EMQ » July – Oct 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 3
Renewed Vision
Summary: Despite our shortcomings, the missio Dei requires a quest for the gospel. That quest is not only to reach all nations but for Christians to become cross-cultural members of God’s kingdom and to faithfully reveal his heart to the watching world through cross-cultural mission outreach.
By Jessica Janvier
The Apocalypse recorded by Saint John or better known to some as the Book of Revelation has, in chapter seven, provided a picture for the Church that teems with diversity. Commenting on verses 9 – 17, New Testament scholar Craig Keener remarked, “That the multitude is countless probably echoes the promise to the patriarchs (Gen. 13:16; 15:5; 32:12). But here the promised multitude is gathered from all nations; the hope of the gospel has touched all peoples.”[i]
The countless multitude appears in this first-century literature in a time when the Church was certainly countable and still primarily Jewish. This picture of ethnic diversity was a two-fold provision of hope. The diverse picture signified a church that would survive its persecuting atmosphere and it indicated that the church would grow beyond its small beginnings. Diversity in the Book of Revelation is seen as a blessing brought about by the fruit of the gospel reaching all people groups (ἔθνος – ethnos).
Revelation presents diversity with positive connotations connected to the eschaton (or end of the world). Yet other New Testament texts reveal the difficulties that sometimes derive from ethnic and racial strife, when the multitudes are gathered together as God’s people. The contention between the Hellenists and the Hebrews in Acts 6 appears early in the Christian movement. Paul’s struggles in Galatia to see a Church not divided between Jews and Gentiles also emerge out of the early Church’s pursuit of a multiethnic and cross-cultural community.
Furthermore, what evolved to be a primarily Gentile post-apostolic Church displayed episodes of great contention with Jewish people and Judaism early on. This grew into various expressions of antisemitism, exposing a sinful weakness in the Church’s approach to the religious diversity that surrounded it. The same great council that helped to produce Christological clarity in Nicaea also came to produce hateful words and laws towards the Jews from the newly “Christian” emperor.[ii]
The centuries following the Council of Nicaea formed a less than pristine account of harmonious diversity within the Church and the Church’s dealings with the outside world alongside beautiful pictures of cross-cultural ministry. Perhaps a mixed picture is the best that can be expected from a people who are still in the process of being transformed into the image of Christ.
Despite our shortcomings, the missio Dei requires a quest for the gospel. That quest is not only to reach all nations but for Christians to become cross-cultural members of God’s kingdom and to faithfully reveal his heart to the watching world through cross-cultural mission outreach. To move forward in a better way requires a missiological education that sees and acknowledges our missteps toward diversity. Additionally, it requires an understanding of how we have failed.
In the history of the Church, certain theological paradigms have produced problematic obstacles to faithful expressions of diversity and inclusion reflective of God’s heart for his kingdom. The age of Protestant mission is not an exception.
Cross-Cultural Mimicry: An Inadequate Approach to Diversity
Before the Protestant Reformation spawned an alternative Christian vision to the Western Roman Catholic Church, Catholicism was on the move. By the fifteenth century, Roman Catholicism already had an extensive mission history. However, what was new about the fifteenth century was the knowledge of great and small land masses to the west of European Christendom.
This realization was viewed with excitement by Europe’s rulers and elites with commercial interests and mission-minded Christians alike – some of whom overlapped in identities. This proved to be disastrous as native people beyond the previously known world to Europeans were introduced to Christianity.
The papal bulls of 1455 and 1493 gave Catholics the permitted moral justifications and permissions to enslave and acquire the land of non-Christians. With this, violence, subjugation, and the degradation of native peoples as bearers of God’s image often went hand in hand with the growth and spread of Christianity. However, at the same time, some missionaries chose a better path, and not all mission endeavors coming out of the Catholic Church of this period were violent.
For example, the initial entrance of the Portuguese into the Kingdom of Kongo was first marked by peace and reciprocal trade. Nonetheless, this changed with the uptick of the transatlantic slave trade. As Thomas Thornton has pointed out, mission mixed with commerce in human bodies and land acquisition often brought missionaries in as a part of a conquering force, which inevitably required a level of brutality and oppression.[iii] Although Roman Catholics were first to engage in this in the “new world,” Protestants followed subsequently and with many of the same ethical problems.
Outside of Iberia, the English, French, and Dutch became the greatest participants in the mixture of slave trading, land acquisition, and missionary work. In this triad, the Dutch started out as the dominant group. They established colonies in the Americas and West Indies and trading connections in West and West Central Africa.
Their African trading connections helped to develop a distinct culture in the Atlantic world. In the Dutch coastal outposts in West Africa, Europeans and Africans created a creole culture of merchants, intermarried families, and those marked by religious exchange. Historian Ira Berlin refers to this phenomenon as “the netherworld between continents.”[iv] Even more so, this “netherworld” reached into continental Europe. There, Africans enslaved and free, crossed paths and cultures with Europeans. The Africans at the center of this cultural exchange were becoming something new. Berlin explains,
“Although the countenances of these new people of the Atlantic – Atlantic creoles – might bear the features of Africa, Europe, or the Americas in whole or in part, their beginnings, strictly speaking, were in none of those places. Instead, by their experiences and sometimes by their persons, they had become part of the three worlds that came together along the Atlantic littoral. Familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, fluent in its new languages, and intimate with its trade and cultures, they were cosmopolitan in the fullest sense.”[v]
It was in this context that the Dutch began their Protestant missionary efforts, and it was in this context that the Dutch became the first to ordain a person of African descent within Protestantism: Jacobus Capitein.
Capitein was born around 1717 in present-day Ghana, West Africa. He was sold at about seven years old to the Dutchman Aarnout Steenhart. Steenhart would go on to give the young boy to his friend, Jacob Van Goch, who was a merchant for the Dutch slave trading enterprise – the West India Company. When Van Goch decided to return to Holland in 1728, he took young Capitein with him, entering him into the African creole world of the Netherlands.
It was not unusual in this period for creoles on the European continent to eventually become freedmen. This was young Capitein’s path. In Holland, he was exposed to the Calvinist tradition of Protestantism from a young age. He expressed an early interest in returning to Ghana as a missionary, which was received positively. In preparation for his missionary work, which he embarked upon in 1742, he was given the opportunity to study theology at Leiden University. Jacobus Capitein’s story is indeed one of cross-cultural ministry and an embrace of diversity. However, his story is also one of a malformed cross-culturalism.
Capitein was trained in a Dutch context which had experienced a lucrative gain from the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover, he was raised in dominantly Reformed Christian surroundings. These two streams flowing into each other resulted in most Dutch theologians supporting the slave trade and making theological arguments for its support. However, historian Christine Levecq noted, “A lone Reformed voice here and there, such as that of Jacobus Hondius or Bernardus Smytegelt, made itself heard against any form of slavery.”[vi]
In this milieu, Capitein himself became a staunch supporter of slavery and argued in his dissertation that Christianity and slavery were compatible. Using arguments from history, the Scriptures, and rationalism he returned to West Africa as a proslavery missionary. His missionary endeavor was largely unsuccessful.
This form of diversity and inclusion that produced Capitein would echo through other African converts in North America. Among the most prominent were James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Chavis, and Jupiter Hammon. They were all embraced and educated by their predominantly white Christian surroundings, and they became mimics of the proslavery slavery gospel that they were handed.
With the exception of Hammon, none of these cross-cultural products had particularly successful and accepted ministries among other Blacks. In Hammon’s case, he was among the only Black preacher allowed to preach to other enslaved Blacks in his area. It is unclear if he would have been looked to if other options were available.
While the majority of these proslavery Black preachers were not widely held in high regard by their peers of African descent, their stories are important, nonetheless. They tell us something important about current efforts for more diversity in churches and mission agencies in the United States and Canada. They reveal that diversity and cross-culturalism are not a healing balm in and of themselves. They demonstrate that cross-cultural ministry can take place with infected gospels.
Most African Americans at large rejected the proslavery gospel and the correlated messages of racial inferiority they encountered from abolitionist white Christians. A reminiscence of Frederick Douglass is illustrative of this rejection. In an 1841 speech, he recounted,
“At the South I was a member of the Methodist Church. When I came north, I thought one Sunday I would attend communion, at one of the churches of my denomination, in the town I was staying. The white people gathered round the altar, the blacks clustered by the door. After the good minister had served out the bread and wine to one portion of those near him, he said, ‘These may withdraw, and others come forward;’ thus he proceeded till all the white members had been served. Then he took a long breath, and looking out towards the door, exclaimed, ‘Come up, colored friends, come up! for you know God is no respecter of persons!’ I haven’t been there to see the sacraments taken since.”[vii]
Segregated seating was not uncommon in Northern and Southern churches. Whites having a better choice of seats reflected an ideology of racial hierarchy in both settings. Douglass went on to become a part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. His separation from white Christians in this instance foreshadowed the movement of African American Christians even after the Civil War. This separation is still largely in place in present-day American churches.
Diversity and Healing
The transatlantic slave trade and the early years of Protestant mission are intertwined. It may be uncomfortable to see that this interwoven story, among many things, is one of cross-cultural ministry. This story had a particular vision of diversity. This malformed vision of diversity bloomed from a malformed gospel at work in Western Christianity.
Remnants of this malformed gospel are at the root of what has kept White and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) communities separated in the Church and mission agencies. Unless this rift is attended to, understood, and healed, the chances of producing more Jacobus Capitein-esq ministers who are mimics rather than reconciling healers, stand before us.
We need to understand why the gospel that entered the Western world, among proslavery and abolitionist Christians alike, did not produce churches that could “break down the wall of separation” (Ephesians 2:14) and why it largely still does not. This haunting theological deficiency needs exploration and healing before our attempts at diversity will be what we hope for. As our history has shown, diversity without healing will not produce a diverse cross-culturalism that reflects God’s heart.
Therefore, a first step that mission agencies can take is an honest, critical examination of early evangelical mission history and the theology that accompanied it. Evangelicals have often upheld important consensual Christian theological values such as the authority of Scripture and the primacy of the gospel. Yet the evangelical tradition has not always done well in examining how these values have been twisted to uphold ungodly hierarchies and injustices.
If we want a gospel that breaks down barriers, then we need to examine how we have broken down the gospel. We cannot correct what we cannot see. A reflective look at our history and theology, with communities that have been adversely affected by our missiology, may provide answers we could not have anticipated and a pathway for a future togetherness.
Jessica Janvier (jnbrooks3@gmail.com) is a recent graduate of Columbia International University where she completed her PhD in intercultural studies. Her interdisciplinary focus has been on African American religious history, the history of Christianity, and evangelical historiography. Beyond her academic pursuits, she is a member of the Global Methodist Church, serving as an associate pastor in a United Methodist Church in the Bronx, New York.
[i] Craig Keener, The New Application Commentary: Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 243.
[ii] I am referring to Constantine’s remarks about the Jews in his letter to Christians in his empire that were not at the council. This letter is commonly referred to as “On the Keeping of Easter”. He would subsequently create legislation that would negatively target Jews.
[iii] See Thomas Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church, 1491-1750,” Journal of African History Vol. 25, 2 (1984): 147-168.
[iv] Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 53, No. 2 (April 1996): 254.
[v] Berlin, “From Creole to Africa,” 254.
[vi] Christiane Levecq, “Jacobus Capitein: Dutch Calvinist and Black Cosmopolitan,” Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter 2013), 154.
[vii] Frederick Douglass, “The Church and Prejudice” in Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass, ed. James Daley (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2013), 8.
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 3. Copyright © 2024 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
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