Jon P. DePriest
From college campuses and the Student Volunteer Movement to elaborate conferences, Americans pushed for a new commitment to overseas missions around the turn of the century. Fredrik Franson, revivalist and founder of the Scandinavian Alliance Mission, sought to Send the Light of the gospel to the entire world. Established in 1890, as an organization to send missionaries to foreign fields, the Mission urged its workers to be culturally sensitive, evangelize, and plant churches. In 1949, the Scandinavian Alliance Mission became The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM).
The history of TEAM illuminates a missing component in our understanding of how fundamentalism became embedded in American society. TEAM balanced religious distinctiveness with evangelical conformity, making it both a success and a failure. As an institution, it demonstrated the outcome of visionary fundamentalist leadership and became a standard for successful non-denominational parachurch organizations. But over the same period, TEAM de-emphasized the power of the individual before God and stressed practicality. Bureaucratic structure, coupled with increasing political compromises, increasingly constrained the evangelical mission through organizational control. While scholars portray a natural inclination of institutions to lose vision over time, TEAM demonstrates how active leadership within the organizational environment channeled the institution down a particular path.
This study follows a chronological format with allowances for important thematic divergence. TEAM’s history is filled with dynamic men and women who illustrate change in American culture as well as their work in overseas missions. Separate chapters on women’s roles after World War I and how China and Japan were affected during World War II bring a personal touch to the pages. The final stage of institutional growth and a modern utility for the evangelical mission emerges as TEAM reframed the evangelical mission within the burgeoning Cold War paradigm.
Dr. Jon DePriest is the Chair of the History/Social Science Department at San Diego Christian College, where he has previously served as the VP of Academics and of Operations. Born in San Diego, he became a graduate of SDCC with a B.A. in History (1984). He earned his M.A. in History from San Diego State University (1990), and a Ph.D. in American Studies at Claremont Graduate University with emphases in Constitutional history and American religious history (2001). Send the Light is his first published book.
Dr. DePriest has been a keynote speaker in the field of education, reviews books for academic journals, and has been a faculty member at San Diego Christian College since 1989. He has been married since 1982 and has three daughters. The DePriest family currently resides in Santee, California.
The evangelical mission drove Franson. He saw himself as God’s chosen messenger to deliver the message of salvation through Jesus Christ to the world. He spent nearly ten years in Europe conducting revival meetings from country to country, even into Germany by 1890. He experienced opposition in most locations as his message challenged existing structures of authority and even leaders of the Mormon presence in those countries. European opposition attacked from entrenched authorities and superb organization and became increasingly burdensome. He continued to preach, believing God guided him. For Franson, God guided his next step through the well-known missionary to China—J. Hudson Taylor.
Itinerant evangelism showed that one man could be a force in the world through the preaching of the gospel. Franson had not thought much about a career change—he preached as long as he believed that God brought results. While he continued his itinerant ministry, a transformation occurred in the way missionary work preceded. Interdenominational “faith” missions blossomed in the late nineteenth century and almost every believer became aware of J. Hudson Taylor and his China Inland Mission. . . . The “faith” mission goal of enculturation for missionaries required them to learn how to communicate within the rules and regulations of established cultural behavior. The missionary internalized normal patterns of everyday life in order to contextualize insights of the culture as a conduit for bringing the message of the gospel to the inhabitants. China Inland Mission missionaries lived among the people to whom they sought to bring ministry in order to have a greater identity with them.
A “faith” mission lacked denominational assistance; therefore, God took on the role as supplier of the individual missionary. Generally, the missionaries raised money without direct personal or institutional solicitation of funds. They gained income through informing church audiences and praying. For many religious communities of the western world, the idea of “faith” missions presented an approach based on unsound planning. For others it possessed an incredible appeal in the faith principles.
. . . It was no more than a simple plea from Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission that moved Franson in a new direction. Taylor repeatedly requested more missionaries for China through the years. Usually the number increased little by little, until December 1889 when he asked for 1,000 new missionaries to come to China and evangelize the 250 million people in its deepest inland provinces. Taylor printed his appeal in China Inland Mission’s publication China’s Millions and other religious publications of the day picked it up. The program was logically presented:
if one thousand whole-hearted evangelists, male and female, were set free and kept free for this special work, they might reach the whole number of China’s millions before the end of 1895, and this allowing two years of the five for study of the language and preparation for the work. Estimating the population of China as we do at 250 million, there will be about 1,000 days by each of the 1,000 evangelists, every creature in China could be reached in three years’ time, leaving the evangelist two or three Sundays for rest each month.
Franson heard the message in Germany while training evangelists and continuing to preach. He prayed and later announced that God called him to recruit ten percent of the 1,000 of Taylor’s group. He organized the German Alliance Mission and sent out several of his students to China in a couple weeks. Then, he planned a trip back to America to gather others for this endeavor. After placing a brief announcement in the Chicago Bladet, Franson boarded a ship for America.
