The Great Commission and the Great Tradition
Thomas Kidd is Research Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Kidd has written extensively on American religious experience. His newest book, Church History: From the Reformation to the Present (B&H Academic, 2024) weaves a helpful introduction to the history of Christian missions, from Luther to Lausanne, through the story of the expansion of Christ’s church.
Dr. Kidd was kind enough to sit down with Missionary for a conversation about the history of Protestant missions that he explores in his book. This text of the interview has been condensed and compressed for concision and clarity.
Missionary: How did you first learn about the history of missions and the expansion of Christianity?
Thomas Kidd: I became a Christian through the Navigators. Missions are really central to the Navigator's mission and DNA. That was my first substantial introduction to missions. My most extensive personal missionary service was a summer-long program in Russia in the 1990s.
Missionary: The history of missions, even in Christian education, often isn’t given the kind of emphasis that you’ve given it in your book. Why do you think the study of missions has been neglected?
Thomas Kidd: A lot of times in church history textbooks you tend to get a lot about the history of theology. That's a perfectly legitimate topic, but part of what I wanted to do with this book was to broaden the lens to take in a lot more of Christians’ experience. There's just a lot more to the story as important as theological development. I try to do a lot with missions in the book. And then that also helps me to make the book more fully global than a lot of other church history textbooks because if you're focused on the history of theology, you're almost certainly going to be focused on Europe and America because that's where the institutions are. But in terms of global Christian growth, especially in the 20th century, Europe and America are not the center of the action.
Missionary: Many students going through college or seminary may or may not be pursuing a role on the mission field. Why is it important for them to learn about the history of missions?
Thomas Kidd: Every Christian should be concerned about the spread of the gospel throughout the world. Beginning with the birth of the church and first century Israel, we all were beneficiaries of traveling evangelists and missionaries bringing the gospel to our ancestors at some point. It’s a point that many of the missionary community will make––even from the beginnings of the formal missionary movement in the 1790s––there was a point when people brought the gospel even to the pagans in England!
We all have a mandate to be involved in missions and evangelism, either on the sending or the going end of that equation. Certainly we would not go to a church if it wasn't tapped into that mandate of missions and evangelism. So whether you go or not, that's a mandate. And so it's honoring the cloud of witnesses to be aware of the broad scope of mission's history and being mindful that at some point people brought the gospel to your people, and, however you intersected with that, it began somewhere through a missionary or an evangelist.
If you look at heroic missionaries in the past, you gain greater appreciation for what the Lord has done through just regular people. Missionaries are just everyday people who are called to a particular vocation in ministry, but often making heroic, courageous sacrifices, especially when doing frontier type work.
Missionary: You mention “the great tradition” of the church at the start of the book. Is there a corollary or companion “great tradition” of missions in the sense of how the church has done missions in a traditional, biblical way?
Thomas Kidd: I think there's at least two issues there. One is “what are you teaching as a missionary?” And that directly connects to the great tradition of Christian theology. And then there are the methods of missionary work, which are not as immutable over time, and different things work in different contexts. But there are still some basic tactics that are in accord with biblical principles, and maybe even you see in Jesus's own ministry and then in Acts.
A fundamental question that missionaries must have straight before they go into the field is, “What kind of demands does the gospel put on someone's spiritual life and beliefs?” Are we looking for conversion? Or is Christianity sort of a supplement to a better life and you don't have to reject your previous spiritual beliefs? So all those things touch on the great tradition of Christian theology.
In terms of means and missionary strategies I would definitely point to the necessity of going, which may seem obvious, but as of the 1790s it was not obvious that you send people out into the world. There really wasn't much focus on Matthew 28’s Great Commission among Protestants until you get to the 1790s. Missionaries like John Eliot, the missionary to Native Americans in the mid-1600s, had a missionary philosophy but it had virtually nothing to do with the Great Commission.
The interpretation that starts in the 1790s is correct, but it wasn’t a given that people would see the Great Commission as a mandate for the church. Some people would've said, “Well, that was for the apostles. That's not for the post-apostolic church era.” I don't think that's right, but somebody had to make an argument, and it was especially William Carey who made the argument that this is a command for the church today.
So, sending messengers out is really essential. . . certainly an incarnational view of missions is sort of a perennial time honored theme. The message is not, “You can come to us if you'll just act like us and take up our language and dress like us.” Rather, it’s going and then trying to incarnate the gospel in that culture, and that involves learning the languages, not putting extra-biblical requirements on Christian converts in another culture. For instance, saying, “No, you can't wear your native tribal dress to church. You have to wear a coat and tie like a European or American would.”
Often where you see the biggest burst of growth in missions sites is where you have a handing over of leadership to indigenous pastors and other church leaders and teachers. And that has historically often been a really hard bridge to cross for Western missionaries. To say, “Okay, we're envisioning now a time where you will have a fully indigenous church operating on its own without outside missionary oversight.” That can be a difficult transition to make. But it strikes me that often when you hand over fully independent leadership to indigenous leaders, pastors, evangelists, that's often when you have the big breakthroughs in terms of evangelism––when the evangelistic appeal is coming from a native speaker and someone who understands the culture.
Missionary: So why did it take Protestants so long to really get excited about foreign missions? What instigates that shift in emphasis?
Thomas Kidd: Among Protestants there wasn't consensus that the Great Commission is a command to the church. And so that was a disputed issue as of the 1790s. They still may not do much about it, but at least they know that this is something the church should be involved with. Catholics just had a lot more organizational power and money to draw on. Orders like the Jesuits and the Franciscans, who are at least partially missionary orders, are very well financed to do this both from the Vatican and also from their strong fundraising programs. Sometimes they're drawing off of raising money from aristocratic families who see it as a way to have a better standing with God.
Catholics are doing a lot more about it, especially by the mid 1500s, partly to counter the Protestant threat. Protestants more typically are just struggling to survive in the decades after the Reformation. So taking on really ambitious sorts of global evangelistic projects in a coordinated way is very difficult. But certainly by the early 1700s, Protestants are regularly lamenting the fact that they have done so little about missions, and they're embarrassed about how much Catholics have done comparatively. And so you do start to see people like David Brainerd in the 1740s, or the Moravians, which is a kind of German pietist group.
By the 1790s there have been sporadic missionary initiatives among Protestants. There have been people like George Liele, who now a lot of people will say was the first missionary from America to go out. But George Liele is not appointed by a missionary agency, which is why people will say Adoniram Judson was first because he's the first one appointed from America by a missionary agency.
I think the shift is connected to theological developments that go back to David Brainerd. He is so well known as this heroic self-sacrificial figure who is popularized by Jonathan Edwards. And so now we have a very clear Protestant model, partly because of developments growing out of Edwards’s theology. There's a new kind of activism associated with evangelism and pursuing revival. And then, of course, that's very closely connected to sending missionaries. Then William Carey, founder of the British Baptist Missionary Society, finally makes the argument that it is incumbent upon Christians to send out missionaries around the world to preach the gospel to all nations and make disciples of all nations.
Missionary: Why is there such an emphasis on reaching India at this point?
Thomas Kidd: One reason is that there have been dramatic improvements in seafaring technology. We don't have steamboats yet, but the sailing ships are so much faster and more reliable. It was still pretty dangerous in the early 1800s to take a ship journey around the world, but it went a lot faster. So they're arguing that God is providentially opening up opportunities for us through technology and scientific improvements and navigation improvements to be able to go around the world. Traders with groups like the East India Company that Britain runs are already doing this. This is why there’s so much focus on India. Of course it's a huge unreached population, but there are other unreached populations in China and so forth. It’s because the British East India Company, from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s, basically is the government of India. China's closed, other big countries are closed, but India is open and the East India company is there. And so a lot of Christians start saying, “God has providentially swung the door wide open. We can get there quickly. It's relatively safe because the British run the government and there's nothing holding us back anymore. We can do this.” And so that's why Carey and his group go to India. The Judsons originally think that they're going to go to India and, for political reasons, they get kicked out and go to Burma next door. A lot of this early focus is on the places that they can go… There are reasons to be cynical about these early missions in India, because of how corrupt the British government is. But also, in a practical sense, it really is a great option and a place they can go.
Missionary: Skipping ahead through a thick forest of missionary growth and expansion, I wanted to ask about the Lausanne Congress, which recently held its Fourth Congress. What is the Lausanne Congress and what does the nature of Lausanne tell us about where missions has come since the days of Carey and Judson?
Thomas Kidd: Lausanne is one of a number of 20th century world evangelism and missions conferences, but it really is probably the place where, in the mid-seventies, the question of the composition of the world church catches up with the Western missionary community. It's happening under the auspices of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association too. By the 1970s the momentum for demographic growth in the world Christian community has shifted to the global south, to Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia. North America and Europe are numerically stagnant at best, and certainly the mainline denominations are in significant decline by that point.
Lausanne raises a question that's going to keep coming up through present day, which is “How do we negotiate this new reality of westerners, especially Europeans and North Americans who have called the shots institutionally and in missionary organizations from day one, but now have become almost a kind of victim of their own success?”
Among other things, you have Latin American delegates who are trying to put some themes from liberation theology and the social aspect of missions more on the radar screen than they have been for Western missionaries up till that point. And so there's a really deep rift that this produces at Lausanne, and there's some debate about who's willing to sign on to the Lausanne Covenant and how much it says about social concerns. None of these people are saying, “We shouldn't do evangelism.” Is social justice and social concern as much of an emphasis as evangelism is? Western delegates tend to say, “No, evangelism is still by far number one. But we also can't ignore it if people are in desperate poverty or being oppressed. You've got to address that.”
It really alerts Western leaders that the days of having world missionary conferences where basically everybody's from Europe and the United States in Canada is over, and that you're going to have to get used to the idea that delegates from Latin America and Africa and Asia may have different concerns than the Western delegates. Sometimes these concerns are that we need to pay more attention to social concerns. Sometimes they’re concerned that we adhere to strict and faithful biblical views on marriage and sexuality or other things. But it's been a wake up call that the center of action in the world church is not in North America and Europe anymore. That's still where the money is. That's still where the institutions tend to be. But in terms of people and churches, the action is in the global south.
Missionary: So we’re at a junction where the west is reckoning with the success of the missions movement, and the reality of planted churches being of no less significance than the planting churches…what does that relationship require of the church?
Thomas Kidd: There's something about missions and the global scale of it that it requires coordination. That's why groups like Lausanne are needed, even though it can create uncomfortable situations and having to deal with issues that maybe you wish you didn't have to deal with. Cooperation is the main rationale for the existence of the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance. There's no reason really to have the Southern Baptist Convention other than number one: missions. And number two: seminaries.
The local church has to be engaged in missions. We're called to be engaged in missions, but that's almost always going to be in a cooperative way. It would be chaotic and ineffective to have every local church just setting out on its own to send out missionaries, but paying no attention to what the church next door is doing or to what the church in India or somewhere else in the world is doing.
So the missionary endeavor at its best is local churches cooperating together in the missionary endeavor. And sometimes you see that reflected in parachurch assemblies like Lausanne, but even better when you have denominations that have really robust mission sending cooperative programs.
Whether it's parachurch or denominational, the nature of missions requires cooperation and coordinating strategy, not overlapping or inadvertently competing with each other. Be aware of what the broader missionary community is up to and what God is doing through various agencies. It behooves us to know about that and plan around it.