Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories by Karen Dubinsky & Sean Mills & Scott Rutherford

Author:Karen Dubinsky & Sean Mills & Scott Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Conclusion: From Missions to Development . . . to Twenty-First-Century Evangelical Missions

In 1887, several years after being rebaptized and experiencing faith healing, the Rev. Albert Benjamin Simpson, a Maritime-born Presbyterian like Grant, founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) in New York. He did so as a means of pursuing mission and healing activities in his adopted country and in order to foster a greater urgency and a more direct focus on the overseas task of saving souls. The latter became his passion. The C&MA eventually became a distinct evangelical Protestant denomination, first in the United States and, in 1981, in Canada. In 2014 its national website in Canada reported almost 130,000 people attending more than 430 churches, and over 250 missionaries working among “least-reached peoples in more than forty countries.”50 Although the website does not say so, its best-known member is Canada’s twenty-second prime minister, Stephen Harper. Simpson’s 1880s initiative is a reminder that even during imperial high noon and the heyday of mainstream Protestant missions there had been individuals and organizations with an urgent, direct, and exclusive focus on making conversions and a consequent disinclination to engage in institution-building for seeking those converts through social outreach. One of the most distinctive of such organizations, the China Inland Mission, which Canadians enthusiastically joined, became particularly noteworthy for its missionaries’ adoption of native dress.51 The early twentieth century saw the emergence of Pentecostal missionaries as well as the growth—and increasing combativeness—of self-styled fundamentalists and other evangelical Protestant groups.

Nevertheless, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century as the mainline churches increasingly abandoned even the language of evangelism at home and abroad that conservative Christians who prioritized making converts in their overseas work found their way into groups like the C&MA and Pentecostalism and became the leading edge of what was effectively the reinvention of the missionary movement. A historian of modern evangelical Protestantism identifies the 1980s as the decade when it first became “a prominent new force in Canada.”52 By the early 1960s, though, Protestants who were still strongly missions-minded were already showing their preference for an approach that gave primacy to evangelization. A 1962 survey conducted by the ecumenical CCC revealed that by far the largest number of Canadian Protestant missionaries was serving with conservative Canadian mission boards (i.e., boards not affiliated with the CCC or the WCC) or with congenial US mission boards. In 1966, a breakaway group in the United Church formed the United Church Renewal Fellowship. Its members were, among other things, “zealous supporters of foreign missions,” and for them the church’s emphasis on social issues was “a diversion from its main business of converting individuals.”53

A significant number of twenty-first-century Canadian evangelical denominations are involved in mission activity in the Global South. They partake in work with existing Christian communities and in missionizing that involves outreach to so-called unreached peoples, including those living in countries where missionary activity is illegal. Even taken together, though, these evangelical denominations certainly do not make Canada one of the world’s top missionary-sending countries.

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