The Deconstruction of Evangelical Missions

There was a time when Protestant missionary work was a dominant topic in American culture. The largest missionary conference ever held, the Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions, happened in 1900. About 180,000 to 200,000 people traveled to New York City to take part. Churches across the city hosted concurrent sessions and the plenaries were held in Carnegie Hall. Almost all newspapers across the country, in large cities and small towns alike, carried daily updates from the conference. The conference was headlined by a former president, Benjamin Harrison, as well as the sitting president, William McKinley, and a future president, Theodore Roosevelt. The conference covered a wide range of topics: women in missionary work, the use of business to advance missions, and reports from across the world. The latter mostly came from white evangelicals because, in fact, most missionaries of the day were white evangelicals. The conference reflected broader themes in American evangelicalism, including pragmatism, an entrepreneurial spirit, a commitment to serving others, and activism on a global scale.

In the same year that the conference was held, dozens of American missionaries were killed in China in the Boxer Rebellion. A memorial arch still stands at Oberlin College, marking the loss of the Oberlin Band, 13 missionaries and five children killed during the revolt. This marked the beginning of a 25-year sustained focus on missions to China by American Protestants. Hundreds of missionaries would go on to serve in China, spurred on by the sacrifice of those who had gone out from Oberlin.

Yet the inclusion of political figures in the conference proceedings betrays an underlying sentiment of a civilizing, expanding, American missionary force. This is one reason why the much smaller Edinburgh Conference held a decade later is the one most often cited today. It emphasized indigenizing the fruit of missionary work through local leadership as well as the need for indigenous missionaries. 

Today there is a growing movement within evangelicalism that seeks to deconstruct missionary work. It is born from the same concepts that are driving a larger cultural transformation using themes drawn from critical theory and identitarian ideologies. Oberlin students were once known for missionary sacrifice. Today, they are infamous as progressive activists. Will evangelical missionary efforts follow suit and self-immolate under the same pressures?

Historical Development

Evangelicalism has split before, and global missions were part of that split. The brewing modernist v. fundamentalist divide in Protestantism affected missionary work starting in the early 1900s. Unlike today, denominational missions were the largest and most influential missionary efforts. Cooperation on foreign missions was a primary reason that denominations existed. Another important element of denominational cooperation was the creation of theological training institutes.

Modernists sought to redefine missions with a focus on social and political issues. This redefinition was not an enlargement of evangelical missions, but rather a hewing off of the soteriological from the social. Evangelicals, after all, were well known for their activism on social issues, such as slavery, literacy, education, and more. This redefinition took place predominantly in what we today know as liberal, mainline denominations.

The founding of more fundamentalist missionary societies sought to counteract the encroaching theological liberalism. The International Foreign Missions Association was formed in part because these new missionary societies were not allowed to participate in the activities of the mainline missionary associations. A significant issue was the use of the faith missions approach, in which missionary societies were unmoored from denominational agencies as they began to solicit funding directly from donors. They also bypassed denominational educational institutions and infused a spirit of entrepreneurialism into their work.

These non-denominational agencies were not purveyors of Western civilization in the same way that the mainline denominations had been. They did not have the government connections and protections, the university systems, nor the financial entanglements of the institutionalized denominations. The aforementioned missions conference in 1900 could boast the presence of US presidents because they themselves were aligned with the mainline denominations. The “civilizing” message went hand-in-hand with Manifest Destiny and ideas surrounding the “modernization” of indigenous peoples. 

This effort to redefine mission around social work culminated in 1932 when the The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry was launched by such luminaries as John D. Rockefeller and John Mott. While Rockefeller is known for his wealth, Mott was an influential voice in a previous generation’s missionary efforts. Seven denominations participated in the research project, all representing movements that today are on the liberal end of the church spectrum. Well financed and executed via three teams of researchers sent out to four Asian countries, the research was published in 1932. The title? Re-Thinking Missions: A Layman’s Inquiry After 100 Years (also known as “The Hockings Report”). 

The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry was a deconstruction of the missionary paradigm. It suggested that missionaries should be primarily concerned with education, poverty, and what contemporary society today calls social justice issues–not evangelism or church planting. They accused missions agencies of self-interest. Actual missionaries were unimpressed by these attacks. They responded that short-term, unqualified visitors to a foreign missions environment are hardly able to judge or understand the local environment. They further questioned the theological foundations of the report, which did not affirm the “unique supremacy of Jesus Christ as Savior.”

In the ensuing years, many mainline churches adopted the Hockings Report’s view of missions and consequently stopped evangelizing practices altogether. This redefining of the missionary task itself has led to the near demise of missions among mainline churches. Today, few mainline churches boast significant foreign missions operations. Conversely, conservative evangelical mission societies from the US have flourished and grown, significantly contributing to the global evangelical movement over the past century.

In the years following World War II, missionary societies proliferated, focusing on discipleship, evangelism, church planting, and Bible translation. The nascent Pentecostal movement led the charge, resulting in one of the most significant spiritual movements in history, influencing Africa and South America. In 1947, the National Association of Evangelicals formed another missionary association, The Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. They also formed a relief agency to serve European families destroyed by war–World Relief. It focused not only on the physical but also spiritual needs of those it served.

Then in 1956, five missionaries were killed in the jungles of Ecuador while seeking to evangelize the Huaorani people. Life Magazine ran a positive feature story about the incident, showing grieving families and noting that these men had died as martyrs. The article finished in a prophetic way, noting that, “all of (the missionaries' wives) wanted to see someone continue the work.” A couple of these women would, in fact, do this very thing and see a church established in this people group. Despite their complicated stories that unfolded over decades of missionary work in Ecuador, they were true to their original calling.

In 1974, Billy Graham initiated a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, a city that would lend its name to the Lausanne Movement. This event ignited a renewed vision for missionary work. Of note was an influential paper presented by Ralph Winter. Winter called for missionaries to ignore nation states as a delimiter for defining the missionary task. Instead, he urged them to see people groups as part of a unique culture, often not aligned with national borders, and requiring a unique approach. Cultures without a church or with only a minimal church presence should be considered “unreached” and have the highest priority for missionary work. “Unreached” does not refer to individuals who are without the gospel message. It refers to those “people groups” (delineated by ethno-linguistic traits) with little to no access to the gospel; cultures with no significant Christian presence. Winter asked, “Why send missionaries to places where Christianity is already present?” 

This “unreached people group” (UPG) paradigm has perhaps had more influence on how US missionary agencies have operated since the 1970s than any other. New organizations were formed around this paradigm (groups like Pioneers and Frontiers) and older agencies were retooled around it. Winter himself founded the US Center for World Mission (now called Frontier Ventures). He created a course teaching basic missiological principles, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, with the UPG ideas at the center. It continues to be taught in local churches and has had over 200,000 students since its inception. The Joshua Project is one of a couple of registries of UPGs. It is a catalog of the cultures of the world alongside a statistical breakdown of missionary progress.

This new framing of missions work offered by Winter also had ramifications for evangelical churches in America. The role of “missions pastor,” largely absent in churches before 1980, has become a common staff position in many large Evangelical churches. Missionary agencies hoped that placing a person on the staff of a local church to focus on global ministry would mean more recruits and funding. Instead, many churches focus on one-to-two-week mission trips. Most aim at “easy to reach” places, such as nations in Central America and the Caribbean. These destinations are chosen not by the needs for evangelism, discipleship, or the planting of churches, but because they are easy, relatively safe, and accessible. These trips are often focused on those going rather than the benefit of expanding the church. They are, in large part, discipleship programs for church members. The underlying assumption is that these trips spur mobilization, giving, and prayer. The sale of travel insurance for church missions trips is at an all time high, and there are more likely more short-term church missions trips today than ever. Despite this, missiologists regard these efforts as having little impact on the cultures with the least gospel access. Some believe the short-term missions movement, as currently conducted, is harmful.

And so today the status of US Protestant missionary work mirrors the split from the fundamentalist era. Mainline churches have largely left the playing field. The number of US missionaries that my own organization tracks has held steady at 135,000 over the past decade or more. The anticipation is that as the US evangelical church fades, so too will missionary sending. But unless church and mission leaders understand the current deconstruction of mission, this “fading” will become much more pronounced over the next decade. 

With that background in mind, we can better understand the current deconstruction efforts in evangelicalism surrounding global mission. This current round of “re-thinking missions” is coming from several directions. 

• The first is an expansion of the definition of missions that seeks to avoid pragmatism. It counters the UPG emphasis that Winter introduced in the 1970s. 
• Another redefinition is happening in part because of missionary success. Why send missionaries when the global church has been growing so fast? This has morphed into seeing refugees and immigrants as the primary expression of God’s mission today. 
• Another deconstruction borrows from critical theory. It places evangelical missions on par with white supremacy and the Doctrine of Discovery.
• A totally different deconstruction may be rising from the right. It sees domestic ministry as a higher priority over expansion of the church into foreign culture.

Expanding the Definition

“The Great Commission” originally sprang from post-Reformation leaders.  Justinian Von Welz, a Lutheran theologian expelled from his home in Austria during the counter-Reformation, is credited with coining the term. His series of papers promoting “Jesus Loving Societies,” described a new missionary sending structure in 1663-1664 that largely conforms to what we have today. He later became a missionary to Suriname. Yet it was missionary Hudson Taylor and D. L. Moody that made the concept of the “Great Commission” synonymous with Evangelical mission. Bebbington’s definition of evangelicals includes biblicism, crucicentrism, activism, and conversionism. The Great Commission overlaps with these last two items. Can one be an evangelical and deny the command of Jesus in Matthew 28:19-20?

The Great Commission is typically understood in this narrow sense, but “missions” is now more broadly understood. Instead of placing mission in the orbit of activism and conversion (or perhaps ecclesiology and soteriology), mission itself is a part of God. This theological concept is roughly known as the Missio Dei. In 1952, at a conference in Willingen, Germany, theologians sought to correct problems with seeing mission as the duty of the church (Missio Ecclesiae) and instead see all of God’s work as his mission (Missio Dei). Mission, according to this view, is not something that we do, but rather it is something that God does. We sojourn with him on mission. Evangelical theologians like Bosch, whose book Transforming Mission has been a staple of seminary degrees in missions, and Guder and Barrett, authors of Missional Church, have contributed to this school of missiology. The Lausanne Conference made Christopher Wright’s The Mission of God the central theme of its 2010 global conference. More than any other text, it has brought Missio Dei to the forefront of missiological thinking. This is a far more abstract understanding of mission than what had preceded it. One implication is that there is no distinct Great Commission. All we do is mission so long as we believe that it aligns with God’s will.

It is no wonder that Winter’s UPG missiology, with its statistics, charts, and calls to specific action, has been criticized as Missio Dei has become the primary definition of mission. This sort of strategic thinking is caricatured as Western and pragmatic. One of the problems which the Missio Dei paradigm fails to address is that missionaries, unlike theologians, must do something when they arrive at whatever location they are sent to. They do not have the luxury of simply talking and writing about the theology of mission. It is in this gap, between the abstract and the concrete, that the definition of the missionary task has fallen. 

While there is much to admire in seeing mission as an initiated act of God, this theological framework diminishes the activist nature of missionary work. It is like the Sunday School kid who always answers every question with “Jesus.” Yes, the answer is correct but obfuscated in generalities. A failure to give mission a more concrete definition is contributing to a lack of focus on mission in the evangelical church.

Yet another stream that is expanding the definition of mission is the missional stream. It teaches that churches themselves, because they have become foreign to their own culture, need to become missionary in their outreach. This is a departure from the traditional way of understanding cross-cultural mission, which emphasizes ethno-linguistic borders that must be crossed. “Missional” coopts the language of mission for largely monocultural ministry in urban populations. One might argue that a country like the US is no longer monocultural. That brings us to the second significant deconstruction of missions.

The Globalizing Narrative Gives Way to the Diaspora Narrative

Over the past two decades, the “globalizing narrative” has risen to the forefront. A 2020 paper by Gina Zurlo and Todd Johnson titled, World Christianity and Mission 2020: Ongoing Shift to the Global South, notes that the “center of gravity for Christianity” has shifted from the “West to the Rest.” As Robert Wuthnow argues in his book Boundless Faith, this narrative implies that the rising global church is now “in the lead,” and therefore there is no longer a need for Western missionaries to be sent. Popularized by Philip Jenkins in his book, The Next Christendom, this paradigm ignores the argument made by Winter in 1974–that the global church is not distributed broadly across the various cultures of the world. In fact, most of the evangelical growth is demographic and concentrated in only a portion of global cultures. Cultures with large populations continue to exist with no local church, missionary witness, or significant effort to send missionaries to them. Despite this, the “globalizing narrative” implies that the job is mostly finished–or, at least, that others are better at finishing it than Western missionaries.

I would contend that the “diaspora narrative” has become a central component of the “globalizing narrative.” Evangelicals use “diaspora ministry” to describe outreach to immigrant and refugee communities. Advocates of diaspora ministry claim that the West will be won back to Christ through ministry to immigrants and refugees. Missionaries need not be sent because the UPGs are coming to America.

Certainly, all serious missiologists should consider the opportunities presented by people on the move. However, diaspora ministry is no substitute for reaching the cultures that, as Winter pointed out, are without a church presence. According to the World Bank’s 2023 report, Migrants, Refugees, and Societies, about 2.3 percent of the world’s population, 184 million people, are immigrants. That is not an insubstantial number, but it pales in comparison to the approximately 3.4 billion who live in unreached cultures per Winter’s definition. Unfortunately, even some of the largest unreached people groups are not represented in significant numbers even in immigrant mega-cities like New York City. Further, there is little to suggest that immigrant churches are successful in cross-cultural outreach. They are mostly successful in monocultural outreach. Hispanic churches tend to stay Hispanic. Nigerian churches are attended almost exclusively by Nigerians, and so forth. There are laudable exceptions, of course, but the very fact that we name these churches by their ethnic markers indicates some measure of homogeneity.

There is no reason to pit the opportunity to work among immigrants and refugees against missionary sending. And yet, advocates of “diaspora missiology” contend with the “go” and “send” verbiage of the Great Commission. Even though Jesus said to “go into all the world,” they see a future where the world comes to the West. They argue that the Western church will be rejuvenated through the more vibrant and spiritual immigrant churches. Why send missionaries when the mission field is coming to us? 

Deconstructing Christian Internationalism: Progressive Critiques

The most direct deconstruction, however, is coming from the highest halls of evangelicalism. Professor Soong-Chan Rah of Fuller Theological Seminary, where Ralph Winter once taught, has co-authored a book with Mark Charles titled, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy Of The Doctrine Of Discovery. The doctrine of discovery is essentially the idea that European settlers obtained rights to land ownership through the “discovery” of new lands. Closely bound up with this idea is the belief that those peoples who had previously lived on those lands were not actually capable of “ownership” properly understood, but simply “occupied” the land because they lacked western conceptions of land ownership and development. Rah and Charles argue that Western Christianity is the product of white supremacy because it arose in partnership with empire building legitimized by the doctrine of discovery. Flowing from this bitter root is the American missionary movement and its influence globally. They write, “In the Western mission model, which is rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery, the primary role for the ‘heathens’ is to simply receive the message and the charity of their benevolent, generous, and well-educated missionaries.”

In a 2019 interview the authors state that the purpose of the book is historical deconstruction. By tying evangelical missionary motive to the Doctrine of Discovery, Rah and Charles lay a foundation for a total repudiation of evangelical mission. As I read this book, I wondered how long it would be until evangelical institutions would be suggesting that evangelism, discipleship, and church planting are white supremacy. Ironically, the majority of Christians outside the US ask us to reject this mentality, as Brazilian missionary Sarah Breuel’s 2024 Lausanne paper “Revival and Repentance: Lessons from Global Movements” makes clear. In her presentation Breuel implored the Western missionary movement to stay engaged. “Can I say, as a leader from the Global South, we need you fully at the table.”

The historic reality of colonialism has undoubtedly influenced evangelical missions since the beginning. William Carey, the founder of the modern missions movement, left England for India during the era of British Colonialism. Often, the colonial system provided a means of access to missionaries. At other times, missionaries abused this access and dominated indigenous cultures. Contemporary missionaries labor under the fall-out of these realities. These are real concerns and evangelicals need to not only be aware of them but recognize and validate the damage that has occurred. This deconstruction, however, is not simply a call for recognition, repentance, and atonement for past wrong-doing. Borrowing from the well of critical theory it goes much further, opposing the need for conversionist missions at all.

In 2022, the same publisher of Unsettling Truths, Intervarsity Press, published A Just Mission by Mekdes Haddis. She writes that we have “lost the capacity to imagine that God’s general revelation could lead people to Christ.” Her message is: despite Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to the nations, God will reveal himself to unreached cultures and thus there is no need to send missionaries. She writes that “general revelation” (the evidence of God in nature and human experience) is a sufficient witness for Christian salvation. Historically, most evangelically Protestant theologians have taught that people need “special revelation” to be saved; they need to hear the Word of God preached, and they need to hear and respond to the name of Jesus. Evangelicals believe that people need to know about Jesus. The view that general revelation makes evangelism unnecessary is simply out of step with historic Protestantism, to say nothing of how difficult it is to square with Paul’s writings in Romans especially, where he seems to draw a quite direct connection between one’s ability to believe and one’s experience of hearing the gospel of Jesus preached. Even though God can sometimes intervene through miraculous means to save, one should also acknowledge that it is not the ordinary or common way in which he acts.

Haddis’s dismissal of missions is not a benign gesture either. When the missionary  John Chau was killed seeking to minister to the Sentinelese Islanders in the Indian Ocean, Haddis called him a misguided “adventure blogger” who was attempting to “invade and convert.” This is not how the church has traditionally spoken of her martyrs. Indeed, such dismissals provide us with a marker of just how far parts of evangelicalism have drifted over the past century. Were Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and Pete Fleming (all killed as missionary martyrs in 1956) similarly thrill-seeking adventurers? How about the Oberlin martyrs? 

This deconstruction is aligned with the broader themes of critical theory. Because of the widespread dissemination of these ideas in educational institutions, it is no wonder that there is no contemporary student missionary movement. 

The Mission, a cinematic collaboration between Disney+ and National Geographic, critiques John Allan Chau’s sacrifice using this same polemic. It is understandable that secular entertainment corporations, hostile to a Christian message, think this way. When leaders of historically evangelical institutions teach these same doctrines of deconstruction, they demonstrate the extent to which they have become like contemporary Oberlin, preparing students who preach a distinctly different gospel than the one John Chau sought to carry into a new culture.

Deconstructing Christian Internationalism: Nationalist Critiques

Advocates of Christian nationalism represent an opposite but equally dangerous form of deconstruction. Rather than understand that Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world, they infuse mission with their own political goals. As noted earlier, the 1900 Missionary Conference of New York featured past and present American political leaders. This diminished the gospel by adding to it the theme of civilizing. God’s heart of the nations represents a serious dilemma for those who see their nation as an extension of the Kingdom of God.

How can we appropriately understand that Jesus expanded the notion of neighbor to include not only the foreigner among us (which he clearly did), but also the foreigner not among us and who has no access to the gospel? While America First might be a winning political message, it is a nightmare for those who advocate for the unreached people groups of the world. 

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the existence of a flourishing domestic culture. Any nation state is distinct from Jesus’ Kingdom. Christian missionary efforts have been at their best when they have empowered the indigenous church. Conversely, missionary work has been at its worst when combined with empire. A reconstituted version of the American Empire, when pressed through the sieve of Christian nationalism, will not serve missions well. It will produce a truncated gospel that communicates the wrong kingdom.

People willing to serve cross-culturally are not likely to embrace an “America First” missiology. Yet the churches that send them may. There is a danger that we will see a resurgence of the philosophy that drove the Missionary Conference of 1900 to obscurity. Just a decade later, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference was held. Though far smaller it was more influential than its predecessor. One cannot study global missions without coming across this event and its significance. Why? Because the overall theme of the 1910 conference was inclusive of what were then called “younger churches.” These were representatives from the non-Western churches that had recently been started. There was a concerted effort to hear from indigenous representatives of these churches and to honor them. This set the stage for a missiological focus on indigenous leadership, churches, and denominations. 

Do Evangelicals Believe in Their Gospel?

In a rather infamous YouTube clip atheist Penn Jillette does a better job than most evangelicals in framing the need for conversionary missionaries. “How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?” Jillette asked. “How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? If I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.”

To be certain, some missionaries have partnered with empires, destroyed culture, and caused harm. At the same time, the global evangelical church is global thanks in part to the sacrifices of missionaries from the West. Can there be a realization of the positive contributions of the Western missionary movement alongside a recognition of the deficiencies? Historic evangelicalism teaches that Christ commands the Great Commission and that we must share the gospel with all the peoples (nations) of the world. For those whose primary goal is to deconstruct evangelical missions, soteriology is where the battle must be fought.