Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

the Sorbonne there were theologians who responded positively to Wake, especially Dr Louis
Ellies Dupin; Wake was ready to accept that the doctrine of transubstantiation need not
hinder intercommunion between the two Churches.
But it would be true to say that the Catholic branches of the Church, Roman and Orthodox,
were seen by most Protestants of Britain in the 18 th Century to be defective or even apostate,
and there was not serious consideration of unity with them. The Toleration Act of 1689 gave
freedom of worship to all Dissenters except Roman Catholics and Unitarians. In view of
James II‟s acceptance of Catholicism, this was understandable. The rejection of Unitarian
views indicates that the doctrine of the Trinity was a uniting factor at that time, and the
rejection of Roman Catholicism owed as much to political interests as to theology.
This period also saw a great expansion of European commercial and colonial interests
overseas. Accompanying this expansion were Catholic and Protestant messengers. Converts
were sought and, in some cases, made in large numbers among the native populations in
South America, Africa and Asia.
The Catholic Church had been busy making converts, especially in Latin America and the Far
East, without any rival Christian presence to deal with, from the 16 th Century, but Protestant
colonial expansion gathered momentum from the middle of the 18 th Century. The American
colony of Georgia was founded in 1732 as a refuge for debtors from English prisons, but it
was intended also as a counterforce to the presence of Spanish colonists to its south. It was
also established as a Church of England enclave, and the Wesley brothers and George
Whitefield spent some time there as parish priests.
The revival of the Evangelical faith in both Anglican and Dissenting Churches led to the rise
of the Protestant overseas missionary movement. It began with the founding of the Baptist
Missionary Society in 1792 and the London Missionary Society in 1795. Protestantism in
England and Wales was beginning to wake up to the vast numbers of people in the world and
to their spiritual needs.
In 1792 William Carey (1761-1834), an English Baptist, had written a tract on the subject
An Enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathens,
in which he tried to assess the number of people worldwide who had no knowledge of the
Christian Gospel. The next year Carey was in India as a missionary with the Baptist
Missionary Society, and there he remained until his death in 1834.
Three years later, in 1795, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans and Anglicans
contributed to the founding of the London Missionary Society, a Protestant missionary
society which had as its goal a non-denominational mission to the South Seas. It was to
produce many notable missions and pioneer missionaries, not least Robert and Mary
Moffat and David Livingstone, their son-in-law, in Central Africa.
It can be said that the London Missionary Society, as a para-church body, was one of the very
first ecumenical ventures of the modern period; it allowed missionaries to be free to pursue
whatever form of church order they felt right. The basic truths of the Gospel based on the
Creeds were accepted as binding on all.
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