convert at a Kenyan mission station to Kenya's second president, guided for decades by his missionary mentor and confidant, Earl Anderson.

From there, the hosts trace how American evangelicals have understood missions, humanitarianism, and their own place in the world across two centuries: the shift from cultural superiority to contextualized missiology, the 1974 Lausanne Congress and its Global South critiques of Western evangelicalism, the astonishing 20th-century demographic shift of Christianity from the global North to the global South, and the increasingly contested question of what — if anything — the word "white" is still doing in front of "evangelical." They close by reckoning honestly with the missionary movement's mixed legacy: real colonial entanglements alongside real cross-cultural courage, and a complicated set of missionary heroes evangelicals still look to for inspiration.

PEOPLE & TERMS MENTIONED

• Bob Pierce: Evangelist and founder of World Vision (1950), following a 1947 trip to China that inspired his humanitarian ministry.
• Kyung Chik Han: Korean pastor and refugee relief leader who built the orphanage and humanitarian network in Seoul that became the operational core of World Vision.
• Daniel Arap Moi: Kenya's second president (1978–2002), mentored in his youth by American missionary Earl Anderson.
• Earl Anderson: American missionary and government school inspector in colonial Kenya; longtime mentor and confidant to Daniel Arap Moi.
• René Padilla & Samuel Escobar: Latin American evangelical theologians whose critiques of Western missions at the 1974 Lausanne Congress challenged American evangelical assumptions.
• John Stott: British evangelical leader who helped mediate the global-north/global-south tensions at the Lausanne Congress.
• William Ernest Hocking: Harvard philosopher who chaired the 1932 “Re-Thinking Missions” laymen's inquiry, questioning the traditional conversion-focused model of missions.
• Bebbington's Quadrilateral: Historian David Bebbington's four-part definition of evangelicalism: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism.
• 1040 Window: Cold War-era missions term for the band of the globe (10° to 40° north latitude) considered least reached by Christianity.
• Carl McIntire: Fundamentalist radio preacher associated with balloon-borne Bible airdrops into communist territory during the Cold War.
• Paul Hiebert: Missiologist (Fuller Theological Seminary, later Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) known for bringing anthropological method into evangelical missions training.
• Walter Kim: President of the National Association of Evangelicals, cited as an example of the organization's non-white leadership.
• New Apostolic Reformation: Term used to describe an influential, loosely organized network of independent charismatic and Pentecostal leaders.

BOOKS MENTIONED

• David R. Swartz, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Philip Dow, Accidental Diplomats: American Missionaries and the Cold War in Africa (William Carey Publishing, 2024).
• David P. King, God's Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
• David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Gina A. Zurlo, How Many Evangelicals in the World? A New Assessment from the World Christian Database, Review of Religious Research (open access).

Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:12

This

Cold open

SPEAKER_05 0:13

story is based on the account by historian David Swartz in his book Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity. It's the origin story of World Vision, one of the 20 largest charities in the U.S. and one of the largest nonprofits in the world, with humanitarian work in more than 100 countries today. The story begins by busting a myth about World Vision's founding. The iconic founder, the evangelical Bob Pierce, had a lesser-known co-founder. The founder most Americans know is Pierce, an evangelist from small town Iowa, who remade himself in Southern California and then began preaching for Youth for Christ. In 1947, he sailed to China, where an impoverished girl named White Jade broke his heart. He emptied his pockets and pledged to support her going forward. The experience made him write a line inside his Bible that became his life creed. Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God. Through this entrepreneurialism and creativity with new communications technologies, Pierce turned his life's creed into an organization. In the fall of 1950, in a tiny room in Portland, Oregon, he signed the papers incorporating an outfit he called World Vision. But that's only half the story. As Swartz puts it, by the time Pierce arrived, the American evangelist was plugging into an existing humanitarian network already constructed by Koreans. The Korean who had built it, Swartz shows us, was Kyung Chik Han. Han was born in 1902 in a tiny village outside Pyongyang. His whole family was Confucian, but they were swept up in a revival by an American Presbyterian missionary who had himself been born in Korea, Samuel Moffat. Han was studying to be a chemist, but then, after his conversion, he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary. He returned to Korea to pastor in the Far North, where he had built a church, an orphanage, and a nursing home. When the communists came, he fled south to a shattered soul and started over. There he founded Young Knack Presbyterian Church, which exploded from 27 refugees to thousands, worshiping in tents. He raised an orphanage and a home for war widows. In his style of leadership, Han was quiet and efficient. Colleagues said he planned like a businessman, even though he insisted he was only a servant of God. So when Bob Pierce stepped off the plane in Seoul in the spring of 1950 without knowledge of a word of Korean to begin building World Vision, it was Han who hosted him. Han discovered Pierce as much as Pierce discovered Han. Ultimately, the two worked well together. Pierce raised the money and made the pitch, while Han ran the work on the ground. The orphanages, the widows' homes, and the relief work that became the core operations of World Vision were Hans, already running before Pierce arrived. In America, Han would be remembered, if at all, as a well-documented interpreter, standing beside Pierce on the stage when he spoke to Korean audiences. But trace worldvision back far enough, Schwartz concludes, and the genealogy is unmistakably Korean and American, a product of both.

Second story

SPEAKER_05 3:14

A second story, this one based on the book Accidental Diplomats: American Missionaries in the Cold War in Africa, by the historian Philip Dow. In 1934, a 10-year-old boy named Daniel Arep Moy left his village in the British Empire Kenya Protectorate, or Colony, and traveled 50 miles to a mission station run by the evangelical Africa Inland Mission. In a chance encounter, he was converted to Christianity, and two years later he was baptized. The American missionaries became his second family, as he said. When he married, one of the missionaries officiated. When his first child was born, another missionary dedicated the baby. He became one of the first Africans in the colony to be certified as a schoolteacher, and he might have stayed one, except for another American missionary. Earl Anderson, born and raised in Kenya as a missionary kid, doubled as a government school inspector. Anderson mentored the young Moy and encouraged him to consider politics, that the British colony would need Christians in its leadership. In 1955, Moy won a seat on the colony's legislative council. From that day until Anderson's death 30 years later, the American missionary was among Moy's closest confidants. Moy, if you haven't guessed it yet, would become a future president of the independent nation of Kenya. The change happened suddenly in August 1978. Moy was vice president and asleep when he was awoken by telephone. The first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, was dead, and a cabal was already setting roadblocks to seize Moy before he could reach the capital. Moy made the road to Nairobi minutes ahead of them and was sworn in as Kenya's second president. He never doubted what had carried him through providentially. The telephone rang, he said, and saved a president. It was God's will that I got through. For the next seven years, as Moy embarked on what was the longest tenure of any Kenyan president, Anderson could walk into the State House whenever he liked. He was never turned away, even at odd hours. Then in 1985, a truck struck the car carrying Anderson and his wife, Esther. She died at the scene and he died soon after. Kenya's long relationship with America, Dow writes, was never really about strategy. It rested, as one man in Washington put it, on a broader popular consensus, built in no small part by missionaries. Those evangelical missionaries evangelized the gospel as they understood it. Their gospel was often accompanied by certain spiritual values that had political implications. Spiritual egalitarianism, that all people have equal access to God. Congregationalism, that churches should be run locally, usually through some sort of democratic or voting process. And volunteerism, common Christians, not just professional Christians, were called to lead the church. Moy's long tenure as president until 2002 was marked by an inconsistent embrace of these values as democratic rather than simply spiritual norms. But he was still indelibly shaped by his missionary education, his American contacts, and the advisory roles of missionaries like Anderson. It is hard to tell the story of Moy, and thus of Kenya, without reference to these missionaries, nor the history of evangelical missions without reference to the societies in which they worked.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

When we talk about American evangelicalism, it's easy to imagine a story confined to the United States. But evangelicalism has always been part of something much bigger. Missionaries, humanitarian organizations, global partnerships, and the rapid growth of Christianity around the world have all challenged the idea that American evangelicals exist in isolation. In this episode, our historians explore how a global perspective changes the way we understand evangelical history. They discuss the evolution of missionary work, the relationship between evangelism and humanitarian aid, and the rise of Christianity in the global South. They wrestle with questions of colonialism, culture, and what it means to tell the story of American evangelicalism in an increasingly interconnected

The hosts open the discussion: "American bubble" assumptions as historians

SPEAKER_00 7:10

world. Let's join the conversation with historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Well, thanks, Dan, for that, and thanks to those scholars who contributed those stories. I think we're all feeling a little bit out of our depth in this particular topic because we are historians of American evangelicalism. Yet at the same time, we're all aware that America is not in a bubble as much as sometimes perhaps we like to think of it that way. And Swartz's work in particular, I think, really helped recast a perspective on how we need to reconsider or perhaps complicate some of the classic stories of American evangelicalism with a more global perspective. And so with that in mind, what have we kind of come across as scholars of evangelicalism that has helped us see, oh, wait, maybe I am thinking a little bit too much within this American bubble in a way that's problematic as a scholar?

SPEAKER_05 8:08

Yeah, well, I'm someone who was trained as a religious historian, but also my actually primary field was American diplomatic history. So I came into graduate school being really interested in foreign policy and diplomacy. And so with that mindset, as I, you know, started studying religious actors, I did always just have sort of an interest in how they span the globe, how they intersected with politics, global politics. So particularly the second story here from Philip Dow's book, I mean, that book is about American missionaries and their influence on basically African post-colonial politics or decolonizing politics. So that those are just topics that I happen to be interested in that not all historians of American religion are. But you know, one thing that, Maggie, to your question about sort of like where where have been times where I've thought, maybe I'm missing something here. A lot of the actors that I've studied, whether they're theologians or political activists or pastors, when you start studying their lives, these are Americans I'm talking about, there will often be big chunks of their life, their biography, that are like spent in other parts of the world.

SPEAKER_03 9:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:19

Because so many evangelicals were missionaries or had some type of reason to be in Europe or some other continent. You know, when you see that enough times, you go, hmm, I wonder, you know, that that's just a unique feature. Not most Americans don't spend a lot of time abroad. Yeah, so is uh there were multiple times where I'd be studying a group of dispensationalist uh writers or political activists, and you just start seeing this pattern where, so for example, studying evangelicals who support Israel, a lot of them spend a lot of time in Israel. Some of them, in fact, move there, and you still are sort of writing about them as Americans, but yet they're justifiably Israelis, or at least people who they're not technically Israelis, it usually by citizenship, but they are embedded in that culture more than in the US culture. So those types of things when you're in the research, some of us are more sensitive to that and probably pick it up really quickly. Others you need to get hit over the head with it multiple times before you recognize it. But that that provokes a bunch of questions as a historian about what am I missing if I'm just focusing on these people as Americans and just assuming that whatever I can say about American culture or society applies to them or or can help me unlock them. When there might be this whole other part of the world or culture that is just as much important to understanding who they are than the American.

unknown 10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

And I should probably clarify you are not so much out of your depth because your first book was actually on the relationship between American evangelicals and Israel, right?

SPEAKER_05 10:46

That's right. And I start the story with missionaries to Israel in the 1940s. So yeah, I'm also a missionary kid. So I I have a personal interest in that as well. But yeah, it was actually really important to me when I did that first book. I was really interested in how missionaries in a place like Palestine and then Israel, how they interacted with the US. This is one thing you learn also is the further back you go, the more missionaries are treated by most Americans, not just as missionaries, but as sources of information. Sometimes as the only people in sometimes in the country who know a certain language really well because they've lived in that country or whatever. So I was interested in that going back to the 40s, because it's a much different media environment than now. And back then, most Americans, if they cared about Palestine or Israel, missions bulletins were like the main way to get regular information about what was going on there. So anyway, yeah, I was prompted by that to really center at least the beginning of the story around that. So yeah, missionaries are a fascinating example, and even in a story like you wouldn't maybe expect it in sort of pro-Israel evangelical activism.

SPEAKER_04 11:57

I have a factual question, Dan, maybe or Maggie.

Is World Vision still an evangelical organization today?

SPEAKER_04 12:00

World Vision, would they still identify as an evangelical organization today? I mean, I know there's World Relief, which is the sort of arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, right? The humanitarian arm. Would World Vision still consider themselves to be an evangelical? I do these evangelical roundups every day on my blog, and I've always treated them as an evangelical organization, but uh I don't know what the latest is on that.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

I think so. I and I think a few of the controversies that have kind of swept through the organization related to some of their theology, whether it's traditional, especially I think on issues of sexuality, if I'm remembering correctly, kind of helped align them or realign them perhaps with the more evangelical group for lack of a better phrasing. So I would say, yeah, that they probably still do.

SPEAKER_05 12:48

There's a book a couple years ago by the historian David King called God's Internationalists, and it was a is an institutional history of worldvision, the subtitles World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism. As I was from a few years ago, but King really wants to put them still in sort of at the that front edge of thinking about the connection between American evangelicalism and global evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_04 13:11

Well you mentioned missionary stand, and it's really interesting. Whenever evangelicals seem to make news in terms of American evangelicals, in terms of global engagement, I don't know, is am I right in suggesting this? Maybe the last like 20, 30 years, it's been much more for humanitarian, whether it be world vision, world relief, Samaritan's Purse, you know, these kinds of things than it is in terms of, you know, the old kind of missionary going into the jungle or someplace else and like standing on the street corner planting churches. But all of that's still going on. But it seems like whenever evangelicals make the news, you know, I'm thinking of like uh the New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoff, who wrote a couple of like back in the early 2000s, mid yeah, the teens, you know, 2010s, wrote about evangelical social engagement or or poverty relief. You know, you think of like George Bush's very evangelical-driven kind of Pepfar humanitarianism, you know, you know, Michael Gerson, you know, trying to relieve AIDS and Bono and all these kinds of people. But you don't really hear much anymore about, at least the broader public doesn't hear much about actual missions where the stated goal is to try to plant a church or to convert people to Christianity. Am I on to something there, or am I just is that just me making something up?

SPEAKER_01 14:41

I mean, I I don't listen to the news as often as I should, so I really am not sure. But I think that if you look at like church life, the focus on missions remains pretty consistent, right? You still usually have a missionary Sunday in most evangelical churches where they'll highlight missions. There's still the little booklet that most churches hand out of like here are our missionaries, um the Southern Baptist Convention. I think over 50% of their most recently approved budget went to missions.

SPEAKER_04 15:08

I mean, so it's it's certainly a very robust component

Why humanitarian relief

SPEAKER_04 15:12

to this might be another example of um the way in which evangelicalism is kind of presented, you know, in the public sphere versus what's happening in the churches on the ground, right? They're still giving money to missions.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Well, is it also a credit issue? I mean, if you think about the way that churches present themselves, missions was an unqualified good. Yeah. Right? Like that was just something that was accepted as like this is what we ought to be doing. And in the 21st century, in the kind of post-colonial decolonization movements, like it's there's much more skepticism. So I would say a lot of these organizations aren't sending out memos or kind of trying to get that sort of public attention from national news media in a way that they would have been in earlier decades.

SPEAKER_04 15:58

And also, and also uh related to this, there's been an acceptance within kind of mainstream evangelicalism of relief work, humanitarian work, social justice work being a legitimate reason for an evangelical to give money to something back in the fundamentalist modernist controversy, which there was an essential part. I think we've talked about this in an episode, right? Where the modernist missionary who was just doing social work or social justice work or was not sharing the evangelical gospel, that was a riff in these denominations. But now it seems like evangelicals seem do not seem to have the same problem with like, you know, well, we're going there to uh deliver water pumps. Yeah, if we get a chance to share the gospel, we will, you know. But the main reason we're going is to show Christ's love in another kind of way. Those two things aren't separate anymore. It seems to me, at least, as someone who's, you know, who's just as an observer of this.

SPEAKER_05 16:58

I think you could definitely see that, yeah, maybe return to a sort of 19th-century view of missions that combines conversion with humanitarianism. It's an interesting thing to think about, you know, the fourth part of Bebington's quadrilature we call activism. It's always interesting when you talk about that because you're sort of trying to combine those things. It's like, well, it's it's it's evangelism, but it's also all the humanitarian stuff. So that's also sort of embedded in that definition, is there are two things, and in certain eras they go really closely together, and in other areas they're pitted against each other as basically it's a zero-sum game that depending on which one you're investing in. So I mean, that's something I think we can see. We can certainly see the humanitarian interest every century uh going back, and we can also see a sort of conversion emphasis, but but yeah, often they're not at the same time in history. And just thinking also of of how this is talked about today, one other example on top of all the stuff Maggie said about the church activity, I have noticed there've been a few stories recent years about Wycliffe Bible translators, which is this very evangelical organization. That's whole goal is to just translate the Bible into as many languages as possible. And one reason I noted it is because they actually were one of the companies a few years ago or organizations to adopt AI as a way to speed up the translation work. And I if I remember right, it was one of these examples where actually AI is doing a lot of really efficient work that would take I'm not good enough on how do you translate to know exactly what the work was, but it was something like you know, they were saving thousands of hours of human work and where they were able to speed up their timeline for all these you know projected translations they were having. So there's an interesting angle there too, where you have a very the motive behind the translation is conversion, usually it's it's it's getting the Bible with the gospel in it to these people who don't have it in their language yet, but it's also merging with like the newest technology that we have and seeing that as sort of a way to accelerate conversion-based missions.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

And I think another thing that plays into this sort of tension between humanitarian versus evangelism, if you want to put those as as kind of two potentially collaborative goals, is that there is collaboration that has to take place on an international scale with mostly the Red Cross. And I'm fairly certain the Red Cross requires you to not proselytize for conversion. Like if you're an approved Red Cross organization such as World Vision, you can't make that your explicit primary goal. And so that's still a component. I'm not saying that World Vision doesn't have Christ as part of their ministry, they do, but the way that they balance that with the humanitarian needs is going to be very different because of collaboration with other organizations.

SPEAKER_04 19:44

When we think about American evangelical engagement with the world historically, right, I think it's fair to say that the missionary movement that we normally think about actually comes out of Great Britain

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missions

SPEAKER_04 19:57

first. So that's that's important to remember. But clearly by the early 19th century, you have uh evangelical missionaries, right, going to the world. And so clearly in the 19th century and well into the 20th century, you have American evangelicals looking out over the world, embedded in their own kind of superiority about Western civilization, uh tied with Christianity, Christianity is tied in with like Western civilization, and they're wanting to reach those who have never heard the gospel or they want to translate the Bible, you know, but it's all kind of American evangelicals looking at the world, right? We have something to give you. And maybe we could talk about how that's you know, today it's more of a two-way street, you know, where we're learning from evangelicals learning from global. But before we get to that, uh these are more questions than anything else. But clearly today, if you go to like a theological seminary to study missions, you're not going to have this kind of American exceptionalism, this kind of, we want to not only give you the gospel, but we also want to tell you how to dress in a Western way and you know, all these kinds of things. You know, at what point do evangelicals kind of wake up and say, like the gospel message, we need to contextualize this, or it's not the same as Western culture, because I don't see that anymore, right? You know, that would be almost heresy today in a missions class in any kind of evangelical seminary, right? That we are the superior, to put it darkly, right? It's the white man's burden kind of kind of Rudyard Kipling argument. But how has I guess I'm real curious about how that changed and when it changed?

The turn toward contextualization

SPEAKER_05 21:39

Yeah, I I think it's actually pretty recent, like historically speaking. So there's a good book by David Hollinger, intellectual historian called Protestants Abroad. He's looking at liberal Protestant missionaries in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties, who are missionaries and in his argument become very attuned and sensitive to. This cultural dynamic. And he calls it the boomerang effect, but it's it's they bring back that pluralistic cosmopolitan view. These are people like Pearl Buck and Ernest Hawking, who wrote a really important report on missions in 1932 that basically made the case that in some sense a lot of Protestant missions is wrong-headed to try to see conversions from other religions. And so that's a sentiment that's growing in that that period, so the 1920s to 40s in the liberal Protestant world. I think you see it's not exactly the same process, but there's a s a similar dynamic in the 50s to the 70s with American evangelicalism. And some of this is the adoption of more academic ways of thinking about other cultures, so anthropology, sociology becoming really important disciplines in seminaries, in Christian colleges. Some of it is the same boomer the same boomerang effect where you have missionaries going to other parts of the world and then coming back and with a much different way of talking about what evangelism is. And then you also have there's a really significant moment in 1974, the International Congress on Global Evangelization in Lausanne, convened by Billy Graham and the leaders of American evangelicalism, but attended by majority non-Global North. So so non-North American and European evangelicals. There's a great telling of that in David Swartz's book of that conference. And it gets really contentious, and the division is over global north and global south evangelicals, and particularly in the in the global south, Latin American evangelicals, these are people like Rene Padilla. So these are sort of people who are dis some their parents or they were converted to a type of evangelical Christianity by missionaries from the US or Europe, and so are evangelical in a lot of their theological convictions, but have serious concerns and critiques of Western culture. And this gets really contentious, and it's a really interesting story. And John Stott, who's a major British evangelical, is a big mediator in all this. But that's another thing that sort of starts American people who are tuned into that, American evangelicals, to start talking differently about missions because there's a very vocal critique of the traditional way of doing missions.

SPEAKER_04 24:22

Yeah, I I think the academic, what you said about the academic turn where missiology kind of becomes a subject of kind of intellectual inquiry and ultimately a kind of interdisciplinary sense of study, right? And anthropology especially, you know, you need to understand the culture you're going to before you can just, you know, the gospel is embedded in sort of cultural forms, you know, rather than just here's the gospel and transcends everything about your culture. I remember being at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and taking a course with uh Paul Hebert, who I think had come from Fuller, you know, which was leading the way on this. And I was joking before we we came on for this podcast, you know, it was almost like I was taking an anthropology course, not a course on missions, you know, is all and so so there was a clear shift there from the way, you know, this would have been in the late 80s, early 90s. I mean, there was a clear shift from the way I just thought of missions, you know, as a new evangelical, you know, you just preach the gospel, you go into, you know, especially someone who kind of read about uh Elizabeth Elliot and, you know, the what were they, the Ecuadorian or the five missionaries who were killed by the Native Americans, um, you know, Nate Saint and so forth. And I went to a Bible college that Nate Saint was a graduate of, and Elizabeth Elliot went to for I think a year or two and dropped out. You know, it was just like you just go and you stand in front of these people groups and you preach. And that was not what I was getting in divinity school. So there's more of an anecdotal kind of support for what you're saying there.

The global success story of Korean Protestantism

SPEAKER_01 26:03

I wonder too, it's just the reality of the success of evangelicalism globally. I know a little bit more about Korean evangelicalism because I lived there for a year, not as a historian, just yeah, I was there. And if you look at the success of Protestantism in post-World War II Korea, it's astounding, right? It's it's kind of a recent scholar whose name uh escapes me, is calls it kind of like a Pentecostal Presbyterianism that's very successful in Korea. But you have the largest church in the world in South Korea, and there's a reality there that American evangelicalism is and just American Protestantism overall is declining in a way that is not the case in other parts of the world. And I think that is just maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I think there's a reckoning that happens when people are like, oh wait, our our story isn't the only story out there, and it's not even perhaps the most successful story in my generation that's going to lead to some reflection that I would hope would help to kind of filter out some of those cultural assumptions that lead to that mentality of superiority.

SPEAKER_04 27:11

And now you have global south churches. I'm thinking of sort of Anglicans here, conservative Anglicans, who are actually sending missionaries to the United States, I guess to the Episcopal Church or, you know, whoever they're sending them to. So you do see a kind of movement both ways. You know, you see almost every back to Korea, almost every town, you know, has a Korean Korean-speaking evangelical, you know, evangelical church in it. You know, the president of the uh National Association of Evangelicals, Walter Kim, is an Asian American, I think American born. Yeah. So we are seeing a very different kind of uh globalization of evangelicalism in a way that perhaps we didn't see a hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Well, there's also a a sense of like, yes, they're Christian, but they're not my kind of Christian. Yeah. Um, like when I was in Korea, and this was a little over 10 years ago, I met American missionaries to Korea. And that was kind of strange to me because I also had a friend who went to seminary in Korea, an American. Uh, and I was like, well, why are you here? Uh, you know, like you're part of this church community. And of course, there's always reasons and things like that.

SPEAKER_04 28:21

Especially because it's booming in South Korea, right? I mean, why do you need missionaries from the United States?

SPEAKER_01 28:26

And we also send our own missionaries to domestic areas as well, right? Like there's plenty of areas where we sponsor our own missionaries on college campuses and things like that. So it doesn't make a lot of sense that there would be people in other countries that would be like, ah, that's where I feel called right now. So I think some of its denominational difference or theological difference is probably the better way of phrasing that. You could make the argument that God's going to call people into spaces that might not make a whole lot of sense if we just look at the country as a whole as to whether or not it's it's Christian or not.

SPEAKER_04 28:57

So how did Korean evangelicals respond to Western missionaries? Like, was there this kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of like a colorblindness, or you know, we're all, we're all we're all believers in Christ, right? You know, so welcome, help us with our work, or was there tension?

SPEAKER_01 29:13

I think in my, again, very limited experience because I was there teaching English and I would like come into this English-speaking church community from a Presbyterian church in Seoul, because it was one of the only places that I didn't speak Korean well enough to go to a congregation uh in the area where I actually lived. There was some tension in the groups that I was in because you had um very well-educated, mostly American-born Koreans who were part of this congregation. And then you had some people that were there for their, you know, mission projects. And they saw it as being a strange thing. The ones that were there to work with North Korean refugees were probably the ones that I saw as bad, like that was like, oh, of course you're here for that. Like that was uh seen as very understandable. But those that had other projects didn't seem to be quite as as good of a fit. But again, very anecdotal and just my personal experience.

Do American evangelicals still need to send missionaries?

SPEAKER_04 30:05

I'm just wondering, you know, mission, you know, we talked, you talked about Dan the fourth uh the fourth point on the Bebe to quadrilateral activism, right? We think about that in terms of humanitarian, but also it's historically really been thought about too in terms of preaching the gospel, evangelizing in an age of globalization and with the rise of the global church. Do American evangelicals even need, you know, missionaries anymore? I mean, you you were talking maybe before about their funding them, they're they're giving tons of money to them. I asked that more as like a historical question, you know, like what what's the point of missions today, especially when many of the places these missionaries are going, the church is much more vibrant because of indigenous evangelicals there rather than uh the missionaries, white missionary savior, you know, kind of coming in. Just something to think about.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Who is the author? I'm trying to remember the name of his book. He I think he founded Gospel for Asia out of Texas. Oh, goodness gracious, it's gonna drive me crazy. But one of the points of the book that I read, and I read this probably about 20 years ago, was that A, it makes so much more economic sense to fund Indigenous missionaries.

SPEAKER_03 31:18

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

And it's the only way to combat the colonial mindset of white American missionaries. And so if and the the call of this book, if I'm remembering correctly, was white Americans need to fund good ministry, but not necessarily go. And I have seen that, I think, just in my own life, be more of an encouraged mission model that a lot of missionaries will go in and teach pastors. They'll have kind of ad hoc seminary classes and things like that. India, I think, is a place where this really thrives because the workers are there, but the kind of knowledge that isn't quite there yet, right? So building that up, but not necessarily taking the entire um work the way that say 19th century American evangelicals would have.

SPEAKER_04 32:06

It's a sort of change over time issue, right? So I I always like to think about what future historians of American evangelicalism, like 500 years from now, are gonna say, right? You know, are they gonna point to the decline of missions or like this strange thing that they did, missionaries, you know, another way of looking at it? The the the missionaries uh from the 19th and 20th centuries kind of work themselves out of a job or you know, something like that. So it's a really, when you think about it historically, like what is this moment that we're in? Is is missionary work still, you know, and then you know, you have this whole kind of short-term missionary stuff. I don't know, my take on that, and this is controversial, I know, but my take on that is sometimes those mission trips are more for the kids, the youth group that's going, than necessarily, you know, for for uh the people on the ground, right?

SPEAKER_05 32:55

They're there to help their pitch like that.

SPEAKER_04 32:57

Yeah, yeah, they're there to help, you know, discover yourself and go for a week to Costa Rica. Not that they're not doing good work, they're helping the churches down there, and they're often appreciated by locals. It'll be an interesting historical question 100, 200 years from now. Like, what is the missionary movement still around and what does it still look like? Or will it continue to persist except it will be uh reversed, right? You know, the missionaries will be coming to the West rather than the other way around.

SPEAKER_05 33:25

I think some of that will have to do with American history. Yeah. Where is part of the reason the American missions movement has been so successful is because the United States and Americans have been so affluent and successful. And it's also how we define missions. This was mentioned a bit earlier, but to take an example, the Southern Baptist Convention, I don't know if they still have these terms, but they used to for a long time. They had two missions boards. They had the Foreign Missions Board and the Internal Missions Board.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

Yeah, North American Missions Board was the inner. They still do.

SPEAKER_05 34:00

So it used to be IMB. I mean, this is like back in the s when I was reading, you know, stuff from the 50s and 60s, but yeah, it's now called North American. And so that's the understanding that there is a mission, they're defined missions in these two ways. We've been mostly talking about foreign missions and we'd call whatever campus ministry and so forth inside the US something not that. But I think that both of those would be for a lot of evangelicals parts of what they understand is mission. Yeah, how many sermons have I sat through where it's you know, be a missionary in your own neighborhood, you know, type uh message at the end of it. And so that's using that missionary language about a very non-foreign.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

So maybe I should nuance my thing and say, well, will global missions be uh be a thing in the future? Right. You're right, Dan.

SPEAKER_05 34:42

Yeah, well and I I think there's you know, one way that why there will probably still be a lot of American evangelical interest in missions is even though there is a lot of growth of Christianity around the globe, it's different brands of Christianity or different traditions of Christianity, and many of them are seen as deficient or not even Christian by American evangelicals. And uh this goes all the way back, by the way. The first some of the first American missionaries in the early 19th century were to the Ottoman Empire.

SPEAKER_04 35:14

The Levant, as it was. The Levant. That's what the that's what the American Bible Society called it.

SPEAKER_05 35:18

Yeah, and particularly in Lebanon and what we'd call what at times like Northern Palestine region. And their the primary converts were not Muslims but Orthodox Christians. The few it was a very the few converts.

SPEAKER_04 35:31

Meaning Eastern Orthodox, yeah, Eastern Orthodox, yeah, yeah, uh, of different, yeah, different uh subgroups.

SPEAKER_05 35:37

Um but that was seen as a win by the Protestant missionaries because they were converting these people from into the gospel-believing Christianity, right? So in a lot of the 20th century, that's been actually in places like Brazil. Brazil a hundred years ago was very Catholic, almost 100% Catholic. It's now significantly Pentecostal and evangelical, and that's people switching from Catholicism to evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. And so, yeah, there's been a boom in evangelicalism in Brazil, but it's not from you know, sort of other religions entirely, it's from Catholicism. And I think that's happening and will continue to happen all around the globe as societies develop and move into more different economies and so forth. Some of these different religions have have different appeals. And then even in the if we just took evangelicals and their sort of circle, a lot of um African Pentecostalism is what we would call here in the US something like prosperity-driven gospel Pentecostalism. And there are plenty of American evangelicals who find that really concerning and would send missionaries into places that would be on a map, sort of, oh, that's a Pentecostal area. Well, that is seen for some evangelicals as you know a deficient form of Christianity. And so there will be causes for missions to go there as well. So I think there will still be a lot of reasons for big missions movements. I do wonder in the US, as the there's a declining number of mostly white, affluent evangelicals, if the money will be there in the same way that there were in previous generations. And there were some really burning geopolitical reasons, you know, the Cold War, fighting communism, opening up these closed societies, all that type of language. That's not the same dynamic we have today. And that was a huge driver of missions in the 20th century. And it's unclear if there will be something to replace that. Do you remember, you know, like the 1040 window? There were these phrases during the Cold War to define big chunks of the world that we just needed to send so much uh resources to. The unreached peoples. The unreached peoples. So we don't have any of that type of paradigm right now that we that I at least I'm aware of. And that's different, and that'll probably mean there's less sort of focus on global missions as there was.

SPEAKER_04 37:48

Your your point about the Cold War reminded me of uh I know you've studied Carl McIntyre too, Maggie. You know, he he had this one event where he tied Bibles to balloons, you know, and sent them over the uh so-called Iron Kirk. It was just it was a complete disaster, you know, because the balloons weren't very good and they they were popping and stuff. Yeah. But that's the idea, right?

Midroll button: free button three-pack giveaway for listeners

SPEAKER_00 38:19

Before we get back to it, we'd like to say a quick thank you to everyone who's been listening along with us this season. We've got a little gift for you. We're offering a free three-pack of American Evangelicals buttons. No cost, no catch. Just our way of saying thank you for being part of these conversations. If you'd like a set, the link is right there in the show notes. Click through and we'll get them shipped out to you. We're able to ship anywhere in the continental United States free of charge. That's a free three-pack of buttons, shipping included. Links in the show notes. Grab a set while they last. Now back to the episode.

SPEAKER_05 38:56

Uh,

Missionaries as accidental diplomats

SPEAKER_05 38:57

one other thing I think we can mention, and this gets us sort of out of the present and further back into the past, is the role of missionaries, not just evangelical missionaries, as counselors or diplomats, still most of American history up until World War II, you could say, many missionaries were, in some sense, the official representatives of the US in different countries. I mentioned David Hollinger's book about the 20th century missionaries. One of the crazy stories he has in there is that during World War II, I think it's it was Thailand, there was no one in the State Department who knew Thai. And so they actually relied on this one missionary who had lived in Thailand for decades to basically be the only intelligence they had around Thailand. I mean, that would be unthinkable today that the State Department wouldn't have that type of proficiency. But that was not that long ago, less than a century ago, missionaries played those roles. And you go back even further, I think of the work of Emily Conroy Kruz, who's written multiple books on sort of early American missions, and the really surprising to us today ways that there were missionaries that were basically doing American high-level diplomacy because they were the only Americans that could actually speak both English and another language. Sometimes they're the only Americans in the in the in the region, whether that's different parts of the Middle East or Asia. So that that's just a part of the history that if we were able to go back a hundred years and talk to Americans, then they would be really probably surprised by how little missionaries today play in foreign policy at the highest levels. I'm sure they still play some role in that. And that's a story somewhat of the decline of the world of religion in American society, but also the professionalization of diplomacy. And, you know, that's a 20th century story as well. But yeah, it's just one of those things that you don't really recognize till you start reading about American foreign policy or America in the world in earlier centuries, and you realize, wow, there's a lot of like really important things happening with like just sort of seemingly random missionaries. And that's how it was. And that that's also a sign of how small the US government was in previous centuries where they really did have to rely on these sort of private citizens in some way, like these private actors, to even get basic work done.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

And I think your second story kind of got to that too. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Um, the role of a missionary, like a single person, really could suddenly be an extraordinarily high-stakes position within government. It's interesting too, because your comment reminds me that like as I go through historical sources, like in archives and things like that, particularly church records, it is always so surprising to me how important the missionary boards were in a way that now it's like that committee that you have to really work hard to get people to volunteer for at a church, at least in the churches that I've been in. It's like, oh man, another committee, another, you know, responsibility. Whereas like those were very powerful positions in a lot of denominations. And policing the theology of missionaries also played a part in some of the really big controversies that we've talked about probably already too much on this podcast. Are missionaries too modernist? And if you're a fundamentalist-leaning church, like that's going to cause major problems. And so the role of missionaries, not only as cultural celebrities for a lot of these evangelical churches, but also as true representatives of good theology or correct Christianity, really played a vital role in earlier generations.

SPEAKER_05 42:25

Andrea talked a lot about that when she was with us on the episode on women and evangelicalism. And how I mean, I think that's her book right now that she's working on is how those mission boards in the Baptist and Presbyterian worlds were these really important sort of arenas to fight this, and that they they had a sort of unique role for women in them because they weren't church proper. And so women could were leaders of that. And yeah, that's totally true. I think you could tell a lot of the modernists from the most controversy through the fights over missions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Um and I think others as well, too, right? Like when we get into neo-evangelicalism and kind of post-World War II. I know I came across when I was at the Presbyterian Historical Society archives, a like exchange between a missionary and the board about whether or not they were too communist friendly. Basically, the question they were asked is like, are you thinking communism is at all okay? They're like, we will pull funding. That threat was very real.

SPEAKER_04 43:20

You know, I've often seen in the archives missionaries arguing with the board back home or the agency back home saying, you just don't understand. Like, how can we, you know, you want us to conform to all these kind of fundamentalist, legalistic whatever, you know, drinking or, you know, something like that, but you don't understand the culture. You don't understand the culture, right?

Opening the "white evangelical" question

SPEAKER_04 43:42

And they're always arguing back. I want to sort of open up a can of worms here. It was something we haven't talked about, and we have talked about a lot in this episode, but you know, I think it's in the last several decades where sociologists or or pollsters, you know, have attached the racial category white. To evangelicalism. White evangelicals believe. And usually it's some kind of political realm where white evangelicals are distinguished from black evangelicals or the black church because the black church votes Democrat historically, and there's reasons for that, right? So it's always defined in a political way. White evangelicals meaning like not the black church because white evangelicals vote for Republican candidates. You know, again, this is a podcast about American evangelicalism. This episode obviously is about evangelicals, American evangelicals and the world. I'm wondering if we if we think about globalization and we think about just how diverse the United States is becoming and the movement of peoples. Now, again, that's becoming, I think, more difficult under the current administration where there's all these restrictions on who can come in and who can't come in and so forth. But that aside, the movement of peoples, which has always been present in world history, but so many ethnic and churches connected to uh whether it be African Pentecostals or so forth, to what extent as these, as these, we know what's going on in the global south, but as these groups come and whether they're from refugee communities, migrant communities, whatever, and form their own congregations that are quite evangelical, I think, in in terms of theology, at least as Bebvington would define it. How long does the white adjective get associated with evangelicals? Again, I look at the future and I'm thinking of future historians and um how are they gonna look at this kind of way in which we attach this adjective to evangelicalism like 500 years from now, right? How they are they gonna see this as just like a little blip that was defined by the social and cultural moment of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, or these kinds of things? Or does white evangelicalism, is that still gonna even be a thing in the United States? And then then it gets to these deeper definitional questions, right? If it's not about race or you know, something like what is what is evangelicalism? Well, maybe it actually is uh based on theology or belief or something like that that sort of transcends these ethnic and and racial differences. I don't know. Just just a thought on that. But how should we think about kind of this this white evangelical mantra that we hear in light of all of seems to seems to contradict the globalization of evangelicalism, especially in terms of immigration to the United States?

SPEAKER_05 46:29

A couple things are going through my mind. One of them is that there is a distinction that you can make between I guess you would call it global South Evangelicals and American, as we I'm not exactly sure if we're gonna white middle class. Like there there are very distinct political and social differences that we can track with statistics and stuff. To know that there are different views on prioritizing social issues, on piety issues versus justice issues, things like that. And so you have to explain that some way. I mean, it it remains to be seen how non-white evangelicals, I mean, I think we have some data, but you you just it's a sort of a newer phenomenon, so it's unclear. Like, will they basically adopt white middle class views of of these things, or will they more reflect global evangelicalism in those things? And I think that'll be part of this. Is like, are we seeing something that there's still like an exception or an anomaly in the United States versus other countries? And I think on a really basic level, I think that white moniker or addition will change either when our politics are different and that's not as important to explaining voting patterns or why certain you know elections go certain ways, or whether the visual representation of who's depicted as the leaders of evangelicalism changes complexion. Because right now, regardless of what the demographics show, the the people who speak for evangelicalism and you know Walter Kim, who we mentioned is the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, significant organization, frankly, not on the top tier of people that are consulted when the media wants to know what evangelicals think. There are the certain pastors, certain political actors that stand in, and those tend to still be largely white people. And so if you know if there's some future where that's a really diverse group of people, it'll it'll look it'll feel a lot more awkward to call that white evangelicalism. And that might change pretty quickly. You don't know. I mean, there's a significant growth in Hispanic and Latino evangelicalism, even including among like organization building, not just in numbers. And that could really change the competition.

SPEAKER_04 48:47

It's gonna have to change, right, at some point because the demographics of the country are just in terms of who's having kids and who's not, right? It's gonna change. The question is, how long will that kind of those white leaders you're talking about hold on? Like a lot of them are old too. You know, a lot of these spokes spokespeople for evangelicals are getting up there in age. I mean, I don't have like I'm thinking of like an Andy Stanley who I used to always think of being in his 30s, when he's probably he's probably pushing 60, you know. So it's uh it'll be interesting to see how that develops. But that's that was my point, right? You you know, is white evangelicalism the product of a particular moment that we're in now and thus shaping the you know, shaping the historiographical or the sociological academic kind of take on this?

SPEAKER_05 49:37

Yeah. I mean we mentioned this in an earlier episode, but if you really take a traditional post-World War II definition of neo-evangelicalism, and you say this is Polar Seminary, Christianity Today, and the NAE, I mean, all three of those are now run by non-white people. And so there is something there, though that doesn't seem to have significantly put a dent in this white evangelical label. But that's often too because those are not those three institutions, as influential as they are, are not interpreted now as sort of the power center of whatever we're calling evangelicalism. And I think that to some extent that's right. I think there's a a real important under-reporting. There's plenty of really good scholars doing this. They just I don't think they have gotten the attention that they probably will get soon around the the just increasing role of Pentecostal Christianity as a distinct form of Christianity. The uh term new apostolic reformation has sort of creeped in largely when we're telling political stories about these sort of influential Pentecostal leaders. I think there's a much bigger story about what that network represents in terms of religious practice and the millions and millions of Christians. So that's a you know, that is a real big power center, you could say, both in a political sense and in a in a religious sense, that really the you know, Christianity today is on the margins of that group.

SPEAKER_04 50:54

And it's a post-Cold War fracturing of I think we discussed this in an episode, right? There's not gonna be another Billy Graham. You know, there's so many different now kind of silos of what we would call evangelical. And you know, there's not gonna be one speaker anymore or publication or educational institution, right, that that represents and I think that's a kind of uh fertile ground too for a more diverse ethnically, racially.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

Well, I think one thing, Dan, on your point about Pentecostalism, and again, this is not my field, so I have a very limited understanding of it, but when I do look for work on the global influence of evangelicalism, you're gonna get a lot more scholarship on Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement than you are on evangelicalism writ large. Part of that is the definitional issue that we've talked so much about. It's really hard. And if you're gonna add any other country or any other kind of global perspective, it's just too much to try and figure out who belongs. And so you need to narrow it to some some movement. And the Pentecostal movement, the charismatic movement in the in the 20th century and 21st century has been, and they are the movers and shakers of the evangelical world. So that scholarly focus makes

Why global evangelical scholarship increasingly centers around Pentecostalism?

SPEAKER_01 52:08

a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

Yeah, it's interesting. My as you were talking, I was thinking about my colleague, longtime colleague at Messiah, uh Douglas Jacobson, who I may have mentioned at some point in the series. Um he started out as a scholar of Pentecostalism. He's not Pentecostal, but he was sort of an outside observer of this. He was fascinated by the tradition and wrote two books on like the theology of Pentecostalism. One was titled, What's really good, actually. It didn't get enough attention, um, Indiana University Press thinking in the spirit, and showed that there was a kind of intellects, somewhat of an intellectual tradition. Well, where does he go then as he finishes his work on Pentecostalism? What did he start writing about then, right? Global Christianity, world Christianity, writes a textbook on global Christianity. When you're looking at that, like Pentecostalism, like you can't ignore the global dimensions of it because you really the the history doesn't go uh beyond like uh a sousa street or before a sousa street, right? You know, it's uh it's it's much more of a global thing. So I just thought about Jake Doug Doug Jacobson when you were talking about that as a natural progression of scholarly development.

How many evangelicals are there in the world?

SPEAKER_05 53:22

There's an article that I just came across a couple weeks ago by Gina Zerlow, who's at Harvard, but she works with Todd Johnson, who's at Gordon Conwell, and Gordon Conwell has a uh very prominent center for the study of global Christianity. They do all these sort of massive surveys and try to give you headcounts of evangelicalism around the globe. And so this is an article from the Review of Religious Research. It's it's open source, so as a listener, if you want to check it out, you don't have to pay anything uh to read this. But it's called How Many Evangelicals in the World, a new assessment from the World Christian Database, which is one of these data sets. I won't go through the whole thing, but they basically say there's three different ways you can define evangelical on a global scale. And depending on your definition, the number of evangelicals in the world, it's a range from 330 million to 930 million, which is a very unsatisfying answer because itself the range is larger than the minimum. Uh it's not a good thing. Pissed off by 600 million, depends how you depends how you define it. Uh well, and it it's an interesting, I mean, the the most of the articles is like trying to explain the problem of how to define it. It's still a lot, yeah. Yeah, it's still a lot anyway. And in any of those stories, the bigger story is just the massive shift of weight of evangelicalism from the global north to the global south. But of course, if we're talking about 900 million, that's a much bigger number. But the way that they they have three types in the 300 million is type one, which is very identifiable evangelical denominations, and evangelical in a sort of American evangelical institutional sense. The middle, which is around if if you go with the middle definition, which includes the first one plus all the charismatics and Pentecostals, you're at about 600 million. So that's the second answer. And then the third, which is an interesting one, includes basically a lot of what they call majority world Protestants. And part of the challenge here is that the term evangelical in certain countries actually means denominational Protestant, and Protestant can mean what we would see more as an evangelical type faith. And so it just gets really confusing on you go to somewhere and you say, Are you an evangelical? and they say yes, and they might mean I'm a very liberal Presbyterian.

SPEAKER_04 55:39

It could like the way we the way like sometimes I'll get questions for people who don't know the religious landscape in America and they'll be like, Oh, I'm an evangelical. I I go to the evangelical Lutheran church, right? Right, which is not an evangelical denomination.

SPEAKER_05 55:52

It's that kind of that's a great reference because the original term for you know, if you think about Luther himself, called Protestantism was called evangelicalism in early Reformation era. What I don't want to convey is this doesn't mean it's just a nihilistic attempt or a fruitless attempt to define this, but it's just really hard. And depending on how you define it, you're gonna have this massive range. And that's one of these challenges that, you know, as an American historian, I almost sort of throw up my hands and say, well, let me just get really down to the ground in the US and not worry about this. But it feels to me, John, to get to your point about the term white as well, is this doesn't only to me affect how we're gonna have to write about evangelicals in the future, because this massive change happened in the 20th century. I'm sure we mentioned this before in the podcast, but in the year 1900, 80% of Christians were in North America and Europe. And that shift alone needs to have an explanation for historians. Like we the American historians. That's just a massive change that from that to what it is now, which is basically the reverse of that. We need to have that be part of our story, but we don't have the tools even by the global evangelical scholars yet to really make sense of that.

SPEAKER_04 57:02

Well, the triumphant view of explaining that, right, is like missionary activity worked.

SPEAKER_05 57:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 57:09

Like we we we went around and now we've, you know, we've worked ourselves out of a job or something like that.

unknown 57:16

You know.

SPEAKER_04 57:16

I'm not sure, I think it's a lot more complicated than that, obviously, but you will hear that in some quarters. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 57:22

Yeah. Yeah. Um, having grown up in one of those mission or sort of one of those cultures, there's a lot of encouragement and celebration. I don't want to say triumphalism because I don't think that's what it was, of just the celebration of the growth of particularly more Protestant type of Christianity around the globe. And there is something about generations of evangelicals investing in that has paid off. Not in exactly the way that a lot of them expected, but you can't really tell that story of the growth of the global South without those missionaries.

SPEAKER_04 57:51

That is so interesting, Dad, because today I think many conservative at least, certain a certain brand of conservative evangelicals would see the story you just told about the rejoicing and the fact that the global church is growing and we are no longer growing here as a very scary thing, bad thing, because so much of evangelicalism, at least a certain type, is tied to nationalistic ideas. So, like, oh my gosh, we're not going to be a how can we keep being a Christian nation? You know, we're losing Christians, kind of thing. It's a really different mindset as opposed to like rejoicing in the fact that the gospel is spreading and people are coming to Christ and believe in Christ all over the world in a global way, as opposed to this fear that we sometimes see.

SPEAKER_05 58:40

Yeah, it even gets into sort of theology of the kingdom of God and how you understand what that entails in terms of national identity versus a global identity.

SPEAKER_01 58:48

I think one of the things that I do is that I I teach in a fellows program where undergraduate and graduate students here at Upper House, where we're recording this, they reflect on their experiences and we lead them

Evangelical students today are reckoning honestly with missionary history

SPEAKER_01 59:00

through these tracks. And one of the tracks that I co-taught with Dr. Errol Carlson was on Christ and culture. And so we got into colonization and colonialism, basically, and the legacy of it. And we had quite a few students who were part of crew, the campus ministry that is very evangelistic and emphasizes evangelism quite a bit.

SPEAKER_04 59:19

The old campus crusade for Christ.

SPEAKER_01 59:21

Absolutely. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting that I think is part of this story is that with that shift and that growth of global Christianity, you have many more self-identified evangelical leaders who are very faithful to the gospel, who are also very critical of this kind of, as we pointed out, assumption of Western superiority. And they're saying, like, there's something wrong about the fact that I have to read books in English before I can understand the gospel in my own language, my heart language, that kind of thing. And that is something that really resonates with students today. Like they love the gospel, they want to go out there and they want to share it, but they also are very in tune with this kind of criticism of what the past has done. And I don't think it's a kind of like deconstruction sort of criticism. It's more of a reckoning, right? That we all live within our historical moment and that you can have these missionary heroes, and this is how it usually happens. They hear about someone who was a great hero that they've heard great things about, and then they read a couple sentences about what they've said about race, and they're like, oh, wait, there was a definite difference in opinion between him and I on this particular issue, et cetera. And so I think that we're getting more of that criticism through a lot of scholars, a lot of evangelical leaders, and some people see that as a political attack. And I think that I understand it, but I also think that you can separate it from sort of arguments over American social justice and also see it within this global framework of how do we, if you self-identify as a believer or an evangelical, however you want to phrase it, how do you respect and with humility receive the teachings of people from other countries who are just as connected with God and scripture as you are? I mean privileged because you're American. And I think that kind of reckoning is really the thing that I see sitting with students and getting them to think about okay, what is my relationship with the global church in a new, and I think a very exciting way.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:32

That's encouraging. And you know, I listeners, few listeners out there have labeled me the cynical member of the trio here. But uh, you know, what you just described, Maggie, would fulfill that stereotype here. What you just described, Maggie, would be, you know, require a carefully nuanced argument where you have to kind of thread the needle a little bit and say, yes, like the

Missionary heroes — Hudson Taylor, William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Amy Carmichael

SPEAKER_04 1:01:52

missionary movement did wonderful things. And, you know, I don't think we've really said it yet today on this episode. There's some dark moments in the history of the missionary movement. Let's not forget that. And some of the criticisms of the connection between missionaries and colonialism are legit. So uh, you know, we can't we can't forget that as well.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:13

Yeah, well, that was one thing I was when thinking about the role that missionaries played as like official diplomats. That's tied up with American commercial interests and diplomatic interests. So yeah, yeah, just to state that more boldly, there's been a lot of intermingling of worldly power and missions. And that we're well into this episode, and we haven't mentioned some of these. You mentioned missionary heroes. So these are people I grew up, Hudson Taylor, William Carey, Adorm Judson. These were sort of like the heroes, Amy Carmichael, these heroes of the mission world. And some of those people have significant baggage, I guess you could say, even a number of those aren't are British, uh not American. But there are they are also people that I've seen in more recent years, someone like Amy Carmichael, for example, who spent decades basically running an orphanage in India, but was also missionary, being used as models of at least in a sort of moral exemplar way, of an individual who was able to separate the Western culture from what she saw as her calling. And so these are people who have been talked about for generations and generations of evangelicals. Evangelicals don't have saints, but they have missionary heroes, right? Like those sort of play a similar role. And you know, it's really important that they're fulfilling the four Bebington sort of all at once of the quadrilateral. But they also can be, if used right, at least some of them, models of pioneering intercultural exchange or or ways of thinking critically about your own culture and thinking cross-culturally. So I think those are people who can be used differently across evangelical history by evangelicals to draw different lessons for the needs of different generations of evangelicals.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:52

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