THERE IS A GAP: The Great Omission From The Great Commission

THERE IS A GAP: The Great Omission From The Great Commission

The modern missions movement has been shaped by many men and women of God who have taken the Great Commission off the pages of their bibles and sought to obey it with their lives. These extravagant “Yeses” echo throughout history and give 21st-century missionaries hope to pick up the baton and charge forward to the finish line of the gospel in every nation. We know it is God who places people groups and nations on the hearts of human beings and compels them to leave behind what is comfortable and to go into places they would have never imagined. These weak broken humans who get touched by God's heart and lay their lives down to be missionaries are often forgotten and rarely celebrated but the inheritance they leave behind somehow survives generation after generation, waiting to be picked up once again. I believe this is the story of African Americans and missions.

Over the last 100 years, missions has evolved and developed so much so that we now know which nations and people groups have had a gospel witness and which ones have yet to be reached with the gospel. We know where they are, who they are, and how many there are. A quick glance at the world missions force today will show that the church in the U.S. sends out most of the world's missionaries. Yet out of all of the missionaries sent out, only one percent of those missionaries are black. 

There is a gap. 

Where are the black missionaries? There are a number of people going and being funded to go but why are there barely any black people joining the contribution to finish the task of the Great Commission? 

The Great Commission wasn't just given to a few believers or a few denominations. It is the mission of the entire church! So I ask then, why so few black laborers on the field? What have been the stumbling blocks in the path of black laborers being sent out to the harvest? 

There seems to have been a great omission from the Great Commission.

By this point, you may feel that you’ve already read this article somewhere out there on the internet, and maybe you have, but I want to talk about how the greatest missions mobilization initiative in world history could have been the contributing factor to the lack of black missionaries on the field today. But first, let's talk about the history of black people in missions in America. 

According to popularized history, many have been told that Adoniram Judson, Jr was the first American missionary who was sent overseas to modern-day Burma (1812). But in fact, he was not the first missionary, he was the first white missionary. The first person to leave the shores of America for the sake of the gospel was an African American man named George Liele who left in 1783 for Jamaica, 30 years before Mr. Judson did, making Goerge Liele America's first missionary. An eerily similar story emerges when we look at who was the first single woman missionary sent from America. It has been taught and believed to be Lottie Moon, who sailed for China in 1873. In fact, it was an African American woman named Betsey Stockton who sailed for the Sandwich Islands (modern-day Hawaii) in 1822.

You might be asking why that is even important? I mean, what does it matter if the first missionaries were black or white? Well, if a black man and black woman are the “firsts” in American history to be missionaries, then the near absence of black people in modern missions makes no sense. How is it that black people were mobilized and sent to the missions field even in the midst of slavery but now are nearly nonexistent in the modern-day missions movement? Many of us have never heard of George Liele and Betsy Stockton so it’s no surprise that African Americans are unaware of the history and the leadership role they have had in missions in America. 

This brings us back to the statement I made earlier concerning the greatest missions mobilization initiative being a major stumbling block to the historic participation of black people in missions. This well-known missions initiative is known as the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM). Founded in 1886, SVM sought to recruit college and university students across the United States for missionary service abroad. By the end of the first year of mobilization, 2,200 young men and women had declared their purpose to become foreign missionaries. It is estimated that over its forty-year run, 20,000 long-term cross-cultural missionaries were mobilized and sent into the nations of the earth. One hundred and sixty-seven colleges were visited and mobilized by people associated with the Student Volunteer Movement. Those colleges were exclusively Ivy league and predominantly white universities while the predominantly black universities were left out. Although President Lincoln had passed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed blacks from slavery over twenty years before the start of the Student Volunteer Movement, the stigma that many whites held about blacks did not change. African Americans were not seen as contributors to society, which is why black colleges were overlooked when the leaders of the SVM began mobilizing laborers to the Great Commission.

SVM had, by and large, defined what a laborer looked like, and they weren’t black. The environments that SVM recruited and mobilized from point to the wealth, prestige, and privilege that validated young white students for the mission field. They not only had the finances, but they had the family name and support. The recruitment of these kinds of people left African Americans sitting on the bench in the world's most notable missions movement of the last 150 years. The Student Volunteer Movement thought impactful, effectively ended black participation in American missions. Therefore, it cannot be the model of mobilizing for the modern-day missions movement.

This mobilization style is not the future of missions from the church in America. It will only hinder the church from finishing the task of the Great Commission. We must begin to ask how we can make room and space for black laborers. How we can provide an onramp into global missions that is safe and accessible to the black community? How can we bridge this gap so that the baton can be successfully passed from George Liele and Betsey Stockton into the hands of a new generation of African Americans who take up their part in finishing the task of the Great Commission? African Americans can no longer be omitted from the very movement that they pioneered. The destiny of the black church to have an irreplaceable part in the last great global missions thrust is rooted, not only in the Scriptures but in their rich history in missions from America. They were the first.