Reformed Pastoral Ministry, Preaching, and Missions — Unit 7: Reformed Missions: From Geneva to Brazil, Korea and Africa

Key Verse

"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Matthew 28:19-20, NKJV)

Learning Objectives

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. Explain the Reformed motive for missions and the means the tradition has used.

2. Describe how Geneva sent pastors to France and Brazil, and state the debate over whether this was "missions."

3. Name the main people and events in Reformed and Presbyterian missions in Brazil, Korea and Africa.

4. Explain the Nevius principles of self-propagation, self-government and self-support, and their place in Korea.

5. State fairly the criticisms that missions served colonial power or supported injustice, and give the Reformed answer.

The Voice of This Unit

This unit is written from inside the Reformed tradition, for Reformed students. It does not repeat the history told in Course 1, "History of the Reformation and Reformed Churches," especially Unit 9, "Reformed Missions and Churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia." Here we ask how Reformed churches have done missions, what they have taught, and what a pastor can learn. We are honest about failures, because a church that confesses sin in its own life can confess it in its history.

Why Reformed Churches Send

The Reformed motive for missions rests on four convictions.

First, the glory of God. The Shorter Catechism teaches that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The Lord has promised that His glory will fill the earth, and the nations are to worship Him (Psalm 67). Second, the command of Christ in our key verse. The King of the church, who has all authority, sends His church to every nation. Third, the power of the Word. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:17). So Reformed missionaries have always translated, taught and preached Scripture. Fourth, the sovereignty of God, which Unit 6 showed to be a ground of confidence. The Lord told Paul that He had many people in Corinth. He has His people among every nation (Revelation 5:9).

An Objection: Did the Reformers Neglect Missions?

Some mission historians have said that the sixteenth-century Reformers, including Calvin, showed little concern for missions beyond Europe. Their churches were under attack, they had no ships and no empires, and their energy went to reforming the church at home. Some have added that Reformed teaching on election lessened mission zeal.

There is truth in the first part. The Reformers did not organize societies for overseas work as later centuries did. But the judgment is too harsh. Calvin's Geneva trained pastors and sent them out, sometimes at great danger. The Reformers preached the gospel to all, translated Scripture, and taught the church to be a witness. As Unit 6 showed, election has fed missionary zeal, not starved it. Missions in the Reformed world grew as soon as the churches were free and had the means. We should neither hide the slowness of the early years nor read modern missions back into the sixteenth century.

Geneva Sends: France and Brazil

By the 1550s Geneva had become a training ground for pastors. The Genevan Academy was founded in 1559 with Theodore Beza as its first rector. Ministers trained in Geneva went to France, where Reformed congregations, called Huguenot churches, were growing under persecution. Some of those ministers risked their lives. This was the Reformed model in its early form: train pastors in the Word, and send them to gather churches. Course 1, Unit 4, "The Reformed Faith Spreads," tells that story.

Geneva also sent pastors across the Atlantic. In 1555 a French colony was founded on an island in Guanabara Bay, near the present city of Rio de Janeiro, under Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon. Some colonists were Protestants, and the leader asked Geneva for ministers. Calvin and the Genevan church sent pastors, who arrived in 1557. The enterprise was brief. The leader quarrelled with the Genevan pastors, partly over the Lord's Supper, and the colony was broken up by Portuguese forces in 1560. Some colonists wrote a confession of faith, and some who held the Reformed faith paid with their lives. Later, a member of the party, Jean de Léry, wrote a book about the land and its people.

Historians disagree about how to describe this. Some call it the first Protestant mission in the Americas. Others say it was a chaplaincy to a colony of Europeans, with little time or effort given to the native peoples, and that the colony itself was a political project. We think both points should be heard. The pastors came to serve a European colony, not to evangelize the Tupinambá. Yet the episode shows that Geneva was willing to send ministers across the ocean. It also warns us how much damage can come when a gospel work is tied to a colonial scheme.

The Puritans and the Native Americans

In the seventeenth century the Puritan minister John Eliot labored among the native peoples of Massachusetts. He learned their language, preached to them, and translated the Bible into the Massachusett language; the New Testament was printed in 1661 and the whole Bible in 1663. Converts gathered in villages called "praying towns."

Critics note that the praying towns required converts to take on English customs and that, when war broke out in 1675, the praying Indians suffered greatly. These are serious criticisms and we should accept them. Eliot's labors were also remarkable for putting Scripture into a people's own language, and for his hope that native pastors would lead native churches. In the following century David Brainerd served native peoples in the 1740s, and his life, published by Jonathan Edwards in 1749, stirred many to prayer for missions.

Brazil: The Presbyterian Church

Portuguese-speaking Protestants owe a debt to João Ferreira de Almeida, a Portuguese-born Reformed minister who served in Asia. His New Testament was printed in 1681, and versions of his translation remain widely used among Protestants in Brazil.

Presbyterian work in Brazil began in earnest with the American missionary Ashbel Green Simonton, who reached Rio de Janeiro in 1859. He preached and taught, gathered the first Presbyterian church in Rio in 1862, and founded a seminary in 1867. He died young in that same year. Others carried on his work. Presbyterian missionaries also opened schools, and the church spread inland with Brazilian pastors and evangelists. A synod was formed in 1888.

In 1903 the church divided. Brazilian leaders under Eduardo Carlos Pereira formed the Independent Presbyterian Church. Historians name several causes: a wish for Brazilian rather than foreign control, and a dispute over whether church members could belong to Freemasonry. This division is painful, but it teaches an important lesson. Presbyterian government places authority in elders of the local church, and those elders will want to govern their own church. A mission that does not prepare for national leadership will meet this question sooner or later. Today Brazilian Presbyterians also send their own missionaries to other lands.

Korea: The Nevius Principles and the Great Revival

The Presbyterian story in Korea is among the most striking in the history of the church.

Scripture reached Korea before most missionaries did. In the 1880s Korean helpers and the Scottish missionary John Ross, working in Manchuria, translated parts of the Bible into Korean, and Korean colporteurs carried them across the border. American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in the 1880s, including the physician Horace Allen in 1884 and Horace Underwood in 1885.

In 1890 the veteran missionary John L. Nevius, a Presbyterian who had worked in China, visited Korea and taught the younger missionaries his approach. The Korean missions adopted it, and it became known as the Nevius method. Its main points are three: churches should be self-propagating, meaning that new believers spread the gospel themselves; self-governing, meaning that the church is led by its own elders and not by foreign missionaries; and self-supporting, meaning that the church pays for its own buildings and pastors. Nevius added a strong emphasis on every believer studying the Bible. His book The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches (1886) explains these principles.

In 1907 a great revival came to Pyongyang, marked by public confession of sin and prayer. In the same year the first Korean ministers were ordained, and the church became increasingly Korean in leadership. When Japan ruled Korea, from 1910 to 1945, Korean Christians suffered. In the later years the authorities pressed churches to bow at Shinto shrines. Some pastors refused, and some were imprisoned and died. Others yielded to pressure, and the church was left with sorrow and division after the war. Korean Presbyterians today are divided into many denominations, and many of them send missionaries across the world.

Historians debate why the church grew so fast. Some stress the Nevius method. Some stress Korean agency, including the early Korean translators and evangelists. Others point to the national crisis, for people hoped the church would help them in a time of loss. Some give weight to the Korean culture of prayer and respect for learning. We should accept that many causes were at work. As Reformed Christians, we add that the Spirit gives growth through ordinary means, and that He used both foreign missionaries and Korean believers. The Nevius principles taught the missionaries to trust Korean leaders, and this was wise.

Africa: Schools, Scripture and Sorrow

Presbyterian and Reformed missions in Africa came mainly from Scotland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and North America. Only a few can be named here.

In the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Scottish missionaries founded the mission at Lovedale, which became a center of education for African students. In what is now Malawi, the Free Church of Scotland began Livingstonia in 1875, with a mission station, a school and medical work. Today the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian is a large church there. In Calabar, in what is now Nigeria, the Scottish missionary Mary Slessor began her work in 1876 with the United Presbyterian church, and she spent her life among the people, caring especially for children and women. In these and other places, missionaries reduced languages to writing, translated Scripture, and opened schools and hospitals. African evangelists and catechists did much of the daily work of preaching and teaching, and African pastors and elders now lead most of these churches.

Here too we must speak honestly. Many missionaries lived in the colonial age and shared some of its attitudes, and some African peoples saw missions and colonial rule as allies. In South Africa, leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church gave theological support to apartheid, a system that divided people by race. Other Reformed Christians, including many Black Reformed believers, opposed it. In 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared that apartheid was a sin and a matter of the church's confession. The Belhar Confession, written in South Africa in the 1980s, was a Reformed witness against racial division. Later, the Dutch Reformed Church acknowledged that its support for apartheid was wrong. Reformed churches must learn from this. A confession in the hand and a Bible on the table do not protect a church from misusing Scripture to serve power. Scripture says that God "has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), and the gospel gathers a people from every nation.

Critics argue that missions were a tool of colonial rule. The honest answer has two parts. It is true that missions and empire were often tied, and the church must repent of every case in which the gospel was made to serve the powerful. But the historical record is also mixed in another way. Missionaries put African languages into writing, translated the Bible, trained African leaders, and sometimes opposed forced labor and cruelty. The faith that arrived has become African, and its greatest growth came after the colonial era ended. A faith that flourishes after the empire falls was not merely the empire's tool.

Lessons for Reformed Pastors

Several practices appear across these stories.

Put the Word in the people's language. Almeida, Eliot and Ross each translated Scripture, because faith comes by hearing the Word.

Train national leaders and trust them. Nevius, the Brazilian division of 1903, and the African church today all teach this.

Plant churches with elders, catechism and confession. Reformed missions aim at lasting congregations ordered by Scripture, not only at converts. Unit 8 takes this up.

Accept the cost. The Genevan pastors, the Korean martyrs and the missionaries who died young show that the Great Commission has often been bought with suffering.

Do not tie the gospel to power. Colonial schemes and apartheid warn against it.

Pastoral Application

A pastor in Jalisco leads a congregation of sixty members. A missionary visits and asks for monthly support to work in a distant village. Some members are enthusiastic, and others ask whether a small church can afford it.

The pastor brings the matter to the session. They ask whether the missionary is known to a sending body that will oversee him, whether his plan trains local leaders and does not make the village dependent on foreign money, whether he will teach the Bible in the villagers' own language, and whether the church will pray for him by name. The session decides to give a modest monthly gift and to write to him each month. The pastor tells the congregation that small gifts joined to prayer have always carried the work, just as the gifts of poor churches supported many missionaries before them.

Summary

Reformed churches send missionaries for God's glory, by Christ's command, through the power of the Word, trusting His sovereign purpose. The charge that the Reformers neglected missions is partly true, but Geneva trained and sent pastors to France and to Brazil, where in 1557 the pastors came to a French colony. Historians debate whether this was a mission or a chaplaincy. The Puritan John Eliot translated the Bible into Massachusett, and critics rightly raise the cost of the praying towns. In Brazil, Ashbel Green Simonton began Presbyterian work in 1859, and national leaders formed the Independent Presbyterian Church in 1903. In Korea, the Nevius principles of self-propagation, self-government and self-support shaped a church that saw revival in 1907 and suffered under Japanese rule. In Africa, Scottish and other Reformed missions founded schools and translated Scripture, while South African Reformed support for apartheid shows how a church can misuse the Bible, and the Belhar Confession shows the witness against it.

Further Reading

• John L. Nevius, The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches (1886).

• Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578).

• David Brainerd, diary, in Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd (1749).

• William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792).

• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Beveridge translation, 1845).

• The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), Question 1.

• Course 1, Unit 9: "Reformed Missions and Churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia."

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