The year 1810 marks the start of the North American foreign missions movement -- a movement begun with typical American enthusiasm and vigor but in need of practical grounding. This volume explores important facets of the development of North American foreign missions, paying particular attention to the role agencies like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) played in shaping the theology, theory, and policy of evangelistic activities overseas. Written by leading experts on missions and religious history, this volume is distinguished by its focus on key events taking place at the home base rather than on happenings in the foreign mission field. In doing so, these insightful studies shed light on important yet neglected topics, including the impact of debates about slavery on foreign missions, the emergence of distinctive mission strategies for women, the role of the social gospel as a missionary ideology, and the contribution of foreign missions to the creation of a global evangelical network. Contributors: Alvyn AustinRuth Compton Brouwer, Wendy J. Diechmann Edwards, Janet F. Fishburn, Paul Harris, David W. Kling, Charles A. Maxfield III, Susan Wilds McArver, John F. Piper Jr., Dana L. Robert, Richard Lee Rogers, Wilbert R. Shenk, Carol Ann Vaughn. bThis excellent volume will command widespread attention not only for its display of scholarly expertise but for the fresh and revealing light it throws on the principal landmarks and major themes in the history of missionary expansion overseas.b -- Andrew Porter Kingbs College London

There were two battles for Hawaii's sovereignty led by Queen Liliuokalani. This book, The Rights of My People, revisits these battles - the 1893 coup d'etat and the annexation in 1898 - from a new perspective, against the backdrop of the harsh remnants of the Civil War, the missionary's disquieting view of race, and the emerging role of Hawaiian women. The Rights of My People explores the fate of the Crown lands, a quarter of the Hawaii islands, taken in the 1893 coup d'etat and contested aggressively by Liliuokalani through 1910. Woven into the story are threats of execution and assassination and the forces of bigotry, condescension, and deception she confronted. The events unfold in Honolulu, Hilo, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. She challenged the United States before Congress repeatedly for complicity in taking the Crown lands. Finally, in the grandeur of what is now the Renwick Art Gallery, the United States Court of Claims heard and decided Liliuokalani v. United States of America.

Offering not only state-of-the-art introductions from Biblical, historical, and constructive theologians, this volume also fosters an inter-disciplinary and cross-confessional conversation, reclaiming the idea of election as a central notion for any retelling of the biblical narrative. Several essays explore the variety of ways in which election is spoken about in the Scripture, drawing on research from the last twenty years that offers a more sophisticated framework than the traditionally theological categories of “elect” and “reject”. The historical part of the volume covers new analyses of Medieval and post-Reformation Catholic and Protestant debates on predestination, while the book's constructive part contributes to contemporary conversations on the relationship between Trinity, Christology, and election, the development of a post-supersessionist understanding of Israel's chosenness, as well as voices from contextual struggles in South America, Palestine, and South Africa.

Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its “manifest destiny” of westward expansion. Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was a key marker of racial ancestry, inspiring conjectures about the structure of Native American vocal organs and the grammatical organization and inheritability of their languages. A racially inflected discourse of “savage languages” entered the American mainstream and shaped attitudes toward Native Americans, fatefully so when it came to questions of Indian sovereignty and justifications of their forcible removal and confinement to reservations. By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific efforts were under way to record the sounds and translate the concepts of Native American languages and to classify them into families. New discoveries by ethnologists and philologists revealed a degree of cultural divergence among speakers of related languages that was incompatible with prevailing notions of race. It became clear that language and race were not essentially connected. Yet theories of a linguistically shaped “Indian mind” continued to inform the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.

Though many of its early leaders were immigrants, most histories of the Stone-Campbell Movement have focused on the unique, American-only message of the Movement. Typically, the story tells the efforts of Christians seeking to restore New Testament Christianity or to promote unity and cooperation among believers. Among the Early Evangelicals charts a new path showing convincingly that the earliest leaders of this Movement cannot be understood apart from a robust evangelical and missionary culture that traces its roots back to the eighteenth century. Leaders, including such luminaries as Thomas and Alexander Campbell, borrowed freely from the outlook, strategies, and methodologies of this transatlantic culture. More than simple Christians with a unique message shaped by frontier democratization, the adherents in the Stone-Campbell Movement were active participants in a broadly networked, uniquely evangelical enterprise.

American Presbyterians have a remarkable heritage of foreign mission work. While today the mission and ministry of the Presbyterian Church and all of mainline Protestantism is in a time of reformation and deep change, it is vital to remember this heritage of world mission. The Presbyterian Mission Enterprise tells this story by highlighting significant mission leaders through the ages. Our story includes Francis Makemie, a colonial-era missionary pastor and church planter who gathered with colleagues to form the first Presbytery in 1706. Tough, old-school Presbyterians like Ashbel Green insisted on a distinctive Presbyterian mission effort, and Presbyterians were among those who heard the call exemplified by William Carey to take the gospel to the whole world. This vision beckoned Walter Lowrie into leadership, and Presbyterians joined the great missionary movement. Robert Speer was a driving force behind this growing movement, negotiating a moderate path through bitter conflicts. After the traumas of World War II, John Coventry Smith worked to reconfigure and redirect the mission enterprise. Now, in an era marked by fragmentation and realignment, leaders like Clifton Kirkpatrick and Hunter Farrell work to continue the Presbyterian mission enterprise as a vital piece of the way forward. Our heritage guides our future.

Adoniram Judson was not only a historic figurehead in the first wave of foreign missionaries from the United States and a hero in his own day, but his story still wins the admiration of Christians even today. Though numerous biographies have been written to retell his life story in every ensuing generation, until now no single volume has sought to comprehensively synthesize and analyze the features of his theology and spiritual life. His vision of spirituality and religion certainly contained degrees of classic evangelical piety, yet his spirituality was fundamentally rooted in and ruled by a mixture of asceticism and New Divinity theology. Judson's renowned fortitude emerged out of a peculiar missionary spirituality that was bibliocentric, ascetic, heavenly minded, and Christocentric. The center of Adoniram Judson's spirituality was a heavenly minded, self-denying submission to the sovereign will of God, motivated by an affectionate desire to please Christ through obedience to his final command revealed in the Scriptures. Unveiling the heart of his missionary spirituality, Judson himself asked, "What, then, is the prominent, all-constraining impulse that should urge us to make sacrifices in this cause?" And he answered thus: "A supreme desire to please him is the grand motive that should animate Christians in their missionary efforts."

In Missionary Interests, David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones bring together works about Protestant and Mormon missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, charting new directions for the historical study of these zealous evangelists for their faith. Despite their sectarian differences, both groups of missionaries shared notions of dividing the world categorically along the lines of race, status, and relative exoticism, and both employed humanitarian outreach with designs to proselytize. American missionaries occupied liminal spaces: between proselytizer and proselytized, feminine and masculine, colonizer and colonized. Taken together, the chapters in Missionary Interests dismantle easy characterizations of missions and conversion and offer an overlooked juxtaposition between Mormon and Protestant missionary efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Perhaps no era in Christian history since the time of the apostles presented a greater challenge to the spread of faith than the twentieth century. The First World War in particular resulted in nearly disastrous losses for the world mission movement. Christian countries were engaged in fratricidal conflict, missionaries were forced to return to their homelands, and traditional sources of mission funding dried up. In response to the missions crisis, American Catholic youth devoted themselves to a program of "prayer, study, and sacrifice"--the Catholic Students' Mission Crusade. Beginning with less than fifty members, the movement grew to over one million youth, and worked to foster support for missionaries in the field, promote missionary vocations, and educate youth about the needs of the church throughout the world. In the course of their "crusade," the movement's youth were exposed the complexities and challenges of diverse religious, political, and cultural worlds, including illiteracy in rural America, communism in China and Eastern Europe, and famine and disease in sub-Saharan Africa. In light of this experience, as well as the Second Vatican Council's reformulation of the Catholic Church's approach to missions, by the late 1960s the movement began to question its goal of converting the world, leading to the Crusade's crisis of faith and eventually to its disbanding. By exploring the fascinating story of the Catholic Students' Mission Crusade, this study offers new insights into the growth of the church amidst contemporary obstacles and historically non-Christian cultures, providing a bridge to understanding the current challenges to Christian globalization.

A half century after its founding in London in 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the first NGO to effectively push a modernization agenda around the globe. Soon followed by a sister organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), founded in 1855, the Y movement defined its global mission in 1889. Although their agendas have been characterized as predominantly religious, both the YMCA and YWCA were also known for their new vision of a global civil society and became major agents in the worldwide dissemination of modern “Western” bodies of knowledge. The YMCA’s and YWCA’s “secular” social work was partly rooted in the Anglo-American notions of the “social gospel” that became popular during the 1890s. The Christian lay organizations’ vision of a “Protestant Modernity” increasingly globalized their “secular” social work that transformed notions of science, humanitarianism, sports, urban citizenship, agriculture, and gender relations. Spreading Protestant Modernity shows how the YMCA and YWCA became crucial in circulating various forms of knowledge and practices that were related to this vision, and how their work was co-opted by governments and rival NGOs eager to achieve similar ends. The studies assembled in this collection explore the influence of the YMCA’s and YWCA’s work on highly diverse societies in South, Southeast, and East Asia; North America; Africa; and Eastern Europe. Focusing on two of the most prominent representative groups within the Protestant youth, social service, and missionary societies (the so-called “Protestant International”), the book provides new insights into the evolution of global civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its multifarious, seemingly secular, legacies for today’s world. Spreading Protestant Modernity offers a compelling read for those interested in global history, the history of colonialism and decolonization, the history of Protestant internationalism, and the trajectories of global civil society. While each study is based on rigorous scholarship, the discussion and analyses are in accessible language that allows everyone from undergraduate students to advanced academics to appreciate the Y movement’s role in social transformations across the world.