Race, Place, and Religion: African American Missionaries in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This paper attempts to provide a more complete analysis of the various conceptions of race and identity held by African American missionaries working in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there has been some attention paid to African American missionaries working in Africa at this time, very little has been written about how their different theological beliefs impacted their conceptions of race and identity as it is related to the native African population they are interacting with. Through thorough analysis, it can be determined that there were distinct links between the different theological beliefs held by African American missionaries working in Africa at this time and their conceptions of race. For example, evangelical African American missionaries more often associated themselves with a Pan-African identity than non-evangelical ones. Alongside this, their theological understandings of the Back-to-Africa movement were quite different depending on where they worked in Africa and it impacted how they viewed themselves in association with the native African populations they interacted with. Finally, different conceptions of race and identity manifested themselves along eschatological lines with different views on the means of attaining salvation correlating with opposing conceptions of race. The significance of these findings is that although these missionaries’ conceptions of race have already been analyzed, the connection to their theological beliefs is rather unexplored

Directory of American Missionaries of the Church of Christ: Spring, 1959

A directory of American missionaries overseas. Entries include name, address, year of entry, city, state, and source of support.https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/1459/thumbnail.jp

Directory of American Missionaries: Number One, June 1965

A directory of American Church of Christ missionaries around the world. Each entry includes name, city, address, and country. Foreword by Alan Bryan, Jimmie Lovell, and Archie Luper.https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/1456/thumbnail.jp

The History of the Kamitomizaka Church of Christ in Tokyo, Japan

This text provides information on some of the earliest mission efforts by American missionaries J. M. McCaleb, William J. Bishop, and Clara Bishop. It narrates some of the earliest history of the congregations they planted and provides biographical information about some of their first converts. This document is from the Joe L. Cannon Papers/https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/1257/thumbnail.jp

Meeting at Middle Ground: American Quaker Women’s Two Palestinian Encounters

In the late nineteenth century the Palestinian town of Ramallah began receiving American missionary women who embodied their middle-class ideology of womanhood and ventured to discourse on Arab women and culture. Their conviction of the American woman as the model for other “unfortunate” women prevented these missionaries from integrating in the Palestinian cultural context. Consequently, this americentric belief led them to construct overwhelmingly negative views of Palestinian women as oppressed, living in ignorance and degraded conditions, and of Arab culture as backward and inept. However, American women missionaries after World War I grew in their cultural and linguistic understanding of Arab culture. this change in perspective came as a result of numerous social and cultural developments in Palestine and the United States that prepared these women to establish an accommodative middle ground between them and the Palestinians, thus modifying their previous perceptions.1 among these developments were the increased secularization of the Quakers’ curriculum, more cultural and linguistic training of American teachers, the significance of Palestine as the “Holy land” in missionary imagination, and most importantly the emergence of the strategy of cooperation and devolution among the different Protestant missions in Syria and Palestine after World War I

The Theological and Geographical Origins of Protestantism in Albania

The Albanian Protestant Movement has both a theological and a geographical origin. Theologically, the movement could only begin after parts of the Bible were translated into Albanian, because the Protestant doctrine of “Sola Scriptura” demands that believers understand the Holy Scriptures. Therefore, in Protestant missions to the Ottoman Empire, Bible translators usually preceded evangelists and the founding of churches. In 1827, the publication of the first Albanian New Testament was a significant achievement, but it was practically useless to most Albanians, who were illiterate (especially in their mother tongue). Hence, the Protestant missionary endeavor included linguistic and educational efforts to help Albanians learn to read their new Bibles. Geographically, the Albanian Protestant Movement originated in Bitola, where, in 1873, American missionaries arrived and began interacting with the Kyrias family. Gerasim Kyrias—Albania\u27s first Protestant reformer—became a Protestant in Bitola, studied theology in Samokov, preached in Bulgarian in Skopje, preached in Albanian in Bitola, was married and ordained as an evangelist in Salonica, and then began an Albanian school and church in Kortcha. From these theological and geographical origins, Protestantism grew into one of Albania’s traditional faith communities

Lessons Learned in Eurasia Ministry: Mostly the Hard Way

The present article is based on a speech delivered at a conference of the United Methodist Church: “Eurasia-Central Asia – In Mission Together,” Fulton, Maryland, May 5, 2017