Overseas Ministries and the Subversion of Theological Education

OMSC I and II

By the early 1920s, two sisters, daughters of William Howard Doane, Cincinnati industrialist and prolific writer of popular hymn tunes, had become convinced that many missionaries needed ministry themselves. Missionary service could be exhausting. Numbers of missionaries fell ill, some seriously. Many suffered stress; some burned out. Many were just tired, and the round of “deputation”—visiting congregations to preach and talk about mission work—commonly expected of missionaries on leave could be demanding.

The Doane sisters, Marguerite and Ida Doane, conceived of a sheltered residential establishment in Ventnor, New Jersey, close to the ocean, where missionaries on furlough and their families could rest, recuperate, and find renewal. There would be housing for single missionaries and for families, forming a community dedicated to mission that respected the theological and methodological diversity represented in missions. In due time, another dimension was added to this ministry to missionaries. It was recognized that their effective ministry involved an intellectual as well as physical and spiritual components, and a program of theological studies was introduced for residents of the Ventnor furlough houses. The program grew in significance, and from this time “Overseas Ministries” was indissolubly linked with “Study,” as reflected in the title the institution adopted. The Center had successive visionary directors: R. Pierce Beaver, formerly of University of Chicago Divinity School, director of the Missionary Research Library and doyen in his day of theologians of missions; and Gerald H. Anderson, who came from theological education in the Philippines to lead the Overseas Ministries Study Center into a new era. This involved a geographic move, to fine premises in New Haven, Connecticut, just across from Yale Divinity School, with its magnificent Day Missions Library; and a conceptual move from ministry to and through missionaries to ministry to the church worldwide and to the world of theological scholarship. Under Anderson’s leadership, a program of research in World Christianity was developed, with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, initiating many projects, mounting international conferences, involving major scholars in various disciplines and from various nations, and producing significant publications. Besides this, OMSC became a center for residential study, with a syllabus of seminars through the academic year, led by specialists and open to all, with a senior missiological scholar in residence each year. There were still missionaries among the residents, but the majority of those who came for study there were not missionaries in the sense that the Doane sisters would have recognized. They were Christian workers from all over the world; they were engaged in various ministries overseas, and as a group, they represented World Christianity.

The century of change

These changes in the focus of the Overseas Ministries Study Center reflect changes that had taken place in the position of the Christian faith in the world. It is arguable that in terms of its composition and situation in the world, the Christian faith changed more during the twentieth century than in any previous century since the second, or even the first. When the Ecumenical Missionary Conference met in 1900, Christianity was, and had been for several centuries, the religion of the West. A migration was still in progress that had begun in the sixteenth century, whereby people from Europe were moving into the temperate parts of the world, settling and forming new nations across the Americas, in Southern Africa, and in the southern Pacific. They established commercial and often political hegemony over much of the rest the of the world, forcing a migration from Africa to the Americas in the process. Though a missionary movement to propagate the Christian faith had seen modest success, by far the greatest number of professed Christians were Europeans or descended from Europeans. And not only was Christianity the religion of the West; it was very much a Western religion, shaped by centuries of interaction with European languages and culture, entrenched in the symbolic registers of Europe and North America, shaping and being shaped by their philosophical, aesthetic, and literary traditions.

During the twentieth century, all this changed. By the century’s end, those who called themselves Christians formed a similar proportion of the world’s population as at its beginning, but there was a marked difference as to where Christians lived. No longer was Christianity so obviously the religion of the West; a recession, possibly the fastest the Christian faith has ever known, had occurred, most notably in Europe; while a rapid expansion had taken place in sub-Saharan Africa and in some parts of Asia. By the year 2000 the majority of the world’s Christians were Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans. The same movements have continued since, year on year; if they continue, Africa, Asia, and Latin America will soon account for some two-thirds of the world’s Christians. Some time ago, an Anglican number cruncher informed me that the median Anglican was then a charismatic, Bible-reading, East African woman in her twenties. I would not be surprised if the median Presbyterian and the median Methodist were to be that lady’s sisters.

Serial change at OMSC, which today enters a new stage, reflects developments in the continuing story of Christianity. OMSC represents a niche branch of theological education, which raises the question how far theological education in the West generally has responded to the same changes. Theology, after all, does not begin in the study or in the library; it arises out of the life-situations of Christians and of the church, from the need to answer the questions “What should I do as a Christian in this situation?” and “How should I think as a Christian in this situation?”

Theological laboratories—now worldwide

For a long time, the life situations that have produced theology have arisen in Europe and North America, shaped by the cultures, traditions, and intellectual history of those continents. For vast numbers of Christians now, the life situations that require theological thinking arise from the conditions, cultures, and intellectual history of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This fact does not, of course, reduce what one might call the domestic concerns of Western theology; indeed, the two run parallel, and the diaspora factor—the large numbers of people from other continents, Christian and otherwise, now resident in Europe and North America—must also be taken into account when considering the scope of theological activity. The ancient cultures of Africa and Asia will throw up issues for theological reflection and decision, just as the Greek philosophical tradition did in the early Christian centuries. Africa, Asia, and Latin America are theological laboratories fully as much as Europe and North America have been hitherto; they will enlarge the whole scope of theological activity. There is every prospect of the twenty-first century becoming a period of major theological expansion, revealing to us from the Scriptures more of who Christ is. It is vital for the good of both theology and the whole church that theological activity be intercontinental in each of the constituent disciplines—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology, practical theology, and the borderlands with philosophy and the social sciences. If the theological academy will respond to the changes within the worldwide Christian community as OMSC has done, an exciting future, a theological renaissance, may be awaiting us.

From the beginning, the Christian faith has been worldwide in its scope. The promise to Abraham proclaims blessings to all nations on earth. The prophets look to the coming of the Desire of all nations. The New Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven at the last day has gates open to the north, south, east, and west, through which the treasures of all nations pass into the City of God. The community of Christians is now a six-continent, worldwide fact of life. The theological laboratories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are already busy, and there is still plenty of laboratory space. This offers a prospect of new sources of light on and from the Bible, long histories embodying ancient cultures and modern realities, engagement with other worldviews and other assumptions about the transcendent and the empirical realms—not to mention abundant expressions of ebullient church life and innumerable situations not covered in the standard works on pastoral theology.

I hope an autobiographical reflection may be forgiven at this point. The theological course I followed in the 1940s referred to no part of the world outside the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and to no date after AD 461. When, in the 1960s, I was appointed to teach church history in the Faculty of Divinity of an ancient Scottish university, the curriculum in church history had three components. The first year was devoted to the early church—but only that part of it lying within the Roman Empire. The Reformation occupied the second year, and Scotland the third. No doubt the object behind this was to show where “we”—that is, the Scottish national church—came from. But neither in church history nor in any other part of the three-year program designed for candidates for the ministry was there any indication of our membership in a worldwide community of Christians. The theological degree program gave the impression that “we” were at the heart of the church. The recession from the faith in Europe was then already underway, and the national church was shedding members year by year, as students for the ministry well knew. I had returned after years in West Africa, where the churches were burgeoning. Nothing in the standard degree program at that time offered any way of introducing that piece of contemporary reality.

Toward truly ecumenical World Christian theology

I am aware that the situation now is very much better, both in Scotland and elsewhere, as regards the teaching of both church history and other disciplines. But I am not convinced that a World Christian consciousness is yet informing the way our courses are planned and taught, or that our thinking on theology is yet in the truest sense of the word ecumenical, that is, reflective of the whole inhabited world. Our structures are venerable, and we are ourselves are shaped by them. Deliberate subversion may be the only way forward.

To this end, I offer four statements, all of which I believe to be true and all of which, if followed in devising the curriculum of theological education, might make it more truly ecumenical, even if subversive of some things hitherto taken for granted. I will confine myself to the teaching of Christian history.

The first statement is: The study of early Christianity should not be confined to Christianity within the Roman Empire.

Study of the early church tends to be dominated by Christian presence in the Roman Empire. A narrative line runs through the age of persecution to Constantine and on to the Christian empire. It can be argued that this is in line with Luke’s narrative in Acts, where the climax of the story is the arrival of Paul in Rome; we last see him preaching the kingdom of God in the imperial capital. But Luke’s carefully crafted presentation offers an important diversion in Acts chapter 8, introducing us to the Ethiopian eunuch, whom we last see going on his way rejoicing to the heart of Africa. It is as though Luke is reminding his readers that not all the roads on which the gospel travels lead to Rome; one day all the gospel highways will join up, even those to the uttermost parts of the earth.

There were many such highways in the early history of Christianity: “beginning from Jerusalem” the gospel traveled not only westward toward the Mediterranean world and Rome, but eastward across Central Asia. The emperor of China was reading (and approving) Christian Scriptures in Chinese by AD 638. The gospel also traveled southward, deep into eastern Africa, and both southward and eastward to India, where churches to this day claim an unbroken link with the apostolic age. It produced perhaps the most remarkable missionary movement in Christian history, with Arab missionaries from what we now call Syria and Iraq; in what may be called early Christian times there were organized churches in Asia from Siberia to Sri Lanka. Even Eusebius knew stories of the Christian movement in the Arab principality of Edessa, where the Roman and Persian empires met. Edessa, a major mission base and center of Christian learning, is indicated on many textbook maps of the early church; from the Roman Empire habit of mind, however, it is usually placed on the eastern edge of the map. There was much Christian activity still further east. The same habit of mind passes over the great ecumenical failure of the century that followed the Council of Chalcedon, leading to the earliest World Christianity splitting three ways along linguistic and cultural lines. ¹ The sad outcome was that the Christians of Europe lost effective contact with those of Further Asia and Africa in the period leading up to the rise and spread of Islam.

The second subversive statement is: Taking a World Christian view, the Protestant Reformation is the second most important development during the sixteenth century.

I put this statement in crude form, without any intention of downplaying the significance of the Protestant Reformation or its defining effect in European history and on lands beyond Europe. I further recognize that the sixteenth century saw several reformations, and that the combined effect of the Catholic, Protestant, and Radical Reformations was immense. But if we are considering the worldwide history of Christianity, we should not overlook another sixteenth-century development with huge implications for the future.

We have noted how the great ecumenical failure of the sixth century caused the earliest form of World Christianity to fall apart. Much of the Christian presence in Central Asia faded; the seventh century saw the rise of Islam and the Arab expansion into both the Roman and the Persian empires, bringing Christian peoples under Muslim rule. Islamic expansion continued until by the late fifteenth century peoples at the eastern and western ends of Europe were also under Muslim rule. By this time, Christianity had also expanded across Europe as the peoples beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, called by the Romans barbarians, moved corporately into the Christian faith, to form the basis of what we know as Western Christianity. By 1500, this process was almost complete. The combined effect of expansion in Europe and decline in the rest of the world was that Europeans became the most considerable body of Christians in the world. The completion of the Christianization of Europe coincided with the end of Europe’s isolation from the rest of the world, as oceanic voyages took Europeans eastward beyond the Islamic world, sailing round Africa to the rich lands of Asia, and westward to the hitherto unknown Americas. In the Americas it seemed at first possible simply to expand Christian territory by conquest and to re-create old Mexico, for instance, as New Spain; but this was unthinkable in the great empires and vast territories of Asia. Those who seriously sought to preach Christ there had to do so on terms set by Asians. A missionary movement emerged out of the Catholic Reformation, producing such figures as Matteo Ricci, who wrestled with the classical literature of China to present the Christian gospel in Chinese terms; and Roberto de Nobili, who followed a parallel course in South India; and the extraordinary developments that produced what is often called Japan’s Christian century. In these stories we see a Christianity that had become thoroughly Europeanized meeting the world beyond Europe; interacting with the history, cultures, languages, literatures, and religious traditions of Asia; seeking to translate, without the power to compel. The huge implications of this encounter of the faith with the non-Western world force this convinced Protestant to stand by the second subversive statement.

The third statement is: The most transformative development in Western Christianity in its modern period is the development of the Western missionary movement.

We have already considered the demographic and cultural shifts in Christianity that became evident in the twentieth century, whereby Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in terms of the numbers of professed Christians, overtook Europe and North America, long thought of as the heartlands of Christianity. Many factors led to this situation, and it remains true, for instance, that at all times most Africans first heard the gospel from other Africans; but it is also true that the missionary movement was the detonator of a huge explosion. Missions had highly complex relationships with colonial and imperial interests and equally complex relations with emigration from Europe. In missions, women’s activity and initiatives were crucial, both in organization and support and in mission operations. Academic disciplines—linguistics, anthropology, religion, medicine among them—gained transforming stimulus from missions. Besides the major theological and ecclesiological issues raised by mission activity, the movement was related to the development of other doctrines—salvation, sanctification, and eschatology among them. Missions have often been the only effective link between Western churches and the rest of the world, and the lens through which much of the world was seen in the West. This suggests that the missionary movement is a significant part of the development of Western, as well as world, church history; yet its place in courses on modern church history is commonly marginal, often nonexistent.

My fourth subversive statement is: America was the scene of a vital phase of the study of a crucial period of African Christian history, which calls for intercontinental consideration.

Africa has had a continuous Christian presence since the early second century, but a new phase began in the sixteenth century, arising from the forced movement of Africans to the Americas—South, Central, and North. The influence of a black Brazilian Christian brought about a papal declaration against the slave trade (with a notable statement on human rights) in the seventeenth century. For a substantial period, there were more African Christians in the Americas than there were in Africa; the processes by which they became Christian need far more study. Protestant and indeed sometimes Catholic missions in Africa looked to the Caribbean for inspiration, motivation, and sources of personnel. African Christianity is likely to play an increasingly important part in Christian history considered as a whole; we need to remember that part of African Christian history lies in the Americas. It is a story of trauma and triumph, and a major field for intercontinental theological and historical cooperation.

Whatever may be made of my four subversive suggestions, it is beyond doubt that the time is ripe for reconsideration of theological education in the light of World Christianity as it is now. The relocation of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, with its long experience of the changing nature of “overseas ministries,” to a place at the heart of a major center of theological education with a distinguished record both in ministerial formation and in academic research is a symbol of a present reality, giving hope for the future.