Early Missionary Work

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Early Missionary Work

The Lord’s Mission . At the heart of evangelical Protestantism was the desire to spread God’s word. In the early national period Americans did this in many ways, from praying with their families before meals, to attending church services and urging their neighbors to come also, to speaking out at revival meetings and inspiring others to do the same. One special form of evangelization that took shape during this period was missionary work. This was an organized outreach to non-Christians in the hope of converting them to Christianity. This work had been going on since the earliest European settlements of America. All of the first colonizing efforts had invoked the need of bringing Christ to the Indians. Later, English and Scottish missionary societies sent ministers from Europe and supported efforts to educate the Indians to assume ministerial roles themselves. Catholics as well had pursued this task; French Jesuits worked in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, and Spanish Franciscans, such as Father Junípero Serra, founded mission settlements in California. Some of those churches still survive today, surrounded by modern cities, but in general these colonial missionary efforts met with little success. After 1783 missionary work took on a new urgency in the United States for various reasons and also began to go in some new directions as Americans put their own stamp on this task.

New Directions . The collapse of the Anglican establishment in America after the Revolutionary War created a vacuum since much missionary work had been sponsored by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Americans took over, particularly the Methodists, who were the primary heirs of the missionary tradition. Francis Asbury, the first American Methodist bishop, began his career as a missionary to America and traveled and preached across the country until his death in 1816. The Methodist evangelization of the frontier was partly a fulfillment of earlier Anglican work, but carrying God’s word to the unchurched was different in early national America. After 1783 evangelical Americans shared a pervasive sense of a new beginning. Many believed that a new day was dawning for America, a day associated with the coming of the last days of God’s judgment, foretold in some parts of the Bible. Some thought those days were coming quickly and that converting as many people as possible was part of the preparation needed to bring on these better times. Others thought that even if the last days of the millennium were still some time away, the job of improving the world by expanding Christianity was still an important part of bringing in a more perfect order, an earthly world where men and women might get a glimpse of heaven. A more Christian America would be the first view of that heaven. In addition to these millennial purposes, missionary work fit in well with the rebuilding of old churches and the founding of new ones, the central religious dynamic after the disruptions of the Revolutionary era.

Missions to Asia. These motivations came together for a group of young men studying for the ministry at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts in 1810. Deeply steeped in the developing orthodox position that salvation was available to all people, and caught up in the momentum of the spread of evangelical Protestantism, these men were searching for their roles in this task. Some of these men had been together in college, and had already “banded” together in a secret society, the Brethren, to spread God’s word. They took a further step at Andover as they settled on the idea of a mission to foreign lands, something the English Baptists had been doing since 1792. The Andover men were inspired by reading about this work in the religious press of the age, as well as by the presence of a Hawaiian native, Henry Obookiah, at Andover. Obookiah’s conversion was a living sign of the possibilities of spreading religion abroad. Adoniram Jud-son, Samuel Mills, and a few others brought their efforts out into the open, founding the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, with the support of the Congregationalist General Association. They began publishing materials and raising money to support this work. In 1812 Judson, with his wife and some others, left for India. They eventually reached Burma, where they would work for thirty-eight years, the first of many American foreign missions. These efforts would not only spread news of Christ, but also of America.

OBSERVATIONS OF A FRENCHMAN

As Americans founded their republic, a French observer, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur, wrote a series of letters describing the character of the new nation and published them in Europe in the 1780s under the pen name J. Hector St. John. His main theme was the struggle to forge a single American identity from the different backgrounds and values of the American people. He saw this process in the story of early American religion:

Let us suppose you and I to be travelling; we observe that in this house, to the right, lives a catholic, who prays to God as he has been taught and believes in transubstan-tiation; he works and raises wheat, he has a large family of children, all hale and robust; his belief, his prayers offend nobody. About one mile farther on the same road, his next neighbour may be a good, honest, plodding German Lutheran, who addresses himself to the same God, the God of all, agreeably to the modes he has been educated in, and believes in consubstantiation; by so doing, he scandalizes nobody; he also works in his fields, embellishes the earth, clears swamps, etc. What has the world to do with his Lutheran principles? He persecutes nobody, and nobody persecutes him: he visits his neighbours, and his neighbours visit him. Next to him lives a seceder, the most enthusiastic of all sectaries.… He likewise raises good crops; his house is handsomely painted; his orchard is one of the fairest in the neighbourhood. How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the province at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are? He is a good farmer; he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen.… Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans.

Sources: J. Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer (Philadelphia: From the Press of Mathew Carey, 1793), pp. 52–54.

Missions at Home. Missionary work went forward at home as well as abroad. In some ways every revivalist and preacher was a missionary of a sort, as all ultimately sought the conversion of souls for Christ. But missionary work as a denomination’s strategy for reaching out to new members took on some more-specific forms in this period. A good deal of attention was paid to Indian missions, but more-innovative forms of mission work were also pursued. The New York Tract Society, founded in 1812 to spread God’s word to the unchurched, printed inexpensive pamphlets filled with Bible stories and moral messages. Philadelphia’s First Day Society founded the first Sunday school, called a “First Day School,” in 1791, and these schools soon became a major movement within evangelical Protestantism. Philadelphia’s First Day Schools were sponsored jointly by several church groups, including the Quakers, and they taught reading and writing to poor children on Sundays, their only time free from labor. Asbury spoke out in 1796 in favor ot denominational Sunday schools which would focus more directly on religious instruction, and the Methodists then took the lead in giving these efforts a more evangelical flavor. The schools continued to teach reading and writing, but they now directed those tasks toward the greater one of knowing and understanding God. The evangelical Sunday schools spread rapidly; in Philadelphia alone, where there had never been more than four First Day Schools, there were forty-one evangelical Sunday schools in 1818. Although they focused on religious instruction, the schools had the broader goal of training moral Christian citizens. Just as the circuit riders tried to tame the frontier by introducing Christianity, so did Sunday school teachers try to tame the increasing disorder of America’s quickly growing cities by introducing young people to Christian belief and godly behavior.

Disinterested Benevolence . If missionary work was securely grounded in the social and religious conditions of the new nation, it also had deep roots in America’s religious past. One of the important motivations for many missionaries was actually a theological idea, the doctrine of disinterested benevolence. This idea was developed by Samuel Hopkins, the staunchly orthodox minister in Newport, Rhode Island. Hopkins preached a rigorous form of Calvinism, part of which was the idea that humans could never earn their salvation, but must receive it as a free gift from God. Yet they must nevertheless strive to do good all their lives, without any hope of reward, but simply for the glory of God. Hopkins took this disinterested benevolence to extremes, even saying people should be happy to be damned to hell since even that would be a demonstration of God’s power, an idea some found hard to take. But many found a softer notion of selfless service in a world of severe hardship and few tangible rewards powerful. The criticism Hopkins received for his early antislavery preaching in Newport, where the slave trade was an important part of the economy, was itself a vivid illustration of his commitment to doing good despite the consequences. Hopkins and his followers offered a compelling rationale for the difficult life of the missionary or of any evangelical work, in America or overseas. There was in this work a strong element of self-interest, as missionaries served the purposes of national expansion, or Sunday school teachers made poor children conform to their polite standards. But Hopkins’s influence should remind us that self-serving actions may also have sincerely selfless goals.

Organization. An important part of missionary work was how it was organized. Although the inspiration of people such as Judson was crucial, the work finally could not succeed without the support of the institutional church. Many denominations founded their own mission societies, beginning with the Massachusetts Congrega-tionalists in 1787. A network of supporting groups gradually grew up around these denominational bodies. These groups raised money, planned mission trips and outposts, recruited the men and women to travel on these journeys, and published the stories of these missionaries in the growing religious press. Many of these, such as the Boston Female Society for Promoting the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, founded in 1801, brought women into the effort. The groups were a form of mission themselves for the people, many of them women, who did this work at home. The societies were a way for mothers and children to participate in work in far-off places and to make a contribution in a way suited to their social circumstances. Groups such as the “Cent Institution,” which asked only one penny a week from its members, stressed the contribution even poor people could make to the cause. The cents added up, too: the Cent Institution raised over $2, 000 from 1802 to 1808. This support was crucial for missionaries, who often were not able to farm or otherwise support themselves while doing their work, and many of whom could not have afforded the training they needed without the support of their churches. Even with this help, more was needed because of the scope of the project and its cost. Early on, Protestant churches banded together, just as the first missionaries from An-dover had, to pool their resources for this important task. In 1801 Congregationalists of New England and Presbyterians of New York joined together in a “Plan of Union,” a document that indicated one future direction of missionary work, as well as of American religion.

THE CIRCUIT RIDER

Peter Cartwright was one of the most tireless Methodist circuit riders of the nineteenth century. At the end of his career he looked back on what his life was like on the early frontier around 1800:

A Methodist preacher in those days, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony or a horse, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library always at hand, namely, Bible, Hymn Book, and Discipline, he started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!” In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swam swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held to his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle or saddle-bags for a pillow, and his old big coat or blanket, if he had any, for a covering. Often he slept in dirty cabins, on earthen floors, before the fire; ate roasting ears for bread, drank butter-milk for coffee, or sage tea for imperial; took, with a hearty zest, deer or bear meat, or wild turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper, if he could get it.

Sources: Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1856), p. 164.

International Efforts . There was also an international aspect to the organization of missionary work in this era. As early as 1792 a group of English Baptists had formed a missionary society and sent one of their number to India. Other Protestants from England and Europe followed their lead, and the American missionaries found themselves participating in a worldwide movement of Christianization. While they considered themselves to have a special place in that task, American Protestants also were aware of the opportunity of this joint work for bringing the world together in one Christian order. The international spirit of early American missionaries, however, was tempered by the experience of the War of 1812. The end of the second war against England found Americans turning away from the world into a period of isolation which would last until after the Civil War. While some foreign missionary efforts continued, the churches put much more energy elsewhere. The home missions came to seem more important, and after 1815 American Protestantism would devote itself to spreading God’s word in the expanding territory of the United States through every type of moral reform movement imaginable.

Protestant Mainstream . This development was in fact one of the principle legacies of the religious history of the early national period. The foundations were laid for the “Protestant mainstream” of American culture. The agitation for missionary endeavors brought home to many the fundamental value of preaching the gospel at every opportunity, just as the organizational efforts to start missions brought home the need for cooperation among all Protestants. Although the denominations continued to be deeply divided on matters of theology and practice, at times those divisions were less important than the basic drive to convert souls to Christ. Over time Protestants would continue to find themselves more alike religiously than not, especially as Catholics became a larger part of the American population. Protestant evangelical efforts would secure their central place in American culture since they were the most prominent shapers of that culture through their involvement in every sphere of life. The foreign mission movement was always a minority movement in this era, but its contribution to the ideological formation of American Protestantism and American culture made it important far beyond the numbers of men and women involved.