Mission, Empire, and the Modern Missionary Movement

The modern missionary movement cannot be understood apart from empire.

It also cannot be reduced to empire.

Both sentences are necessary because each corrects a historical simplification.

European expansion created ships, trade routes, military protection, colonial administrations, educational systems, commercial languages, printing networks, and legal structures that missionaries frequently used. Missionaries often arrived carrying the social authority of the imperial worlds from which they came even when they possessed little formal political power. Some shared racial assumptions common to their societies. Some interpreted European civilization as evidence of Christianity’s superiority. Some benefited from coerced labor, unequal land systems, settler expansion, or colonial state protection.

Missionaries also criticized colonial officials, defended communities against settlers, opposed slavery, documented abuses, translated languages colonial authorities ignored, established institutions later used by anticolonial leaders, and sometimes became serious irritants to the empires supposedly sponsoring them.

The historical relationship is therefore not one of identity but entanglement.

Mission and empire overlapped unevenly across time, place, denomination, and personality.

Before Protestant Voluntary Missions

The story begins before William Carey.

The maritime expansion of Spain and Portugal carried Catholic Christianity into the Americas, Africa, and Asia from the late fifteenth century onward. Papal patronage systems, crown authority, conquest, commercial ambition, and mission became intertwined. Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians, and other orders entered societies transformed—often violently—by European expansion.

The institutional relationship between mission and imperial power varied, but the proximity itself created enduring questions.

Can conversion be free when missionaries accompany conquerors?

Can Christian teaching be distinguished from the social authority of the colonizer?

What happens when baptism, political incorporation, education, taxation, and cultural change arrive within one imperial process?

These questions are not merely retrospective moral judgments imposed from the twenty-first century. Christians inside the colonial world argued about them.

Las Casas and the Moral Contradictions of Conquest. Bartolomé de las Casas became the most famous Catholic critic of Spanish mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. His long life contains its own moral development and contradictions, including early participation in structures he later condemned. Yet his critique demonstrates something essential: Christian mission did not speak with one imperial voice.

Las Casas argued that Indigenous peoples possessed rational and moral capacities denied by those who used supposedly civilizational arguments to justify domination. He condemned violent conquest and coercive evangelization, insisting that Christian persuasion had to be compatible with human freedom and dignity.¹

His work should not be turned into a convenient moral alibi for the entire missionary enterprise. One missionary critic cannot erase systemic violence.

Neither should the existence of colonial violence erase the fact that Christian theology itself supplied resources by which Christians challenged that violence.

This internal conflict will recur throughout mission history.

Christian doctrine can legitimate power when interpreted badly.

It can also become a language for judging Christian power.

Jesuit Adaptation and the Contextual Question. Catholic missions in Asia generated another enduring question: how far may Christianity adapt to local culture?

Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci in China pursued strategies of accommodation, learned elite literary culture, adopted forms of dress and social behavior suited to Chinese scholarly environments, and sought terminology through which Christian teaching could become intelligible. In India, Roberto de Nobili adopted aspects of elite Brahman social practice in an effort to detach Christianity from Portuguese cultural identity.

These experiments remain controversial because cultural adaptation touched theological boundaries. The Chinese Rites controversy over ancestor and Confucian practices eventually became a major conflict concerning what could be treated as civic-cultural ritual and what constituted religious practice incompatible with Christian faith.

The episode matters for mission because contextualization did not begin as a late Protestant response to colonialism. Missionaries repeatedly encountered the same underlying problem:

How much foreignness belongs to the gospel, and how much belongs to the missionary?

No mission can avoid the question.

The Moravian Challenge

The Moravian movement of the eighteenth century occupies an unusual place in Protestant mission history. Emerging from the renewed community associated with Herrnhut and Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the Moravians sent missionaries from a remarkably small population into the Caribbean, Greenland, North America, Africa, and elsewhere.

Their missionary imagination challenged the idea that overseas mission required a large state church or national empire. Ordinary tradespeople could go. Communities could organize themselves around sustained prayer and sending.

Moravian missionary memory also includes stories so dramatic that hagiography has sometimes outrun evidence. Popular accounts that missionaries deliberately sold themselves into slavery, for example, require careful scrutiny in particular cases.

More importantly, Moravian missions themselves operated within slave societies. Missionaries served enslaved populations in the Caribbean while navigating economic and political systems built upon slavery. Their presence could offer pastoral care and Christian community while remaining entangled with plantation realities.

The example again refuses simple classification.

Missionary sympathy with oppressed people does not automatically place the missionary outside the structure oppressing them.

William Carey and the Voluntary Society. William Carey is traditionally described as the “father of modern missions.” The title is memorable and historically misleading if taken literally. Catholic, Orthodox, Moravian, early Protestant, African, Asian, and other missionary movements long predated him.

Carey’s importance lies elsewhere.

His 1792 Enquiry argued that Christ’s missionary command remained binding and challenged Protestant complacency toward global evangelization. The Baptist Missionary Society, founded that year, represented the voluntary-society model that would become enormously influential in the nineteenth century.

Voluntary societies could mobilize Christians across local congregations for specialized missionary purposes. They raised money, recruited candidates, printed reports, developed administrative systems, and sustained long-distance work.

This institutional innovation helped create what historians call the modern missionary movement.

It also created structures that would later develop their own institutional gravity.

Serampore: Translation, Education, and Complexity

Carey’s missionary career in India illustrates both missionary creativity and the complicated relationship with empire.

Because the British East India Company was at times wary of missionary activity, Carey and his colleagues eventually worked from Danish-controlled Serampore rather than simply enjoying unrestricted British imperial sponsorship. This fact alone complicates the assumption that British missionaries and British colonial authorities always acted as one system.

The Serampore mission engaged in:

• Bible translation;
• printing;
• education;
• language study;
• evangelism;
• social reform.

The translation output associated with Serampore was extraordinary, though later scholarship also evaluates the quality and methods of particular translations critically. Missionary enthusiasm for scale could produce ambitious projects whose linguistic depth varied.

That pattern remains relevant in contemporary technology-assisted translation: speed is useful only when accuracy, comprehension, and local ownership remain strong.

Missionary Print Culture. The nineteenth-century missionary movement was also a communications revolution.

Mission societies produced:

• journals;
• newsletters;
• maps;
• biographies;
• children’s materials;
• annual reports.

These publications mobilized prayer and finance across Europe and North America. They also constructed missionary imagination.

Foreign populations were represented through stories selected for donor audiences. Certain images—heathen darkness, heroic missionary, rescued child, suffering widow, exotic custom—became recurring motifs.

The ethical problem of missionary storytelling is therefore older than social media.

Organizations need stories because distant supporters need to understand the work.

The selection and framing of stories can reinforce stereotypes.

Chapter 24 will return to this problem in the age of digital data and fundraising.

Empire Opens Doors. The great European empires of the nineteenth century transformed missionary access.

Steamships reduced travel times.

Colonial administration created roads, railways, postal systems, and legal environments.

European languages acquired institutional power.

Missionaries could sometimes appeal to consular officials or colonial courts.

Mission stations operated under security conditions produced partly by imperial power.

These advantages were real even where missionaries personally opposed colonial policy.

A missionary could say sincerely, “I am here only for the gospel,” while local observers reasonably saw:

• a British passport;
• foreign money;
• racial privilege;
• imperial military power behind the broader system.

Intention cannot erase symbolism.

This insight becomes critical for understanding contemporary missionary power as well. Formal colonial empire has ended, but passports, wealth, military history, aid systems, and geopolitical inequality still shape how outsiders are perceived.

Missionaries Against Empire

The opposite evidence is equally real.

Missionaries could become advocates for local communities because they possessed language knowledge, long residence, international contacts, and moral concern. Some documented atrocities. Some resisted settler expansion. Some criticized forced labor or exploitative commercial practices.

The relationship between missionaries and colonial authorities could therefore be adversarial.

Norman Etherington’s Missions and Empire and the wider scholarship it represents has helped move historical interpretation beyond the older debate in which missionaries had to be either saints or imperial agents. The important question is empirical:

What did these missionaries do in this setting, under this political structure, at this time?²

The answer can change even across a single missionary career.

Slavery and Abolition. Christian mission’s relationship with slavery similarly resists one slogan.

Christians participated in slave systems.

Biblical texts were used to defend slavery.

Churches and mission institutions benefited from economies connected to slave labor.

At the same time, Christian conviction became a major force in abolitionist movements in Britain and elsewhere. Evangelical networks associated with figures such as William Wilberforce connected reform, moral activism, and missionary concern. Missionary reports sometimes exposed slave trading and other abuses in places distant from metropolitan audiences.

It is therefore historically inadequate to say either:

Christianity abolished slavery,

or

Christianity simply sanctified slavery.

Christian communities did both kinds of things because the Christian tradition contained texts, institutions, interests, moral reform movements, and theological arguments interpreted by people within conflicting social systems.

Mission history should be honest enough to let that contradiction remain visible.

Education. Mission schools became among the most consequential institutions of the modern missionary movement.

Missionary education could function as cultural imperialism. Curricula often privileged European knowledge, languages, dress, moral codes, and social forms. Boarding schools could separate children from families and cultures. In some colonial settings Christian education became part of more explicitly coercive assimilation systems.

Education also created literacy, professional opportunity, local leadership, and political consciousness. Graduates of mission schools sometimes became critics of colonial rule and leaders in nationalist movements.

The institution therefore cannot be assigned one universal meaning.

A school could transmit foreign cultural hierarchy and equip local people to challenge it.

The missionary may not control what education ultimately produces.

Medicine. Medical missions similarly combined humanitarian care with evangelistic purpose.

Hospitals and clinics served populations with limited healthcare access. Women medical missionaries gained particular importance in societies where social norms restricted male physicians’ access to female patients. Medical work also gave missionaries extraordinary moral authority because patients encountered Christians at moments of vulnerability.

That authority could be used compassionately or manipulatively.

The ethical principle remains important today: medical care should never become conditional upon religious response.

A patient is not an evangelistic transaction.

The strongest Christian medical witness is care that remains genuinely excellent and genuinely noncoercive while Christian practitioners remain honest about their faith.

Women and the Modern Missionary Movement. Women were not peripheral to the modern Protestant missionary movement, even when the institutions recording its history often treated them that way.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women constituted a majority of missionary personnel in important British and American Protestant systems. They served as teachers, physicians, evangelists, translators, administrators, Bible women, writers, and founders of institutions. Women’s missionary societies mobilized extraordinary financial and organizational networks at a time when women were often excluded from formal denominational governance.³

This development had several causes.

Mission created forms of public religious vocation available to women beyond the roles open in many home churches. Social conventions in mission fields also created ministries to women that male missionaries could not easily perform. Single women became missionaries in large numbers, complicating the assumption that the missionary household was necessarily a male missionary accompanied by a supportive wife.

Mission history written only through ordained male leaders therefore misrepresents the workforce that actually carried modern Christianity across cultures.

Pandita Ramabai: Local Christian Agency and Female Leadership

Women outside the West were not merely recipients of women’s missions.

Pandita Ramabai offers a particularly important Indian example. Born into a high-caste Hindu scholarly family, renowned for Sanskrit learning, later converted to Christianity, Ramabai became an educator, reformer, institution builder, and translator. Her Mukti Mission developed under Indian female leadership while receiving international support and attracting foreign coworkers.

Her life resists several simple categories.

She was shaped by transnational Christian networks without becoming a passive product of Western mission.

She criticized aspects of both Indian social practice and missionary paternalism.

She exercised theological and institutional agency.

Her Marathi Bible translation work further demonstrates how local Christian leadership can move beyond receiving foreign translations toward producing Scripture within its own linguistic world.⁴

Ramabai should not appear in mission history as a token exceptional woman. Her visibility helps expose how many other women and local Christian actors have been obscured by institutional records centered on foreign male leaders.

African Women as Christian Agents. The same correction is necessary in Africa.

Christian expansion often depended on women transmitting faith through households, schools, women’s networks, prayer communities, and local evangelistic work. Recent scholarship increasingly recovers African women’s role in extending and reshaping Christianity rather than presenting mission as a conversation between European men and African male converts.

This matters for more than representation.

If mission history systematically overlooks ordinary local agents, it will misunderstand how Christianity actually spreads.

Foreign missionaries may initiate an institution.

The faith becomes durable when local people reproduce it through relationships the missionary cannot control.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Samuel Ajayi Crowther provides one of the clearest examples of African Christian agency within the nineteenth-century Anglican missionary world.

Captured as a boy in the Atlantic slave trade, liberated by a British naval patrol, educated in Sierra Leone, and later ordained, Crowther became a translator, missionary leader, and eventually the first African Anglican bishop in the modern period.

His career is significant not merely because an African rose within a European mission structure. Crowther brought linguistic competence, regional knowledge, and Christian leadership that European missionaries could not replicate easily.

His later treatment also exposes the racial limits of missionary trust. European missionary leadership increasingly questioned African control, and later administrative interventions undermined the model of African leadership associated with his episcopate.⁵

The lesson is uncomfortable.

Missionaries could affirm indigenous churches in principle while resisting local authority when it threatened inherited assumptions about competence and control.

Venn, Anderson, and the “Three-Self” Ideal

Henry Venn in the Church Missionary Society and Rufus Anderson in the American Board independently developed influential principles emphasizing churches that would become self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating.

The language was a major advance over models assuming permanent missionary control.

The ideal also exposed practical contradictions.

What counts as self-support if foreign mission money pays pastors?

Who decides when local leaders are qualified to govern?

Who owns mission property?

Who controls seminaries?

Who defines orthodox theology?

Who holds the donor relationship?

A church can possess local clergy while remaining structurally dependent on foreign decisions.

This is why Part V will use the deeper category of local ownership rather than assuming local staffing automatically equals indigenous authority.

Translation and the Unintended Consequences of Mission. Bible translation became one of modern mission’s greatest long-term contributions.

Missionaries often developed grammars, dictionaries, orthographies, and printed literatures. Their work could be entangled with colonial classification. Linguistic boundaries sometimes became administrative categories in ways that hardened identities previously more fluid.

Yet vernacular Scripture also transferred interpretive power.

Lamin Sanneh argued that translation allowed Christianity to become locally appropriated in ways missionaries could not fully control. Once the Bible entered the vernacular, local Christians could read it against missionary assumptions.

The missionary translated a text.

The text could then become a resource for local critique of the missionary.

This is one of Christian translation’s most important historical paradoxes.

Missionaries, Abolition, and Local Reform. Missionary involvement in social reform likewise operated through complex interactions with local Christians.

Campaigns against practices such as slavery, sati, female infanticide, or particular ritual systems have been interpreted in sharply different ways. Some reforms responded to real human suffering. Some missionary descriptions exaggerated or sensationalized practices for metropolitan audiences. Colonial governments sometimes used humanitarian rhetoric to legitimate political intervention.

Historical evaluation therefore requires specificity.

Which practice?

Whose testimony?

What degree of coercion?

What did local reformers themselves say?

How did women within the society understand the issue?

Missionary criticism of culture is not automatically imperialist.

Missionary confidence does not automatically make the criticism accurate.

Race

Race became one of the modern missionary movement’s deepest contradictions.

Missionaries proclaimed a gospel in which people from every nation could become one in Christ. Mission institutions nevertheless operated within societies structured by racial hierarchy. White missionaries could receive higher salaries, superior housing, greater authority, or easier access to education than local Christians doing similar work.

Some missionaries explicitly challenged racism.

Others absorbed it.

Still others opposed extreme racial oppression while retaining paternal assumptions concerning local leadership.

This complexity matters because contemporary mission can congratulate itself for rejecting nineteenth-century racism while retaining subtler hierarchies based on passports, education, funding, or organizational prestige.

Power changes form more easily than it disappears.

The Missionary and the Colonial State. It is therefore misleading to ask in the abstract:

Were missionaries colonialists?

A better series of questions asks:

Did this missionary depend upon colonial access?

Did the mission accept state funding?

Did missionaries support or resist conquest?

How did they speak about local cultures?

Were converts granted real authority?

How did property and money work?

What did local people think the missionary represented?

Different answers are possible within the same empire.

Missionary history becomes intellectually serious when it stops demanding one verdict for millions of people across several centuries.

Decolonization. The twentieth century brought the collapse of formal European empires across Asia and Africa.

Political decolonization transformed missionary structures but did not automatically decolonize Christian institutions.

Property remained under foreign boards.

Budgets still flowed from Europe and North America.

Seminary accreditation depended on foreign institutions.

Missionaries could continue exercising substantial influence because they controlled donor relationships and access to international networks.

At the same time, national churches were growing rapidly and insisting upon greater authority. Ecumenical and mission conferences increasingly wrestled with the relationship between older sending societies and emerging churches.

The phrase “mission field” itself began to look unstable.

From Western Mission to World Christianity

This historical transition eventually produced one of the most important changes in modern missiology: the shift from studying missions as the outward activity of Western churches toward studying World Christianity as a field concerned with the many local forms, histories, and centers of Christian life.

Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Brian Stanley, and many others helped reshape the field by centering translation, local agency, demographic change, and Christianity’s repeated cultural transformation.⁶

The effect was not to make Western missions irrelevant.

It placed them within a larger history.

Europe became an extraordinarily influential Christian center, especially in the age of empire.

It was never Christianity’s only center.

By the mid-twentieth century it was no longer Christianity’s demographic center either.

That transformation is the subject of the next chapter.

Footnotes

1. On Las Casas, conquest, and Christian arguments concerning Indigenous peoples, see major scholarship on the Valladolid debates and Spanish colonial theology; Bartolomé de las Casas’s own writings remain indispensable primary sources. ↩

2. Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2005); Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission; Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Apollos, 1990). ↩

3. Dana L. Robert’s scholarship on women in mission documents women’s numerical and institutional centrality to the modern Protestant missionary movement; see also the Oxford scholarship on women and world Christianity. ↩

4. For Pandita Ramabai, see scholarly biographies and studies of her Christian leadership, social reform, Mukti Mission, and Marathi Bible translation. ↩

5. On Samuel Ajayi Crowther, African leadership, and late nineteenth-century mission policy, see Andrew F. Walls, Dana Robert, and specialist Crowther scholarship; the episode is also central to discussions of Henry Venn’s indigenous-church principles. ↩

6. Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message; Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History. ↩