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Marginally Generalizing Is Not A Good Thing

Recently I was reading a book, a study by a notable scholar of a notable figure and published by a notable university press. And I came across this statement: “Like most missionaries, … was a marginal man.” Call me sensitive (marginal disclosure: I’m the descendant of three generations of missionaries and served as a missionary for a short while myself), but this statement irritated me to the bone.

Just where did the author come by this information that most missionaries are marginal? Did he survey missionaries past and present? Or did he just consult his mental filing cabinet of biases and stereotypes?

When the Missionary Gets Out of the Way

Seventy-two years ago, on May 12, 1937, James R. Graham Sr., a Southern Presbyterian missionary in Tsingkiangpu, China, wrote home to supporting churches. This was in the forty-seventh year of Sophie and James Graham’s missionary service in Tsingkiangpu:

We have a very large country work, extending over all of three counties and over parts of two other counties. The country work from this station was, for years, exceedingly slow. The prejudice against us was great and it took many years to live it down. This has always been a great official center and wherever the official influence predominated in the old days, their influence was always thrown against allowing the foreigners to get any foothold anywhere. They didn’t love us and felt that we would be a source of trouble to them, I suppose. It is quite different now. The Church, which grew up here in the city, has long ago become self-supporting and self-governing. We have no hand in it at all, except to lend it every help and support that we can in the way of advice and moral assistance.

Was Paul a Cross-Cultural Missionary?

Many have said so, including not a few missiologists. Not so fast, says Eckhard Schnabel. In his forthcoming Paul the Missionary, Schnabel does a sort of reprise—but beefier, more comprehensive and, well, different!—of Roland Allen’s venerable Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? Schnabel is known for his extensive, two-volume work Early Christian Mission (IVP Academic, 2004), and this new book recasts and augments the Pauline material in the larger work. It is capped by a final chapter exploring how this all intersects with missionary work in the twenty-first century. There is much to consider and weigh in this new book, and it's sure to stir the missiological pot. Here is one interesting sample: