The Missionary Impulse
The Missionary Impulse
This chapter investigates the broader global context that generated the nineteenth-century missionary revival, which laid the foundation for missionary organizations like the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Witnessing the rise of revolutionary anti-clerical forces swell in the late eighteenth century, the founders of both missionary societies lived during a period of deep anxiety about the fate of Christianity. Missionary leaders channeled these anxieties. They recruited pious young men and sent them across the globe with the hopes of winning new converts as a way to combat the forces of secularism. This chapter argues that anxiety and optimism formed the dual pillars that propped up the nineteenth- century German missionary mind.
Keywords: pietism, Jesuits, secularism, voluntary organizations, ultramontanism, missionary work, Age of Revolutions
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