The Challenge to Gilded Age Methodism

In my last post I described how evangelical missionaries were often agents of cultural sensitivity. William Taylor, for example, encouraged Xhosa converts in South Africa to continue using “Dala,” “Tixo,” or “Inkosi,” their native terms for God. For Jay Case, author of An Unpredictable Gospel, this was evidence of missionaries’ concern for native empowerment. “To be sure,” he writes, “many missionaries attempted to impose their will on others, and themes of resistance may effectively describe those who did not accept the message brought by missionaries. However, the missionary encounter did not simply encompass imposition and resistance, as many scholars have painted it, or simple proclamation and acceptance, as many evangelicals have described it.” For colonized peoples in the two-thirds world, Case suggests, missionaries were far more preferable than Western corporations or nation-states.