The Rise and Decline of the Missionary Movement in Scotland
A missionary spirit is essential for the church to have. Without a passion for missions, a church is not obeying the Great Commission, found in Matthew 28. We are to go. We are to make disciples. And our disciples are to be made of all nations. This is a call to every Christian household, every Christian congregation. When households and congregations are faithful, great things happen.
As we consider how to follow the Great Commission today, we might look at historical examples of those countries and people who obediently followed the call. Scotland is one such example, as in the 1800s it was overflowing with the mission spirit. Amongst the well-known names of Scottish missionaries one can find John G. Paton, William Carey, David Livingstone, and so many more. How was it that one small country managed to send out so many? Iain Murray in A Scottish Christian Heritage thoroughly outlines how God equipped the seemingly insignificant nation of Scotland to share His word, digging deeply into Scotland’s overarching influence on discipling all nations. This excerpt thought-provokingly examines Scotland’s past success in missions, gently humbling readers into examining their passion for the Great Commission––they and their countries, congregations, and households.
The Origin of the Missionary Spirit
The question deserves comment why, within a hundred years, such a small country, with a small population, produced so many missionaries. The explanation cannot simply be that the world had opened for travel in a new way. That was true, yet history shows that openness of itself does not produce evangelization. A pointer to the true explanation lies in the fact that the missionary era began in Scotland before any denomination took official action. Not until 1824 was there any commitment by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; yet more than a quarter of a century before that date individuals had formed the Glasgow and the Edinburgh (later Scottish) Missionary Societies in 196, and such was the rise of concern at the ‘grass-roots’ level that between that date and 1825, no fewer than sixty-one local mission societies sprang up in Scotland, including one in each of the four universities. Movements of the Spirit of God are generally to be recognized by their spontaneity and this was to be seen in Scotland in the early nineteenth century. In the words of one observer: ‘In the end of the last [i.e. 18th] century and the beginning of this, when the missionary spirit awoke, missions were undertaken and carried on by societies, not Churches; but, as the missionary spirit increased and spread, the Churches were aroused to a sense of their duties and responsibilities, and missions began to be undertaken by Churches.’
The first of these non-denominational societies, in time and importance, was actually established in London in 1795, subsequently to be known as the London Missionary Society (LMS), but one of the prime movers was a Scot (David Bogue) and from the outset there was a large Scots presence both among the missionaries who went out and among the Directors. ‘Almost half the original committee were Scots.’
This widespread new concern can only be explained in terms of the increased hold of the gospel on the Scottish population. In the Lowlands, the Secession churches, originating from evangelical recovery in the mid-eighteenth century, had spread their influence and, as already said, provided a number of the first Scots missionaries. Before the end of the eighteenth century it is notable how many ministers of the Secession, who had excluded Whitefield in 1742, were breathing his same spirit. Without such a change the age of interdenominational co-operation would never have come. The Evangelical Revival had brought a new standpoint. Rowland Hill said of Whitefield:
It pleased God to give him a most enlarged mind, and liberated him from all the wretched shackles of education. He knew no party; his glory was to preach the gospel to every creature. Bigotry his soul abhorred; and, like a second Samson, he had so made her main pillars to totter, that we may rejoice that she trembles to the very foundation.
This new catholicity was related to the recovery of the truth of God’s love to all men. The special interest in the missionary movement early shown by Secession churches came in no small degree from the tradition that Thomas Boston and others had revived early in the eighteenth century. The gospel is not a message simply intended for the elect: it is an offer of salvation, flowing from divine love, for all men. Those at the forefront of the new missionary endeavour commonly had no doubt about this truth. As Henry Martyn could preach beside the Ganges, ‘god loved the Hindoos’, so could the Scottish evangelicals take the same good news to other corners of the earth.
The recovery of the gospel in parts of the Church of Scotland, after 1800, inspired the same missionary spirit, and this was no less evident in the North where the revival lay behind the formation of the Highland Missionary Society. Nominal Christians, who think little of their own souls, are not going to be concerned for others, least of all for people whom they never saw. The indifference to foreign needs which affected many in the eighteenth century was the direct result of unbelief; and the new zeal to take the gospel to the world was born out of a new experience of its power. The pattern of the book of Acts was thus repeated: the indwelling of the Holy Spirit leads to compassion and to outreach. Before this time, as John Campbell noted, professing Christians had been ‘busy repairing and adding to their walls of separation, and now and then throwing squibs at each other from their battlements.’ Now the true spirit of Christianity appeared at the popular level:
Friends, parents, neighbours first it will embrace
Our country next, and next the human race.
The gospel does affect homes first. In Scotland it led to a type of home life and family religion fitted to produce young men and women whose great interest was the service of Christ. There can be little more moving in missionary literature than the picture which John G. Paton gives us of the piety of his cottage home near Dumfries. His autobiography provides an unforgettable account of the prayerfulness of his father, who, as John finally left home for Glasgow, so lovingly watched him till he was out of sight up the road. Paton’s biographers write:
The Lowland cotter’s lad cherished and guarded in his heart the spell of his father’s habit of communion with God, and the vision of his mother’s absorbed passion to win her children to fear and love the Most High. These were his main equipment in life. No science can produce them; no money can purchase them.
One of the most remembered sounds of Paton’s childhood was of his father’s voice, at family worship, as ‘he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the Heathen world to the service of Jesus’. The thatched cottage of the Patons was only one of many such nurseries. Most of the Scottish missionaries came from homes and backgrounds where simple living, hard work, ready sacrifice and earnest devotion were the everyday experiences of youth. A few, it should be added, came from less humble backgrounds; they belong with the exceptions noted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:26. Robert Moffat, in the heart of Africa in 1854, wrote in his Journal: ‘Was much interested in reading a review of the lives of the Haldanes. What nobles they were in the kingdom of Christ! How few have been so highly favoured, and all by, or through the instrumentality of a praying mother!’ The Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer, the son of the Earl of Kintore, was reared by parents of the same spirit. He became an Arabic scholar/missionary, before he died in South Arabia in 1887 at the age of twenty-nine. What is certain is that a home like that of Eli, the high priest, will rarely produce a missionary.
Faith in Divine Revelation
The origins of the new spirit involved something more than a recovery of compassion and the nurture of godly homes. The driving impulse was faith in Scripture as the Word of God, and in the teaching it contains. “I believed, and therefore have I spoken,” has to be where the missionary spirit begins. It is bound up with being “not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” and the confidence that it has power that depends on no man for its accomplishment.
When metal gates, to the memory of John G. Paton, were erected at the peaceful cemetery at Torthorwald, Dumfriesshire, they bore the text: “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring” (John 10:16). These words of Christ are at the heart of the missionary movement. Peter Cameron Scott, and his brother John, went as missionaries to the Congo from Glasgow in 1890. Very soon John died, and Peter, alone in the jungle, with his own health broken, gave up in discouragement. He returned to Britain where, in London, he visited the grave of David Livingstone in Westminster Abbey. There he read the same words on the gates at Torthorwald: “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must bring.” The promise was enough for him to spend the remainder of his life in Africa.
Christ is the ‘missionary.’ Without him there would be no others. It is his sheep who are to be gathered, and for whose salvation he is responsible. That his voice should be heard is the reason he sends messengers (Rom. 10:14–15); he is both the agent and the pattern for all who carry the message. In the words of John MacDonald Jr., explaining to his London congregation the reason for his departure to India: “The standard of that interest which we ought to take in the matter of publishing the Gospel of salvation, is surely to be found in the interest the Son of God took in working out that salvation.”
“What is the object of the missionary enterprise on which the Church of Scotland has embarked?” asked Alexander Duff, and he answered:
“It is, to announce to those millions, who are still enslaved in sin and exposed to eternal misery, that, to restore and save them, the Son of God himself came down from heaven, to proclaim liberty to captives, and shed his precious blood for their ransom. It is, to beseech them to renounce their numberless penances, and soul-deceiving works of merit, and flee for refuge to the atoning sacrifice and justifying righteousness of the divine Redeemer.”
The proof that faith in Scripture and its message is supreme in the motivation of mission can be seen in what happens when that faith is absent. When faith was undermined in so many of the Scottish churches towards the end of the nineteenth century a great era of Scottish missionary endeavor slowly came to a close. The World’s Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 was supposed to be a high point in the evangelization of the world, but it was not so. The veteran missionary, Mary Slessor, watching events at home from afar in Calabar in West Africa, was disappointed that so little practical result followed that much-publicized occasion. Yet she was not altogether surprised:
“After all, it is not committees and organizations from without that are to bring the revival, and to send the Gospel to the heathen at home and abroad, but the living Spirit of God working from within the heart… Surely there is something very far wrong with our Church, the largest in Scotland. Where are the men? Are there no heroes in the making among us? No hearts beating high with the enthusiasm of the Gospel? Men smile nowadays at the old-fashioned idea of sin and hell and broken law and a perishing world, but these made men, men of purpose, of power and achievement, and self-denying devotion to the highest ideals earth has known.”
What had happened in Scotland was parallel with what had happened in Germany a century earlier. Germany had led the world in the zeal shown in the eighteenth century by the Danish-Halle Mission. That mission had sent out some sixty missionaries, supported by about 15,000 people at home, and the work continued in strength, as Dr. Warneck wrote, “until in the last quarter of the century and afterwards rationalism at home dug up its roots.” Only when the universities, having fallen completely under the sway of this withering movement, ceased to furnish theologians, was the first trial made in 1803 of a missionary who had not been a university student.
The same thing happened in the Scottish universities. In the 1820s and 30s, it was enthusiasm for foreign mission that excited student minds; sixty years later, as already noted in these pages, German “scholarship” replaced the enthusiasm of the earlier generation.
In 1870 the veteran Free Church missionary in Bombay, John Wilson, pointed the young W. Robertson Smith to India as a field needing his great linguistic gifts. Instead, Robertson Smith, as described in a later chapter, became a leader in the Higher-Critical approach to the Bible. George Adam Smith, born in India in 1856, might have followed his missionary-minded father, George Smith, but, as Professor of Old Testament in the Free and then the United Free Church College in Glasgow, he also undermined faith in the Word of God. The “faith,” as he claimed, is now left “clear, practical and without mystery.” A different description would be a truer description of what his students learned. On the basis of such teaching, there would be no need for missionaries.
In the Free Church of Scotland, as in others, unbelief went far to kill missionary enterprise. “Send us men ‘full of faith and of the Holy Spirit,’” the mission fields asked, but in the course of time there was little of the missionary spirit left to respond.
This article was adapted from A Scottish Christian Heritage by Iain M. Murray, pp. 217–226.