Converting Conversion

Evangelicalism, writes Andrew Wall, is a “protest movement,” one of many illustrious such movements in the history of Christianity, beginning with St. Anthony’s retreat into the desert. As protest, “Evangelical faith is about inward religion as distinct from formal, real Christianity as distinct from nominal. In other words, the evangelicalism of the [19th century] takes its identity from protest, and in effect from nominal Christianity. Evangelical religion presupposes Christendom, Christian civil society” (The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 82-3). 

A certain view of conversion went with this protest stance: Those converted in European revivals were freshly convicted of sin and longed for holiness. When Evangelical missionaries went abroad, things didn’t work that way. As Walls puts it:

“The encouragements or successes of early missions may have been more baffling to the understanding of evangelical missionaries and their supporters than the more frequent episodes of failure, heartbreak, and disaster. There were events that missionaries could ascribe only to the hand of God. How else could one interpret a whole island people rejecting their traditional worship and acknowledging Christ? And yet this could take place without any sign of the long-established patterns of evangelical conversion. When the missionaries on Tahiti—Congregationalists at that—ceased to record the names of converts on the ground of ‘the profession becoming national,’ it was a sign of the extension of the meaning of the word ‘conversion.’ It might now denote a wholehearted recognition of a change of religious allegiance; conviction of sin and longing for holiness might follow later. Time after time missionaries noted apparently sincere professions of faith that lacked these features” (85).

Missionaries may have gone to Africa expecting that “Christianity would assimilate Africans to a European style of life” (93). It happened in some places, like Sierra Leone, for reasons peculiar to Sierra Leone.  In general, though, the results of the mission were not in the hands of the missionaries but in the two hands of the Father, the Son and the Spirit who blows as He wills. In the event, whatever their intentions, “the fruit of the work of evangelical missionaries has not simply been a replication of Western evangelicalism” (100).