An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812–1920

Written by Jay Riley Chase Reviewed By Nathan A. Finn

Most historians of missions frame their narratives as stories of cultural imperialism wherein Western missionaries impose their religion and values on indigenous peoples. In An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920, Jay Riley Case challenges this tired but persistent interpretation. Case argues that the real picture was far more complicated. “Missionary engagement . . . involved cooperation, negotiation, conversation, reassessment, and transformation, from all parties” (p. 7). Cases focuses his attention on the American evangelical side of these encounters, demonstrating that foreign missions is actually a resounding success story for evangelicals, though that success came in ways unforeseen by many of the earliest missionaries.

Case makes a distinction between two different evangelical missionary strategies. Evangelical “formalists” emphasized personal conversion and were moderately revivalistic, but they also believed that God advanced his kingdom through Christianized (and thus civilized) societal structures. Formalists built institutions such as hospitals and schools, maintained alliances when possible with indigenous officials, and sought to Christianize as much of the social order as they could through a combination of evangelism and cultural engagement (p. 13). “Antiformalists” were far more revivalistic and were motivated by an almost exclusive focus upon conversions. The antiformalists were more egalitarian and less consistently doctrinaire than their formalist counterparts. They were also less inclined to engage with indigenous culture and more apt to disregard social conventions for the sake of greater evangelistic results (pp. 13-14). Perhaps not surprisingly, formalists were more successful at making broader societal contributions (both good and bad), while antiformalists were generally more successful at winning converts.

This important distinction between formalists and antiformalists runs throughout the book's nine chapters. For example, the Baptist missionaries George and Sarah Boardman (ch. 1) began their ministry in Burma among the dominant Burman people group. When presented with the opportunity to work among the less-civilized Karens, a minority group, the Boardmans hesitated. But the Karens persisted in asking for the gospel (!), so the Boardmans acquiesced and switched the emphasis of their ministry. Though the Boardmans remained paternalistic in their approach to the Karens, the latter insisted on indigenous leadership, including pastors and evangelists. This forced the Boardmans and other missionaries to focus on institutions and initiatives (like Bible translation) to aid the Karens in their own inter-cultural missionary work. This shift, in turn, influenced the entire American Baptist missionary strategy as the Karens embraced Christianity in large numbers and became a selling point for further missionary recruitment.

The Boardmans's experience with the Karens included both formalist and antiformalist elements, which introduced tensions concerning strategy among missions-minded American Baptists (ch. 2). Some advocated missionaries gradually giving up their power to indigenous leaders, while others wished to maintain a paternalistic relationship with those among whom they were ministering. Formalists advocated working through institutions to both evangelize and civilize from a culturally privileged position, while antiformalists were more open to somewhat more egalitarian partnership relationships with national leaders. This led to a significant debate among Baptists in the 1840s (ch. 3). Francis Wayland-a university president-advocated an antiformalist approach, emphasizing granting autonomy to national believers as soon as reasonable. Barna Sears countered by arguing for a formalist strategy that emphasized education and maintained a paternalistic vantage point for missionaries. Sears's vision ultimately carried the day, spurred on by the growth of single female missionaries, most of whom were educators, as well as the North American context of postbellum mission work among African Americans, much of which was educational. Foreign mission engagement had influenced home mission strategies.

Other evangelicals, especially Wesleyans, tended to be more committed to antiformalist approaches. William Taylor, a Methodist missionary to South Africa, partnered with a national evangelist named Charles Pamla (ch. 4). The result was a revival that made Taylor famous. Taylor cared little for civilizing nationals, opting for a vision similar to Wayland's, though adapted to a Wesleyan theological context. The South African revival became an apologetic for Taylor's belief in a transcultural, minimally adapted gospel that would always lead to large numbers of conversions and the rapid growth of indigenous churches. Taylor became an influential itinerant missionary and eventually African bishop for the Methodist Episcopal Church (ch. 5). His evangelistic results were mixed, depending upon context. His antiformalist strategy drew criticism from many Methodist officials, but it paved the way for the Holiness approach that would eventually help birth global Pentecostalism.

Case next turns to what he calls the African American Great Awakening, when Blacks began to embrace evangelicalism following the mid-eighteenth century (ch. 6). As with the foreign mission field, white evangelists labored among African Americans, though the preponderance of conversions came at the hand of indigenous evangelists. Black evangelicals adopted antiformalist strategies for ministry, even as whites such as the American Baptists used formalist strategies to educate African Americans and (at times) curb their autonomy. Ironically, by the postbellum era, Black denominations were becoming more formalist in their own mission work. When South African Methodists broke from the control of American Methodists, they affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (ch. 7). The AME missionaries then began to struggle with the same formalist-antiformalist tensions that white Baptists had faced with the Karens in Burma.

In the late nineteenth century, Wesleyan Holiness views began to spread to new foreign fields (ch. 8). The Holiness movement was anti-formalist, egalitarian, and far less concerned with middle-class sensibilities than mainline Methodists. As Holiness missionaries engaged foreign cultures, their sensibilities often connected with indigenous believers. Holiness missionary Agnes McAllister sparked a revival in East Africa in the 1890s that challenged received gender expectations and served as a precursor to Pentecostalism. In India, Pandita Ramabi became the leading figure in the Mukti Revival of 1905, another pre-Pentecostal, antiformalist movement led by a woman (ch. 9). In her case, Ramabi rejected the paradigm of the formalist Anglican missionaries who first evangelized her, leading to an indigenous revival that resulted in numerous conversions. The Azusa Street Revival (1906) is thus best understood as the American version of a wider movement that had already begun among antiformalist missionaries and national believers on other continents.

In The New Shape of World Christianity (IVP, 2009), Mark Noll argues that North American evangelicalism has shaped global Christianity by exporting a low church, democratic, conversionist ethos that has resonated worldwide. Case demonstrates that much of this ethos was refined through the influence that the earliest foreign converts had on their missionaries and sending denominations back home. Global evangelicalism is mostly antiformalist, in part because the antiformalist impulses of indigenous evangelicals influenced nineteenth-century American evangelicalism, in some cases furthering evangelical republicanism and in other cases challenging latent evangelical formalism. The American evangelical DNA that has been replicated worldwide includes mutations introduced through earlier interactions with foreign converts. An Unpredictable Gospel is an important book that challenges faulty assumptions about cultural imperialism while also raising new questions about the nature of contextualization, the relationship between evangelism and social control, and the contours of intra-denominational debates about mission strategy at home and abroad. Highly recommended.


Nathan A. Finn

Nathan A. Finn (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as provost and dean of the university faculty at North Greenville University. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Historical Theology for the Church (B&H Academic, 2021).

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