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  (CHRISTIAN HISTORY) 18. THE MODERN MISSIONS MOVEMENT
  by David Guzik
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Summary: The modern missions movement began in the 19th century with the
Moravian Advance, led by Niklaus Zinzendorf, and was later influenced by
William Carey and the Baptist Missionary Society.

Topics: "Missions Movement", "Christian History"
Scripture References: Genesis 1:27, Matthew 28:19

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DESCRIPTION
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In this sermon, the speaker discusses the missionary work of David
Livingstone in Africa during a time when the continent was plagued by
poverty, abuse, and the slave trade. Livingstone embarked on a journey
across Africa to spread the gospel and heal the 'open sore' of the slave
trade. The speaker highlights the voluntary aspect of the gospel and the
lack of state support or control in the missionary efforts.
Additionally, the speaker emphasizes the use of everyday Christians and
their talents in the mission field, showcasing inspiring stories of
individuals who were initially rejected but became successful
missionaries. The sermon also mentions the initial disbelief and
resistance towards the abolition of the slave trade, as people struggled
to imagine a world without slavery.

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CONTENT
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At the beginning of the 19th century, Protestant Christianity barely
existed outside of Europe and America. Asia was almost untouched, except
for a few traces in India and Indonesia. Africa was called famously the
Dark Continent, and had no Christians except for a few Coptic believers
in Egypt and Ethiopia.

Now what's amazing, that was at the beginning of the 19th century. By
the end of the 19th century, there had been an amazing missionary
movement that extended the gospel incredibly over so much of the world.
Kenneth Scott Latteret, the great historian, says, of so many millions
of individuals.

That's the story in a nutshell of the modern missions movement,
especially in what's termed as the Great Century, the 19th century. But
let's go back a little bit further and talk about the beginnings of the
modern missions movement. Some people say that the first missions
movement was the Reformation itself, and that the mission field was
Central and Western Europe.

However, it's clear that many groups had some kind of evangelistic zeal
before that. The Valdenses, the Lawlords are examples, and even Francis
of Assisi, as we mentioned before, went to Egypt to preach to the Muslim
king. Roman Catholics were busy spreading their faith around the world,
while Protestants had virtually no missions work.

One big reason was this, was that the more successful seafaring nations
at that time, such as Spain and Portugal, were strongly Roman Catholic.
And so it was the Roman Catholics that sent missionaries to the
Americas, North and South, long before Protestants did. It also helped
that there were monastic orders within the Roman Catholic Church that
were sort of a ready-made missionary force, right? I mean, the Pope or
some archbishop could just say, hey you, this monastic order, go do
this, and they're already sort of under this vow of obedience.

It's not like after you go recruit volunteers, you have them ready at
hand. Now, Luther was not much of a missionary. Luther felt that Jesus
was coming so soon that there wasn't much sense in putting forth a long-
term strategy of missions.

He also felt that the Great Commission was given only to the original
Twelve Apostles and not to the Church in general. This was a common
thinking in Christendom before the modern missions movement. And many
Calvinists tended to be fatalistic about missions and evangelism, mostly
because of their doctrine of election.

Their thinking was that if God had chosen some among the heathen to
salvation, then they would find their way to salvation. If God had not
chosen them, then there was nothing anybody could do about it anyway.
Yet, it's unfair to characterize Calvinists, and Calvin especially, as
being completely uninterested in missions.

Calvin himself seemed to have a strong missionary interest. From Geneva,
he sent dozens of missionaries back to his native France, but he also
commissioned four missionaries to go with a group of French colonists
and to establish a colony in Brazil to evangelize the natives. The
venture began in the year 1555, but it ended tragically when one in the
group defected to the Portuguese and who robbed and killed the French
colonists.

But as early as the year 1550, King Gustav Vasa, the King of Sweden,
sent a missionary to Lapland. His successor, Gustavus Adolphus, who died
in the Thirty Years' War, he also planned missionary work from the
Kingdom of Sweden, and again Calvin promoted some missionary work in
Brazil. The Quakers had an interest in mission.

1661, we haven't really discussed the Quakers, they're just sort of an
interesting, almost fringe group. But George Fox, a Quaker leader,
commissioned three missionaries to go to China, but they actually never
made it to their destination. The Roman Catholic missions were sort of
very interesting as they began before Protestant missions, but let's
consider here the general setting of Protestant missions in the modern
world.

The Peace of Vesfalia marked an end of an ugly era. This was the end of
the Thirty Years' War. This basically returned things, at least
religiously, to the status quo that it had been before the Thirty Years'
War, to the Peace of Augsburg, which was, again, many decades before the
Peace of Vesfalia.

By the way, the Peace of Vesfalia was signed, in all places, in Münster,
the city that we talked about so much before. Of course, a good number
of decades after Münster had been devastated so much by the crazy
Anabaptists that took it over. Anyway, the Peace of Vesfalia marked the
end of the ugly wars that had crippled Europe from so long, and
Europeans began to prosper and colonize many other parts of the world.

The Evangelical revivals up to the 18th and 19th century combined with
European imperialist expansion to open up vast new areas to the
Christian message. The dawn of Protestant missions can really be traced
back to the Moravian advance. We're going to talk about the Moravians
much more in our next lecture, but the Moravians were the first church
to undertake foreign missions seriously, or at least one in the modern
world that we have record of.

The first real breakthrough came through with the German Pietist, the
Moravians, but it sort of started in Denmark. King Ferdinand IV of
Denmark was a Pietist himself, and he appealed to Augustus Franke, a
Pietistic leader who as a university professor had turned the University
of Halle into a major center of training and education for the Pietistic
movement. Now at that time, almost nobody thought of foreign missions at
all, and the German Pietists following Franke were commonly ridiculed.

They were called enthusiasts, they were called priests of Baal, they
were called heretics, they were called false Lutherans, they were
considered to be dangerous people. And these were the people the king of
Denmark sent to for help in evangelizing people in his overseas lands.
You see, two men volunteered to go to a Danish colony on the southeast
coast of India.

And so these two men, Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henry Plutschau, this
was the beginning of what was known as the Danish Halle Mission. And in
the following decade, this missionary college sent out many
missionaries, including Hans Egede, who established a missionary colony
in Greenland in 1722. And so the Danish king sort of underwrote the
support of sending out these missionaries to the different Danish
territories across the world as colonization by the Western European
powers started to happen more and more in Africa, in Asia, in South
America.

These colonies, oftentimes the rulers of the European countries had an
interest in seeing religion promoted in these colonies. When Hans Egede
and his wife came to Greenland, they came to convert these descendants
of the Vikings to Christianity. However, they got there and they found
that those Viking settlements were gone.

And so they turned their missionary attention to the native population
and they established a Scandinavian colony on Greenland. Egede was an
educator, an author, a natural historian, a mapmaker, in addition to his
work for the Lord. Soon after he returned to Copenhagen, he drew a map
of Greenland.

It's the oldest surviving map of an inhabitant of that land. Now, this
was the earliest sort of hint of missions in the modern world, I should
say, but it really started getting going with the Moravian missionary
movement and this great statesman of the Moravian missionary movement,
Niklaus Wudwig, Count von Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf was the son of a high
government official in Saxony, but his father died when Zinzendorf was
only six weeks old.

So he was brought up by his grandmother, who was a friend of Jakob
Spenner and a follower of Pietism. When he was 10 years old, Zinzendorf
was sent to Augustus Franka's grammar school at Halle, and he and five
other Christian boys founded a club that they called the Order of the
Grain of Mustard Seed. They pledged themselves to love the whole human
family and to spread the gospel.

And then he went on to study law at the universities of Wittenberg and
Utrecht. In 1719, on a grand tour of Europe, he saw a painting in an art
gallery in Dusseldorf. It was Domenico Fetti's painting titled Eche
Homo, meaning Behold the Man.

It showed Christ wearing a crown of thorns, and at the bottom it had an
inscription, All this I did for you. What are you doing for me? Right
then, Zinzendorf was absolutely convicted to the heart while looking at
this painting, and he decided to leave his job as a government official
for Saxony and give himself to full-time Christian service. In 1722, he
arranged the settlement of a group of Moravian refugees on his land at
Bettelsdorf.

In 1727, there was a unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon this
group. We'll talk more about that in our next lecture. But Zinzendorf
emerged as the leader of this spirit-filled group of Moravians, and he
ended up traveling extensively throughout the world, including Europe,
England, and North America, promoting their work and supporting their
missionaries.

On a visit to Copenhagen in 1731, Zinzendorf met two Eskimo converts of
a Danish work. They pleaded with him, Send missionaries to the Eskimos.
When Zinzendorf returned home to Herrenhut, he inspired the Moravians to
respond to the appeal.

Within 30 years, the Moravians had missions works in more than 10
countries. They had an amazing sense of self-sacrifice, of love, and
total commitment to evangelization. It's said to be unparalleled in the
history of missions.

One historian has estimated that the Moravian missionaries achieved more
in this period than all the Protestant missionaries had achieved in the
200 years previous. And so some of the places where the Moravians went,
they went to the Virgin Islands, they went to Greenland, they went to
North America, to Lapland, to South America, and to Labrador.
Interestingly, Moravian missionaries were expected to be self-
supporting.

They were expected to make a living for themselves in the places where
they went. For example, in South America, the Moravians established a
variety of businesses, including tailoring, watchmaking, and baking.
Their economic and spiritual influence grew, and a thriving Moravian
church emerged in Suriname, off the northeast coast of South America.

Now, Zinzendorf was definitely a nobleman and an aristocrat. He mightily
used his prestige and his connections to advance the cause of the
gospel. But people say he was also somewhat arrogant and conceited.

He had a hard time living the life of a normal missionary, as his
Moravian brethren did. Now, there's another dynamic that is sort of
connected with the missionary spread, and that's with the pilgrims who
came to America. You sort of know that story, don't you? The pilgrims
were actually separatists from the Church of England who found refuge in
the more tolerant Netherlands.

And they lived in the Netherlands to escape the religious persecution
that they would face in England. And they liked living in the
Netherlands well enough. But when they saw their children growing up
speaking Dutch and adopting Dutch customs and Dutch culture, they said,
you know, we don't want this for our kids.

We want our children to be Englishmen. I mean, nothing against the
Dutch, I suppose, they thought, but they wanted their children to be
Englishmen. Therefore, they made the very dangerous journey over to the
colonies of Great Britain on the American continent, and they colonized
the areas that the pilgrims lived in.

But what you need to understand by that is that the pilgrims who came to
America saw themselves as deliberate missionaries. They even brought one
man with their group, Robert Cushman, whose specific job was to
evangelize and to promote the conversion of the Indians. When the
pilgrims were followed by many other groups who for the Massachusetts
Bay Company in 1629, the company seal showed the figure of an Indian
saying to England, come over and help us.

That was the attitude. They felt, look, go over and help the Indians,
not only to colonize the new world, but to evangelize it as well. And by
the way, this whole phenomenon of how America was colonized from people
of different groups from different areas who lived in geographically
separate places really helps to explain why there was never a single
established state church in America, and why America developed
politically and ecclesiastically, if you want to say, in church
reference differently than Europe did.

Well, another great phenomenon along these lines was the founding of
various missionary societies. You see, the formation of the voluntary
missionary society had a big impact on Christianity. It began to take
power and money and interest away from the institutional churches and
denominations, and give it to these groups that at their best had a
great zeal for missions.

And it also promoted an interdenominational cooperation, and it also
gave much more leadership to laymen than before. Now think about what it
before when all missions were just done through the agency of a church.
Now there's many things to commend that, right? When missions is just
done through the local church or through a collection of churches which
might be known as a denomination.

There are many benefits to that. There are many good things about that.
But imagine how different it is when you start forming an independent
missionary group, an independent missionary agency, that people just
join voluntarily, sort of like a missions club, if you want to say, or a
missions society that's going to try to reach different places around
the world with the gospel.

Well, the first thing that it does is you ask for contributions among
your members. That's money that otherwise they would have given to their
local church, but they don't give it to their local church now, they
give it to you. Secondly, it really promotes interdenominational
cooperation, right? Because in your particular mission society or club,
you'll take whoever's interested, right? You don't care if they're
Methodist or Presbyterian or Lutheran.

If they're interested, if they have the same heart, the same vision,
you'll take them. And then thirdly, the other aspect of this is that it
also promoted very much so the leadership of laymen, right? Because
there weren't necessarily professional clerics in your missionary club
or society, they just rose to the top of leadership, that is, the layman
did. Well, anyway, by the end of the 19th century, almost every
Christian body from the Orthodox Church of Russia to the Salvation Army
and almost every country from the Lutheran Church of Finland to the
Waldensian Church of Italy to the newest denomination of the United
States had some kind of role or participation in missionary enterprise
oversee.

You got to say that's a remarkable change, right? At the beginning of
the 19th century, almost nobody is involved in missions. At the end of
the 19th century, virtually every church has some kind of missionary
outreach. The Baptist Missionary Society founded in 1792, it was first
called the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
Among Heathen, so that's one early group.

Then the London Missionary Society was founded in 1795, the Netherlands
Missionary Society in 1797, the Basel Mission in 1815. It's sort of
interesting if you take a look at the seal of the Society for
Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It shows a ship under sail
making towards a point of land, and upon the prow of the ship stands a
minister with an open Bible in his hand.

The people standing on the shore are in a posture of expectation,
reaching out to the ship, and basically what they say here in Latin is,
come over and help us. That's what they're saying. This whole idea, yes,
the natives, the aboriginal peoples, the peoples in untouched parts of
the world, they're hungering for the gospel.

It's our responsibility to come bring it to them. Another interesting
thing, sort of to get out of chronological order here though, is that
the China Inland Mission, which was founded by Hudson Taylor, was also a
new development. It repudiated connection with any one church.

It was absolutely interdenominational, and it was the forerunner of many
faith missions that would follow. But that's sort of getting out of
order. Let's backtrack a little bit more and go back to William Carey
and the Baptist Missionary Society.

William Carey was another revolutionary in the thinking of missions,
because he thought of evangelizing a whole country. He wanted to see
whole populations become Christian. He held that foreign missionaries
can only begin the work, and the greater work has to be done by
nationals within their own country.

He put an emphasis on developing local ministry. He also saw that
Christianity could and should in some ways adapt to the local culture
and customs. William Carey had an interesting background.

He was an English cobbler. Now you know what a cobbler is? A cobbler
isn't someone who makes shoes. He's lower on the totem pole than
somebody who makes shoes.

A cobbler is someone who repairs shoes. He was married to a mentally ill
woman, and he barely made enough money to keep them both fed. But he was
a ravenous learner, and he would go without food in order to buy a book.

He also had a thirst for adventure. His two greatest heroes in the books
that they wrote were Columbus and Captain James Cook. He was converted
by the witness of a fellow shoemaker in 1779, and he was baptized in
1783.

A few years later, after gaining a little bit of preaching experience,
he became the pastor of Moulton Baptist Church in England. Now William
Carey was an example of a missionary teacher who sought to bring the
gospel and learning and civilization to heathen lands. And so he
basically did everything he could to advance not just the gospel, but
sort of a widespread effort.

Now for sure he faced a lot of discouragement. It is said that at a
gathering of ministers, what they would call a minister's fraternal
meeting, you know, sort of a pastor's fellowship kind of thing, Carey
got up and expressed his zeal for missions. And a man, actually a godly
man named John Ryland, rebuked him by saying, young man, sit down.

You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will
do it without your help or mine. When somebody put him down as just a
simple shoemaker, William Carey said, no, sir, I protest.

I'm not a shoemaker. I'm only a cobbler who repairs shoes. But Carey was
a great man.

His motto was expect great things from God, attempt great things for
God. He arrived in Calcutta in 1793 and he died there in 1834. He spent
his entire time in India without a break, without a furlough.

The British East India Company would not allow Carey and his associates
to work in Calcutta. So they moved 14 miles inland to Serampore, which
was under Danish protection. Now, again, he had a passion to change
things in society.

In India at that time, if an infant was sick, the parents simply left
the child out in the wild to die and rot or to be eaten by wild animals.
Near Malda, Carey found the remains of a baby that had been offered as a
sacrifice to be eaten alive by white ants. Another place Carey saw how
Indian mothers threw their babies into the sea or to drown or to be
eaten by crocodiles.

The Indians regarded this as a holy sacrifice to the mother goddess of
the Ganges. He also worked against the Hindu practice of sati. Sati is
where the wife of a deceased man, her widow, the widow actually, was
expected to throw herself on his burning funeral pyre and kill himself.

Combined with polygamy, this was a special horror. Carey documented one
time when a man died and all 33 of his wives burned themselves to death
on his funeral pyre. So he worked against these practices, but he was a
skilled man, an educated man.

He had learned Latin, Hebrew, and Greek before he left England. In
India, he circulated about 200,000 Bibles or Bible portions in about 40
different languages or dialects, besides many tracts and Christian
books. Another notable missionary to India was Henry Martin.

He was a man who did an amazing work there, following up, succeeding
William Carey's work. A great quote from his, he says, the spirit of
Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to him, the more
intensely missionary we become.

Another great worker was a man named Adoniram Judson. He and his wife
were the first American missionaries. They started out for India, but
they ended up in Burma.

He worked in Burma for six years before he had a single convert. He lost
his wife, and he lost several children to sickness and disease. Yet by
the time Adoniram Judson died, there were over 100,000 baptized
Christians among the Karan tribe of Burma.

Well, again, through the 19th century, this missionary work just
continued to spread and spread. You have the great example not only of
Adoniram and Ann Judson, but of course you have the great example of
David Livingstone as well. David Livingstone went to what was known as
the Dark Continent, Africa, in the middle of the 19th century.

It began to open up, and David Livingstone of Scotland was one of the
pioneers who did it. He was a medical missionary who gave completely to
bringing the gospel and civilization to Africa. Livingstone came to
Africa in 1841, and he served for about ten years as a typical
missionary.

But then he was driven to leave his mission station and follow the smoke
of a thousand villages that had never seen a missionary. And so instead
of doing the typical thing of staying at your mission station and doing
whatever work you could around there, he just launched off on the trail
and said--again, it's a beautiful statement--there's a smoke of a
thousand villages that says, we need the gospel. His famous journey led
him from Angola in the middle of Africa to the west coast of the
continent, and then across the whole continent to the east coast of
Africa.

On that journey, he showed all the great qualities of a great explorer.
One of the great motivations he had was to heal what he called the open
sore of the world, the devastating slave trade of Central Africa. You
know, at this time, there was still a very profitable slave trade going
on.

Even though slaves in the middle of this time were not being exported to
America still, they still were to other parts of the world. David
Livingstone died an amazing death and was so beloved of the Africans
that he ministered to. He's a tremendous example.

Then you have the example of Robert Morrison in China. He was one of the
first missionaries to China, and he became the chief European expert on
Chinese languages, and he had translated the entire Bible into Chinese
by 1819. After him was a man named William Chalmers Burns, who was
another British missionary to China.

These men and these women had a tremendous devotion to God, and they
faced great sacrifices on the mission field. Take Hudson Taylor. Hudson
Taylor's wife died on childbirth on the mission field at the age of 33
years old.

William Carey, he buried two wives on the mission field. Adoniram Judson
lost two wives to disease. David Livingstone buried his wife, Mary, in
Africa.

Johann Krapf, a German missionary, pioneer missionary to Kenya, he lost
his wife and both his children within months of arriving in Africa. Many
of these radical missionaries, when they would go and transport
themselves, for example, to Africa, it came to the point where they
would actually not take a packing crate, not take suitcases. As they
transported their goods on the ship, they would actually transport them
in a coffin, because they said, I'm going to be using this when I'm
here.

That's how dedicated they were. When they went on the mission field,
they knew there was a very good chance that they or their families would
never come back alive. It is said that in the 19th century, the average
life expectancy of a missionary to Africa was eight years.

Now, there's some very important characteristics generally of the modern
missions movement. First of all, it was voluntary, not compulsory. And
this is really wonderful.

I mean, nobody was making these people, nobody was forcing them. It was
really a tremendous work of the great voluntary aspect of the gospel.
Secondly, it was done almost completely without state support and state
control, right? When they sent these missionaries out, they didn't ask
for state support, nor did they want state control as well.

Thirdly, they used the wealth and the talents of everyday Christians.
You know, the feeling was, you didn't have to be a Superman to be a
great missionary. And the wonderful stories of so many people who were
refused by a missions board, who were refused in some manner of
Christian service, yet turned out to be wonderful missionaries on the
field for Jesus Christ.

It's a very inspiring example. And then finally, we can say that there
was also a very strong humanitarian impulse. Hospitals, schools,
languages, agriculture, over and over again, we see the tremendous
examples of these people.

They had a real heart, not only to preach the gospel, but to help and to
better these people with Christian love the very best they could. There
are some people who criticize the missions movement of the 19th century
as being just another tool of Western imperialism and colonialism, meant
to subjugate and to hurt the abused people or the further abused people
there of these native lands and these aboriginal peoples. I don't think
that's accurate estimation at all, not one bit.

I think instead that it shows in a remarkable way how these people
brought the love and the grace of Jesus Christ to these cultures. Now,
we're going to move from the modern missions movement just a little bit
here and talk somewhat in the last part of this lecture about
Christianity and social reform. The beginnings of modern social reform
as a part of evangelical Christianity began with what might be known as
the Clapham sect.

You see, England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and London
became the world's largest city and the financial center of the world.
British commerce circled the globe and the British Navy dominated the
seas, but there was a tremendous strain on the social institutions of
England. At the beginning of the great century, at the beginning of the
1900s, the evangelical movement started by Wesley and Whitefield had an
influence.

It was marked by an intense personal godly, usually springing from a
conversion experience and then an aggressive concern for Christian
service in the world. And as they looked around, they saw a world that
needed help. It's very, very difficult to describe what an impact the
Industrial Revolution had on Europe.

Now, we don't want to over-idealize the farm life and everything about
the farm life was great. No, listen, many European farmers lived in
poverty and filth and hunger. Nevertheless, it didn't seem to get better
for a lot of the people who moved to the cities to work in factories
that came up.

The slums of Europe, in particular many places over England, which was
sort of the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the slums of Europe
were almost unspeakably filthy, dangerous, dark, sordid places that one
can only imagine about. I mean, I could tell you stories, and maybe I
will later, but it's just this was a world where life was cheap, where
people were abused endlessly, where children worked as soon as they were
able to, to go work in a factory in the most deplorable conditions one
can imagine. And I'll tell you what changed it.

What changed it was Christians. Notably, this Clapham sect. Clapham was
a villager community three miles from London, and there, there lived a
group of wealthy and influential Christians.

The unquestioned leader of the Clapham sect was a man named William
Wilberforce. He was a member of Parliament. Wilberforce was an
influential statement with an amazing gift of eloquence and public
speech.

And out of the Clapham movement came many different things. There came
the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, there came the
Church Missionary Society, and there came the British and Foreign Bible
Society. But the greatest campaign of William Wilberforce was against
slavery in the British Empire.

Wilberforce made his first anti-slavery speech in the House of Commons
in 1789. Two years later, he introduced a bill against importing any
more slaves into the British West Indies. This is what Wilberforce said.

He said, Never, never, till we desist, till we, will we desist, till we
have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves
from the load of guilt, and extinguished every trace of this bloody
traffic. Now listen, what's absolutely interesting about this was at the
time Wilberforce started saying, we need to abolish the slave trade in
the British Empire, people thought he was nuts. Now look, people didn't
like slavery.

People recognized that slavery was an evil. They weren't stupid, but
they believed that it was a necessary evil. And they honestly could not
conceive of a world without slavery.

They could not conceive of how the economy would work without slavery.
They thought it was absolutely necessary, though it was evil, for the
functioning of the economy. Well, that's why at first, Wilberforce's
effort to abolish slavery, which I want to stress, was motivated almost
purely out of his Christian concern.

You know, every once in a while you'll get people who say that
Christianity is to blame for slavery. That's one of the stupidest things
I've ever heard in my life. Number one, slavery existed well before
Christianity.

How can you say it caused it? Number two, slavery has existed outside of
Christianity and of Christendom. How can you say that it caused it? And
while it is true that slavery was excused by the misunderstanding and
misquoting of many Bible passages by people in the United States and in
Europe, they would quote a verse, you know, servants submit to your
masters and all things. See, the Bible approves of slavery.

They would do things like that. Even though the Bible was misquoted and
misused to falsely support slavery, you need to understand that
Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. This impulse
to abolish slavery, it did not come from the Enlightenment thinkers,
right? As wonderful as all those Enlightenment thinkers were, with all
of their reason, with all of their rationality, they didn't abolish
slavery.

No, it was a Christian movement that abolished slavery, first in the
British Empire and then in the United States of America. Well, again,
Wilberforce was absolutely devoted to his cause. He had an energetic and
effective campaign to shape public opinion against the slave trade.

Finally, in February of 1807, the House of Commons abolished the slave
trade in the British Empire, but the institution of slavery remained.
You see the difference? You can't sell slaves anymore, but the slaves
that are there still remain. And then finally, it wasn't until 1833 that
Wilberforce was able to get that law changed, four days before he died.

The Clatham sect remains the shining example of how a society can be
influenced by a few men of great devotion. And so the abolitionist
movement had its impact not only with Wilberforce and the British
Empire, but all over the place. They would appeal to such things as
this.

You know, a popular image of the British abolitionist movement was a
slave in chains with the signature underneath them, Am I not a man and a
brother? Just appealing to the basic humanity of the situation. But then
again, these feelings were mocked greatly. They said, well, you say this
man is a man and a brother, this Negro, but look at the way you treat
him.

Or they would say, listen, when they go out and rampage and kill, are
you still saying that he is a man and a brother? You see, these feelings
had to, this abolitionist movement had to combat tremendous prejudice.
This is supposedly Wilberforce, you know, committing immoral acts with
the people trying to persuade them to the anti-slavery bill. You can see
how vicious the attacks against the abolitionist movement was.

Yet nevertheless, things changed. The opposition to slavery, not only in
the British Empire, but also in the Americas, was fundamentally a
Christian movement, and the abolitionists were dedicated and
unstoppable. They tried to influence public opinion and lawmakers
through newspapers, through speeches, and through books in America, such
as Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous Uncle Tom's Cabin, and they opposed
slavery on firm Christian principles.

Now, one other movement that I want to speak to you about, Christian
social reform, we could talk about so many things. We could talk about
orphanages. We could talk about hospitals.

We could talk about, again, the abolition of the slave trade. We can
talk about the temperance movement, which we're going to talk about
here. We can talk about the missionary movement.

But this is what you need to understand. Whenever people, you know, it's
amazing, all these of these generous philanthropic efforts sprung forth
from Christianity, not from the secular world, not from the
Enlightenment philosophers. These were the ones who really wanted to
change the world for the better and did it under a Christian impulse.

But when we talk about the temperance movement, we're talking about
these 19th century reform movements that were meant to encourage
individuals to either limit or to abstain from the use of alcohol. They
did this out of tremendous social concern. For example, by 1835, there
were 8,000 temperance groups in the United States, with 1.5 million
people belonging to these 8,000 groups.

The temperance movement was the longest-lasting and most broad-based
social reform movement in the United States. It was also in many ways
successful because by the end of the 19th century, in the decades before
Prohibition, the drinking habits of Americans had radically changed.
Activism in the movement crossed gender, race, class, religion, and age
barriers, but it was mostly a Christian influence.

And so they noticed the absolute devastation that drink was causing all
over America and all over Europe. And it was, especially gin in Great
Britain. There's terrible stories.

You just hear how it was so cheap, so bad, and how much of the
population was just terribly, terribly drunk and disordered much of the
time. And so there were people like Carrie A. Nation, a temperance
activist, who literally used to go in with a hatchet and chop up
saloons. But again, notice what's in her other hand.

There's a hatchet in one hand and a Bible in the other. It points to the
fundamentally Christian impulse that started a lot of these things. They
would try to mock people who were drunks, but then again, they even
developed things like root beer as alternatives to alcoholic beverages.

Again, all as an effort of the modern Christianity and of this idea of
Christianity and social reform or social improvement. Now, there's just
one more thing I need to say before we conclude this lecture. When we
take a look at the radical good that has been done by Christians in
helping the poor, the sick, the orphans, those who need the gospel, when
we think of all these different people that have been helped radically
through Christian influence--slaves, prisoners, women--over and over
again, what we must always remember is while true Christianity will
result in this impulse to better society and to help people, it must
never degenerate into being only social action.

Because look, the bottom line is that there are other people, especially
in our modern world, there are other people who will feed the poor and
minister to the sick and minister to the prisoner and help the
persecuted. There are other people in this world who will do that, but
no one but the Christian will preach the gospel. Therefore, we do not
neglect social work.

We think it's good. We think it's powerful. We think it's in line with
who we are and what we're called to be as Christians.

Nevertheless, we just have to be careful that we don't allow
Christianity to become merely social action without a strong, clear, and
consistent presentation of the gospel.

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Audio: http://archive.org/download/SERMONINDEX_SID18573/SID18573.mp3
Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/david-guzik/christian-history-18-the-modern-missions-movement/
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