Regular and Separate Baptists in America

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CHAPTER III THE GOSPEL MISSION MOVEMENT (1892-1910)

In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic questions humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the thing that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who [sic] we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.l
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the world is undergoing a series of radical changes. Scholars are now trying to piece together the past in order to chart the most reasonable understanding of the future. The citation above illustrates the degree to which learned observers are looking backward to face the future. Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University, indicates that a paradigm shift is
occurring. The old structures that gave meaning to geopolitical circumstances of the modern world are in decline and, oddly enough, older medieval or even ancient cultural, religious, and linguistic loyalties are reemerging as the foundational grounds for alignments of peoples around the world. 2
Huntington uses the basic constructs of paradigm theory, a developed by Thomas Kuhn, to assess modern political trends. Historical observers cannot divorce Christian missionary activity from the flow of secular history. It naturally occurs within the broader contexts of human developments. David J . Bosch also erected structures similar to Kuhn’s for interpreting the ebb and flow of missiological trends throughout the eras of the Christian church. 3 In so doing, Bosch provided a set of models that help missiologists look back to begin the process of sorting out the future. As the world is undergoing radical changes in the geopolitical arenas, similarly modern mission trends are showing signs of equally drastic change. At the end of this century, one is increasingly aware that there is a distinct difference in the way Christians ought to perceive the mandate for mission, design strategies for engagement, and apply the same as the Church enters the next century. Yet, the nature of the changes is elusive unless one backs up and views current circumstances from the vantage point of the larger context of long term developments.
In an analysis of Bosch’s work, John Kevin Livingston notes the delineation of a period that Bosch called the •constantinian era » of the Church’s missiological development. This epoch roughly runs from the time of Constantine, 325, to the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910. 4 This was the period when the Church predominantly reflected customs and values of the Western world. Western expressions of the Church controlled the sending and receiving processes through which Christianity expanded. Yet, a shift has come and the Western Church no shares in a much larger process, one whereby the younger churches throughout the two-thirds world are increasingly becoming partners and leaders. 5
One undergirding explanation for this shift was the gradual, and sometimes begrudging, affirmation of other cultures and peoples by the Western world. Methods used by Western missionaries throughout most of the last century tended to reflect more of the « Constantinian era » or an « Enlightenment » understanding of truth than is seen in the modern shifting scene. 6 The shift has not come about suddenly. It developed bit by bit, person by person, idea by idea until a new set of perceptions and values changed the way things are done.
Individual denominations experience change in varying degrees, depending on the given set of founding convictions, outside influences, and willingness to accept or adapt to innovations.
The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (USA) 7 has usually been slow to accept change. One case in point is the specific topic of this dissertation. The Gospel Mission Movement (1892-1910) developed due to the collective field experiences of the veteran missionary, Tarleton Perry Crawford, and a host of younger missionaries. 8 Was this simply 6Bosch, Transforming Mission, 351-362. a renegade movement that reflected insubordinate attitudes because of anti-board sentiments, or is there evidence that the Gospel Mission field personnel reflected values, albeit in incipient and perhaps unconscious forms, like those of an emerging shift in mission methods that was more in keeping with what Bosch later called a post-modern mission paradigm? 9 This chapter attempts to answer that question.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Baptist historians have tended to see Gospel Missionism through the lens of another movement that developed earlier, namely Landmarkism. 10 In order to determine the degree to which their conclusion is warranted, one must set Gospel Missionism in the broader contexts of nineteenth-century China, and the Protestant mission milieu of that time. The first section addresses this issue.
The heart of the chapter revolves around determination of the core values of the Gospel Missioners. Since the elemental ideas surfaced in and through the field ministries of Crawford and D. W. Herring, their lives are integral to this study. They are studied in order to detect the field forces that influenced and shaped their understandings and practice of mission. Where pertinent, this thesis also examines other Gospel Missioners and their expressed ideas.
Finally, there is a section that compares the core values 9Bosch, Transforming Mission, 349. 1osee Chapter 2, footnote 77. of the Gospel Missioners with those identified by Bosch as indicative of the Enlightenment era and the emerging post-modern mission paradigm. Incipient forms of post-modern ideals, expressed by the Gospel Missioners, will not necessarily bear the model’s mature traits, but they should show some marks of later developments. Attention is now directed to the historical setting of the Gospel Mission Movement.
Contemporary Milieu of the Gospel Mission Movement
Protestant Missions in China
The encounter between East and West captivates both the literary imaginations of those possessed of wanderlust and the more austere research interests of historians, sociologists, or anthropologists. Exactly why two generally variant sets of cultures, each with ancient development patterns, vie for each other’s attention is a bit of a mystery. Yet, when and where East and West meet, there is sure to be mutual concerns and competitions.
Nineteenth-century Protestantism was full of adventure and its emissary missionaries sortieed forth bearing what they perceived was unique truth that they needed to graft into the cultures of the world. China represented a particularly strong challenge. She had proven resistant throughout most of the Qing Dynasty (which lasted from 1644-1912) to outsiders. The Manchu rulers had a strong hand and generated episodes of both prosperity and upheaval during their nearly three hundred year reign. After 1790, European powers were continually encroaching on the Middle Kingdom’s ability to police its borders, both geographical and cultural. The flash point issue was the importation of opium. 11 The Qing rulers wanted opium out of China, especially if they were not able to control its flow. A series of wars ensued, the first ended with the signing of the « Treaty of Nanjing by which Hong Kong was ceded to Britain, and China opened five ports to foreign trade. They were Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Ziamen, and Guangzhou. » 12 Western imperial powers gained what the Chinese perceived to be a forced entry and opened China to reluctant trade and cultural interaction. Missionaries arrived along with the entrepreneurs, albeit with generally different motives. Nonetheless, nationals also perceived them as intruders, especially the established Chinese gentry who wished to maintain the status quo. Economic expansionism sometimes had mutual benefit, but cultural imperialism fostered by those peddling novel religious ideologies was much less tolerable, especially if they posed any threat to those benefitting from the established order of the day. So Christianity, particularly the newly arriving Protestant forms, was of great concern to the gentry. « Watchful Ch’ing officials at Canton had stopped this llJonathan Chao, ed. The China Mission Handbook: A Portrait of China and Its Church (Hong Kong: Chinese Church Research Center, 1989) : 11. 12Ibid., 19. foreign religion’s proselytizing more successfully than they could check the inflow of opium. Evidently they considered the propagation of alien doctrine more dangerous than the sale of a mere drug. . If China’s traditional order felt itself under foreign attack, surely the missionary was its spearpoint.• 13
The advent of Protestant Christianity in the midst of such antagonistic upheaval did not foster wholesome development of their form of the church in China. To make matters worse, many incoming missionaries had more than propagation of the gospel on their agendas. It was an era in which echoes of « manifest destiny » were heard. The West, some assumed, was expanding and flowing throughout the known world because it was somehow blessed by God with a mandate for a mission to subdue other cultures and bring them to the point of sociological development enjoyed by Western countries. The presupposition was that other cultures were somehow less developed or sophisticated due to ignorance, or poverty stemming from lower ranking on the social evolutionary scale. Western insights, including religious ones, could rectify this situation. Such attitudes, coupled with foreign aggression, aided the forces that were resisting incoming Protestant beliefs. « The fact that Protestant missionaries were allowed to propagate their faith due to China’s defeat under Western expansion further stimulated the rise of Chinese anti-foreignism. Thus, Christianity as an institutional religion was held in low regard by the Chinese people. « 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 . INTRODUCTION
Organization
Research Methodology
2. BACKGROUND DEVELOPMENTS
Formation of the Southern Baptist Convention
Baptist Beginnings
Baptist Beginnings in America
Regular and Separate Baptists in America
The Baptist General Missionary Convention’ (1814)
The Southern Baptist Convention (1845)
Formative Influences and Trends
Antimissionism
Major Proponents and Their Ideas
Significance of Antimissionism
Landmarkism
Landmarkism’s Prophet: Graves
Pendleton and Dayton
Landmarkism’s Lasting Impact
Summary
3. THE GOSPEL MISSION MOVEMENT (1892-1910)
Contemporary Milieu of the Gospel Mission Movement
Protestant Missions in China
Missionary Motivation
Southern Baptists in China
The Landmark Challenge
Crawford and Landrnarkism
Historical Development of Gospel Missionism’s Core Values
Tarleton Perry and Martha Foster Crawford in China
Gospel Missionism’s Core Values
Shanghai Period: 1852-1863
Teng Chow Period: 1863-1892
1863-1869
1870-1879
1880-1889
Taianfu Period: 1894-1909
1890-1899
Herring’s Resignation
Bostick’s Board Battles
1900-1909
Summary Interpretation of The Gospel Mission’s Core Values
Use of Paradigm Theory
Enlightenment, Postmodern, and Gospel Mission Values
Compared: Indigeneity
Enlightenment, Postmodern, and Gospel Mission Values
Compared: Incarnation
Enlightenment, Postmodern, and Gospel Mission Values
Compared: Responsible Independence
4. GOSPEL MISSIONISM’S LINGERING LEGACY AND POST-MODERN TRENDS IN THE SBC’S FOREIGN MISSION BOARD (1910-1997)
Introduction
Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board Values
and Practices (1910-1945)
Herring Sounds Retreat
The Subsidy System Continued
A New Generation Emerges
Old Paradigm Lost (1945-1986)
M. Theron Rankin Era: 1945-1953
Baker James Cauthen Era: 1954-1979
New Paradigm Gained (1986-1997)
R. Keith Parks Era (1980-1992)
Jerry A. Rankin Era (1993-1997)
5. CONCLUSION
Summary
Conclusion
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