This is an excellent post and I commend it to my readers. The way Anglo-Catholicism has gone–especially on this side of the Atlantic–one wouldn’t normally associate it with missions but here we are. I have a couple of comments to make:
It was not enough, Pusey argued, based on Romans 10:14, for Bibles to be simply translated and distributed around the globe without a teacher of the faith to proclaim the message of the gospel.
I attend a Bible study at my church led by Dr. R. Lamar Vest, former president of the American Bible Society. One of his objectives as president of that organisation was to get it past just translating and distributing Bibles and facilitate the reading and studying of the Bible as well. Obviously sending “boots on the ground” was beyond the Society’s mission but the recognition that it’s necessary to do more than just get the Bible out the door goes back a long way in Christian missions, and still needs to be emphasised.
Since Protestant churches overall did not seem to be earnest for missions, Stephen Neill notes that this was the era of “voluntary societies, dependent on the initiative of consecrated individuals, and relying for financial support on the voluntary gifts of interested Christians.”
I got in a lot of trouble for pointing this out based on another source, and you can see the online food fight that followed in my post The Reformation and Missions: Theology and Doctrine. The tricky part has been how to integrate the churches founded outside of the home country with those within, and that issue is very much with us today, as I pointed out for my own church in Some Thoughts on the General Council Agenda for the 2026 Church of God General Assembly. There are numerous solutions with uneven success (the Anglican Communion is a prime example of that) but I think that, for all its difficulties, Modern Pentecost has finally matched Roman Catholicism’s ability to expand Christianity outside of a “home base.” That, in turn, was laid out by none other than Roland Allen, who was mentioned at the end of the piece and whose work is linked to in my post Modern Pentecost’s Use of an Anglican’s Missionary Method.
Positive Infinity 