A History of Christian Missions - Review and Summary

Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions. Volume Six in the Penguin History of the Church. Revised for the Second Edition by Owen Chadwick. London: Penguin Books, 1986.  Paper. 528 pages, including Bibliography and Index.

Long considered a standard work, this revised edition was brought up to date by Owen Chadwick according to the “projected intentions” of the author. I confess that I have not read it until now, perhaps because I thought it might be too sketchy or antiquated to be of use. How wrong I was! For several reasons, I now consider Stephen Neill’s book to be essential reading for all teachers, students, and practitioners of Christian missions.[1]

First, let us note the word “Missions.” Scholars have largely abandoned this term, deciding to replace it with “Mission,” as more faithful to the truth that cross-cultural missions are but one aspect of the God-given and God-centered “mission” of the church, itself an outworking of the missio Dei – the mission of God.

Recently, however, missiologists have seen the need to revive the venerable use of “missions” to highlight the distinct necessity and nature of intentionally taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to people of all ethno-linguistic groups – the new understanding of “nations” – by Christians who dare to leave “home” and go to “the other” out of love for God and the people he has created.[2]

To be sure, drastic changes have radically altered the landscape of “missions” since even the revised edition of Neil’s classic history. We now talk about “from all places to all places,” since global migration and the collapse of Western Christendom, among other forces, have shifted the center of Christianity from the West to the Global South, and countries that formerly received missionaries now send them out by the thousands.[3] The last few pages of this history make note of these great transitions, which were still in their infancy at the time of writing, but the book as a whole concentrates on the previous eras of worldwide missions.

Why, then, must we still turn to the work of a man who was a missionary bishop in India in the twentieth century? In this review I can only list and briefly discuss a few of the merits of A History of Christian Missions and urge you to read this classic yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

Strengths

This one-volume history of Christian missions is, in one sense, comprehensive. At 478 pages, its length exceeds that of similar surveys, such as Dana Robert’s Christian Mission (177 pages), Lamin Sanneh’s Disciples of All Nations (287 pages), and Edward Smither’s Christian Mission: A Concise Global History (200 pages), and Encountering the History of Missions, by John Mark Terry and Robert L. Gallagher (362 pages).

Neill sought to give the main facts about history of missions in a balanced way, and largely succeeded. Proceeding chronology, he discusses evangelism and church planting in virtually all parts of the world. He includes treatments of early church missionaries, the Syrian Church’s far-flung initiatives (using the old name Nestorian), Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestant missions, and some of the new outreaches by independent churches like the African independent churches.

His desire to be comprehensive did not lead Neill into the trap of a – necessarily futile – attempt to write an exhaustive history. He consciously selected what were the key men, movements, and moments in the 2,000 years since Christ commanded his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world.

Fair and frank: Stephen Neill, though an Anglican bishop who served twenty years in India, largely succeeded in presenting the achievements of those from other Christian traditions with fairness and objectivity. Nor does he neglect to point out the faults and failings of even the greatest missionaries, but in a spirit of gentle charity.

Highly readable: Neill’s grandparents and parents had served as missionaries in India, bequeathing to him an insider’s knowledge of missionary life and work, which he augmented by serving in India with the Church Missionary Society for twenty years. He was the beneficiary, also, of the best English education, including a brilliant career at Cambridge University, where he served as a tutor before going to India. He wrote as, perhaps, only someone from that educational background could: with erudition, grace, wit, and elegance. In other words, his narrative reads like a story rather than a mere chronicle.

Chapter 1: A Faith for the World

Neill starts with the fundamental fact of “universalism” in the Old Testament, based not only on the creation of all mankind by one God but also on clear declarations throughout the Old Testament of God’s will to save people of all nations. Though the early Christians in Jerusalem did not immediately see the worldwide implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, within a generation they realized that “the New Israel, like the old, was destined to have its history” and that “the life of the Church is to be not a frenzied proclamation because the time is short, but a steady programme of expansion throughout the world, yet with an unfailing sense of urgency because for each man any and every moment may prove to be the crucial time of decision” (20).

Largely because of the ministry of Paul, Christians began to see that “the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles is an essential part of the plan of God” (20), and that “the great consummation” cannot come “until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in” (21). Since the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., “the Christian Church has never had one local centre; it has learned to look only to the living presence of the Lord within itself,” so that every Christian now knows that “he belongs to the wandering people of God, who here have no continuing city” (21).

From the first pages, therefore, Neill built his History on a solid biblical foundation and laid down the essential lines of his fast-paced and wide-ranging narrative.

He ends the first chapter with the observation that “every Christian was a missionary. . . [F]ew, if any, of the great Churches were really founded by apostles. . . That was the greatest glory of the Church of those days. The Church was the body of Christ, indwelt by his Spirit; and what Christ had begun to do, that the church would continue to do, through all the days and unto the uttermost parts of the earth until is unpredictable but certain coming again” (22-23).

Chapter 2: The Conquest of the Roman World, A.D. 100-500

In the early days, Jewish synagogues could be found in almost every city, and they were attended also by “God-fearers,” Gentiles who were already interested in the God of the Old Testament. “It was the presence of this prepared elite that differentiated the missions of the apostolic age from every subsequent time, and makes comparison almost impossible” (25).

After tracing the rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire during its first three hundred years, Neill states some of the possible causes of this remarkable phenomenon: “First and foremost we must reckon with the burning conviction by which a great number of the earlies Christians were possessed.” Many renounced everything to take the gospel to the ends of the world, with the “assurance that in face of very obstacle men can be won and must be won for Christ” (35). They knew that they had a message much needed, and often welcomed, in the world at that time.

“Thirdly, the new Christian communities commended themselves by the evident purity of their lives . . . In those days to be a Christian meant something” (36). They belonged to a community with strong bonds of love and arms open wide to people of all classes. They shared their goods with the poor in an “elaborate development of charitable service, especially to those within the fellowship” (37).

“Finally, we must consider the effect of the persecution of the Christians on the popular opinion about them.” Though persecution was sporadic, “martyrdom could be attended by the utmost possible publicity. . . There is no doubt that that the attitude of the martyrs, and particularly of the young women who suffered along with the men, made a deep impression. . . what we find is calm, dignified, decorous behaviour, cool courage in the face of torment, courtesy towards enemies, and a joyful acceptance of suffering as the way appointed by the Lord to lead to his heavenly kingdom” (38).

By the year 300, perhaps ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Christian. This church by then had “gathered into itself almost all that was vital in the thought and creativity of the last phase of the life of the ancient world,” creating a Christian literature of surpassing elegance and persuasive power (40).

After Constantine declared Christianity to be legal, “the favourable attitude of the emperor produced a complete change in the situation of the Christian Church. . . Crowds pressed into it, and the Church was in danger of being submerged under the flood of new believers . . . Christianity was fashionable. . . In all this there were great dangers. Faith became superficial and was identified with the acceptance of dogmatic teachings rather than with a radical change of inner being. As the Church became rich, bishoprics became objects of contention rather than instruments of humble service. . . In a new and dangerous fashion, the world entered into the Church” (41).

At the same time, we must recognize several lasting contributions of the early church, especially the clarification of Christian doctrine through the great councils from Nicaea (325) to Chalcedon (451), and the creation of the “great classical liturgies” (42). These were foundational, and have set the tone of much of Christianity since then, until the spread of non-liturgical Protestantism, including charismatic and Pentecostal churches, in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Neill mentions another, much more problematic, development: “The synthesis between Christian faith and the ancient languages and culture was brought to completion” (41). No doubt, the mastery of Greek and Latin by prominent church leaders greatly assisted the spread of the faith among intellectuals. On the other hand, the “synthesis” of which Neill wrote has become a model, as it were, for other attempts to “synthesize” biblical Christianity with local cultures, a project which has almost universally led to toxic compromise and even syncretism. This will be another major theme in later chapters.

To his great credit, and anticipating recent emphases upon World Christianity, Neill expands his narrative beyond the Roman Empire to discuss the spread of the gospel to Edessa in the “little country of Osrhoene,” where the king accepted the new religion. The emergence of a church there showed that “the Gospel early spread eastwards from Palestine into the region of Mesopotamia; that Edessa was one of the great Christian centres in that region; and that the language of that area was Syriac” (43).

Without lending his authority to the venerable tradition that Thomas, one of the Twelve, traveled as far as India and planted the church known by his name, Neill presents the evidence and declares that there is nothing impossible about this tradition. He then traces the rise of the church in Ethiopia in Africa and then Armenia in Asia Minor. “If Osrhoene was the first Christian kingdom, the second was undoubtedly Armenia” (47). ”This is the first case known to us in which the conversion of a king was the first step in the conversion of a whole country. . . Secondly, from the start the Church was associated with the language and the thought of the people,” when a scholar invented a new alphabet for them and participated in the translation of the New Testament into Armenian. “The close identification of race, language, culture, religion, and political organization has given to Armenian Christianity an extraordinary resilience and pertinacity” (48).

Neill skillfully re-tells the well-known stories of the conversion of Ireland through the pioneer work of Patrick, and that of the Franks when their king, Clovis, was baptized in 496. Alas, this mass accession of the wild Franks helped to sow the seeds of the fundamental weaknesses of Western European Christianity, for “what they brought in was fierce untempered natures, with an inveterate tendency to brutality and excess” (52).

By the year 500 the Christian church had helped to civilize the Western world, at least to some degree; “defined the limits of the Scriptures, . . . settled many questions of doctrine, . . . developed a system of worship, … and through the Councils . . . had developed a marvellous instrument for the expression and the maintenance of Christian unity. . . Christians in ever part of the world felt themselves to be one with all other Christians” (52)

I have quoted this section at length because it lays out many of the principal themes of rest of the book: zealous evangelism and devotion to Christ; growth in numbers; persecution; recognition by - and often alliance with - political rulers, followed by superficiality, worldliness, and even corruption.

Chapter 3: The Dark Age, 500-1000

During this period, the Christian Church was engaged in two conflicts: “the struggle with the barbarians, and the unending battle with Islam” (53).

As for the first, in brief: Some were “converted” en masse, usually through the influence of kings, so “for five hundred years the major task of the Western Church was that of wrestling with the barbarians and with barbarism in the effort to make their conversions something more than nominal” (53-54). By the end of this period, “the greater part of this task had been at least outwardly accomplished, though . . . it was still very far from being completed” (54).

Far different was the protracted conflict with Islam. In the end, “the Muslim conquest was a major disaster for the Christian world. The ancient Eastern Churches lost their dominant position in government and in the world of thought. They were constantly drained of their resources through the defection of so many of their young men,” though they were able to “maintain their worshipping tradition with courage” (55).

As a result, “Christianity became an almost completely European religion . . . and increasingly a religion of the northern and western Mediterranean” (56).

Should we take note of this before we too quickly charge previous writers of Christian history for being “Euro-centric” until very recently? In point of fact, both the majority of Christians and of cross-cultural Christian missions had no choice but to be “European.”

As for the “conquest” of Europe itself by Christianity, the task was “that of making Christian faith effective in their lives, of bringing proud, undisciplined, and illiterate natures under the yoke of the Gospel. That it was accomplished at all was due in the main to three continuing factors – royal favour, martyrdom, and monasticism” (57).

With consummate skill, Neill tells the story of this complex, world-changing process with great conciseness, while giving due attention to the major people, events, and institutions. Beginning with Britain and the Venerable Bede, he describes the progress of Christianity through Germany, France (the kingdoms of the Franks), Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Russia, and all the way to China.

We meet great missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury, Columba, Aidan, Wilfrid, Columban, Willibrord, Boniface, Anskar, the brothers Constantine (later Cyril) and Methodius, Adelbert, and Alopen, the first to bring Christianity to China. Along the way, we trace the beginnings of the churches in these regions and countries, as well as the great church in Byzantium, a city (and empire, albeit shrinking) that far surpassed anything in Europe for a thousand years.

Neill shows how the great monasteries became bases, not only for profound piety and learning, but also for courageous outreach to the dangerous tribes of Europe. He also draws our attention to the important role played by those who were willing to suffer martyrdom that others might be saved.

The author does not shrink from telling us the less savory aspects of “conversions” led by “Christian” kings. Charlemagne may have been the most powerful and aggressive, but there were many others, like Geisa in Hungary, “who set himself to make his country Christian; where persuasion did not prove effective, he had recourse to other and less agreeable methods. Converts multiplied” (80). We can only imagine the “methods” he employed, and be skeptical about the meaning of words like “Christian” and “converts.”

As with the “conquest” of the Roman Empire by Christianity, the “conquest” of Europe by the Gospel raises serious questions about the quality and nature of the Christianity that “conquered” pagan kingdoms. Indeed, much of later European history and of what is called Christendom makes sense when we understand the very mixed process by which Western civilization took on its character.

Chapter 4: Early European Expansion

This chapter’s title fits the subject, which includes the spread of European culture and political power as well as that of the gospel.

Indeed, sadly, as before, the boundaries between politics, power, and persuasion were fluid and porous. As in the previous centuries, emissaries of Western – that is, Roman – Christianity seemed to concentrate their energies on converting rulers, who would then be expected to “persuade” their people to embrace the new religion.

In the eighth century, the Vikings burst out of Scandinavia into Europe. “The range of their depredations is astonishing, and the destruction which they caused was almost without limit” (86). Over the course of about three centuries, conquered Christians very gradually began to make an impact on their barbaric overlords. King Canute had apparently been brought up by an unnamed Christian; as he grow older, “he became more pious, and devoted himself with intense earnestness to making of his realms and Christian kingdom” (88). Using England as his base, he sponsored the establishment of the Christian church.

His program became a pattern: “Every king wanted to have his own church organization, headed by an archbishop who would be under the direction of a king, except in so far as the Pope was able to exercise a shadowy suzerainty” (88). Neill traces this pattern to Denmark (Canute was a Dane), Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Prussia, and then Lithuania, the “conversion” of which marked “the end of European paganism as an organized body, though not, certainly, of its subterranean force” (96). In the process, nations as we know them were formed around the nexus of state and church.

“Conversion” all too often came at the point of the sword. “Saint” Olaf of Norway, for example, “made use of every weapon – flattery, guile, persuasion, and when all else failed, sheer naked coercion” (90). The nadir of this commitment to force, if necessary, came with the Crusades, which were “a vast fiasco,” leading to the permanent alienation of Western Christianity from Eastern Orthodoxy, “a trail of bitterness across the relations between Christians and Muslims” to this very day, and “a lowering of the whole moral temperature of Christendom” (98). The “Christianization” of Spain and Portugal fit the same mold. For the Popes, it was a short step from authorizing, and rewarding, a “holy war” against Muslims, to the slaughter of “heretical” Albigensians in France.

Were the terrible invasions by the Mongols part of God’s judgment on European Christianity? In any case, they put a stop to the eastern advance of Western power and furthered the advance of Islam.

During this dark period, bright lights shone from time to time. As always, courageous missionaries, most of them Dominicans or Franciscans, endured incredible hardships to carry the message of Christ into pagan lands, often suffering martyrdom as a consequence. Neill brilliantly tells the stories of these pioneers in the Ukraine, and especially the heroic missions to Central Asia and eventually China.  We read of William of Rubruck, who visited the Great Khan in Russia; the Nestorians, who continued their work among the Mongols; John of Monte Corvino, who established a flourishing church in Beijing; and Ramon (Raymond) Lull, “one of the greatest missionaries in the history of the Church” (114-115).

Lull would have nothing to do with force or coercion as the means of evangelizing Muslims. Instead, he propounded a missiology that called for careful study of Islamic language, theology, and culture; reasoned and respectful dialogue with Muslim scholars; and “the willingness to be a faithful and courageous witness among the Saracens, even at the cost of life itself” (117). On his fourth trip to North Africa, he was “so roughly handled that he died of his injuries” (117).

Neill does not ignore the indispensable role of the countless anonymous traders, slaves, and Christian wives whose gentle witness led to the conversion of nobles, and even princes, among the nomadic tribes of Central Asia.

In the end, however, very little came of Christian witness to the Mongols or the Muslims of the Middle East. Neill assigns several possible reasons for this failure: The great distances that had to be traveled and the resulting loneliness and isolation of missionaries; the loss of life; and especially “the tragic unsettlement of the times, and the recurrent calamities caused by one invasion of the barbarians after another,” culminating in the horrible destruction caused by Tamurlane (113). He concludes, “It seemed as though the time for Asia had not yet come” (114).

Despite the epic travels and labors of intrepid missionaries, this chapter leads me to think that we must blame the alliance of church and state, the superficial nature of “conversions” from the top down, and the resulting lack of spiritual vitality. Neill puts it this way: “It is true that the Christianity of those times does not give the impression of having been a dynamic conviction producing both holiness of life and the inspiration to witness” (113).

(To be continued)

[1] For convenience, I shall refer to the author as Stephen Neill, since Owen Chadwick made his revisions along the lines laid down by Neill, and since Neill is listed as the author on the cover and in bibliographies and catalogues.

[2] See, for example, A. Scott Moreau, Gary R. Corwin, Gary B. McGee, Introducing World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004); Timothy C. Tennent, Invitation to World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2010); John Mark Terry and Robert L. Gallagher, Encountering the History of Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).

[3] “Global South refers not only to countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but also to newer centers of Christianity like China and South Korea.