The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age

By Andrew F. Walls, Brian Stanley and Gillian Mary Bediako

The Gospel Coalition Book Award in Missions & the Global Church (2023)

The long-awaited work of a pioneer of missiology and global Christianity 
   
The history of the missions is complex and fraught. Though modern missions began with European colonialism, the outcome was a largely non-Western global Christianity. Highly esteemed scholar Andrew Walls explores every facet of the movement, including its history, theory, and future. 
 
Walls locates the birth of the Protestant missionary movement in the West with the Puritans and Pietists and their efforts to convert the Native Americans they displaced. Tracing the movement into the twentieth century, Walls shows how colonialism and missionary work turned out to be essentially incompatible. Missionaries must live on another culture’s terms, and their goal—the establishment of churches of every nation—depends on accepting new, indigenous Christians as equals. Now that Christianity has become primarily an African, Latin American, and Asian religion rather than a European one, the dynamics of the church’s mission have transformed. Sensitive to this shift, Walls indicates new areas of listening to and learning from this new center of Christianity and speculates on the theological contributions from a truly global church. 
 
Throughout his long and fruitful career, Walls told the story of missions as a dedicated Christian scholar, teacher, and mentor. Prior to his passing in 2021, he entrusted the editing of his lectures to his friends and students. The result of this labor of love, The Missionary Movement from the West is a must-read for scholars of missiology, world Christianity, and church history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781467467636

Andrew F. Walls

Andrew F. Walls (1928–2021) was an influential and beloved historian of Christian missions ending with the new era of the globalized church. He was a devoted participant-observer and learner in the work of world evangelization, and he was teacher and mentor to many current missiologists. Before his death he invited trusted students and colleagues to edit his renowned lectures into this book.

Book preview

PART 1

Birth and Early Years

The Origins of Western Missions

CHAPTER 1

The Birth of the Western Missionary Movement

Christendom and the Great European Migration

There have been many missionary movements in Christian history. The first was Jewish; we meet it in the early chapters of Acts. The first believers in Jesus, rejoicing in the new assurance of his resurrection from the dead, proclaimed to all who would listen to the joyful news that the Messiah had come. When the persecution over Stephen scattered them, they took that message to their relatives and friends in Damascus and Tyre and such places. Some of them—we do not even know their names—came to Antioch and opened a new chapter in Christian history. They talked about Jesus not just to their own countrymen, not just to the house of Israel, but also to Greeks—that is, to pagans. Cross-cultural mission began in Antioch, bringing new ways of thinking and speaking about Christ. A Greek audience would not be interested by talk about the Messiah, the Savior of Israel, and a message so full of promise for Jews. Cross-cultural mission meant a new vocabulary, fresh ways of thinking, new ways of presenting Jesus, proclaiming him as Lord (kyrios), the title that Antiochean pagans gave to their cult divinities. So the next missionaries were Greek; and we get pictures of Christian slaves gossiping the gospel to their colleagues and gently introducing it to the children left in their charge, and of Christian intellectuals presenting the gospel in schools as a philosophy, introducing the Christian Scriptures as a textbook.

Before long, there were missionaries from the Syrian church preaching throughout the land we now call Iraq and introducing the gospel within the old civilization of Iran, among the tribes of north Arabia and Yemen, moving across the sea to India, across the steppes of central Asia to the letterless Turkic Mongols and the highly literate civilization of China. This East Syrian missionary movement is one of the most remarkable, but again largely untold, missionary stories of all. There was a Coptic missionary movement associated with a Coptic revival movement in rural Egypt spreading the Christian faith along the Nile valley. A shipwreck brought Christians to Eritrea, leading in due time to an Ethiopian missionary movement, taking the faith into the African interior. My own people in Scotland were evangelized by two missionary movements, one Celtic, one Roman. All of these, and many others, preceded the movement from the West that is the theme of this book. There were thus missionary movements long before the Western one, giving rise to a range of expressions of Christianity in parts of Asia and Africa. But by 1500, when the great European migration got under way, most of these other expressions of Christianity had gone into eclipse or existed under Muslim rule. Some had disappeared; others, like those in Ethiopia and South India, were outside the practical knowledge of European Christians. Western Christians thus came to think of themselves as the representative Christians, and if not absolutely the only Christians, at least representatives of the only authentic form of Christianity. So as Western Christians came out of isolation and met representatives of the old churches of East Africa and Asia, they often regarded them as deviants. By 1500, Christianity wore a more European face than it had ever done before. Europeans had become the world’s representative Christians. And these Europeans readily came to believe that their expression of Christianity was, if not the only, at least the sole authentic form of Christian faith.

It is, therefore, important to recall that the Christian faith has always been global in principle, and to a large degree in practice, too. For a thousand years and more, it spread across much of Asia and a substantial part of East Africa. If we are to understand the distinctively Western form of the missionary movement—indeed, if we are to understand our present situation in the Christian faith—we must go back a little. I would like to attempt in this opening chapter a bare schematic outline of some features of the past five centuries. Since it is not possible in this study to separate the history of the church from the history of the wider world, those stories interlock. We will be looking at both; on the last day, after all, the histories of the church, which is God’s people, and of the world, which he made and redeemed, will alike be summed up in Christ.

The Great European Migration

During the twentieth century, a great population movement that had been shaping world history for several centuries reached its peak and then came to a halt. We may call it the great European migration. For a long time, the peoples of Europe had been isolated from most of the world, out at the western end of the Eurasian landmass. For centuries, they knew less of India and China than had the Greeks or Romans. They knew next to nothing about Africa except for the Muslim northern and western coasts. They knew nothing of the vast westward landmass of the Americas or of the southern land of Australia and multitudinous islands of the Pacific.

Around the year 1500, this isolation gradually came to an end, and the great European migration began. Over the next four and a half centuries, Europeans, people of European descent, departed from Europe for the world beyond Europe, first in hundreds, then in thousands, until eventually there were many millions of them in the lands beyond Europe. Some went voluntarily, some involuntarily. Some were actuated by greed or lust of conquest; most, probably, were looking for a better life or a fairer society than they could get at home. European Christendom had reached its broadest extent geographically. The last pagan peoples had been brought into it, and Muslim power in Spain had been broken after six hundred years. It had also reached a point of cultural synthesis, with European art, literature, music, and philosophy all dominated by Christian symbols, Christian teaching, and biblical language and idiom, so that it is impossible for twenty-first-century observers to understand any of these without some knowledge of the Christian faith.

It was the Iberian powers, Spain and Portugal, who got their conservative form of Reformation over early, that led the movement that was to take a Europe that knew less of the world beyond Europe than did the Greeks and Romans out of its long isolation. They were the first European nations to develop ocean-going capacity, for this migration was, with one important exception, essentially maritime in character, a migration by sea. The one exception to the maritime expansion of Europe was Russia, which expanded overland, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spread right across Asia to the Pacific and into Alaska. With that important exception, European expansion was determined to a large extent by who controlled the seas at any given time. Ocean-going ships under the auspices of these powers worked further around the African coast than ever before and found Africa much larger than they had realized. By this means, they found the way to the fabled riches of Asia. Europe’s maritime age had begun.

Seeking those same lands and those same riches in the other direction, they reached the great land mass of the Americas, of whose existence they had previously been unaware. In the Caribbean Islands, they found little resistance, small populations with simple technology and no military tradition. In Mexico, an indigenous myth caused them to be taken as returning ancestors, and they soon took charge of the empire that had brought many neighboring peoples into subjection. In Peru, they arrived and found their progress assisted by a civil war, which meant that a very small Spanish force was able to defeat the highly developed empire of the Incas. In all these territories, there was vast mineral wealth, silver especially, and always rumors of more.

In Spain, local society was based on landowners who often held large estates that were worked by peasants who were tied to that particular estate. It thus became an attractive proposal for people who were not themselves landowners in Spain to go to America and to get an estate that would be worked by local people tied to the estate. In Europe, inheritance was usually by primogeniture; that is, the elder son inherited the whole estate. The attraction to America was thus strong for younger sons of landowners, who now had a chance otherwise denied to them of wealth and prestige. So more people came from Spain to America. They often intermarried with indigenous people but kept the Spanish language and the main lines of Spanish culture. So Latin America developed over time a mestizo culture, Spanish in its main lines, Catholic in religion; Spanish in general culture, Spanish in language, but with indigenous elements. This culture was sharply distinguished from that of purely indigenous people, usually called Indians. These people were treated so harshly in many areas and were so subject to diseases introduced by Europeans that in Central America and some other parts, there was not enough labor to work the estates and the silver mines. So Spain began to bring in labor from Africa, first raiding the African coast and then setting up a transatlantic market in slaves. It was the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, which over the years was to cause a huge movement of population from Africa to the Americas. In effect, a large piece of Africa was broken off and set down in the Americas.

The Portuguese experience was somewhat different. Their principal journeys took them eastward, down the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the East African coast, to the Persian Gulf, across to India, then to Southeast Asia, to the Spice Islands in what today we call Indonesia. From there they moved northward to China and then to Japan. This, of course, is a huge area, and Portugal is a very small country. There was no prospect of conquering all this territory or of doing what the Spanish had done in the Americas, setting up an empire. The Portuguese did make some conquests, but for the most part small ones, and their settlements were small, groups of merchants, soldiers, and priests. They were traders, finding rich reward in bringing luxury goods such as spices and silks to Europe, their trading posts made up in the way I have described. It was a male society. Occasionally a ship would come in with orphan girls from Portugal as wives for the colony, but more often the Portuguese united with local women, producing a Eurasian population, Portuguese speaking, Catholic, but merging Portuguese and Indian or Chinese or African or some other Asian culture. For Portugal, a small country with few resources apart from its population, settlement overseas offered a prospect of comfort and comparative wealth.

These developments in southern Europe inaugurated a migration that changed the pattern of world history. Between the last years of the fifteenth century and the middle years of the twentieth, millions of people were to leave Europe for the lands beyond Europe. They were a diverse crowd: adventurers, soldiers, entrepreneurs, desperate characters and destitute ones, indentured servants, convicted criminals, younger sons frustrated by European inheritance laws, and above all, ordinary people looking for a better life or a fairer society than Europe offered. Over the four and a half centuries of this migration, people from Europe and their descendants settled much of the world, especially the Americas and the temperate parts of Africa and the Pacific. Whole new nations came into being: the United States and indeed all the nations of the Americas; Australia; New Zealand; in a very real sense South Africa. Russia, which had so long been bounded by the Urals, grew beyond the Urals until it stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific and for a time into America; it was the only participant in the great European migration that expanded over land rather than by sea.

The new nations that arose as a result of the migration adopted the languages and cultural traditions of Europe. The languages and cultures of the original inhabitants who were unable or unwilling to adopt those traditions were effectively dispossessed or forced to the margins of a society that now lived by European cultural norms.

The great European migration enabled the powers of Europe to redraw the patterns of world trade to their advantage. Frequently the result was baleful, most notable in the case of the Atlantic slave trade, which with the cooperation of some African states generated immense wealth. Another baleful example was the China opium trade. European states moved populations from place to place to meet their needs for labor and production. They broke off a huge piece of Africa and transported it to the Americas in order to meet the migration’s labor needs. Smaller-scale operations moved people from India and China to South Africa or the Caribbean. An Indian population was imposed on Fiji in the interests of economic development. Resistance to the desired trade patterns could be met with force. The Western powers literally blasted their way into China and Japan in order to liberalize trade. Economic involvement led imperceptibly to the extension of political control. Some of the earliest and most complex examples of this took place in India and in Indonesia, but by the end of the nineteenth century, almost all of Africa, much of Asia, and all the Pacific had been divided among the European powers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great Muslim ruler was the sultan of Turkey; by the end of the nineteenth century, the great Muslim ruler was Queen Victoria, with more Muslim subjects than the sultan had ever had. During the early twentieth century, the process was extended to the Middle East as the Ottoman Empire, once ruled by the Caliph (or deputy of Muhammad), gave place to territories ruled by Western powers or to newly invented states such as Iraq, with Western-appointed rulers. By the 1920s, it was hard to find an independent Muslim ruler who was not the client of a Western power.

The story of the missionary movement from the West takes place against this background. The missionary movement—first Catholic, then Protestant, then both—makes a single story that arises out of the great European migration and covers the whole period of its existence. The story of the Western missionary movement, then, is inseparable from that of the great European migration. The twists and turns of that story, the rise and decline of the migration, provide the theater in which the missionary movement is played out. The relationship between the two stories is a complex one, and one aim of this book is to try to explore some of the complexities. At the heart of these lies the peculiarity of the European experience of Christianity that for convenience I denominate the Christendom experience. And that form had been conditioned by the particular way in which Europe had become Christian: by its own pattern of conversion.

European Christendom and Its Patterns of Conversion

When the great European migration began, Europeans described the territory in which they lived as Christendom. The word Christendom simply means Christianity. How did it come about that a continent came to be called Christianity? The roots of this process lie in the period of European conversion, the centuries that it took—for it did take many centuries—for Europe to turn to the Christian faith. The European peoples accepted the Christian faith as entire communities and essentially in terms of law and custom. It is the nature of law and custom that no one is permitted to opt out. So Europe became Christian territory in which all were to be regarded as Christians, all baptized into the faith, with territorial churches, each family living in a parish with a church that would teach the faith and laws shaped by Christian teaching. Within Christian territory, no idolatry, no blasphemy, and no heresy could be permitted. It was the duty of the state not less than that of the church to ensure that, for all Christian rulers were in principle the servants, the vassals, of Christ.

To understand the European experience of conversion we must go back in time, and to avoid going too far back, let us visit one of the latest parts of Europe to accept the faith, Iceland, on its furthest fringe, in the year 1000. At the Althing, the general assembly of the heads of families in Iceland (there is no king in Iceland; it is a democracy), a heated debate is in process. The issue is whether or not the community should become Christian. Powerful speeches for and against are being made, but there is no sign of agreement. It has been necessary, therefore, to go to arbitration and place the decision in the hands of Thorgeir, one of the most respected elders. He sits, hour after hour, in silence, a cloak over his head, as day passes into night and night into day again. At length he rises, throws aside the cloak, and announces his decision: We will be Christians, keeping the festivals of Easter and Christmas. There will be a grace period of six months during which those who wish to use the shrines may continue to do so, after which they will be closed. The practice of putting female children out to die is to cease. There is grumbling and manifest disappointment on the part of those who favored maintaining the old customs, but they accept the decision. Iceland has entered Christendom. Here I have followed the account given in the Saga of Njal.¹

It is unlikely that Thorgeir, as he sat under the cloak, was agonizing over the doctrine of the Trinity. It is more likely that he was pondering questions of customary law, of spiritual resources for the community, and of the general well-being of the society. But why was his arbitration necessary? To modern minds, it seems obvious that the solution was for Christian families to follow Christian ways and for traditionalists to follow the old ways. No one in Iceland ever suggested that—it was a recipe for civil war. A single people must have a single code of conduct: This is our custom. And the code of conduct regulates communal matters, such as festivals. When he emerged from under his cloak, Thorgeir instituted observance of the Lord’s Day, Christian fasts, and festivals for Christmas and Easter; these were essential markers of the change to Christian ways. The code of conduct regulates taboos. In Iceland, adopting the Christian code involved a new taboo, a taboo on the traditional population control mechanism of putting female children out to die in a very harsh environment. When the community modifies its code of customs in this respect by saying that God has forbidden this thing, it is accepting the corollary, that they must look in faith and prayer to God for feeding of any extra mouths that come.

In earliest Christian times, individuals or family groups entered at baptism the new society of the church. In northern Europe, the existing society is reoriented by means of its code of customs to become the church. Adopting the Christian faith and its resultant code of life enlarged people’s views of the universe, creating a new sense of kinship with those of other groups who had adopted the same faith, worship, and code. It was solidified by the use of a single language, Latin, for the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the study and discussion of theology, as well as an attachment to a single apostolic see as a source of authority. Western Christianity was born with territoriality as its outstanding characteristic. Christendom was contiguous Christian territory all the way from the Atlantic to the Carpathians, notionally subject to the law of Christ administered by princes who were themselves vassals of the King of Kings—lands where no idolatry, blasphemy, or heresy could be permitted.

It was a powerful concept, giving a sense of coherence and of identity, conferring a past that went back to the Roman Empire and to the Bible. It provided a kinship that transcended ethnic and linguistic boundaries. Kinship, of course, did not necessarily mean unbroken amity, any more than Christian princes were always ready to heed the voice of Peter speaking through his successors. Indeed, living in central Europe in the eighth century must have been rather like living in eastern Congo during the civil wars that followed the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But many things combined to mark out Christendom over against heathendom. As the Song of Roland (line 1015) puts it, Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit—pagans are wrong and Christians are right!²

This sense of identity was strengthened as European Christendom looked south and east to lands once Christian but now ruled by the deputy of the prophet. Beyond Christendom lay Christendom’s mirror image: the territory of Dar al-Islam (the land of submission to the word of Allah). Conversely, Muslims regarded the adjacent territory of Christendom, located beyond Dar al-Islam, as Dar al-Harb (the land of war), which had to be called to submit to the teaching of the Prophet. But within Christendom, Christians sought to absorb biblical and Christian traditions, taking them into their inherited traditions and customs. Over the years, they developed a cultural synthesis. European literature, art, and music burst into flower with a symbolic register drawn from the Bible and Christian history and legend. Theology reigned as queen of the sciences, and its learned practitioners appeared to have canvassed every important question. Such was the situation when Christendom came into contact with the non-Western world, which was also—with some important exceptions—the non-Christian world. This long disquisition on Christendom may seem irrelevant to the general theme of this book. But I am convinced that it is essential to understanding some important aspects of the missionary movement from the West. Western missionaries were children of Christendom, heirs of the idea of a Christian society in which Christian teaching was meant to permeate every aspect of that society, with plurality at best an anomaly.

European Christendom’s Encounters with Muslims and Jews

European Christendom’s only long-standing contact with non-Christian peoples had been with Muslims and with Jews. As early as the eighth century, Muslim armies had swept into Europe from North Africa. They occupied Spain, and in France were turned back only on the banks of the Loire. Successive waves of invaders from Africa settled in Spain; the Muslim presence there lasted for six hundred years. Gradually Christian princes won back conquered territory, until by the fifteenth century, only the kingdom of Granada, ruling Andalusia in the south, remained as a Muslim kingdom. In the reconquered lands of the north of Spain, a Muslim population remained, peasantry for the most part, living peaceably enough with their Christian neighbors (with occasional outbreaks of friction), intermarrying with them, and sharing a common discourse that included Christian, Muslim, and Jewish elements. The Spanish word for this living together is convivencia—and indeed in some respects it was a convivial relationship.

In medieval chivalry, the warrior known as El Cid became the pattern of the ideal Christian knight, and his story caught the later European imagination.³ But El Cid spent much of his time in the service of a Muslim prince and himself became ruler of Valencia. And El Cid itself is a version of the Arabic Said. In Spain, one could learn Arabic, find Arabic texts. Spain was the place where Western Christendom rediscovered its lost heritage in Greek philosophy and science, works originally translated into Syriac by Arab Christian scholars and then into Arabic.

In Spain, the Catalan scholar Ramon Lull (1235–1315), who went on to lay down his life for the gospel in North Africa, developed a Christian-Muslim-Jewish dialogue in Arabic. It should be remembered that there were Jewish communities in the cities and small towns of Christendom. Some Jews were celebrated as physicians and financiers, others scratching a living in humble occupations. Much of the largest community of Jews was in Spain. Jewish communities lived a dangerous life, subject to outbursts of crowd violence excited by lurid stories of their supposedly vile actions, demonized theologically as the murderers of Christ, open to mass expulsion from the countries in which they settled. The Jewish community in Spain was drastically reduced in 1391 after mob violence that induced thousands of Jews to seek Christian baptism. This was but the beginning of troubles. Accusations built up that the conversions were hypocritical, that the converted Jews were still secretly practicing Judaism. Others accused the unconverted Jews of perverting the converted ones. The main business of the Spanish Inquisition in its early period was the investigation of converted Jews or Muslims, the evidence against them perhaps a suspicion of Sabbath keeping, or the lack of avoidance of pork, or the consumption of alcohol, or singing in Arabic. It was not sufficient that Jews or Muslims should convert, not sufficient that they be baptized, acknowledge the faith of the church, or attend mass; they must conform to the cultural norms of their old Christian neighbors, or their conversion would not be accepted.

In principle, Christendom had no place for plurality; in this respect the large Jewish and Muslim communities in Spain were anomalies. In 1492, the logic of Christendom was followed out. That year—the same year that Columbus’s expedition (which incidentally was financed by converted Jews) set out to find the new route to Asia—the monarchs of Spain settled on the expulsion of the Jews. The sufferings of those who left were appalling. Many returned, accepting the price of return: baptism. Europe’s largest Jewish community was swallowed up in Christendom.

And what of the Muslims? Sometime before this, the monarchs had set about the reconquest of Granada, the last remaining Muslim entity in Spain; and it is in that same year, 1492, that they finally succeeded. Columbus, about to set sail, saw the submission of the Muslim king. From one point of view, this was the culmination of a territorial war that had lasted for centuries, and the first expressions of Spanish rule were not harsh. The archbishop wanted to encourage voluntary conversions and did not force converts to cultural rejection, even allowing use of Arabic at Mass. But government policy overruled, and it was ordained (with some grumbling, though hardly enough, from the theologians) that all Muslims should be baptized, on the ground that if they don’t become Christians, their children and grandchildren will.⁴ A grand bonfire was held of Arabic booty. Over the next three decades, the old Muslims of Castile and Aragon, who had lived under Christian rule in convivencia with their Christian neighbors over the centuries, met the same fate. Muslim Spain was absorbed into Christendom.

The date of 1492 is significant. Christendom reaches its completion in the years leading up to 1500. In this period, Europe became more Christian than it had ever been before, in two senses. Territorially, those years saw the forced conversion of the last pagan peoples in the Baltic states and Finland, so that only the Saami (or Sámi) of the far north remained outside; and they saw the end of the visible Muslim and Jewish presence in Spain. Culturally, the process of Christian interaction with the languages and thought of Europe reached its height. Intellectually and theologically, a fermentation process was going on that was soon to bubble up in the diverse currents of reform and renewal that marked the sixteenth century.

Supposing the people refused the invitation to submit to Christ, European Christendom had a long-established institution in crusade, the use of force to extend Christendom or to reclaim lost Christian territory. The territorial nature of European Christian experience encouraged Christians to identify the propagation of the faith with the extension of Christian territory, to increase the number and area of localities that were subject to Christian rule. The early crusades had been seen in these terms. The short-lived Crusader States of Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa appeared to give substance to the idea; use of the same word crusade to describe the Teutonic knights’ subjugation of the Baltic States and, most of all, use of the same word to describe the war that brought Muslim power in Spain to an end in 1492 took it still further in that direction. After six centuries of Muslim presence there, Spanish Muslims now had to choose between Christian baptism and leaving the country.

The Crusader and the Missionary as Two Modes of Christian Expansion

The crusading mode and the missionary mode are sharply differing methods of extending the Christian faith. They grew up in the same areas in the same period; they coexisted and went on side by side. But they are totally different in concept and in spirit. The crusader may invite, but in the end, he is prepared to compel. The missionary cannot compel; the missionary can only demonstrate, explain, entreat—and leave the rest to God. But if the missionary is to demonstrate, invite, and explain, then the missionary has to gain a hearing. That will probably involve learning a language. The conquistadors in the Americas did not trouble themselves much with languages. The Spanish conquest of the Americas is the last of the crusades. Mexico and Peru are conquered, and conquered remarkably quickly. The gods of their empires were destroyed; Aztec and Inca were themselves great empire builders, and the great national shrines of each contained the images of all the deities of all the peoples they had conquered. The shrines reflected a picture of the heavenly world that reflected the earthly. The Spaniards followed a more radical path: they destroyed all the images and built churches over the shrines. Whole populations were baptized. Mexico became New Spain, with the laws and customs of Old Spain, without idolatry, blasphemy, or heresy. Thus by force and violence, and to the accompaniment of brutality, greed, and extortion on the part of the crusaders, the new lands of America were brought into Christendom to become subject to the law of Christ and the pattern of Christian nations.

In most of Africa, however, and still more in Asia, crusade was out of the question. Portugal, the original representative of Christendom in the east, is a very small country. How could it take on the power of the Mughal Empire in India or the empire of China or of Japan? While never giving up the rhetoric of Christendom, the Portuguese gave up all ambitious ideas of extending it. They settled for survival and profit, for the most part attempting little by way of extending Christendom outside the small enclaves, such as Goa and Malacca, that they controlled. The Dutch, who succeeded the Portuguese in the leadership of the migration, maintained the rhetoric of Christendom, in Protestant instead of Catholic language. The British, their successors, did not even trouble with the rhetoric. Under the British East India Company, it was clear policy that religion must never interfere with business. Colonialism forced the powers of Christendom to choose between their economic and political interests and their religious profession—and we know which they all chose.

Hence, despite the prevalence of the crusading mode of Christian expansion, the first contacts of European Christendom with the non-Western world did include some successful peaceful overtures to states beyond Europe to accept the rule of Christ. One of the earliest was in the state of Mbanza Mbenga, near the mouth of the Congo River, which Portuguese vessels reached in the closing years of the fifteenth century. There followed some years of investigation in which Portuguese and Kongolese exchanged hostages, so that Portuguese lived in Africa and Kongolese in Lisbon. Then the chief, with the full support of his council of elders, agreed to accept baptism, taking the name John I (the king of Portugal was John II). Many other chiefs were baptized, and many of the people, too. Nkisi, traditional cult objects, were collected and a vast bonfire lit; a huge wooden cross was set up in the center of the main town. Mbanza was neither a Portuguese colony nor a Portuguese puppet: it was an independent African state but within Christendom. After a while, indeed, John I and many of his elders decided that the decision to become Christian had not been justified by its results. There had been the great bonfire of nkisi, but the Christian teachers insisted on burning other nkisi as they appeared. But without them how could the realm be protected from evil influences, from witchcraft, from sorcery?

The Christian answer was, By the power of Christ. But how was the power of Christ to be made manifest? In the Portuguese model of Christianity, the only one on offer, the answer was, In the grace of God shown in the sacrament, when Christ’s presence is made real and the merits of his sacrifice declared. But the sacrament depended on the presence of priests. In Portugal, there were many of these; in Kongo, very few. King and council appear to have decided that the new way was not offering adequate protection; they renounced the faith and returned to the nkisi. But