Evangelical History Research Articles

Give Me A Name Give Me A God Give Me A Land The Waorani´ History of Contact and Evangelism

For generations, the Waorani people were known as the "Aucas," a term used to designate their family groups. However, in September 1955, missionaries from the Summer Linguistic Institute-Wycliffe Books Translators (SLI-WBT) and Fellowship-Christian Mission in Many Lands (FAM) were hired by the Ecuadorian government to evangelize, pacify, and civilize these indigenous groups. This marked the beginning of the so-called Auca's operation, aimed at contacting and evangelizing a clan of Waorani near the Curaray River settlement. Employing strategies such as dropping steel objects from airplanes as gifts, the missionaries sought to build trust with the Waorani. This paper utilizes extensive ethnographic data and the lens of orientalism to explore how colonialism transformed the mindset and ethos of the Waorani people. It examines the cultural changes resulting not only from physical domination but also from the colonization of the mind, which reshaped their perception of places, people, and history. By analyzing the hegemonic construction of the other, it seeks to elucidate the impact on modern Waorani identity in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Prophet Jonah Is not Alone: Understanding the History of Pentecostal Evangelism in Light of Contemporary Missionary Endeavours in Nigeria

This article examines reasons for the increasing neglect of rural evangelism in Nigeria. Some Pentecostal missionaries, churches and faith-based communities seem unwilling to go on evangelism missions to rural areas; thus the increasing number of churches and missionaries in the city compared to rural Nigeria. Missionary impacts have been felt in schools, hospitals and microfinance banks. Historiography reveals that missionaries before the last decade were willing to go to rural areas. Most churches and schools in rural areas were established by missionaries. However, Pentecostal missionaries are now shifting their interests from urban-rural to urban-urban evangelism. In this qualitative analysis, data were gathered from primary and secondary sources. Oral interviews and relevant academic literature form the sources of the data. Many scholars have written on the history of church missionary activities in Nigeria, but literature is scarce on reasons for the current decrease in the number of missionaries in rural areas. Why do Christian missionaries relegate rural evangelism to the background? What has been the impact on the church? Our findings show the reasons as the advent of mega-churches in Nigerian cities, financial reward from city missionary activities, resistance of some communities, punishment, increased financial burdens, the quest for popularity, intimidation, the few rural evangelists, and the lack of sufficient assistance. Missionary activities, if revived, will lead to the development of rural areas spiritually, morally, educationally, socially, and economically. The church should not restrict the spread of the gospel to specific places. Churches sending missionaries to rural areas should also provide financial support to strengthen these missionaries, as they serve as crucial links between the host church and the local community.

Metaphysical turmoil

In the article, we present, comment and analyse some elements of our cultural and evangelical history, which have been marked by numerous philosophers and theologians starting from the ancient Church to the present day. Closing into the present actually means a ban on living. Present life has its roots in the past and offers its promises, expectations and courage to the future. History exists, and man can dwell in history, without which there is no creative culture, only when three dimensions of time are lived organically. In this context, we also observe the contribution of an immense procession of thinkers like St Thomas Aquinas in successive historical periods. In the article, we explore the possible contribution of metaphysics to the questions posed to the modern man. The evangelical influence on culture, which is a complex phenomenon, should certainly be shed light on. Furthermore, it can be more or less deep. It can be hidden, more or less conscious. It is not always strongly present where it is most required, it is not real where it is explicitly ordered. In addition to authentic fruits, one should also be aware of counterfeits and hypocritical activities. In short, its paths are different and manifold. It seems important to point this out so that we could evaluate this influence, which is authenticated and credibly confirmed in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy, and which establishes piety. Certain errors, exaggerations and deviations are not imaginable outside the Christian horizon, which unmask it or wage a battle with it.

Review of "Gospel witness through the ages: A history of evangelism"

Review of "Gospel witness through the ages: A history of evangelism"

Speaking In-Between: Vernacular Spirituality of a Woman in Late Chosǒn Korea

precis: This essay presents a transcultural and transhistorical case that exhibits the impact of everyday language use in the practice of Christian spirituality, which stems from the biblical sermo humilis of late antiquity Christians, across and throughout the history of Christian mission and evangelism. In the specific case of Yi Suni, a Korean female martyr, I argue, this manner of sermo humilis kindles such Spirit-led influence in a mission field without a Western missionary’s intervention, as the Christian message spreads through the raw language of ordinary people. Even though there has been some research on Yi Suni’s in-between identity as an ordinary Confucian woman and a Catholic individual subject, there has not been enough attention to how her manner of speech in her letters reflects her struggles in the liminal space of her transcultural context. Her letters written in the real voice of Korean vernacular ǒnmun exhibit the rawness of the impact of the appropriated Catholicism in the everyday life of a Korean Confucian woman and her family. This rawness of her language, along with the core biblical message, I suggest, is the hallmark of Christian spirituality that Yi Suni revealed without direct influence from any Western missionary.

MANUSCRIPT XLI: Papeiha, E tuatua no te taeanga mai o te tuatua na te atua ki Rarotonga nei (An Account of the Coming of the Word of God to Rarotonga), c. 1830

ABSTRACT Papeiha’s manuscript, which Mata Tumu-Makara introduces, translates, and annotates, is a historically important example of a very early Indigenous Pacific voice in a region where Christianity remains an intensely lived experience for most people. Makara’s work contributes to an understanding of the divergent meanings of ‘mission’ and ‘missionary’ by identifying a critical moment in the contemporary history of evangelism in the Pacific when Maeliau’s prophetic movement challenged established evangelical practices. Although the Deep Sea Canoe has not yet been relaunched from the Cook Islands, Makara’s work makes a major contribution to the focus on the history of Cook Islander missionaries and their families, a theme of the CICC bicentenary celebrations that is celebrated in this special issue of JPH, the CICC Newsletter and the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), Special Collections, blog series, Cook Islander missionaries: recovering hidden histories from missionary archives.

Kristiyanong Pinoy: A glimpse on the history of evangelization towards renewed catechesis in the Philippines

Kristiyanong Pinoy: A glimpse on the history of evangelization towards renewed catechesis in the Philippines

Not an “Ordinary Man”: J. Gresham Machen and the Un-Queering of Evangelical Theology

ABSTRACTIn the 1920s, Princeton Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist intellectual of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. His Calvinist theology, commitment to biblical inerrancy, and opposition to liberalism were passed on to and spread by his influential students including Carl McIntire, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer. But in the early days of 1906, the young man who would go on to indelibly shape evangelical theology wrote home from Germany where he was a graduate student that he could never go into Christian ministry because of his “moral fault” that no “ordinary man” could understand. This article analyzes the coded language of J. Gresham Machen's letters during his pivotal personal crisis in the context of changing German understandings of “homosexuality” and Machen's lifelong homosocial tendencies. Moreover, it connects Machen's confrontation with his sexuality with his simultaneous confrontation with German liberal theology. In the fall of 1905, Machen found himself drawn to the more experiential and pluralistic Christianity of Wilhelm Herrmann. However, in facing his own perceived immorality, Machen found “Calvinism a very comforting doctrine indeed.” He rejected modernism and spent his life defending a rigid orthodoxy against the theologies that would come to accommodate and embrace queerness. The results of his personal crisis echoed through the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. This article analyzes the historical process of “un-queering” theology that emanated from that crisis and demonstrates that resistance to queerness was woven into the ideological fabric of evangelicalism far earlier than scholars have yet recognized.

Review: The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano

Review: <i>The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico</i>, edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano

The First Global Revivalist? Reuben Archer Torrey and the 1902 Evangelistic Campaign in Australia

AbstractAs a revivalist who appeared to have initiated a world-wide awakening of Christianity and was also an early leader of the fundamentalist movement, Reuben A. Torrey is generally regarded as a major figure in the early twentieth-century history of evangelicalism. By tracing its origins and results, this article attributes Torrey's rise to prominence in the global evangelical movement to the evangelistic campaign he conducted in Australia in 1902. Setting this episode in the context of the history of international revivalism, it identifies Torrey as the first global revivalist in influence as well as geographical range. In place of the traditional providential interpretation, the analysis proposes the alignment of the revivalist theology, methods, and achievement exhibited in the Australian campaign with the hopes and expectations of the preexisting conservative evangelical subculture as a “functionalist” explanation of Torrey's impact. As the reason for Torrey's transformed standing in the evangelical movement in America and the wider world, the 1902 Australian campaign also emerges as a revealing case study of the dynamics of global evangelicalism and the function of international revivalism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Evangelicalism before the Fall: The Christian Herald and Signs of our Times

“Evangelicalism Before the Fall” reveals the surprising and largely forgotten world of the premillennialist wing of late Victorian Evangelicalism through a close reading of its leading paper, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Organized around five thematic soundings (“worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”), the paper shows that premillennialism comported easily with socially elite status, liberal instincts, and irenic habits of mind not commonly associated with those holding similar beliefs in the decades after. Although the primary goal of the article is to recover an overlooked moment in Evangelical history, it secondarily contributes to a historiographical debate in the field of Fundamentalism studies, where revisionists have challenged the “fall” narrative of an earlier cohort of scholars, such as George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, who documented a decline in social standing and influence for the movement relative to the late nineteenth century. The article lends support to the fall narrative, properly understood as a change in social and cultural status.

Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past

Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past

AndrewAtherstone and David C.Jones, eds.: Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past. Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism, London and New York: Routledge, 2019; pp. 288.

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 534-537 BOOK REVIEWS Andrew Atherstone and David C. Jones, eds.: Making Evangelical History: Faith, Scholarship and the Evangelical Past. Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism, London and New York: Routledge, 2019; pp. 288. Geoffrey R. Treloar, Geoffrey R. Treloar orcid.org/0000-0001-6690-3323 University of New South WalesSearch for more papers by this author Geoffrey R. Treloar, Geoffrey R. Treloar orcid.org/0000-0001-6690-3323 University of New South WalesSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 November 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12706Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume44, Issue4Special Issue: Religious Devotion, Gender and the Body in Europe, 1100–1800December 2020Pages 534-537 RelatedInformation

Thomas S. Kidd, The History of a Movement in Crisis

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 201–204 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.22 Book Review Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Kristin Kobes Du Mez Calvin University, Grand Rapids, USA As the title reveals, Thomas Kidd’s Who is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis addresses two primary purposes: first, supplying a proper definition of evangelical, and second, explaining what has led to evangelicalism’s present “crisis.” As to “Who is an evangelical?”, Kidd wastes no time in disabusing readers of popular notions that evangelical means Republican, that evangelicals are white, or that evangelicals should be defined by their political allegiances. Such definitions are “historically peculiar,” he contends; originally, evangelicalism “was basically a spiritual movement”—at its heart “a movement about biblical doctrine , the salvation of sinners, and the work of revival” (26, 66). More specifically, Kidd defines evangelicals as “born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.” For Kidd, then, true evangelicals are known by their theological beliefs and by practices such as church attendance or perhaps subscribing to an evangelical magazine. Using these measures, “Hispanic, African American, and other evangelical people of color are just as evangelical as white evangelicals are” (4). Accordingly, Kidd’s history of evangelicalism includes Phillis Wheatley alongside American Religion 2:1 202 slaveholders Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, segregationists alongside civil rights activists, and diverse believers the world over, including the post-1965 immigrants who are currently changing the face of evangelicalism in the United States. Kidd’s kaleidoscopic overview of evangelical history extends beyond racial and ethnic diversity. Evangelicals have always disagreed with each other “about a host of theological, cultural, and political issues.” Kidd finds them “at their best” when they used their power “to defend the weak and oppressed,” and finds them generally more problematic when they seek “to impose evangelical practices, ideas, or standards of conscience on the public” (34). Still, he concedes that the line often blurs between the better sort of evangelical advocacy and that which he finds lamentable. And Kidd finds much that is lamentable. Here it is worth noting that Kidd is transparent about the fact that he is no disinterested observer. A distinguished professor of history at Baylor University, writer for The Gospel Coalition, and newly appointed visiting professor at the SBC’s Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kidd self-identifies as a white evangelical who is active in his conservative Baptist church in Waco, Texas. Kidd’s religious identity helps explain his perception of the current “crisis,” the book’s second purpose. A #NeverTrump evangelical (who served a stint on Marco Rubio’s religious liberty advisory board), Kidd chides evangelicals for too often following “well-meaning (or crassly opportunistic) politicians” into misguided quests for political power (53). Here, although Kidd defines evangelicalism as a diverse, global phenomenon, the crisis appears to be an American phenomenon. And here, the blame lies with evangelicals themselves, especially certain “Republican insider evangelicals” who lead hapless (or at least deceived) followers into temptation. But Kidd also blames pollsters and the media for perpetuating the erroneous notion that evangelicalism can be reduced to white Republicans who consider themselves religious. In this way, the definitional question at the heart of the book also contributes to the current crisis. Still another layer of crisis has to do with the racial divide within “the evangelical movement”: the failure of Black and white evangelicals to agree on politics . Kidd doesn’t hesitate to call out white evangelical “passivity” and “silence” in the face of lynching, Jim Crow, and the fight for civil rights, a reticence he attributes in part to a wariness of “social gospel” efforts that would distract from “the church’s core business.” (He refrains, however, from pointing out that white evangelicals exhibited no such qualms in their anticommunist activism or their promotion of an array of conservative social causes.) When Kidd acknowledges white evangelicals’ overwhelming support for Trump in 2016, he also notes that Black Protestants...

The Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones

This ‘Companion’ is what it says on the cover, a companion. It is not itself a history, and it has little overall picture of an unfolding and growing organic movement. Rather, it identifies some characteristic features of evangelicalism, and traces the story of each of these seriatim. The scope is in theory five centuries of time and the whole globe in space. The upshot brings certain trees into sharp focus without giving very much picture of either the wood or the neighbouring trees. The reader’s interest is directed to these particular concerns—some very general and predictable (as, e.g., ‘Evangelicals and the Bible’), some much less expected (as, e.g., ‘Evangelicals, money and business’). The editors kickstart the enquiry with some difficult mapwork on ‘Evangelicals and evangelicalisms: contested identities’. Tensions exist among evangelicals, classically in relation to ecclesiology and the quest for a tightly confessional church or the readiness to live in a ‘mixed’ fellowship—some of which affect the issue of infant baptism, not mentioned in this enquiry; should the pure scriptural gospel be locked into an exclusive, even sectarian, organization, or can it be risked in an unconfessional context? And when new presenting issues arise (as, e.g., in different centuries the retention of slavery, the ordination of women, or the acceptability of same-sex unions), corresponding new tensions threaten the identity of a supposed single evangelical constituency. If, of course, there is no identity, then there can be no enquiry; but for the moment we go along with the editors’ conviction, or at least working hypothesis, that within the world Christian church there is an evangelical entity which can be identified and reported.

STRATEGI DAKWAH MOHAMMAD NATSIR: RESPON TERHADAP KRISTENISASI DAN NATIVISASI DI INDONESIA

The evangelism and nativisation which is one of lack of aqidah which until today remains a da’wah challenge. Muhammad Natsir as one of the leading national and international has da’wah strategy to oversee the Muslim faith. This research focuses on the study of how the Mohammad Natsir’s da’wah strategy in response evangelism and nativisation. This is a qualitative research with a historical approach analysis, and using techniques of data collection is the library research and interviews with DDII competent administrators as a primary source. As for other sources used are books, journals that discussed the history of evangelism and nativisation in Indonesia. The analysis method used in this study is an inductive. The type of this research is explanatory. The results of this study, concluded that M. Natsir’s da’wah strategy in response to evangelism and nativisation is to strengthen the Islamic faith in a way to make people aware their existence as a Muslim and aware their missionary challenge through education, da’wah fardhiyah, structural da’wah,and cultural da’wah. The steps are chosen is to educate every Muslim and to unite ummah in the middle of Indonesian diversity. Keywords: Da’wah, Strategy, Evangelism, Nativisation.

MAKING EVANGELICAL HISTORY: FAITH, SCHOLARSHIP, AND THE EVANGELICAL PAST. Edited by AndrewAtherstone and David CeriJones. Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. viii + 296. $155.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 46, Issue 2 p. 239-239 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Christianity: Modern/Global MAKING EVANGELICAL HISTORY: FAITH, SCHOLARSHIP, AND THE EVANGELICAL PAST. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones. Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. viii + 296. $155.00. First published: 03 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.14627Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume46, Issue2June 2020Pages 239-239 RelatedInformation

Making Evangelical history. Faith, scholarship and the Evangelical past. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones. (Studies in Evangelicalism.) Pp. viii + 296. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £115. 978 1 4724 6628 0

Making Evangelical history. Faith, scholarship and the Evangelical past. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones. (Studies in Evangelicalism.) Pp. viii + 296. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £115. 978 1 4724 6628 0

The Routledge research companion to the history of Evangelicalism. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones. (Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism.) Pp. x + 302. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £135. 978 1 4724 3892 8

The Routledge research companion to the history of Evangelicalism. Edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones. (Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism.) Pp. x + 302. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £135. 978 1 4724 3892 8 - Volume 71 Issue 1

The Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism

Relatively neglected before the late 1980s, the historiography of evangelicalism, one of the world's largest religious movements, has burgeoned over the last three decades. Given the proliferation of articles, collections, and monographs on the subject, an enterprise that seeks to chart the field and set out proposals for future lines of enquiry is particularly welcome. The volume comprises a total of sixteen essays, mostly by established scholars, grouped in broad thematic sections with the first five concerned with key features of evangelicalism: evangelical identities, the Bible, the cross, spirituality, and revival and revivalism. This is followed by a group of essays on evangelical encounters with the ‘other’: Rome, Eastern Christianity, Islam, and evangelical mission in both the Atlantic North and the Global South. Finally, there is a group of essays on the relationship of evangelicalism to a range of social and cultural themes: the end of the world, race, gender, culture and the arts, money and business, and globalization.All of these essays represent thoughtful contributions to the existing literature. Thus, the essay on identity, for example, seeks not to add a further definition of evangelicalism to an already overcrowded field but to trace the main contours of the debate and analyse some of the reasons why this issue is so often and so fiercely disputed. It concludes by pointing to the explosion of evangelicalism in the Global South as inevitably generative of new questions and new forms of contestation. A number of authors make notably creative use of the opportunities offered by their topics. The essay on the Bible, for example, eschews a rehearsal of the familiar debates around inerrancy in favour of an emphasis on the centrality of the Bible to evangelical faith and its popular appropriation both directly and through the medium of hymns and songs. Similarly, the essay on culture and the arts avoids a catalogue of evangelical attitudes by genre and instead offers an illuminating analysis of evangelical encounters with the arts and evangelical cultural production according to the contexts in which they occurred: the home, the church, in evangelism, and in wider society. If a general theme emerges from this body of work it is the complexity of the phenomena under consideration, the unhelpfulness of the stereotypes by which evangelicalism is commonly interpreted both by insiders and outsiders, and the need to understand its development among multiple axes frequently defying generalization and always demanding nuance in any attempt at characterization.Given the treasure on offer in this volume it may seem churlish to ask for more, but at least two topics are unrepresented here: evangelicalism and politics and evangelicalism and the body have a salience that clearly calls for similarly thoughtful treatment and might be included in a later edition. A more serious reservation concerns the strong North Atlantic focus of the majority of the writing. To some extent this is inevitable given the origins of the movement and the historical approach intrinsic to the volume, but given the transformation of evangelicalism since the mid-twentieth century into a movement principally located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it is surprising that essays focused on evangelical complexity should so largely exclude the ramifications of this expansion. In a handful of cases this has a potentially significant impact on the analysis offered. The conclusion, for example, that ‘Wealth for the evangelical is always likely to remain ambiguous’ (266), derived principally from a survey of the British tradition, would surely be subject to reappraisal given the powerful themes of health and prosperity characteristic of much evangelicalism in the Global South. However, these criticisms do not detract from the achievement of this volume, which should be regarded as essential reading for anyone who wishes to think afresh and creatively about the history of this dynamic and protean form of Christianity.