5 minute read
Essentially Missional
Our first foreign missions in India and Bangladesh celebrated their 125th birthday in 2023. As many of our readers know, the CGGC is about to celebrate our 200th birthday next year. You could be forgiven then for coming to the logical conclusion that it took the denomination about 77 years to acquire a strong sense of mission. For a variety of reasons, that is simply not the case, and the truth is far more interesting.
In his 1912 history of the Churches of God, C.H. Forney writes, “The missionary idea is not only as old as Christianity, but it is the essential element.” The same could be said not only of Christianity in general, but of the Churches of God in particular. Before the Churches of God ever sent missionaries off to foreign and international fields, missions work began here, domestically, in the United States. At the founding of the denomination and the first eldership in 1825, only 24 states were in the Union. Missouri, added in 1821, was sparsely populated and would have demarcated, along with Louisiana, the westernmost edge of the Union. The early years of the Churches of God were abundant with missions work, and many of our churches established in the 19th century were planted by what we could simultaneously call “church planters” and “missionaries,” traveling not far behind the expanding frontiers. By 1831, it was cemented in the first Eldership constitution that “there shall be appointed annually one or more missionaries, whose duty it shall be to visit destitute places, establish churches, form new stations and circuits.” (Pg. 874)
These mission-minded folk were following God’s call, traveling into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and to Iowa on the most direct westward route. With a map of our churches and your favorite index finger, you can trace the even line from Harrisburg to Wooster, from Findlay to Fort Wayne, and all the way to Brighton.
Likewise, missionaries were sent to each new state or territory as the denomination could find eager people to do it. Sometimes that meant entering into areas like Texas or Missouri a few years after they were admitted into the Union. In other cases, like Iowa, it’s clear that missionary work was started in 1844 even before it was officially admitted as a state in 1846. This is to say that the missionary spirit was alive and fervent in the Churches of God well from the start.
Yet, foreign missions were not inevitable despite much consistent effort. It’s clear that there was difficulty in finding sufficient support for foreign missions. The “Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church of God” was created relatively early, in 1845, but funds and support were not forthcoming, at least not at a denominational level. It was at the eldership level that most of the missionaries were gathered and initially supported with the help of local churches. General Eldership reports consistently demonstrate a lack of success in fund raising. Whatever the strategy of the General Eldership, it’s clear that their efforts were ineffective and unmotivating. All the while domestic missionary work continued, but foreign work was a non-starter.
It's in 1884 that an auspicious “opportunity” arises that finally let loose the CGGC into foreign fields. John R. H. Latchaw, pastor and first President of the University of Findlay, writes in The Church Advocate that the Free Baptist Foreign Mission Board had reached out to cooperate with the Churches of God in India, saying:
“Their proposal was to grant us the privilege of cooperating with them in their foreign field….
They are not necessitated to make this offer to us. But the urgent cries from the unknown said millions within their territory impel them to say to someone, ‘come over and help us!’, This invitation has reached our ears.
We, with one voice have pronounced it a ‘rare opportunity’…
Now the question arises—are we ready and willing to seize it, or will we suffer it to go by unimproved?”
We did not suffer the Free Baptist Foreign Mission Board long. And what a model for today, that we might see another denomination’s offer for partnership as a rare opportunity, and not a threat to our own identity.
In 1890 the Women’s General Mission Society (WGMS) was created as a national body for organizing the diverse number of eldership women’s societies. Soon all missionary related work was bequeathed from the General Eldership to the WGMS, highlighting just how significant and influential women’s societies were at this time. It was this society that officially sent Clara Landes as our first foreign missionary who landed in India in 1896. Its successor society from 1903 carried on the mission work of the Churches of God, raising funds, employing missionaries, and uniting the disparate local Churches of God mission societies all around the United States.
Now, almost 200 years after Winebrenner laid the foundations for a new church movement, it is evident just how mission-minded it always was. Reading through the letters, firsthand accounts, journals, and pamphlets of our missionaries across these generations ought to crystalize the intense effort and love that carried them to distant lands for the sake of Christ and His Gospel. It is with equally intense appreciation that we can now look at all our foreign fields, and with equal love all of our brothers and sisters in Christ who sustain the missions even now.
