Copyright 2017 by Timothy C. Tennent
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Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
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Page design by PerfecType, Nashville, Tennessee
Tennent, Timothy C.
How God saves the world : a short history of global Christianity / Timothy C. Tennent. – Frankin, Tennessee : Seedbed Publishing, ©2016.
xi, 123, [1] pages ; 21 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-123)
ISBN 9781628243697 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 9781628243703 (mobipocket ebk.)
ISBN 9781628243710 (epub ebk.)
ISBN 9781628243727 (updf ebk.)
1. Church history. I. Title. II. Series.
BR145.3 .T46 2016 270 2016955397
SEEDBED PUBLISHING
Franklin, Tennessee
Seedbed.com
To my dear friends David and Peggy Harvey, who have embodied God’s Unfolding Story around the world.
Introduction
Act One
Seven Turning Points in the History of Missions before 1792
Introduction
Chapter 1: Unnamed Disciples from Cyprus and Cyrene
Chapter 2: St. Thomas Preaches the Gospel in India
Chapter 3: The Tale of Two Monks: Alopen and Augustine
Chapter 4: Raymond Lull and the Challenge of Islam
Chapter 5: From Padroado (1493) to Propaganda Fide (1622)
Chapter 6: Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf and the Moravian Mission
Chapter 7: The Odd Origins of Korean Christianity
Act Two
The Great Century of Missions, 1792–1910
Introduction
Chapter 8: Holy Subversion: The Birth of the Protestant Missionary Society
Chapter 9: The Word Made Text: Vernacular Bible Translations
Chapter 10: The Legacy of Women Missionaries
Chapter 11: Indigenous Ingenuity: Church Planting in the Great Century
Chapter 12: Global Collaboration: The Birth of World Christianity
Act Three
The Flowering of World Christianity, 1910–present
Introduction
Chapter 13: Pentecostalism in Latin America
Chapter 14: The African Indigenous Churches in Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 15: Muslims Who Are Following Christ
Chapter 16: South Indian Missionaries to North India
Chapter 17: The Non-Registered House Church Movement in China
Chapter 18: The Korean Missionary Movement
Chapter 19: Post-Christendom European Christianity
Notes
Hymn: “The Spreading Flame” words by Julie Tennent
Two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, sat in their dorm room at Stanford University and pledged themselves to the following mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The result was Google, the most powerful and widely used search engine in the world. Today, it seems that large and small businesses are all adopting mission statements. Even businesses with an unambiguous and widely known purpose—such as FedEx, Barnes & Noble, and Nike—all have mission statements. Nike’s mission statement, for example, is “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” The mission craze has even begun to influence the government. Even the U.S. State Department now has a mission statement. Some marriage counselors are now encouraging couples to write up their own personal mission statement. It seems that it is no longer only the church that has a mission. We live in a world awash with mission statements—everybody is on a mission. Clearly the word mission has lost its identity as an exclusively Christian term.
This little book is dedicated to helping you understand the mission of the church. It is not easy to tell the story of the worldwide mission of the church of Jesus Christ in such a short little book. Before I became the president of Asbury Theological Seminary, I used to teach a course on the history of missions. I would have the opportunity to spend an entire semester with students and unfold the story over many hours, supplemented by thousands of pages of reading.
I would like to approach this book in a different way. Rather than plowing through countless names and events that make up this remarkable story, I would rather like to invite you out to an evening together. Let’s jump in the car and go see a play entitled God’s Unfolding Story. Like a true epic play, it will be a play in three acts. Another way to envision this little book is to imagine that we decided we didn’t want to go out to see a play, but we just wanted to stay home and look at some pictures together. I will throw a picture on the table of some event in Christian history and then tell the story of that picture. We will spend an evening together looking at pictures through the history of the church. Either way, we will look at the pictures or see the play in three acts or three parts. Act 1 will look at the history of missions from the book of Acts until the year 1792. Act 2 will cover the period between 1792 and 1910, and act 3 will look at the history of the church between 1910 and the present.
Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, is one of the earliest writers to record the ancient myth of Narcissus. According to Ovid, after Narcissus’s encounter with Echo, he fled to a river, where he knelt down to drink. However, as he was about to drink, he caught sight of his own reflection in the water and fell in love. Whenever he tried to drink from the river, the reflection was disturbed. So, Narcissus refused to drink, and he gazed longingly at his own reflection until he died. The myth of Narcissus has been used by modern writers and artists as varied as Keats, Dostoevsky, Freud, and even Bob Dylan to highlight the destructive nature of narcissism. Today, mirrors are among the most common objects in the world. Mirrors are used in telescopes to bring distant images closer. Sometimes mirrors are distorted and twisted and used in carnivals to make us laugh at our own caricatures. Mirrors are used every day by people all over the world to help with personal grooming.
According to Webster’s dictionary, a mirror is defined as a smooth surface with spectral qualities. In other words, a good mirror is one that is able to reflect an image with clarity and precision.
Missions history can be conceptualized as a mirror, or image reflector. Just as God in Jesus Christ entered history in order to show us what God was like, so the church is to embody and reflect the very presence of God in the world. In short, missions history is a reflection of the incarnation. The role of the church is not just to bring a particular message, but to embody the message as we image the incarnation and foreshadow the coming New Creation. Undoubtedly, numerous examples can be cited where we have distorted God’s intention for the church in the world. Like the distorted mirrors at carnivals, we have sometimes reflected only a crude caricature of Jesus Christ in the world. However, God in His providence has chosen and sent the church into the world to bear witness to His glory and the salvation which is found in Jesus Christ.
In act 1, we will explore the earliest period of our Christian history, as the church sought to be faithful in reflecting the glory of Jesus Christ. Act 1 will cover the period from the first century, as recorded in the book of Acts, until the year 1792. We will explore this vast period by looking at seven “snapshots,” which cover this period of mission history. It is hoped that these seven pictures will, in some way, reflect something of the vibrancy and beauty of the earliest days of the church in mission in the world.
The first picture I want to show you is the story of a group of disciples from the island of Cyprus and from a city in North Africa known as Cyrene. You might expect that the first picture we would look at would be the apostle Paul, the reputed “Apostle to the Gentiles” (Rom. 11:13; Gal. 2:8) and probably the greatest missionary in the history of the church. However, I have chosen to focus on a small group of unnamed disciples from Cyprus and Cyrene who were the first to address the gospel to Gentiles who had no prior identity with Judaism. These early missionaries preached the gospel to Gentiles before Paul’s first missionary journey. They were used by God to foster what is arguably the most important breakthrough in the entire book of Acts.
The book of Acts records that a great persecution broke out against the church in connection with the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 8:1). This persecution caused a scattering of believers from its base in Jerusalem to such faraway places as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch (Acts 11:19). These scattered believers, Acts records, went around “spreading the word only among Jews.” But, Acts 11:20 records, “some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.” The Lord blessed these early missionaries, and “a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord” (v. 21). This is the origin of the church at Antioch, which, some years later, would be the sending church for the apostle Paul’s great missionary journeys (Acts 13:1).
There are three very important observations that should be made in reflecting on this early breakthrough among the Gentiles. First, the encounter between these unnamed Jewish believers and the pagan Gentiles of Antioch was precipitated because of the persecution that broke out in Jerusalem. While it is not good to overly romanticize persecution, it is nevertheless important to see that God has used persecution throughout mission history to advance His purposes.
Second, we do not even know the names of these believers. We only know that they were men from Cyprus and Cyrene. These men were not apostles. They were not part of the inner circle of Peter, James, and John in Jerusalem. They occupied the margins of the fledgling Christian movement. After the dramatic Gentile breakthrough occurred in Antioch, “news of this reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem” (Acts 11:22). The church leadership was in Jerusalem, while the front edge of God’s work was taking place in Antioch. Throughout the history of missions we discover that God often moves from the margins, not from the center of the Christian movement.
Third, it is the Gentile breakthrough in Antioch that led to the famous Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15. As long as the number of Gentiles remained small, then the Jews had various ways of accommodating Gentiles within a larger Jewish movement that retained Jewish identity. However, the growth of the Gentile movement forced the Jerusalem Council to meet in AD 49. The decision of the Council of Jerusalem was in favor of one body of Christ, but multiple cultures within the broad parameters of Christian morality. In short, the church embraced the idea of a diverse church, opening the door to a potentially infinite number of cultural expressions that could all be authentically Christian. Excepting any ethnic Jews who are following Christ and reading this book, every Christian who is reading these pages is indebted to these earliest unnamed Christians who crossed that first cultural boundary with the good news of Jesus. We are Christians because someone followed in their footsteps and preached the gospel to our ancestors. In short, this picture is our story, and it all began with these two disciples from Cyprus and Cyrene, who boldly decided to tell Gentiles “the good news about the Lord Jesus.”