Over 200 years, how has the mission map changed?

Two hundred years ago this fall, the first American missionaries opened the doors of their first school in India and the work of the American foreign mission movement officially began.

Bicentennials are often a time of commemoration and celebration, but they are also great opportunities to consider what has changed. Those first schools in India were a small start to what would become a large movement. By the Civil War, more than a thousand American Protestant missionaries operated in Africa, Asia, North and South America, the Pacific Islands, and Europe. Today, millions of Americans travel for international mission work every year. 

In 200 years, some priorities have changed. Early missionaries cared about education and medical care, but they saw them as being at the service of religious conversion. (One 1830s missionary doctor in Singapore complained that the lines of people at his clinic were a tremendous distraction from his real work as a missionary.) The early movement’s goal: conversion from “heathenism” to Protestant “civilization.”