Evangelistic associations targeting university students are sustained by a broad evangelical impulse to share faith in every possible way. In the early national period in the United States, for example, the determination to be aggressive about planting the Gospel in the vast new territories of the Louisiana Purchase captured the imaginations of Congregationalists in New England, Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic region, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists as well as of newer groups like the Disciples of Christ. The era saw expanded foreign trade and the growth of the British Empire, and some Americans also felt the urge to convert the world. As in the colonial era, the first targets were the “heathen” of North America. The Connecticut Missionary Association, established in 1798, produced the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine to interest people in this work. A CongregationalPresbyterian Plan of Union in 1801 had as part of its purpose the efficient preaching of the gospel in the West. The Union accelerated efforts and contributed to the founding in New York City in 1826 of the American Home Missionary Association.
Meanwhile, a few students at Williams College in western Massachusetts expressed their interest in foreign missions. During their years at Andover Seminary in Boston, these and other students pursued this interest and gained the support of the General Association of Massachusetts. The same year (1810), Connecticut and Massachusetts Congregationalists cooperated to form the AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS FOR FOREIGN Missions. This society sent its first party of missionaries to India in 1812.
Aboard ship, however, Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice changed their minds about Congregationalism and embraced Baptist views (see JUDSON FAMILY). This led in 1814 to the creation of the General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Mission. Both societies recruited workers and expanded their global reach. Their contact with other cultures gave them influence over the American perception of other peoples, religions, and cultures and sometimes translated into influence in American foreign policy.
These early missionary societies—like the European Protestant missionary societies that preceded them—were denominational in intent (see MISSIONARY ORGANIZATIONS). By the mid-nineteenth century, non-denominational evangelistic associations took on specific tasks and invited a cooperative approach to missionary outreach. Representative of these groups is the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands (WUMS), established in November 1860 in New York by Sarah Doremus and women from six denominations. The first North American agency to send single female missionaries, the WUMS drew inspiration from a similar British endeavor and worked especially among WOMEN and children, and it soon had placed missionaries around the world. Part of the era’s growing interest in “women’s work for women,” the WUMS sent women to the secluded women to whom traditional missionaries seldom had access. By the end of the century, a long list of such nondenominational mission agencies recruited workers for worldwide evangelism. Between 1900 and 1920, for example, societies promoting village evan-gelism originated in India under the auspices of the Ramabai Mukti Mission, an agency led by Indians, and in England as The Fellowship for Evangelising Britain’s Villages. Such local agencies worked side-by-side with others that had national constituencies in view.
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