discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 44
44 Christian Mission
In the 1300s Franciscan and Dominican missionaries were sent to India
and southeast Asia. In the 1400s the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa saw
the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries.
1500 to 1799
The years from 1500 to 1799 saw fresh expansion of the Christian faith,
the spirit of which is exemplified in Martin de Valencia. In 1511, Martin came
to believe that Psalm 57 prophesied the conversion of all peoples. Among the
words of that psalm are:
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
let your glory be over all the earth. . . .
I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples (vv. 5, 9).
Martin asked, “When will this be? When will this prophecy be filled?” 8
Not long afterward, he had a vision of multitudes being converted and baptized
and began to pray that he would be the one sent to convert them. Martin
died 20 years later as a Franciscan missionary in Mexico.
Missionaries and Colonial Adventurers
European exploration thrusts provided sea lanes and overland paths for
colonization enterprises. These transportation routes facilitated Christian missionary
outreach in the same ways as had the Roman Empire’s roads of the first
century. Because Christian missionaries and colonial adventurers of the 16th
and 17th centuries sometimes traveled together, they occasionally are assumed
to have been basically one and the same. They were not. The life of Bartolomé
de las Casas shows how diametrically opposed they could be. Around 1500,
Las Casas went to the New World as a slave-owning colonial settler. Eight years
later he had a change of heart, set his slaves free, entered the priesthood, and
began a fight against slavery and the mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
Of course, even though missionaries did not share all the aims of the colonizers,
they were still “children of their times.” It was difficult for their judgment
not to be colored by the ethnocentrism of colonialism. For their part,
colonial authorities tried to control and even curtail missionary activity because
the preaching of the gospel was deemed “unsettling” to people in subjugated
lands.
Protestant Foot-Dragging
Although the Protestant Reformation brought renewal to the Western European
Church in the 1500s, Reformed churches did not immediately follow
the missionary-sending model of the first-century Antioch church. To be sure,
in 1523 Martin Luther did write a hymn based on these words from Psalm 67: