The Bicentennial and Missions

by James W. Reapsome

This being our first issue of the bicentennial year, perhaps it is well to consider the bicentennial in the perspective of missions. What can a missionary do to celebrate 1776 in 1976?

This being our first issue of the bicentennial year, perhaps it is well to consider the bicentennial in the perspective of missions. What can a missionary do to celebrate 1776 in 1976?

At first glance, some would say nothing. Indeed, some have suggested it is wrong for Christians to be involved in the celebration at all, lest the church be simply carried along with unthinking patriotic fervor.

It has been recalled that many Christians suffered during the American revolution, not from the British but from the Americans, because they thought the revolution was wrong.

Early missionaries to America, the Moravians especially, suffered because they went against the prevailing tide of public opinion and sought to convert the Indians rather than exterminate them.

If we think missionaries today face tough choices in the realm of politics and religion, whether at home or abroad, we ought to study our colonial history a little more carefully. It has never been easy or popular to chart a strictly biblical course.

What then can an American missionary celebrate this year? (At this point, our British and Australian readers, among others, will have to be patient with us. – Ed.) From the missionary perspective, he can rejoice that for most of the past 200 years there has been a strong spiritual impetus in his country for foreign missions. This impetus has at times, it is true, been mixed with feelings of superiority and "manifest destiny," as though American Christians were the hope of the world in somewhat the same way as our country’s economic and military power and political system were thought to be.

Of course, national pride gets in the way of missionaries, but even looking that sin squarely in the eye, we can be thankful to God for his mercy ‘in allowing so many American churches and individuals to participate in his plan of world-wide evangelization. Yes, the gospel has often ridden on the coattails of the entrepreneurs and the conquerors, but ought we to have refused to enter the doors thus opened by a sovereign Lord?

God forgive us if we think we are somehow better, or if we think we have deserved to be God’s instruments of evangelization. This year, while we rejoice in God’s preservation of us, we ought to do so with humility and penitence. Where else would this make a greater impact than on foreign soil, where missionaries are the guests of others with equally deep national feelings and aspirations?

The bicentennial will give every missionary a chance to think not only about his past heritage but also about his future. It ought to help him appreciate why, from a certain standpoint, some national Christians are eager to run their own churches the way they want to, rather than the way Americans want to.

After all, it was this kind of thinking that gave birth to the American revolution in the first place. Why should it surprise us in 1976 when people in a given country want their own churches as well as their own politics’ and economics? We independence-minded Americans have somehow been slow to sense the same spirit among believers in churches we have given birth to.

It would be ideal, of course, if national feelings could be completely submerged among Christians the world over. But God has placed us in unique national and cultural situations. The barriers to fellowship are terribly real. We have yet to attain in experience the statement of fact in Scripture: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

The bicentennial isn’t the time to grovel in our failures, but it is an opportunity to show how much of our nationalism we can shed for the sake of oneness in Christ. Rejoice? Yes. Be thankful? Yes. But above all, missionary, do so with the spirit of Jesus Christ who "came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

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