Church History, History of Christianity, Religious History: Some Reflections on British Missionary Enterprise Since the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In the Introduction to his lectures on the modern British missionary movement published in 1965, Max Warren suggested that “any serious student of modern history must find some explanation of the missionary expansion of the Christian Church.” Many, perhaps most, scholars have ignored his advice, and until very recently, it would have been difficult to persuade researchers in the modern academic mainstream to take such an injunction seriously, so flatly would it have seemed to contradict or question the dominant assumptions of liberal, secular scholarship. The progress of an all-pervasive secularization meant that missions, if not the churches both that supported them and that they hoped to build, were to be listed amongst history's losers and were therefore unattractive subjects for study.