In Christianity, evangelism is the act of preaching the gospel with the intention of sharing the message and teachings of Jesus Christ.
This timeline of Christian missions chronicles the global expansion of Christianity through a listing of the most significant missionary outreach events.
A Christian mission is an organized effort for the propagation of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they do mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission. Missionaries preach the Christian faith, and provide humanitarian aid. Christian doctrines permit the provision of aid without requiring religious conversion. However, Christian missionaries are implicated in the genocide of indigenous peoples. Around 100,000 native people in California, U.S., or 1/3 of the native population, are said to have died due to missions.
In Christianity, the Great Commission is the instruction of the resurrected Jesus Christ to his disciples to spread the gospel to all the nations of the world. The Great Commission is outlined in Matthew 28:16–20, where on a mountain in Galilee Jesus calls on his followers to make disciples of and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Chosen People Ministries (CPM) is a Messianic Jewish nonprofit organization which engages in Christian evangelism to Jews. It is headquartered in New York City and currently led by Mitch Glaser, who was raised Jewish and converted to Christianity.
Ethnos360, formerly known as New Tribes Mission (NTM), is an international, theologically evangelical Christian mission organization based in Sanford, Florida, United States. Ethnos360 has approximately 2,300 missionaries in more than 20 nations.
The Venture Center was a collaborative Christian mission base located on a 15-acre campus in Pasadena, California. It has moved to a virtual "hub" approach, and sold the campus in 2019. The Venture Center sought to connect other like-minded organizations around prayer, research, innovation, media, education, strategy, and mobilization with a continued focus on unreached people groups. The U.S. Center for World Mission archives now reside at the Ralph D. Winter Research Center, which houses collections of Ralph D. Winter and Donald McGavran and other special collections. Many Christian ministries had their genesis at the center or resided for a season before moving on to new locations throughout the world.
In Christianity, missional living is the adoption of the posture, thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in order to engage others with the gospel message. The missional church movement, a church renewal movement predicated on the necessity of missional living by Christians, gained popularity at the end of the twentieth century due to advocates like Tim Keller and others in the Gospel and Our Culture Network. Advocates contrast missional living with the concept of a select group of "professional" missionaries, emphasizing that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
WEC International is an interdenominational mission agency of evangelical tradition which focuses on evangelism, discipleship and church planting, through music and the arts, serving addicts and vulnerable children, through Christian education, missionary and church leadership training, medical and development work, Bible translation, literacy and media production, in order to help local Christians share the gospel cross-culturally. WEC emphasises the importance of shared life in a local church as a vital expression of Christian life. WEC prioritises the planting of churches among indigenous people groups and unreached people groups, who have little or no access to the Christian gospel.
Redemptoris missio, subtitled On the permanent validity of the Church's missionary mandate, is an encyclical by Pope John Paul II published on 7 December 1990. The release coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Vatican II's Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity, Ad gentes. It is devoted to the subject of "the urgency of missionary activity" and in it the pope wished "to invite the Church to renew her missionary commitment."
Christians have used many different approaches to spread Christianity via the practice of evangelism. Christianity began with only a few different evangelistic approaches, but over the years, many different forms of evangelism have been employed by various groups to spread their faith. Many of these forms of evangelism are often employed in only certain parts of the world by Christians in different geographical areas. In particular, most new approaches to evangelism today have arisen out of Europe or the United States, especially when new technologies are used for the effort of evangelism.
Ralph Dana Winter was an American missiologist and Presbyterian missionary who helped pioneer Theological Education by Extension, raised the debate about the role of the church and mission structures and became well known as the advocate for pioneer outreach among unreached people groups. He was the founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, William Carey International University, and the International Society for Frontier Missiology.
The Church of the Province of Myanmar in Asia is a member church of the Anglican Communion. The province comprises the entire country of Myanmar. The current archbishop of Myanmar and bishop of Yangon is Stephen Than Myint Oo.
Frontier Missions is a Christian missiological term referring to the natural pioneering of the gospel among ethno-cultural and ethno-linguistic population segments where there is no indigenous church. The phrase was originally used with reference to Roman Catholic, and later Protestant, mission stations in the Western United States.
Christianity is a minority religion in Maharashtra, a state of India. 79.8% of the population of Maharashtra are Hindus, Christian adherents being 1.0% of the population. The Roman Catholic archdiocese whose seat is in Maharashtra is Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay. There are two different Christian ethnic communities in Maharashtra: one is East Indians who are predominantly Roman Catholic and another is Marathi Christians, predominantly Protestant with a small Roman Catholic population. The Catholics in Maharashtra are mainly concentrated in coastal Maharashtra, specially Vasai, Mumbai, Raigad and are known as East Indians, were evangelized by Portuguese missionaries during 15th-16th century. Protestants, who reside throughout the Maharashtra, being significant in Ahmednagar, Solapur, Pune Aurangabad and Jalna are called Marathi Christians, Who were evangelized by British and American missionaries during British rule in India. The Church of North India has dioceses in the state and is a large Protestant church with full communion with the Anglican Church.
Christianity in the 20th century was characterized by an accelerating secularization of Western society, which had begun in the 19th century, and by the spread of Christianity to non-Western regions of the world.
World Gospel Mission (WGM) is an interdenominational Christian holiness missionary agency headquartered in Marion, Indiana, United States. Aligned with the Wesleyan Holiness tradition of Protestantism, WGM was founded on 10 July 1910 in University Park, Iowa as the Missionary Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Holiness. As of 2018, WGM operates in 23 countries and supports 236 full-time missionaries, in addition to short-term team members and volunteers.
The Joshua Project is a Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, United States, which seeks to coordinate the work of missionary organizations to track the ethnic groups of the world with the fewest followers of evangelical Christianity. To do so, it maintains ethnologic data to support Christian missions. It also tracks the evangelism efforts among 17,000 people groups worldwide — a people group being "the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement," according to the project's website — to identify people groups as of yet unreached by Christian evangelism.
In Christianity, an unreached people group refers to an ethnic group without an indigenous, self-propagating Christian church movement. Any ethnic or ethnolinguistic nation without enough Christians to evangelize the rest of the nation is an "unreached people group". It is a missiological term used by Evangelical Protestants. The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization defines a people group as "the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance." "Nation" is sometimes used interchangeably for "people group". The term is sometimes applied to ethnic groups in which less than 2% of the population is Evangelical Protestant Christian, Including nations where other forms of Christianity are prevalent such as Western Catholicism, Eastern Christianity or Lutheranism.
The Boro Baptist Church Association (BBCA) is a Baptist Christian denomination in the state of Assam. Established in 1927 by the American Baptist Missionaries and later nurtured by Australian Baptist Missionary Society ABMS. It consists of 219 churches and fellowships with a total population 40,000 above and 18,000 plus baptized members. The BBCA has its headquarters in the Tukrajhar Baptist Mission compound in Chirang district of Bodoland, Assam. BBCA is working in partnership with Baptist World Alliance, Global Interaction (Australia), Asian Pacific Baptist Federation, Seva Bharat, Missionaries Upholders Trust, Inspire India and Tura Baptist Church in Church Plantation and community development ventures to bring transformation in the lives of people, spiritually and economically. The motto of the church is "Arise and Build" Nehemiah 2:18
