the medieval mission and evangelism...the confines of the roman empire, not exclusively, of course,...

Church History to the Reformation

Transcript - CH506 Church History to the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 13 of 24CH506

The Medieval Mission and Evangelism

Church History to the Reformation

This is lecture thirteen—Medieval Missions and Evangelism. Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me invite you to join in prayer with me again as we start this class. Let us pray. Eternal God, we ask that you would open our minds and hearts for that which you have to teach us today, that we might serve you more faithfully through this name of the strong Son of God. Amen.

From its very earliest years, the Christian church has been a missionary organization. In fact, on the very day it was established that first Pentecost, literally thousands of new Christians were born into the faith through its bold witness. You can recall the discussion of this movement in our text—Kenneth Scott Latourette writings, page 65-108—in what he called “The Sweep of Christianity Across the Greco-Roman world.” Some of you may even have read portions or all of Michael Green’s fine little book Evangelism in the Early Church or perhaps F. F. Bruce’s study, The Spreading Flame. Many Christians suppose that this missionary spirit, however, died out by the close of the Roman Era then in fact it languished throughout the Middle Ages only to be revived in the eighteenth century in the Great Pilatus Movement, particularly the work of the Moravians and in the nineteenth century through the missionary outreach of the Evangelical Church in what came to be called “The Great Century of Missionary Expansion.”

In actuality, the church remained a missionary church across the centuries, some eras with stronger emphasis than others, but in every age, the church, seeking to be faithful to the commission that Christ gave it, has been a missionary organization and has attempted to do its missionary work. And it’s the story in the Middle Ages that I would like for us to focus our attention on as we look at this period of history together today. Latourette picks this story up in his book pages 385 and following. But those of you who may wish to examine this question more deeply can turn to books such as J. T. Addison’s The Medieval Missionary, published in 1936 in New York by IMC; or perhaps even those chapters on

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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missions in the Cambridge Medieval History Series.

Our story actually begins around the year 600 AD. Before we dive directly into it, it might be helpful to provide a bit of historical background. Christianity has been born in a politically stable world under what we call the Roman Peace or the Pax Romana. For over four centuries the church had developed largely within the confines of the Roman Empire, not exclusively, of course, because a good number of brave, faithful missionaries had carried the message to many other parts of the world—indeed, to the very ends of the earth. Within the Roman Empire, however, the church was well-established by the beginning of the Middle Ages, having grown and prospered in many parts of the Empire.

By 600 AD, however, the situation politically and socially had already started to change. The unity of the Empire had been shattered by the influx of Germanic tribes who had crossed the line and were in the process of establishing themselves as independent states—The Burgundians in the Valley, the Visigoths in Spain and Southern France, the Vandals in North Africa, and in Italy the Lombards. Many of these peoples had been converted to Christianity, albeit an Arian form of Christianity. The Franks dominated most of France in the Low Countries. Many of these folk had adopted an Orthodox form of Christianity under Clovis by the end of the fifth century

To the North were the fierce Saxon tribes, still largely following a kind of nature religion. To the East, extending through modern Russia, lay the kingdom of the Slavs and Avars who worship tribal gods. On the Isles of Great Britain, the Picts, the Scots, and the Angles had established themselves during the fifth century so that by 600 AD, these tribes had sorted themselves out into seven small kingdoms known collectively as the Heptarchy.

It was this situation in the Roman Empire that Gregory the Great entered as he was appointed bishop of Rome in the late sixth century. Gregory is a remarkable individual. He had already been a mayor or prefect of Rome, having gained that position by the age of thirty. Soon after that appointment, he sold all of his considerable possessions and with that money established some six monasteries and gave great sums of money to charity. He in fact lived in one of those monasteries for a time and was then appointed a deacon of Rome; his specific job was dispensing food and clothing to the poor. But then in 578 the bishop of Rome made him his own representative to the Emperor’s Court in



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Constantinople. Finally by 590 he was appointed bishop of Rome himself.

He was a remarkable individual, an astute political leader, a deeply committed pastor, and for our purposes today, perhaps most important, a man with a deep missionary spirit. Italy at that time was, of course, in desperate conditions. Famine had swept the land. There was threat politically by the Lombards. Gregory himself describes the situation, “Everywhere we look we see mourning. From all sides we hear lamentations. Cities are destroyed. Military camps are overturned. Fields are laid waste. We see some led captive, some mutilated, others murdered, and Rome herself who once seemed to be the very mistress of the world, what has remained of her is abundantly afflicted with tremendous misfortunes. And we, those few of us who remain, are daily attacked by the sword and still daily attacked by numerous woes.”

The Byzantine Empire to the East, which we’ll have opportunity to examine more closely in our next lecture, was preoccupied with its own struggles, particularly against Persia and had little interest in helping Rome or the West with its woes. Consequently the bishop of Rome was left to do what he could to help—to secure food to stave off the starvation which was plaguing the land, to care for the sick, to bring order to the church. He also, in fact, negotiated a peace with the Lombards, thereby establishing a kind of precedence or papal independence even in temporal affairs. And this was enhanced further by the fact that over the first five centuries the Roman bishop had been given very substantial lands in Italy, often called the Patrimony of Peter,. And it’s from the income of those lands that the bishop of Rome would draw funds to feed the hungry and help the poor.

Unwittingly, then, Gregory is drawn into the political realm and proves to be an astute political leader, but more than that he was a deeply concerned pastor. We see this in the remarkable document which comes out of this era and from his pen called “A Pastoral Rule.” This “Pastoral Rule” was a kind of handbook for pastoral theology, suggesting on how one might go about premarital counseling or preaching or dealing with troublemakers in the church or the like. The opening lines are classic. “No one ventures to teach any art,” Gregory wrote, “unless he has learned it after deep thought. With what rationalist then would be the pastoral office if under taken by the unfit? Seeing that the government of souls is the very art of arts, for who does not realize that the



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wounds of the mind are more hidden than the internal wounds of the body. There are some who investigate spiritual precepts with shrewd diligence, but the life they live tramples on what they have penetrated with their understanding. The pastor should find joy not in ruling over others, but in helping them. When these little ones are enduring the ways of temptation, they will have recourse to the pastor’s understanding as to a mother’s bosom and in the solace of his comforting words, find cleansing for themselves from their sin.”

We can profit not only from reading this “Pastoral Rule,” and those of you who may want to do so can find it in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers second series, Volume 12. The second half of the book deals with Gregory’s writings and includes “The Pastoral Rule.” You’ll also find his writing known as the “Moralia,” the exegetical study of Job which he produced, or his “Dialogues: The Study of Miracles.” Some of you may know Gregory through the music, often called the Gregorian Chants, which have added to our understanding of the liturgy. Gregory was a deeply concerned pastor who wanted to see his pastoral colleagues encouraged and built up in the faith and in their work.

Primarily, however, we want to see Gregory as a missionary figure, for not only was he an astute political leader and a concerned pastor, but he was a great missionary spirit. And we see this beautifully described in the missionary outreach which began to take fruit under his leadership in the British Isles. We’re fortunate to have a full account of this by the great English church historian, the Venerable Bede. Those of you who may want to read this story can find a number of editions of the Venerable Bede’s History of the Church in England—the Penguin Press series which was first published in 1965 includes that volume in paperback form.

The Venerable Bede reports that in 596 Gregory sent the monk Augustine (now this is different form the St. Augustine whom we’ve talked about before), sent the monk Augustine with forty companions to bring the Gospel to England. His explanation of the origin of the mission has become famous. Let me read it for you. “We are told that one day some merchants who recently arrived in Rome, displayed their many wares in the crowded marketplace. Among other merchandise Gregory saw there were some boys for sale. These boys had fair complexions, fine cut features, and fair hair. Looking at them with interest, he inquired what country and what race they come from. ‘They come from Britain,’ he was told, where all the people have this appearance. Then he asked whether



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the people were Christians or whether they were still ignorant heathen. ‘They are pagans,’ he was informed. ‘What is the name of this race?’ he asked. ‘They are called Angles,’ he was told. ‘That is appropriate,” he said, ‘for they have angelic faces and it is right that they should become fellow heirs with the angels of heaven.’” Isn’t that a beautiful account?

It’s out of that experience that the great missionary outreach to England first took place. Augustine and his missionary party encouraged by Gregory arrived in Kent early in 597 AD. They were received their cordially by King Ethelbert and his wife Queen Bertha. Augustine preached and the king responded, “Your words and promises are fair indeed, but they are new and strange to us, and I cannot now accept them and abandon the age-old beliefs of the whole English nation.” Nevertheless, soon after this, Ethelbert and his wife were converted and at Christmas 597 some 10,000 others were baptized along with them into the Christian faith. Augustine established the Monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul there at Canterbury, which became not only the center for mission activities throughout the British Isles, but eventually became the very mother church, the center of the church in England and of Anglicanism around the world.

Since the mission had been sponsored by Gregory, the new churches came under Rome’s authority, following its liturgy and practice, and yet Gregory intended that it be flexible in its practice. He wrote to Augustine, “My brother, you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church in which you were brought up, but if you have found customs whether they are Roman, Gallican, or any other churches that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them and teach them to the English nation.”

Gregory also permitted Augustine to adopt and to adapt old customs to use by the church, and Augustine does this drawing in a variety of the old English customs for the praise and glory of God. Those of you who may be especially interested in mission strategy might like to look up the correspondence between Gregory and Augustine. In that you will find discussed missionary methods and strategies and attitudes. Included in that is an instruction from Gregory to Augustine on the use of money. “All money received is to be allocated under four heads,” Gregory said, “one for the bishop, another for the clergy, one for the poor, and one to maintain the church buildings.” This became the normal practice of the Middle Ages of dividing up income into those four parts.



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It’s significant, I think, that twenty-five percent was fully given to the needy, to the poor, the hungry, and this was in addition to the bishop’s funds which also were used to support the poor. In fact, some have estimated that fully a third of all total revenue of the church was used to take care of practical needs of people who were hungry or who need housing or clothing. That’s always been a deep concern and activity of the Christian church.

Now in pursuing the mission of evangelizing pagan England, Augustine also confronted the remnants of an older church, the Celtic Church, those who had survived the invasions of the fifth century. These Celtic bishops were suspicious of Augustine and his colleagues. They had a different liturgy, a different date for Easter, even a different style of haircuts for the clergy, and they organized the church in ways that were unfamiliar. Given that suspicion, Bede tells the story that reflects the problem. When these Celtic bishops as an old monk whether they ought to submit to Augustine or not, the monk replied, “Yes, of course, if he’s a man of God.” “How can we tell if he is?” And the monk answered, “If he’s gentle and humble of heart.” “But how do we determine this?” they asked. The monk answered, “Arrange for Augustine to arrive first at your meeting. If he stands up when you arrive, it will prove that he is a servant of God.” Well the meeting was arranged, Augustine arrived first, but when the Celtic Christians came in, who did not rise and they refused thereafter to accept his leadership. It’s interesting the small events upon which history turns. In fact, mutual hostility continues right down to our own day between certain branches of these Welch Celtic Christians and the English Church.

In 630 AD King Edwin of North Umbria, that is the land north of the Umber River, married a Christian woman from Kent and she brought a monk with her, Paulinas, and the whole court was converted to the faith. And Christianity was introduced into the northern parts of England and a whole new center, a major center at York was established, which in fact continues to exist as England’s second major church center, along with the southern church. By 700 AD most of England was at least nominally Christian. Following Roman Latin rites, Theodore of Tarsus was the archbishop of Canterbury. He is the one that organized church structure, diocesan arrangements, consecrated bishops for each of these. He’s the one who really consolidated order and discipline within the English Church after that part of the world was evangelized with the faith.



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It was from that church, from those Christian communities in the British Isles, that missionaries were first sent out to evangelize Europe once again. Let’s turn our thoughts for a moment upon that development. By the fifth century Christianity in Gaul, as it was then known, was over 300 years old, but the church had fallen on hard times. Clovis, the Frankish king, had been baptized along with some 3,000 of his followers by the bishop of Rheims. In turn, most of the Barbarian tribe, so called those between Paris and the Pyrenees, had also been baptized under the Merovingians, as the descendants of Clovis were known. Christianity was expanded, but secular rulers tended to dominate the church. Furthermore, it was an exceedingly nominal form of Christianity. We talked a little bit about culture faith within the Constantinian Era, and here you have it continuing now in other parts of Europe. As Gregory of Tours in the sixth century phrased it, “In these times, the church were assailed by heretics. The faith of Christ that glowed in many hearts was lukewarm in not a few. The faithful enriched the churches while the unbelievers striped them bare. Wherefore, the voice of lament was often raised alas for these our days.”

Such was the situation then on a summer’s in 575 AD, a shipload of Irish monks landed near Mount St. Michael. The leader was Columbanus, a physical giant, strong as an ox and agood preacher, who by example of disputation preaching, teaching, sometimes even feats of strength, sought to evangelize Gaul. This was the first of wave upon wave of missionaries which came from England and Ireland during the seventh and eighth centuries to bring the Gospel to the continent. Much of the strategy for doing this was through the missionary Apostolate what was called Aparagranotsio por Cristo, this voluntary exile for the purpose of spreading the Gospel. This was done through little clusters of monks, usually ten or twelve of them, who would settle in an unchurched area in Europe, establish a Christian church, evangelize, bring those people into the fellowship, teach them, and train them as leaders. And once they had established this church, they would then leave the area and move on to another unchurched part of Europe. A marvelous missionary strategy and one I think we might do well to pick up again even in our own day. Columbanus established a monastic house first at Lucile, which became the very center for the evangelization of Europe and then established some forty additional monasteries throughout Gaul using this basic strategy of missionary outreach.

The first territory to be evangelized outside the old Roman boundaries on the continent was Belgium, Holland, and Frisia.



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About 690 and Anglo-Saxon monk from Ireland arrived on the shores of Frisia with eleven of his companions. This was Willibrord, the Apostle of Frisia. He secured a papal sanction for his work, was consecrated as archbishop of Utrecht, which became the center for missionary work in that part of the world, and Alcuin, his biographer describes the success of Willibrord’s mission. “He traverse every part of the country exhorting the people in cities, villages, and forts where he had previously preached the Gospel to remain loyal to the faith and as the number of the faithful increased day-by-day, and a considerable multitude of believers came to the knowledge of God’s Word, there was tremendous growth and the church prospered.”

The best known and most successful missionary in Northern Europe was Boniface. He was a colleague of Willibrord who carried the faith into sections of what we now know as Germany. He had a remarkable ministry as Willibrord his biographer recounted. Boniface on one occasion attempted to cut down a certain oak of extraordinary size which, in fact, the locals considered to be the Oak of Jupiter. Taking courage in his hands because he was being harassed by these folk who were bitter at him for trying to destroy something they felt was a habitation of their god, he cut the first notch in the tree, but when he had made the first superficial cut, suddenly the oak crashed to the ground and burst asunder into four parts. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle, the heathen, we have reported to us, those who had been cursing, ceased to revile and began to believe and bless the Lord.

Boniface also used monks as his missionaries, including women evangelists who were very effective in part of outreach of the Gospel in Europe. He established some sixty monastic houses in Germany, the most famous at Fulda, which in fact still contains his own remains. In 747 he established an Episcopal center at Mainz, which became the center of the German Evangelistic Outreach.

It was under Charlemagne, the great warrior king who by 800 AD had largely consolidated much of the old Roman Empire, that a new feature, but one that was to become all too familiar was added to the missionary strategy; that is, the use of physical force to evangelize and promote the faith. Missionaries were sent to Westphalia to begin the work of evangelism, and they were closely followed by troops and after bitter battles, including Charlemagne’s beheading of some 4500 Saxons, the Saxons finally bowed to that authority and, in fact, received Christian baptism. Charlemagne then proclaimed his notorious capitulary in Saxony



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which reads, “If anyone out contempt for Christianity shall have despised the holy Lenten feast and shall have eat flesh, let him be punished by death. If any Saxons hereafter shall hide himself unbaptized and shall have sworn to come to baptism and remain as pagans, let him be punished by death.” This was, of course, later softened, but it stands as an early example of what we will come to see as Crusader Christianity. The attempt to win converts by force, to baptize people at the point of the sword. This kind of strategy, of course, raises questions in many of our minds, but it’s one that was established in the Middle Ages as a missionary outreach strategy and one which in fact we see replicated again and again in missionary outreach. We see this pattern, for example, in the evangelization of the Scandinavian countries to the North. In 831, the pope created an Episcopal sea in Hamborg, to serve as a center for the Scandinavian mission and Ansgar was appointed the first archbishop, known as the Apostle for the North.

In Sweden it took longer to eradicate the old paganism and to convert them to the faith. In the twelfth century, Cistercian monks led this mission and by 1164 Uppsala had become a major center for the work. The conversion of Denmark was facilitated when the German emperor, Otto I, defeated Harald, King of the Danes in the mid-tenth century. The event is described as follows: “A meeting between Emperor Otto and the King of the Danes was arranged at Morsø. There the Holy Bishop Poppa explained the faith to King Harald who carried a red hot iron in his hand and showed the king that it did not burn him. Then King Harald and the entire Danish army were baptized. After King Harald had accepted Catholicism, he sent men throughout his entire kingdom ordering that everybody should be baptized and accept the true faith, and he used force and severe punishment when he could not get their adherence otherwise.

The evangelization of Norway was brought about largely under the work of St. Olaf as he’s been come to be called to us, actually King Olaf Haraldsson who ruled from 1014-1030 AD. In fact, he got his followers to promise that they would follow him wherever he would wanted them to go and when they agreed, he announced that he’d make Christians of all of them and he punished severely those who refused and some even were killed as a result.

Iceland received Christianity through Norwegian missionaries, and we see this intriguing process of the faith being spread from one center and one region to another through this kind of missionary activity through the settlement of these little monastic



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centers, through individual evangelistic outreach, and, in fact, as we see even through military force.

Well what about missionary outreach to the East? Well, during the eighth century, Christian expansion to the East mostly followed the victorious armies of Charlemagne and his successors. By 805 AD, for example, Charlemagne had conquered the Czechs, and in 845, fourteen Czech chieftains were baptized at Regensburg. The conversion of Moravia and Bohemia came through two celebrated brothers, Cyril and Methodius. In 863 King Rastislav of Moravia petitioned the emperor for missionaries to preach the Gospel and the emperor sent Cyril and Methodius. They had actually grown up in Thessalonica. They knew Slavonic customs and, in fact, contributed significantly to their culture. Cyril invented an alphabet, the ancestor to modern Russian. He translated portions of the Bible into that language, and after four fruitful years in Moravia, they were summoned to Rome and ordained as bishops. Cyril died, but Methodius returned to become the first archbishop of Moravia, and from Moravia, then, the faith spread into Bohemia.

You see a marked difference between Eastern and Western missions. In the East, new language and liturgy developed as mission tools, the faith was presented not as a foreign element, but as something profoundly indigenous to the culture, and we see new principles beginning to emerge of missionary strategy. And it was very effective for the Czechs came to faith in the eighth century; many Moravians and Bohemians in the ninth century through the Byzantine missionaries from Thessalonica. Bulgaria was evangelized in the mid-ninth century by German missionaries. Hungary was evangelized in the mid-tenth century, again by German missionaries, and Russia evangelized by the Greeks in the late-tenth century, and so the faith spread from place to place.

It’s important to note that during these same centuries as Christianity spread throughout Britain, Europe, and the East, some spectacular events were actually occurring in the South. There lived in Mecca, a city in Arabia, a caravan trader named Mohammed who claimed to have revelations from God. He taught the doctrines of resurrection, monotheism, justice toward the poor. He also taught that God, who he called Allah, had manifested himself through great religious figures in the past, including Jesus, but that his most complete manifestation had come in Mohammed. In 622 AD he was expelled from Mecca partly due to his lofty social ethics and he went to Medina. He died there in



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632 in this event called the Hegira. It’s usually taken as the very starting point of the Islamic faith.

Some thirty years after the Hegira, a collection of Mohammed’s sayings was drawn together in what is called the Koran, the recitation. This became the Bible of the new religion. The followers were called Muslims, one who submits himself holy to God. The religion called Islam with its stringent morality, its discipline, its simplicity. The Islamic faith sees five great pillars on which it is founded and built. The first the profession of faith—there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Secondly, the ritual prayer, third, alms giving, fourth, the fast of the month of Ramadan, and fifth, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the holy city of Islam.

Later they developed the idea of the Jehad, the holy war to spread the faith, and one needs to see the missionary strategy using force by the Christian church, alongside of that growing Islamic Jihad, the use of military force to propel the faith through battle by the Islamic forces. To understand the popularity and power of that strategy which seems like such an odd one to many of us when we hear the words of Jesus to forgive our enemies and to persuade through the power of the Gospel itself, to spread the good news not by force and through the sword, but through the very power of lifting Christ up and the compelling nature of Christ’s person and work, his death and resurrection, which draws men and women to Him.

The spread of Islam was breathtaking. The Arab army spurred by religious idealism swept seemingly everything before it—Damascus fell in 635, Jerusalem in 638, Alexandria in 643. So complete was the takeover that by 1050 there were only five bishops left in all of Africa, where literally hundreds of churches and bishops had existed before. They swept northward into the area of Constantinople, only to be held off at the very gates of the city. They swept up into Europe as well. Into Spain; the fall of Spain followed that of Africa in fact, and in 711 the Islamic general, Tariq crossed the Straits of Jebel. Gibraltar, of course, is Anglicized form of Jebel Tariq, putting those two words together. By 720, in nine years, they dominated the peninsula. They continued into France until they were stopped, as you will recall, by Charles Martel in 732 at the Battle of Tours.

Not until the late eleventh century did the fabled El Cid helped to push the Islamic forces out of Castile. The process was completed



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by 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella finally pushed the Islamic forces out Granada and Spain became once again nominally Christian. From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, then, the Mediterranean world was dominated in many ways by these Islamic forces with their powerful, militant faith. They displaced the Byzantines in Southern Italy. They also controlled the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and this set up the background for the great Crusades, which will pick up in a later lecture. One needs to see this militancy, both of Christianity and of Islam, to understand the background of the coming of the crusades.

What are we to say then about the missionary methods and strategies which emerged in the Middle Ages? When Christian missionaries ventured into pagan territory, they generally established little communities, often monastic communities, to serve as centers for their mission. They evangelized. They also planted crops. They acquired herds. They lived as normal citizens within that area. And then once they had trained the leadership and established the church, they moved out to establish churches elsewhere. And as I suggested before, this is a fascinating, and I think very useful, strategy for us to consider and perhaps replicate in certain modern forms in our own day. These groups were small, well-disciplined, rotated regularly, in close communion and communication with the mother house, with the monastic order in many cases which had sent them out, so that they were supported and prayed for, they were financially benefited; it was a part of their strategy for bringing the faith to parts of the world that did not know Christ and where the church had not yet been established.

Their strategy for preaching was basically to undermine pagan religion by comparison with Christianity. They often addressed the people in their native tongue, and, in fact, this is an enormously important learning for missionary strategy that we continue to forget over and over in our day; that in order to communicated to people, you need to speak to them in their own language, so that language study becomes an important part of missionary training. And once they speak in the native tongue, many of these Medieval missionaries tried to compare what they found in pagan religion with the sublime teachings of Christ in the Christian faith. We see this in a sermon by Willibrord. Let me quote a part of it. “It is not God that you worship, but the devil who has deceived you, O king, into the vilest error so that he might deliver your souls to eternal flame, for there is no god except the one God who created the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them.”



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Along with this they tended to paint heaven and hell in rather vivid colors.

Their concern was not primarily on theology, and here was a weakness of Medieval missions, that they took too little time to teach the faith from a theological standpoint. The assumption was that that would come later as the church was established and began to grow, but all too often evangelism became simply defined as bringing people into the faith without adequate components of teaching and training in good solid biblical theology to follow it.

The State also takes it role in Medieval missions. A form of what we might call evangelistic imperialism. The missionary endeavor was often aided by the strong arm of the State. They felt some of them that as strong fathers, they should use force for the good of the child, and they believed that this strategy was not only right, but that they could see that it was quite effective. With very few exceptions, the missionaries sought the conversion of the king in aristocracy first since the chieftains often determined the religion of their subjects, and this went hand-in-hand with this more military strategy, the clear strategy of reaching those key leaders within the society and through them gaining either access to or the right to preach to those who were their subjects. Occasionally we find examples of outright bribes of people to become Christians. Ebbo of Rheims went to Denmark where in order to win souls we have reported to us he distributed much money and added many to the Christian religion. The more things changed, the more they seemed to stay the same.

And Ansgar, the apostle to Scandinavia, tried to conciliate the Danish king with gifts, bribes in affect, in order that he might gain permission to preach to the subjects through the kingdom. These are unfortunate examples, I think, of illegitimate aims and goals, but oftentimes spurred by deep understandable desire to preach the Gospel and to win people to the faith. We need to be careful, not only for what we are preaching, but for the way we are preaching and the strategy we use in reaching out. Medieval missions provides a wonderful context within which to both to study and understand these important issues. All of us, and I hope that includes everyone, interested in evangelization and missionary outreach needs to wrestle long and hard with what it means to preach the faith faithfully and effectively in areas of the world that need the Gospel. This includes our own people right here in our own country.


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I like to think that most of those who were involved in missionary activities in the Middle Ages were faithful, humble, dedicated men and women who wanted to see people introduced to Christ and drawn into that new life and vitality which they had themselves experienced. And, in fact, I think that many, if not most, of those who are won to the faith in Europe at this time came as a result of the very power of the Gospel through the charity, patience, dedication, faithfulness of these good missionaries. Most of their names we don’t know, but they effectively preached the Gospel throughout that part of the world. By the so-called High Middle Ages—this period from about 1000 to about 1300 AD—Christianity, in fact, had become dominant over paganism in virtually the whole of Europe. And in many minds, of course, Christendom and Europe had become essentially synonymous.

I think we can be grateful to these faithful servants, these missionaries of the Middle Ages, who spread the faith, sometimes at great personal cost. And we need that kind of dedication and commitment in our day as well. Let’s be a missionary church today as it has been in its best years across the centuries.

the medieval mission and evangelism...the confines of the roman empire, not exclusively, of course,...

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