discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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Doing Mission Together 53
world mission outreach. The second was his development of a functional and
reproducible structure for missionary deployment and support by believers.
Carey at first tried to mobilize the existing structure of his denomination for
world evangelism. When that did not happen, he and some friends organized a
Baptist mission society focused on foreign missions. Carey’s missionary society
found a place alongside the official structure of his church just as the Roman
Catholic orders had, although Carey’s organization did not have the degree of
denominational accountability that Roman Catholic orders have to their official
church structure. Carey did not dream up this structure on his own. Justinian
von Welz had proposed something similar more than a century earlier. It
was, however, Carey that made it a working reality that could be replicated.
The Protestant mission agencies begun in Europe and America as the result
of William Carey’s influence were organized and operated in a variety of
ways. Some agencies were nondenominational or interdenominational, such as
the London Missionary Society organized by John Ryland just two years after
Carey left for India. Some were denominational, such as the Church of England’s
Church Missionary Society (CMS), whose founding in 1799 was inspired
by Carey. Its missionaries included people like Alexander McKay
(Africa) and Samuel Zwemer (Muslim world). Marcus Whitman, missionary to
Native Americans, was one of the better-known missionaries of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810 also as a result
of Carey’s inspiration. Well-known names like those are part of the universal
Church’s mission history. In addition, every mission board will have key people
who should be known by the supporters of that particular board.
Ralph Winter has noted that specific mission-focused organizations like
Carey’s have been present when the Church did its most aggressive global outreach.
Winter gave the name sodality to such task-oriented groups of committed
people focused on evangelizing the world. Sodalities focus on a limited set
of goals and tasks within the larger framework of all that the church does.
Winter used the word modality to refer to the larger, all-inclusive church organization
that gathers nominal as well as committed members under the same
umbrella. During those periods when global mission was left to the modality
or larger group, cross-cultural outreach has usually waned. 2
The mission sodality is a structure that Roman Catholicism has also used.
Protestants sometimes think of Roman Catholic orders as people living in isolated
monasteries where they give themselves to prayer and meditation, with
some even having taken a vow of silence. While there are a few cloistered religious
orders, most Roman Catholic orders were started as mission arms. Indeed,
it was the founding of those orders as missionary sodalities that launched
the Western Church into aggressive global outreach. Two missionary orders,