Browsing by Subject "Missions"

This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.

I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.

On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures.

The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

This dissertation investigates the interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology from 1927 through 2015. The history of interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has never been attempted in such a comprehensive way as what is attempted in this dissertation. That is its basic contribution.

The primary argument of the dissertation is that Barth’s ecclesiology has been mischaracterized in five different ways. The investigation reveals that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has thrilled and puzzled interpreters. They end up characterizing Barth in a largely appreciative way or dismissive way but in whatever way, it is reductive. When all the secondary literature is investigated it is revealed that Sacramental interpreters applaud the fierceness with which he defends the importance of the church in the midst of a confused world but are disturbed by what they perceive to be his lack of attention to the institutional church. Free Church interpreters gloat in his denunciation of infant baptism and his preference for congregational polity but wonder why he is not even more firmly congregationalist. Architectonic interpreters bask in the genius of his Trinitarian and Christological descriptions of the church but then criticize him when he does not hew to their elegant explanations. Actualistic interpreters, disenchanted with the institutional church, relish his attacks on religion in his early commentaries on Romans but ignore that he calls his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics. Missionary interpreters trumpet his emphasis on witness but play down his obsessive denunciation of syncretism. When all of this is seen, it becomes clear that Barth’s ecclesiology defies easy characterization. The specific evidence for different characterizations are identified and analyzed in light of what Barth really said. Sometimes the characterizations are due to a misreading of what Barth was saying. Other times Barth’s interpreters have identified an isolated statement that Barth developed elsewhere more adequately. The great advantage of this close analysis is to convey the complexity and nuance of ecclesiology. Someone who generally shares Barth’s approach to ecclesiology may learn what objections may be posed by other church traditions. For people critical of Barth’s ecclesiology, they can more adequately weigh whether indeed their critiques are well-founded.

The secondary argument of the dissertation, impossible to prove, is that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology is reasonably solid ecclesiology. The dissertation seeks to take seriously the major accusations hurled at his ecclesiology and they are found wanting. The dissertation concludes with what Barth wanted the church to be—over against the five schools of interpretation—practicing, local, catholic, confessing, and witnessing.

The work of missions has been integral to the church’s identity since Jesus commissioned his followers to make disciples, to teach, to baptize, and to tend to the needs of his people. In the long history of the church, missions is a complicated story full of both success and failure. It is also an aspect of the church’s identity that has at times been misunderstood, even by those within the church. This project is a response to one local congregation whose attitudes about and participation in missions revealed an opportunity to develop a more complete understanding of missions.

Using Jesus’ last words to his disciples and the apostle Paul’s writings to the church at Corinth, this project builds the case that biblical missions is sacrificial, formational, holistic, and transformational. In Luke-Acts, Jesus tells the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit before they go into all the world. They sacrifice their control, their comfort, and their preferences. In Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples not merely to go into the world, but to make disciples as they go, by baptizing and teaching. Their work is formational, as they make more disciples in the same way Jesus formed them. In John, Jesus tells Peter to tend to the physical needs of his people. The work of Peter and all subsequent disciples of Jesus is to treat the needs of others holistically, nurturing the body as well as the soul. Finally, in 2 Corinthians, Paul explains to the Corinthians how giving to the collection for Jerusalem will open the door for their own transformation. This transformation – more than the benefit to the believers in Jerusalem – is what Paul puts forward as a motivation for benevolence.

Taken together, these four truths about missions paint a picture of how and why the modern church still ought to engage in missions. The product that came out of this congregational and biblical research is a 4-session Bible study with Leader Guides that is designed to teach each of these truths. At the culmination, the Bible study participants will have the opportunity to learn more about specific missions opportunities and to find a way engage in missions through the local church.