Considering the vacuous, variegated mutations of religiosity in the twenty-first century, the vernacular often employed in contemporary Christian communities can be murky to describe and dreadfully difficult to define (especially compared with Christian culture fifty or a hundred years ago). Words like faith, salvation, sin, hell, and so on may still cling to vestiges of their traditional denotations, but their postmodern emphases and interpretations (in some progressive churches) are often creatively removed or contorted from their original sense and significances. Still, at the core of many Christian terms and ideas is a steely kernel of meaning that endures throughout the historical timeline.
For instance, the words, “Friends Evangelical Missions,” can be understood in the nuanced-yet-united understandings of people groups separated by ages, geography, and culturalisms. In his 1880 book, Friends Missions, English philanthropist Stanley Pumphrey remarked, “The early Friends . . . recognized the obligation, to quote words which occur so often in their writings, to ‘spread the truth abroad and be valiant for it.’ Very early in their history, we find their ministers in most of the countries of Europe, in Asia, Africa, America and the West Indies.”[1]
In Christina Jones’ 1946 book, American Friends in World Missions, she explains, “A sense of mission permeated the life and thought of early Quakerism. The early followers of George Fox . . . were filled with a burning desire to tell [great truth] to all men. The discovery of the power of the love of Jesus to transform souls and lead them from darkness to light was glad tidings of great joy to be told to all people everywhere.”[2]
Some sixty years later, Quaker professor Ron Stansell notes, “Beneath their stolid Victorian appearances, Friends at the end of the nineteenth century were saturated in a spiritual gospel and enlivened by Wesleyan revivals. This made them a part of the hugely significant missionary movement that would profoundly alter world cultures and color the geo-political picture for decades to come.”[3]
Four clear themes can be ascertained in their writings: 1. they all felt compelled to share the good news with others far away, 2. they wanted to introduce foreigners to Jesus, their Savior, 3. they wanted to help improve the daily lives (with biblical studies, spiritual formation, education, literacy, healthcare, vocational training, economic assistance, and so on) of those suffering in other countries and cultures, and 4. they were willing to suffer and sacrifice for their message and the missions. Pumphrey writes, “[My own book] deals with Missionary Work—a term by which I understand the service of those who are sent out by the churches into needy districts, to live and labour with the object of bringing people to the saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, and planting churches.”[4] Jones attests, “In the harshest periods of persecution, they seemed almost oblivious to physical suffering, so powerful was the reality of the spiritual resources within them. It was a wonderful privilege to tell men of the near-ness of God, of his intimateness, and his great love.”[5]
Stansell sums up the evangelical missions mentality nicely in his book, Missions by the Spirit: “But common themes emerge from their lives core message, integrity of life, equal concern for faith and practice, and belief that a spiritual gospel radiates from a personal Spirit who communicates Jesus Christ to individuals and to societies. Their stories express a concept of conversion as a spiritual transformation and a commitment to evangelization as reconciliation and peace with God and neighbor.”[6]
Truthfully, though, in all three books, these authors (who lived several decades apart) tell tale-after-tale of Quaker missionaries (and their domestic administrators) on fire for the Lord,[7] empowered by the Holy Spirit, eager to “enter into the world's needs and suffering. They had a message, living and glowing within them to be shared, and they were ready.”[8] Such altruistic attitudes, sacrificial sufferance, and steadfast intentionality were the constant, unquestionable, beneficent proofs of their evangelical missionary callings.
Perhaps that is why American author (and literary cynic) Mark Twain admiringly admitted about these missionaries:
A missionary is a man who is pretty nearly all heart, else he would not be in a calling which requires of him such large sacrifices of one kind and another. He is made up of faith, zeal, courage, sentiment, emotion, enthusiasm; and so he is a mixture of poet, devotee and knight-errant. He exiles himself from home and friends and the scenes and associations that are dearest to him; patiently endures discomforts, privations, discouragements; goes with good pluck into dangers which he knows may cost him his life; and. when he must suffer death, willingly makes that supreme sacrifice for his cause.[9]
Ultimately, to find the clearest evidence of an evangelical theology upon which to build a Friends missiology to carry the Gospel to other cultures, one can (and should) carefully study the numerous Quaker testimonies, lives, and missionary examples shared by Pumphrey, Jones, and Stansell. These brave men and women obeyed Jesus’s commandment to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19); and they positively responded to the apostle Paul’s crucial questions in Romans 10:14—“And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” Thankfully, the same opportunity still holds true today for any would-be Quaker evangelical seeking to share the Good News across the globe to those in need of Christ.
Bibliography
Jones, Christina. American Friends in World Missions. Eigin: Brethren, 1946.
Pumphrey, Stanley. Friends Missions. Richmond: Friends’ Review, 1880.
Stansell, Ron. Missions by the Spirit. Newberg: Barclay Press, 2009.
Twain, Mark. “To My Missionary Critics.” The North American Review 172, no. 533 (1901): 520–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105150.
[1] Stanley Pumphrey, Friends Missions (Richmond: Friends’ Review, 1880), 11.
[2] Christina Jones, American Friends in World Missions (Eigin: Brethren, 1946), 11.
[3] Ron Stansell, Missions by the Spirit (Newberg: Barclay Press, 2009), 7.
[4] Pumphrey, Friends Missions, 6.
[5] Jones, American Friends in World Missions, 18.
[6] Stansell, Missions by the Spirit, 11.
[7] Such as Joseph S. Sewell, Louis and Sarah Street, Rachel Metcafe, Irena S. Beard, Charles Gayford, Eli and Sibyl Jones, Theophilus Waldmeier, Micajah M. Binford, Calvin and Alida Clark, and so on. See Stanley Pumphrey, Friends Missions (Richmond: Friends’ Review, 1880) for more missionary testimonies and stories.
[8] Jones, American Friends in World Missions, 35.
[9] Mark Twain, “To My Missionary Critics,” The North American Review 172, no. 533 (1901): 534. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105150.