discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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82 From Every Nation
it honest to promote them in the West as missionaries? This is not to disparage
the Kingdom work of such people. These barefoot evangelists, as Billy Graham
and others have called them, are doing a remarkable work of evangelizing in
their home countries. They need to be commended for their unique ministries
rather than being lumped in with cross-cultural expatriate missionaries from
those same countries.
African-American Missionary Outreach
“From Every Nation,” the title of this chapter, needs to be understood in
the sense of “From Every People.” Because all sectors of the Church are supposed
to embrace the global missionary enterprise, missiologists have puzzled
over why some minority churches, such as African-American, Hispanic, and
Native American ones in the U.S., have seemingly had only minimal involvement
in world evangelism. Some hypotheses have been advanced to answer
questions like these: Are there expectations that people from these minority
backgrounds being called to missionary service will limit themselves to reaching
only “their own people”? Do the models of global missionary outreach the
minorities see in historic Western mission organizations seem too costly to implement?
Sadly, American mission boards were as slow in racially integrating
their global missionary force as the nation was in integrating its public institutions,
its military, and its work force. Did the racism that made existing mission
agencies reluctant to recruit Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities discourage
members of those minority groups from applying in the first place?
To be sure, stories of African-American missionaries do not get told very
often. Adoniram and Ann Judson, who went to India in 1812, are often credited
with being the first American Protestant missionaries. In reality, the title of
“First Protestant missionary from the New World” may belong to John Marrant,
a “free black” from New York City who in 1770 began preaching to Native
Americans in Canada. Marrant went on to take the gospel to four tribal
groups: Cherokee, Creek, Catawar, and Housaw. Or, if the title of “first American
missionary” needs to be reserved for someone who actually boarded a ship,
then it might be claimed by George Liele, a freed slave who went to Jamaica in
1783 to start a Baptist church. In 1790, former slave Prince Williams went
from the U.S. to the Bahamas to plant Baptist churches. That work has borne
so much long-term fruit that today the Baptists are the largest denominational
group in the Bahamas. All three of these—Liele, Marrant, and Williams—were
planting churches cross-culturally before the Judsons ever left New England.
Betsey Stockton, a former slave of the African Diaspora, was the first single
female missionary in modern history. In 1882 Betsey was sent by the American
Board of Commissioners to Hawaii partly as a missionary and partly as a servant
for a missionary couple expecting a child. However, Betsey’s contract with