The Story of Lutheran Missions

by Elsie Singmaster

To those outside the law Paul became the first missionary. Through his teaching Christianity was made a universal religion, by his personal work he evangelized a large part of Asia Minor and the chief cities of Greece. His accomplished task was but a small part of that which he planned. His longing eyes turned toward the West, toward the “utmost ramparts of the world”. When the sword of the executioner ended his life in Rome, only a small part of his dreams had been realized.

LOUIS HARMS.

HERMANNSBURG PARSONAGE.

|The Early Church.| Not only the apostles but the whole of the early Christian Church was filled with the missionary spirit. To that early period our eyes turn with longing desire to penetrate farther into the story of devotion, of passion for the things of Christ, of persecution, of martyrdom and of eventual triumph. To us glorious and pathetic relics remain in tradition, in a few written accounts and in inscriptions on tombs and funeral urns. In Thessalonica (now Saloniki), that city in which Paul and Barnabas were said to have “turned the world upside down,” were found two funeral urns of this period. Upon one was the inscription “No hope”; on the other, “Christ my life.” What a mighty hope had been born in the hearts of men!

|Its Extent.| It is impossible to know exactly the size and extent of the Christian Church at any of the early periods of its history. It is estimated by the conservative that at the end of the First Century there were in the Roman Empire two hundred thousand Christians, and at the end of the Second perhaps eight millions, which was about one fifteenth of the population. By the time of the Emperor Constantine, Christianity had become so vast in its extent and so tremendous in influence that he made it in 313 A.D. the State Church of the Empire.

|A Change in Method.| As we study the history of the Christian Church during the next centuries, we observe a new method of Christianizing. The apostles had built up small churches, had watched and nourished them, had chidden the backsliders, had permitted no sacrifice of the cardinal Christian principles. Now there were added to the Empire barbarian countries upon whose people the Christian religion was imposed, whether or not they were truly converted, whether or not, indeed, they were willing to receive it. There were not lacking, of course, many individual conversions, there were not lacking hundreds of Christians who labored with apostolic diligence and devotion and who doubtless deplored the growing union of their religion with the corrupt politics of a great empire.

|Early Missionaries.| Among the famous missionaries of this period were Gregory, the Illuminator, a missionary to the Armenians about the year 300; Ulfilas, who invented a Gothic alphabet so that he might translate the Scriptures into Gothic; Chrysostom, who founded in Constantinople a missionary institution, and Saint Patrick, who converted Ireland. From the secluded churches of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands there went forth to Iceland, to the Faroe Islands, and far into the barbarian sections of the Empire a new band, Columba, Aidan, Columbanus and Trudpert. From the young English Church went Wilfrid to Friesland, Willibrord to the neighborhood of Utrecht, and Boniface to Germany. Further to the east the Gospel was proclaimed under fearful difficulties. At one time it seemed that Christianity might become one of the religions of old China.

|Church and State.| Gradually the alliance of the Church and State came to its inevitable conclusion. The Church began to share the ambitions of the State. Christianity armed itself with the sword and strove to wrest from the Moslem the sepulcher of the Prince of Peace. A measure of the true spirit of the Nazarene remained in such as Raymond Lull, who protested against extending God’s kingdom by the sword and testified to his convictions by giving up his life. The great missionary societies of the Church, the Jesuit, the Dominican, the Capuchin, accepted in the main the Church’s theory of conquest, a theory made enormously advantageous by the discovery of new continents. The missionary enterprises of Spain and Portugal were marked by hideous oppression of those who would not accept the offered religion.