Gospel Missions
he Reformers are sometimes accused of having had no missionary vision. It is true that they founded no mission societies and sent few workers beyond the borders of Christendom. But the charge mistakes the shape of their mission field. Europe itself was baptized but largely unevangelized. Millions who had been christened as infants had never heard the gospel of free grace in a language they understood. The Reformation was, before it was anything else, a missionary movement to its own continent.
Mission in the Mother Tongue
The engine of that mission was the Bible in the common tongue. Every vernacular translation of the sixteenth century was a missionary act: Luther’s German New Testament of 1522, Tyndale’s English of 1526, the French of Olivétan in 1535, and many more. The conviction behind them was Tyndale’s, that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue. (See Tyndale’s New Testament.)
Tyndale also knew men who carried the gospel further. In the preface to The Parable of the Wicked Mammon he mentions a faithful companion, whose identity is uncertain, who had left him and
taken another voyage upon him, to preach Christ where, I suppose, he was never yet preached.1 William Tyndale
Tyndale’s prayer for him is the prayer of every sending church: that God, who put it in his heart to go, would send His Spirit with him, comfort him, and bring his purpose to good effect.
Geneva as a Missionary Center
No city did more to send preachers than Calvin’s Geneva. Calvin wrote his Institutes, he told King Francis I, chiefly for his countrymen the French, “multitudes of whom I perceived to be hungering and thirsting after Christ, while very few seemed to have been duly imbued with even a slender knowledge of him.”2 Refugees poured into Geneva from France and elsewhere; many were trained there and sent back. The Academy of Geneva, founded by Calvin in 1559, served as a training ground for French pastors.3
The results were extraordinary. France was closed to Protestant worship by law, and preachers who entered it went at the risk of their lives. Yet by 1562, by one estimate, there were perhaps two million Protestants and nearly 1,250 Reformed churches in France, flourishing despite repeated royal censures and harsh persecution.4 Many of those congregations were planted or pastored by men Geneva had trained and sent. (See The Huguenots.)
The First Protestant Mission to the New World
Geneva also sent the first Protestant missionaries to the Americas. In 1555 the French naval officer Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon founded a small colony on an island in Guanabara Bay, near modern Rio de Janeiro. He wrote asking for settlers and ministers, and with the support of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the church of Geneva answered. In November 1556 a party set out that included two pastors, Pierre Richier and Guillaume Chartier, and a young shoemaker and theological student named Jean de Léry. They arrived in Guanabara Bay on March 7, 1557, and soon afterward celebrated what is generally regarded as the first Protestant Lord’s Supper in the Americas.5
The mission did not last. Villegagnon quarreled with the Genevans over the Lord’s Supper and expelled them early in 1558. Several who tried to remain were put to death for their faith, leaving behind a short statement of belief now known as the Guanabara Confession. Léry survived, returned to Geneva, and later served as a pastor in France. His account of the voyage, published in 1578, is among the earliest and most sympathetic European descriptions of the native peoples of Brazil, and he chose for its cover a verse that expressed the hope behind the whole venture: “I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: and I will sing praises unto thee among the nations” (Psalm 108:3).6
From Reformation Theology to the Modern Missionary Movement
The organized missionary movement of later centuries grew from Reformation soil. A full century and a half before that movement, the Puritan pastor John Eliot of Roxbury learned Algonkian, was preaching in it by 1647, and in 1663 published the entire Bible in that language, the first Bible printed in America. By 1674 there were fourteen towns of “praying Indians,” some 1,100 people, and Eliot had begun training native men for the ministry.7 From the other side of Europe, the Czech Brethren, heirs of John Hus, survived generations of persecution to become the seed from which the eighteenth-century Moravian Brethren, and much of the modern missionary movement, grew.8 The Particular Baptist William Carey, whose Enquiry of 1792 launched the modern missionary era, was a Calvinist who believed that God’s sovereign purpose to save His elect from every nation was the strongest possible reason to go, not a reason to stay home.
The link is not accidental. The doctrines the Reformers recovered are missionary doctrines. If salvation is by grace alone, no people is too degraded to receive it. If it is through faith alone, it requires no prior mastery of Latin rites. If Scripture alone is the rule, it must be translated into every tongue. And if all things are to the glory of God alone, then the nations must be summoned to give Him that glory (Psalm 96:3; Romans 15:8–11).
Cautions and Counterarguments
The charge has some force. In the nineteenth century the German mission historian Gustav Warneck argued that the Reformers lacked a missionary vision for the non-Christian world, and he was not entirely wrong. The magisterial Reformers founded no foreign missions comparable to the Jesuits and Franciscans of their day, and some later Protestant theologians held that the Great Commission had been fulfilled by the apostles. A fair account must admit this.
But circumstances explain much. The Protestant territories of the sixteenth century were fighting for their survival. The sea routes to Asia, Africa, and the Americas were controlled by Catholic Spain and Portugal, whose monarchs sponsored missions as part of their empires. The Brazil mission shows what happened when Protestants did get a foothold: it depended on a Catholic-born colonial commander, and it collapsed when he turned against it.
Mission and empire must not be confused. The Guanabara venture was bound up with a French colonial project, and later Protestant missions were often carried on the ships of trading companies and empires. Eliot’s work shows the cost. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, the “praying Indians” sided with the English, yet panicked settlers confined them to an island in Boston Harbor. The war destroyed most copies of Eliot’s Bible and all but four of the Indian towns, and it undermined native trust in the English and English interest in native missions.9 The gospel does not need a flag to travel, and its credibility suffers when it is mistaken for one. The Reformers’ own convictions supply the corrective: the kingdom of Christ advances by the Word and the Spirit, not by the sword.
Mission begins at home but does not end there. The Reformers’ great achievement was to re-evangelize a nominally Christian Europe. That remains a pressing need in every country where Christianity has become a cultural inheritance rather than a living faith. But Christ’s command reaches to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8), and heirs of the Reformation must never use the needs near at hand as an excuse to neglect the nations.
Why It Still Matters
The Reformation began with a man in a monastery cell discovering that the righteousness of God is a gift. It spread because others could not keep that discovery to themselves. Luther preached it, Tyndale translated it, Calvin trained men to carry it, Huguenot pastors crossed the border with it at the risk of their lives, and a handful of Genevans sailed across an ocean to sing it among the nations.
Every church that names the Reformers as its fathers inherits their burden. “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:14–15).
