Introduction
At the end of the first century, Christianity was a small movement that was persecuted by the Roman empire. “Had the church been wiped off the face of the earth at the end of the first century, its disappearance would have caused no dislocation in the empire, just as its presence was hardly noticed at the time.”[1] But by the fourth century, it had become the official religion of the Roman empire. From there, Christianity spread to become the global religion it is today. This paper will argue that Christianity spread from the second century to the present as a result of the persecution of Christians, imperial ambitions for unity and expansion, colonialism and industrialization, evangelical revivals, missionary zeal to fulfill the Great Commission, as well as favorable changes in the religious environment around the world.
The Conquest of the Roman World, AD 100 to 500
God used the persecution of Christians, the imperial ambitions of Roman emperors beginning with Constantine, and the missionary zeal of monks to conquer the Roman empire. During the period from AD 100 to about AD 303 (with the last major persecution of Christians under Diocletian), Christianity grew within the Roman empire, at least partly, on the blood of the martyrs. A good example was the martyrdom of Polycarp, a beloved and venerated bishop of Smyrna. As a young believer, he sat at the feet of the apostle John. At the time of his martyrdom in about AD 155, he gave a feast to the guards who apprehended him and asked them for time to pray. He prayed so fervently that the guards repented of their role in arresting him. When the proconsul urged him to renounce Christ and be spared, Polycarp responded with the famous words, “Eighty-six years I have been his servant and he has done me no wrong. How can I then blaspheme my king who saved me?’”[2]
The conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in AD 312 was a major turning point in the history of Christianity. Until that time, the church was a minority that was intermittently persecuted. Jesus used Constantine’s imperial ambitions to do his will. Prior to Constantine’s battle at Milvian Bridge with Maxentius, while praying, he saw a sign in the sky, a trophy of a cross, and was promised victory in battle by Christ in a vision. After his victory, he became converted to Christianity, though he delayed Baptism till the last year of his life in AD 337. He immediately made an agreement in Milan with his co-emperor Licinius that resulted in the passing of the Edict of Milan, a decree that legalized the Christian faith and established toleration of all peaceful religions throughout the Roman empire. In AD 324, after defeating Licinius to become the sole emperor, he gave Christianity a favored status making it a state religion. This status came with many benefits such as tax-exempt status for clergy, churches receiving funding, and government-sponsored construction of new church buildings.[3] Constantine saw in Christianity a source of victory on the battlefield. Once he became the sole emperor, he worked for unity within the state religion (Christianity) calling councils such as the first ecumenical council of AD 325 at Nicaea because unity within the church meant unity within the empire.
In the centuries following Emperor Constantine, missionary outreach was done mainly through monastic ministries. One of the most powerful evangelists of the fifth century was a peculiar monk called Symeon Stylites. He lived high on a pillar near Antioch, where he stood day after day and cried out, drawing many people from distant places to himself. Crowds of two hundred to one thousand people went to hear him. In response to his message, “They renounced with their shouts their traditional errors; they broke up their venerated idols in the presence of that great light; and they forswore the ecstatic rites of Aphrodite, the demon whose service they had long accepted.[4]”
St Patrick of Ireland was another powerful fifth-century evangelist. He was born into a Christian family in the Roman province of Britain around AD 389. When he was about sixteen years of age, his town was invaded by a band of Irish plunderers and Patrick along with thousands of other people was carried into slavery. After being in slavery for six years, God miraculously helped him escape back to his homeland. Later, through a vision, God called Patrick back to Ireland.[5] After his call, “Patrick trained for ministry at the church of Auxerre in Gaul. But there were further delays. Even after his ordination as a deacon, his superiors found him unsuited for mission work in Ireland. Palladius was chosen to go instead. But he died less than a year after he arrived, and that opened the way for Patrick, then past age forty.”[6] When he arrived in Ireland in AD 432, he was zealous to fulfill the Great Commission but found much of the territory unreached with many pagan religions including priests who offered human sacrifice. After fifteen years of preaching, Patrick had planted many churches and much of Ireland was evangelized.[7]
The Spread of Christianity from AD 500 to 1500
During these one thousand years of uncertainty when the church struggled with conflicts with the barbarians, Islam, and the Vikings,[8] God used the persecution of Christians, the zeal of missions’ leaders and missionaries (like Pope Gregory, Boniface, the Benedictines, and other monks), and the imperial ambitions of Charlemagne to spread the gospel message further. Ralph D. Winter notes that from AD 0 to 400, Christianity conquered the Roman Empire “but did not reach out with the gospel to the barbaric Celts and Goths. Almost as a penalty, the Goths invaded Rome and the whole western (Latin) part of the empire”[9] leading to the fall of the western Roman empire and the chaos that ensued. From AD 400 to 800, the Barbarians were won with the gospel and added to the Christian fold, and “they and others briefly achieved a new ‘Holy’ Roman Empire. But this new sphere did not effectively reach further north with the gospel.”[10] From AD 800 to 1200, “again almost as a penalty, the Vikings invaded these Christianized Celtic and Gothic barbarians. In the resulting agony, the Vikings, too, became Christians.”[11]
Several key individuals and group efforts were instrumental in the spread of the gospel during the middle ages. Pope Gregory the Great did more than any other person to stabilize the Western church in the wake of the fall of the western Roman empire.[12] A monk, Gregory was called from his monastery to be Bishop of Rome in AD 590 where he served till AD 604. He revitalized missions personally initiating and sending Augustine and his team of monks to evangelize England.[13] Gregory’s mission strategy “was almost the first example since the days of Paul of a carefully planned and calculated mission.”[14] Monastic ministries continued to produce other missionaries during this period. The Benedictines met great success in their missionary endeavors through the founding of mission compounds in remote areas. Unfortunately, accumulation of material wealth diverted monks’ attention and made monasteries a target for Viking raids.[15]
Boniface (c. AD 680-754) was “the greatest of all the missionaries of the Dark Ages.”[16] He was “a man who had a deeper influence on the history of Europe than any Englishman who has ever lived.”[17] Until the age of forty, Boniface was a monk. It was then that he felt called to evangelize the pagans of the continent. He had the greatest influence on the expansion of Roman Catholic missions in central Europe during the dark ages than any other person.[18] He was martyred by the “Saxons because his patron, Charlemagne (with whose military policies he did not at all agree) had brutally suppressed the Saxons on many occasions.”[19]
Charlemagne (AD 742–814) was crowned emperor of the Roman Empire by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day AD 800. His crowning began the Holy Roman Empire which lasted for over one thousand years.[20] He “ranks above all other kings as a military supporter of Christianity. No other ruler before or after gave as much attention to the copying and transmission of the Bible. Charlemagne brought nominal Christianity to vast portions of Europe and was the prime mover in the Carolingian Renaissance that fostered learning and a wide variety of Christian activity.”[21] Even though Charlemagne was a veritable supporter of Christianity, he saw Christian conversion of pagans as a military strategy. As a result, he was a patron to missionaries like Boniface.
The rise of the preaching monks (friars), was the greatest missionary development among Catholic religious orders during the dark ages.[22] Of these, the Franciscans (founded 1209) and Dominicans (founded 1216), evangelized and planted churches in Europe and all over the world.[23]
The Reformation and the Spread of Christianity in the Aftermath (AD 1500 to 1792)
The Protestant Reformation and the enthusiasm generated by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others, made many gains on the political and religious fronts but contributed almost nothing to evangelism outside their already Christian territories. “They did not even talk of mission outreach.”[24] Yet, God was at work preparing for something big in this period and in the centuries to come. God used the pain of the reformation to refine the presentation of the gospel message, prepare the church for the awakenings, and spark a spirit of reform and missionary zeal within the Catholic church.
In the wake of the Reformation, while Protestants were focused inwardly and fighting for their own survival, the Roman Catholic church, having lost some territories to the Reformation, now vigorously tried to win the rest of the world. Global Catholic missionaries preceded Protestant missionaries by two hundred years and “actively promoted and accompanied a worldwide movement of scope unprecedented in the annals of mankind, one in which there was greater Christian missionary awareness than ever before.”[25] Even though missions’ efforts were largely absent within the Protestant world, it is important to state that few groups like the Anabaptist movement actively and zealously engaged in missions’ activities.[26]
In the aftermath of the Reformation, Catholic orders like the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Augustinians played a huge role in global missions. For example, Matthew Ricci (1552 to 1610), was a Jesuit missionary who with his Jesuit colleagues played a key role in starting the evangelization of China.[27] Though two centuries behind the Catholic church, the evangelical awakenings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inspired and advanced Protestant missions. The rise of pietism on the European continent together with an evangelical zeal in Britain and America combined to create a revitalized Protestant Christianity with a passion for global missions. European Protestant missionaries Nicolaus Zinzendorf (ca. 1700-1760) carried out Moravian missions and American missionaries like David Brainerd (1718-1747) were moved to evangelize American Indians.[28]
The “Great Century” of the Spread of Christianity: AD 1792 to 1910)
During what Kenneth Scott LaTourette called “the Great Century,”[29] God unleashed an army of zealous missionaries that he had been preparing through the work of the Reformation and the Great Awakenings onto a global mission field softened by a huge wave of colonialism and industrialization. This army deployed rapidly and covered the globe with the gospel in a way that no eye had ever seen, no ear had ever heard, and no human mind could have imagined. It was “Christianity’s most extensive geographic spread.”[30] Christianity went from being a Caucasian religion to a worldwide religion. During this period, when Catholic missions suffered significant setbacks, the nineteenth-century awakening spurred Protestant missions to distant shores to preach the gospel.[31] The period termed “the Great Century” does not fall neatly into the boundary dates of 1800 to 1900 but covers the period from the founding of the William Carey’s Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) in 1792 to the first World Missions Conference in Edinburgh in 1910.[32] Christianity “reached more peoples and entered more cultures than in all preceding centuries” by re-entering and expanding work within countries and territories that had already been reached but were largely unconquered and by pioneering missions to areas that had never been evangelized. While colonialism and industrialization created a favorable environment for missionaries to succeed overseas, a notable feature of this era was the rise of missionary societies founded by people who were zealous for missions to support missionaries going to different parts of the world. William Carey’s BMS was the “first British entity organized especially for foreign missions.”[33] Now called the father of the modern missionary movement, Carey served as a missionary to India where he died. In 1792, he wrote his treatise, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens, to contend with hyper-Calvinism within his Baptist denomination that claimed that conversion of the heathens ought to be left to God to do at his own time. His treatise became the constitution of the modern missionary movement[34]. In it, Carey argues that the Great Commission still applied to the church in his day and that believers out to be acquainted with the religious state of the world so they could fulfill the commission[35].
During this period, Robert Moffat (1795 to 1883) and his famous son-in-law David Livingstone (1813 – 1873) evangelized south Africa. Moffat, who preceded Livingstone on the mission field prepared the way for him and facilitated his arrival[36]. Livingstone would become famous both for his missions work and his exploration of Africa some of which are recorded in his book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.
Hudson Taylor (1832 to 1905) founded the China Inland Mission and was instrumental in the evangelization of China. “Few missionaries in the nineteen centuries since the apostle Paul have had a wider vision and have carried out a more systematic plan of evangelizing a broad geographical area than did James Hudson Taylor.”[37]
The Spread of Christianity from 1910 to the Present
During the twentieth century, several global factors shaped the missionary climate. There were the first and second world wars which left the West “economically impoverished and without a shred of virtue.”[38] Resistance to colonialism and imperialism was beginning and there was growing anti-western sentiments. The spread of Marxism from Europe further incentivized missionaries, many of whom saw their mission as spreading both the gospel and capitalism. In the United States, the 19th amendment to the constitution, passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, gave women the right to vote. This together with other changes that were happening in the culture led to more women going to school, taking jobs, and also more women going into the mission field as leaders not helpers of their husbands.[39] The growth of Christian fundamentalism meant that nominal Christians within areas that were regarded as evangelized became targets for evangelization by fundamentalists. Within this climate, single women missionaries like Adele Marion Fielde and Amy Carmichael deployed to the mission field. This era also saw many student missionaries like C.T. Studd and John R. Mott. World Christian missions also began to see significant innovation and specialization. There were medical missionaries like Angels of Mercy, Bible translation missionaries like William Cameron Townsend and aviation missionaries like Elizabeth Greene[40].
In the last half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, many western missionaries were martyred as many colonies fought and gained independence. Indigenous missionary movements blossomed. Missionary strategists like Donald McGavran (1897 to 1990) popularized missions research and transformed the way missions is studied and practiced.[41] Missionary celebrities like Bob Pierce (1914–1978), Mother Teresa (1910 to 1997), and Billy Graham (1918-2018) inspired millions and led many to Christ. Technologies such as television, radio, and the internet began helping evangelists cover the world with the message of Christ and also making it easy for both indigenous and international missionaries to carry out their mission.
Conclusion
At the end of the first century, Christianity was a small movement that was persecuted by the Roman empire. If it had gone extinct, few would have noticed. But by the fourth century, it had become the official religion of the Roman empire. From there, Christianity spread to become the global religion it is today because of the righteous blood of the martyrs, persecution of Christians, providential circumstances God provided, and the boldness of missionaries who dared to take the gospel to places that have not heard it. If the history of Christianity is any indication to its future, it will grow till every ear has heard. Yet, the same factors that contributed to its growth in the past will largely spur its future growth. With the continuing growth in technology and the progressively smaller world in which we live with transportation systems that can take us to the ends of the earth within days and communication systems that can connect us to anyone on earth instantly, the advance of the gospel will look different from previous generations. But the core message and the power will be the same.
Footnotes
[1] Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire: (A.D. 100-400) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984) VIII
[2] John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1869), 12.
[3] Edward L. Smither, Mission in the Early Church: Themes and Reflections (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2004), 19-22
[4] Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 16
[5] St. Patrick The Confession of St. Patrick, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/patrick/confession.pdf, accessed April 28, 2019.
[6] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 38.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions. 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 42-53
[9] Ralph D. Winter, The Kingdom Strikes Back: Ten Epochs of Redemptive History, http://www.worldevangelicals.org/resources/source.htm?id=435, accessed April 29, 2019.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Neill, History of Christian Missions, 58
[13] Neill, History of Christian Missions, 58
[14] Ibid.
[15] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 18
[16] Neill, History of Christian Missions, 64
[17] Ibid.
[18] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 46
[19] Winter, The Kingdom Strikes Back, 14
[20] Neill, History of Christian Missions, 67
[21] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 18
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Winter, The Kingdom Strikes Back, 20
[25] Winter, The Kingdom Strikes Back, 20
[26] John Mark Terry, Evangelism: A Concise History (New York: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 80-83.
[27] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 66.
[28] John Mark Terry, ed., Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategy of World Missions (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2015), 170-199.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Terry, Missiology, 170-199.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Terry, Missiology, 175.
[34] Ibid.
[35] William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens, https://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/enquiry/anenquiry.pdf, accessed April 30, 2019.
[36] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1039/1039-h/1039-h.htm, accessed April 30, 2019.
[37] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 185.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, 185.
[40] Ibid., 280-391
[41] Ibid., 394-478
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_______, ed. Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategy of World Missions. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2015.
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