A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to promote their faith or perform ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin missionem, meaning "act of sending" or mittere, meaning "to send". The word was used in light of its biblical usage; in the Latin translation of the Bible, Christ uses the word when sending the disciples to preach The gospel in his name. The term is most commonly used for Christian missions, but can be used for any creed or ideology.
In Christianity, evangelism is the commitment to or act of publicly preaching (ministry) of the Gospel with the intention of spreading the message and teachings of Jesus Christ.
A Christian mission is an organized effort to spread Christianity to new converts. Missions involve sending individuals and groups, called missionaries, 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 ones meant simply for helping people in need. Some might choose to dedicate their whole lives to missions as well. Missionaries have the authority to preach the Christian faith, and provide humanitarian aid. Christian doctrines permit the provision of aid without requiring religious conversion.
Christianity is India's third-largest religion after Hinduism and Islam, with approximately 28 million followers, constituting 2.3 percent of India's population. According to Indian tradition, the Christian faith was introduced to India by Thomas the Apostle, who supposedly reached the Malabar Coast (Kerala) in 52 AD. According to another tradition Bartholomew the Apostle is credited with simultaneously introducing Christianity along the Konkan Coast. There is a general scholarly consensus that Christian communities were firmly established in India by the 6th century AD, including some communities who used Syriac liturgies.
Protestant Christianity entered China in the early 19th century, taking root in a significant way during the Qing dynasty. Some historians consider the Taiping Rebellion to have been influenced by Protestant teachings. Since the mid-20th century, there has been an increase in the number of Christian practitioners in China. According to a survey published in 2010 there are approximately 40 million Protestants in China.
Christianity in Japan is among the nation's minority religions. Around 1 percent of the population claims Christian belief or affiliation. Most large Christian denominations, including Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodox Christianity, are represented in Japan today. Since the mid-1990s, the majority of Japanese people are nonreligious, although many of those who are religious identify with the Shinto or Buddhist faith. Some Japanese couples are wed in Western-style ceremonies called howaito uedingu, which have been influenced by Christianity.
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was a member of the Lutheran clergy and the first Pietist missionary to India.
In the early 19th century, Western colonial expansion occurred at the same time as an evangelical revival – the Second Great Awakening – throughout the English-speaking world, leading to more overseas missionary activity. The nineteenth century became known as the Great Century of modern religious missions.
Christianity in Myanmar has a history dating to the early 18th century. According to the 2014 census, Christianity is the country's second largest religion, practiced by 6.2% of the population, primarily among the Kachin, Chin and Kayin, and Eurasians because of missionary work in their respective areas. About four-fifths of the country’s Christians are Protestants, in particular Baptists of the Myanmar Baptist Convention; Roman Catholics make up the remainder.
Missionary work of the Catholic Church has often been undertaken outside the geographically defined parishes and dioceses by religious orders who have people and material resources to spare, and some of which specialized in missions. Eventually, parishes and dioceses would be organized worldwide, often after an intermediate phase as an apostolic prefecture or apostolic vicariate. Catholic mission has predominantly been carried out by the Latin Church in practice.
Christianity was first introduced to Thailand by European missionaries. It represents 1.2% of the national population, which is predominantly Buddhist. Christians are numerically and organizationally concentrated more heavily in the north, where they make up an estimated 16% of some lowland districts and up to very high percents in tribal districts.
Christianity in Asia has its roots in the very inception of Christianity, which originated from the life and teachings of Jesus in 1st century Roman Judea. Christianity then spread through the missionary work of his apostles, first in the Levant and taking roots in the major cities such as Jerusalem and Antioch. According to tradition, further eastward expansion occurred via the preaching of Thomas the Apostle, who established Christianity in the Parthian Empire (Iran) and India. The very First Ecumenical Council was held in the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor (325). The first nations to adopt Christianity as a state religion were Armenia in 301 and Georgia in 327. By the 4th century, Christianity became the dominant religion in all Asian provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Salem is a diocese located in the city of Salem in the Ecclesiastical province of Pondicherry and Cuddalore in India.
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 majority of Christians in Maharashtra are Roman Catholics, who are mainly concentrated in coastal Maharashtra, specially Thane, Mumbai, Raigad and are known as East Indians, were evangelised 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 are recent converts evangelised 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.
The 15th century is part of the High Middle Ages, the period from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the close of the 15th century, which saw the fall of Constantinople (1453), the end of the Hundred Years War (1453), the discovery of the New World (1492), and thereafter the Protestant Reformation (1515). It also marked the later years of scholasticism and the growth of Christian humanism and other developments of the early Renaissance.
In 16th-century Christianity, Protestantism came to the forefront and marked a significant change in the Christian world.
17th-century Missionary activity in Asia and the Americas grew strongly, put down roots, and developed its institutions, though it met with strong resistance in Japan in particular. At the same time Christian colonization of some areas outside Europe succeeded, driven by economic as well as religious reasons. Christian traders were heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade, which had the effect of transporting Africans into Christian communities. A land war between Christianity and Islam continued, in the form of the campaigns of the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, a turning point coming at Vienna in 1683. The Tsardom of Russia, where Orthodox Christianity was the established religion, expanded eastwards into Siberia and Central Asia, regions of Islamic and shamanistic beliefs, and also southwest into the Ukraine, where the Uniate Eastern Catholic Churches arose.
Christianity in the 18th century is marked by the First Great Awakening in the Americas, along with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires around the world, which helped to spread Catholicism.
Characteristic of Christianity in the 19th century were Evangelical revivals in some largely Protestant countries and later the effects of modern Biblical scholarship on the churches. Liberal or modernist theology was one consequence of this. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church strongly opposed liberalism and culture wars launched in Germany, Italy, Belgium and France. It strongly emphasized personal piety. In Europe there was a general move away from religious observance and belief in Christian teachings and a move towards secularism. In Protestantism, pietistic revivals were common.
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.
