in the last lecture we talked about the moravian missionary movement and this movement that i said is one of the most consequential in the history of christian missions but didn't have the massive numeric impact that other movements like the jesuits or even the the church of the east on the silk road or the jewish diaspora movement they didn't have thousands and thousands and millions of followers but the reason why the raven missionary was so important was because of the other movements that it sparked and we often refer the moravians in shorthand and say they inspired everyone else we kind of know that but i want to go into a little bit of detail on how they inspired two significant movements that are perhaps numerically the most significant protestant missionary movements in world history numerically but i'm going to argue that moravians it was that dom that one domino that knocked down these two now begin with a story from 1736 keep in mind this is just a few years into that golden decade of missionary sending from earnhot 1736 young john wesley was on his first missionary journey to the colony of georgia as you many of you know from church history john wesley had been a student at oxford he had been part of the oxford holy clubs and he felt very compelled to make disciples to preach the gospel and this move to georgia was his first attempt to do a mission uh in the british colonies in georgia he's on the ship and he's pretty new at this and he has this life-changing experience and i'll describe in a little bit of detail but as is often the case when you're at c which i've never been at c for that long but people before airplanes anyone who went by c this is kind of what you have there was a storm in the middle of the atlantic ocean and even unless you're an experienced seafarer it's horrifyingly scary because you just don't know what's going to happen when there's waves crashing on the ship and the ships doing this and you can't see land anywhere and you're stuck in the middle of the ocean you don't know what's going to happen so there's this storm and everyone on the ship is terrified and thinking they're all going to die wesley describes in his journals a wave crashing over the ship and splitting the mainsail so their main their chief mechanism for moving is destroyed which they're going to repair it but and then a wave he said engulfing the ship to where you have the water completely covering the deck and then washing out on this over the side spilling out of the sides of the boat so you can kind of imagine this scene and he said everyone especially the english passengers which are the people who can share the same languages are just losing it they all think they're gonna die they're freaking out and he said he hears singing on the ship he's wondering what on earth is singing is coming from and he finds this group he calls them german but they're actually the moravians he finds his group of moravians and they were some of those early moravian missionaries being sent to georgia this is the year they went to georgia he sees this group of moravians and in the middle of the storm on the ship they're doing a prayer and hymn service and they're singing and describes in great detail he just watches he doesn't know that language he doesn't know their language he's watching them and everyone else is losing it and you have waves crashing on the ship and they're just singing there's no interruption and he remembers after the storm asking what i'm saying weren't you afraid that we were all going to die and they said in simple terms nope god sent us here he's going to protect us if we die at sea and he was just completely stunned by this remember the wilberforce quote this sense there was nothing that they were afraid of right they were not intimidated by any danger and wesley's just blown away by this experience with and many of you have heard this you know wesley sees moravians on the ship and they're not scared and he's but there's more when he gets to georgia he's so impressed by the character of the moravians there's such a different spirit about them he decides to stay with some moravians in german so while he's in georgia on what would end up being a failed missionary journey wesley went back didn't work out so well for him there he staged the moravians and he remarks on their remarkable joy enduring through hardship they're setting up their missions not like they're they're natives there they're setting up permission there he's living with them and just observing the way they work observing the way they live he actually goes to one of the ordinations of their bishop zinzendorf comes and he watches an ordination of one of their bishops and hears them singing again that he's just blown away by the simplicity and the power of the holy spirit at work among them and he basically sees something okay these are this is a lutheran pietist the moravians are sort of this this central european protestant nomination they've formed a new church and he's an an anglican at the time who would end up founding the methodist church but he's he sees this and he's just blown away he goes back to england after this experiences all over about a two year period and he begins to wonder and this is a stunning thing we need to be reminded of wesley who was or it was oxford grad ordained starts the holy clubs goes on a missionary journey to georgia he gets back to england he goes i don't think i'm actually a christian right he's raised by susannah wesley like christian foundation to the core he's already writing theological documents he goes i don't think i'm a christian and the main crux was he said i know all the doctrines i believe it all but i don't feel that assurance of forgiveness that assurance of salvation that actual calm that i saw not only on the storm in the ship but in georgia at their home when they were being missionaries and they're actually at that time moravian's in london he met him raving in london he sought them out in london he goes i and the words that many of us have have either used in a testimony or heard he said i don't have what they have we're christians but that's i don't have that and moravians everyone i meet seems to have that and right it's it's that deep piety that deep sense that christianity is not just about uh ascent to a particular set of doctrines or participation in community there's something that has to happen in your soul a transformation of the individual so wesley goes on this quest to uncover what's going on in his soul and he starts going to moravian meetings he starts following them around and in 1738 again two years after his initial meeting with him on the ship he has this experience and it's the famous moment where he says at alders gate always gate street i felt my heart strangely warmed i felt that i did trust christ christ alone for my salvation and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death and whether you see that as wesley's sort of a second experience of grace and signification reason as his conversion wesley had a life altering experience that was directly connected to his experience watching and interacting with and observing the moravians and how they lived and discipled and were on mission for a two year period and it was completely providential they just happened to be on the same ship in the atlantic then he began following them shortly after this wesley goes to her her hood in central europe he travels all the way there to see this community and keep in mind in 1738 they're in the middle of their golden age they are that place is on fire they are 13 years into the 24 7 prayer meeting they're right in the middle of sending out missionaries all over the world he's he's probably getting there and seeing people being sent out they're going to greenland and they're going to finland and they're going to sri lanka he's seeing this happen before his eyes he writes in his journals and again wesley was a prolific journaler so you can read all you want in this journal he writes in the journals about watching moravians bury their child who died and again being just floored watching and moved watching this funeral he recalls watching someone being commissioned to go on the mission field he recalls being a part of ace of these different services your calls walking around and talking to different people he's just blowing he goes to the core and wesley comments on this and he says he's reflecting back after he said i would have gladly spent my life there but my master is calling me to labor in another part of his vineyard well he's like i would have just stayed there and never left and some of you may have had that experience whether it's uh visiting another nation where god's doing something amazing or visiting a church where you felt the deep kinship with them and you think we're the same we we have the same dna but wesley was just in a two-year period utterly transformed and undone it wasn't just a i used to teach it as kind of this brush by he runs some moravians on a ship stop provoking and he moves on no no it was a two-year quest for him to figure out what they had that he didn't have and in many ways i would argue that wesleyan piety shaped by john wesley is deeply rooted in this pietistic moravian spirituality that he experienced and he began importing into the wesleyan movement that really had not fully taken off yet this is early we could talk a great deal about the wesley movement but we all know that that would end up becoming not only a movement within england but throughout the united states particularly preaching of george whitefield but also wesley and it would deeply influence modern evangelicalism in many ways the the some of the fundamental marks of modern global evangelicalism are rooted so deeply in this westinghound movement but wesley would not be the same person and there would be no wesleyan movement i would argue had it not been for these two years 1736-38 when he met and was transformed by the moravians we could go on about this and it's painful not to go further with the wesleyans there's so much to go there but you'll have plenty of opportunities to read and learn more about the wesley's and the wesleyan movement but i want to fast forward a few years to 1761. as i said zinzendorf dies 1760. and he was a contemporary with wesley like wesley was there in that first generation he goes to the site he goes to the place he meets the founder but didn't stop there the year after zinzendorf dies a poor english commoner named william carey was born in 1761 carrie is known as the father father of the modern mission movement and everyone acknowledges in the textbook and elsewhere they were precursors most notably the moravians and the wesleyans were precursors in significant missionary activity and i'll talk about the reason why he's seen as this threshold figure but let's talk about the influence he was in a poor commoner family but he became a converted christian through a baptist church and his trade was he was a shoemaker but he was also a lay preacher so he led a baptist congregation as a preacher and he made shoes for a living and he was a very poor man but he was deeply intrigued by world missions he began reading the journals of captain cook right who'd been traveling in the 18th century ladies and gentlemen all over the south pacific and he begins to opens his world to go there's so much world out there and we need to preach the gospel out there and he begins even as a shoemaker and by day and preacher by night he begins to feel this deeper sense that god had called him to foreign missions and there needed to be something that happened but the real one of the real influences for him was there was a publication created in the second generation of moravian missions called periodical accounts and it was a regular periodical that described and told stories of of moravian missions it was their way of communicating think about missionary newsletters and wesley began reading the periodical accounts and being and realizing that there were protestants doing missions around the world kind of when it was before it was a thing before it was trending before it was attached to colonial expansion they were missionaries and these crazy refugees from central europe going all over the world finding ways as extreme as selling themselves into slavery to go he begins reading this season he completely blows his mind so he's reading captain cook realizing the world's bigger than he ever thought that he's reading the periodicals going oh people have been going i just didn't know it and my people english baptists have not been going as i said in the very introduction of this class the tipping point for carrie was his publishing of a small book with a long title in 1792. i'll read you the whole title just for fun the title is this an inquiry into the obligations of christians to use means for the conversion of the heathens in which the religious state of the different nations of the world the success of former undertakings and the practicability of further undertakings are considered it was his title was the argument is often just called an inquiry into the obligations of christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen which is still long but there carey confronted the common notion among protestants that was still present in 1792 well 250 years after the present reformation that god would that the great commission was not for everyone really not for the modern church and god would do what god would do among the heathen and carrie argued no and you can see in the title nope we have an obligation one it's not an option it's an obligation which was a a very strong claim and two the obligations to use means we actually have to do something to participate in this mission and it's interesting in carrie's short treatise in his manifesto the main example the main core he wrote uh he gave demographic sketches of the nations around the world i i'll actually i can link uh to an excerpt from that book but he talks about every continent every nation he does he basically estimates that less than a quarter of the world had been reached with the gospel meaning they had heard the gospel preached so he said there's more than 75 percent of the world who's never heard the gospel it's a big world out there here's all the continents and all the nations here's who hasn't heard the gospel you've never heard it before here's where we need to go it's a very sort of geographical work like a like an amateur geographer and he argued you know there's this moment of globalism this moment where there's significant colonialism and global trade christians this is our chance we can go everywhere we need to leverage this moment this global moment we have to breach all the unreached peoples with the gospel and who was his chief example on the plausibility of this the moravians because people say okay maybe it's a good thing but it's just not plausible we live in london we don't know anything about indonesia can we really go to indonesia can can that can we really make that cultural jump he says see and i quote see what the moravians have done can we not and he means we british baptists can we not follow their example and in obedience to our heavenly father our heavenly master go out into the world and preach the gospel to the heathen and he gives these stories and examples of moravian missionaries they've been reading about in the periodical accounts and saying we have no excuse there's absolutely no excuse they had fewer resources more cultural barriers fewer ships to jump on and they've been everywhere and we're just waking up to it now in the wake of kerry's manifesto many people thought this is you're right we're in and many people resist resisted him but they felt that the way to best facilitate this movement they wanted to initiate that would that would in many ways follow in the wake of the raven movement they launched the baptist missionary society so society organized to help facilitate and fund and send missionaries all over the world the first missionary they sent a year after he was founded was william carey himself william carey said not only am i going to make the call make the appeal not only am i going to help organize the society the infrastructure to do it i'm the first one to go i'm going to india i won't tell you the whole story about carrion india it's a long and tragic and beautiful and heroic story of uh the first uh pioneering english missionaries not the first missionary first english missionary doing this english speaking that's part of the reason why he's so famous but carrie wood inspired by the moravians right would set this pattern for future modern protestant missions whether it was the pattern of uh coming with a family and we'll talk about that in the case study kind of missions in the family whether it's the the the pattern of doing serious language study and bible translation which we also saw with the jesuits uh whether it's the pattern of having a sending organization that supports you that you are accountable to that funds you that sends reinforcements there's a lot of patterns that he set up and i think it's important to recognize that there this was just one new innovation in many different models of sending let's just do a quick review just to think about the impact of this particular moment right in the early church we talked about uh sending through diasporas that were already on the move right the jewish diaspora we talked also about missionaries being sent along the silk road who were who were bi-vocational they were merchants and they were preaching the gospel as they went so there's diasporic strategies there's merchant missionaries in the medieval period they're missionary monks single celibate missionaries who were either sent out in groups from a monastery or like the franciscans wandering preachers these are other models for mission we talked about early modern models particularly the jesuits who often would be accompanying colonial ships or accompanying a merchant ship or uh they were part they were they they piggybacked on a colonial move a colonial moment but now in this modern period in in this in this modern period for the protestants were introduced to two more models the moravians and i believe smithere talked about is how novel it was they were a local church community a few hundred people that mobilized and sent out missionaries as a local church community that was completely novel you just don't have a random local church in france saying we're going to send our missionaries over there people do it all the time now but that was a model that was pioneering where local churches do global missions they fund it they train they send people out they stay connected with them they pray for them they said reinforcements but the other one we see is kerry saying most baptist churches don't have the resources or the interest in doing this so why don't we get like-minded baptists together and we'll pool our resources and do it so it's some somewhat para church right it's it was a society clear people came from local churches but it wasn't a church like the moravians mobilizing and sending it was a society a group after kerry organized and i would argue that these two innovations you have with the moravians and with carrie and the baptist become the operative models right in the present day either you have local churches that do a lot of sending or you have missionary missionary societies or groups or denominations that are doing sending more centrally often they work together but you can see that these two models still in existence in some ways in tension today uh because there's there's pros and cons to both but what kerry does is he's not the pioneer in the sense of the first protestant missionary by any means but he pioneers certain models that really break the dam open right he he pioneers a theological argument against the old protestant argument that we shouldn't be engaged in using means and feeling obligation for missions but he also pioneers things methodologically with the missionary society in a variety of ways that even when they're on the ground they structured their community structure their mission they engage contextually and when you think about the influence the impact overall and the textbook calls this the great era of protestant missions and the 19th century really was one in 1792 when kerry published his famous manifesto there are probably a few hundred protestant missionaries in the world not many a few hundred is not many at all concerning the millions of protestants in the world at the time considering the fact that the reformation was almost 300 years old few hundred compared to the number of catholics that is a pitifully small number a century later there are over 15 000 right so you have this exponential increase in the number of missionaries being recruited and trained and sent out and supported around the world over a century this is the century where the protestant church in the west gets really serious about missions think how late this is this is just 200 years ago the previous 1800 years other people were taking the gospel to the world it was only the last 200 years that white westerners protestants took it seriously it's helpful for perspective to understand it was a remarkable moment but it was just one among many remarkable moments and it was quite late in the game and i also note on the modern missionary movement that is the thing that's often most talked about we're just talking about sort of in shorthand as a huge domino that was knocked over by the moravians it's important to note that though there is a swelling number of protestant missionaries going around the world typically from europe in the united states going elsewhere the number of missionaries is exponential we shouldn't imagine that they were all wildly successful in the mission field when you read their textbooks you're going to read about some really really famous missionary heroes who you've probably heard of and know more or less about their story the textbook does a good job so i decided not to tell you all their stories because you can read about in the textbook william carey in india hudson taylor in china lottie moon in china added iron and judson in burma david livingston and africa i could go on and on right there are these it's an era of missionary heroes but it's important to note that most of them labored for decades to learn a language to learn a culture to translate the bible suffering through illness suffering through persecution suffering through loss of family and and loss of partnerships and many of them perhaps most famously david livingston had one convert for a lifetime of work in africa others had a few hundred right maybe the most widely successful had a few thousand and that would have been just mind-blowing success but the number of christians the number of missionaries exploded the number of christians in those areas where they went to the end of the earth really was a trickle right there was not massive fruit there's lots of plowing and sowing and laboring not much reaping in the 19th century the reaping would happen in the 20th century we'll talk about another time statistically what you see happen it's the seas were sown in the 19th century often through the very sort of actual deaths of missionaries giving their lives on the mission field but it was when that next generation of the local converts takes over right if there's a successful transfer that's when you see the church taking off in these various mission fields but as we close and think about the impact historians have to play this game carefully think about historical counterfactuals and that means if x hadn't happened would y have happened later i really do think it's worth pondering just for a moment three historical hypotheticals and just imagine how history has gone think about just the scale of the protestant missionary movement over the last 200 years think about the impact and just ask yourself a what if zinzendorf had not welcomed those 10 refugees onto his land in 1722. certainly there would be no moravian missionary community movement certainly that would not have happened they would have gone somewhere else but that's just a remarkable moment i just go that is crazy six uh six refugee adults and four children and then it becomes this community that becomes this missionary movement second question what if wesley had not been on the same ship as those moravians in 1736 on the way to georgia there were lots of ships you could have taken to georgia it was like it was one ship a year they could have been put on a different ship you know like one week one month difference we know wesley's life was utterly changed by his encounters or two-year pursuit in many ways of the deep heartfelt affection for god that he saw in the moravians what if wesley hadn't been on the same ship would we have the wesleyan movement we have today and three what if that second generation this is fun for me because i'm historian what if that second generation of moravians hadn't thought it was important to write down their early missionary stories in the periodical accounts what if that that document that regularly sent out newsletter never got was never produced and ultimately never got in william carey's hands would he have the modern missionary movement would we have the british missionary society would he have gone to india he had other missionary influences for sure but there's interesting things to think about because it it identifies two things right two tensions in history two tensions in mission one things are so contingent you have to go wow god is really sovereign god had a divine appointment for wesley on that ship god had a divine appointment for zizendorf when he met those refugees god had a divine appointment for kerry when he got that paper in his hand to read about moravian missions on the one hand god is sovereign we also go hmm what would happen had had the publisher just kind of got tired and abandoned ship with with publishing the uh periodical accounts from ravens what if sisendorf just got tired in 1727 i said you know what guys this experiment is not working just please go somewhere else instead of him making a decision to move in with the people there's all these it's both god's remarkable sovereignty but then there's these very life-changing human decisions that happen at the same time so when we think about the moravians and that missionary movement that would end up they would end up igniting the two most important missionary movements i would say that that end up coalescing they become what we'd see is modern evangelicalism the wesleyan movement and the modern missions movement they're they're not the same but they're closely related when we see that i think we should return to the famous william carey admonition he gave that first group he tried to convince to go on mission right we should all attempt great things for god but we should all at the same time not just be reliant on our efforts and recognize that we need to expect great things from god ultimately god is sovereign but he's given us this place in history where our lives are contingent and decisions we make actually do have an impact on the trajectory of our lives and others lives and that is both really exciting and terrifying at the same time and i think that's called the fear of god when we have that we have wisdom let's pray lord i thank you for an opportunity to look back at history and see your hand and also see people who are operating with limited knowledge operating in situations of uncertainty and making decisions the kind of decisions we hope we can make when we're faced with similar circumstances and opportunities but lord i just pray that everyone who watches this everyone who's taking this course everyone who's studying these movements more than anything would have a sober expectation that you were sovereign and you were in control of all things you were calling us to take steps of faith you're calling us to discern but only to trust you and take risks that will change our lives and change others for your glory jesus name amen [Music]