july 2002

Four years ago the world celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations� Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Measured by the standards of that document, Christian mission has contributed considerably to the enhancement of human rights.

When William Carey arrived in India to preach the Gospel, he immediately joined in the struggle to end the practice of sati, widow burning. He started newspapers and printed books to stimulate and enlarge Indian vernacular writing and readership, thereby helping to ignite India�s literary renaissance.

In 1964, in the waning days of colonialism in Africa, anthropologist Paul Bohannan paid tribute to missionary schools: �Whatever any individual Westerner may think of the missionary edifice, every African knows that it is to missionaries that they owe the beginning of the African educational system� (Africa and Africans, p. 235). Later anthropologists have explored ways in which missionaries, if unwittingly, planted the seeds of national consciousness that challenged and ultimately doomed colonial domination, bringing into increasingly sharp relief colonialism�s intrinsic suppression of human rights.

As surgeon Paul H. Brand�s �My Pilgrimage in Mission� reminds us, Christian missionaries went to India and elsewhere to bind up wounds and minister comfort to the neediest of the needy. They founded teaching hospitals that trained thousands of indigenous physicians and nurses. On another front, Frank Laubach worked ceaselessly for the spread of literacy. Thus have missionary labors contributed to human well-being and enlarged awareness of human rights.

But this self-awareness must be tempered with humility, for as contributing editor Charles R. Taber reminds us in our lead article, the various inventories of human rights inevitably fall short of the ideal. The human rights project articulated in the United Nations� Universal Declaration betrays its Western orientation: it is individualistic, legalistic, and defensive. An authentic and comprehensive understanding of human rights, Taber argues, must be grounded in the larger recognition of the inherent dignity of every person being made in the image of God.

Taber�s analysis contains both challenge and reassurance. The recognition he calls for is imperfectly incarnated in even the most exemplary missionary practice. But as long as admittedly imperfect missionary life and service are fundamentally aligned with faith, hope, and love, and as long as missionaries insist that the greatest of these is love the Gospel will produce the peaceable fruit of righteousness, quietly but inexorably transforming the human condition from bottom to top.

Also in this issue, Sherron K. George examines shifting religious alignments within Brazil today and that country�s emergence as a missionary-sending country. In our Legacy series, Joyce E. Winifred Every-Clayton shows that a central feature of the legacy of Robert Reid Kalley, Scottish missionary to Brazil, is his quiet, persistent effort to expand the bounds of religious freedom, and hence human rights. 

July 2002

In the Image of God: The Gospel and Human Rights
Charles R. Taber

 Brazil: An �Evangelized� Giant Calling for Liberating Evangelism     
Sherron K. George

Research on Protestantism in Latin America: A Bibliographic Essay
John H. Sinclair

 Harold W. Turner Remembered
John M. Hitchen

My Pilgrimage in Mission
Paul W. Brand 

The Legacy of Robert Reid Kalley
Joyce E. Winifred Every-Clayton

World Christianity by the Numbers: A Review of the World Christian Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Gerald H. Anderson

In Coming Issues

More Than We Knew: The Contribution of Missionary Photography
Paul Jenkins

From Alpine Snows to Asian Cities Through the Missionary Periodicals Database
Terry Barringer

�Blessed Reflex�: Mission as God�s Spiral for Renewal
Kenneth R. Ross

Keeping Faith with Culture: A Study of Zoroastrian Converst of the Nineteenth Century
Farshid Namdaran

Pre-Revolution Russian Mission to Central Asia: A Contextualized Legacy 
David M. Johnstone

What the Baila Believed About God: A Study in Cultural Clues to Evangelization
Dennis G. Fowler

In our Series on the Legacy of Outstanding Missionary Figures of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, articles about

Norman Anderson
Thomas Barclay
Rowland V. Bingham
George Bowen 
H�l�ne de Chappotin
Fran�ois Daubanton
John Duncan
James Gilmour
Hannah Kilham
George Leslie Mackay
Lesslie Newbigin
M. D. Opara
Constance E. Padwick
Peter Parker
Julius Richter
Elizabeth Russell
Johannes Sch�tte, S.V.D.
Bakht Singh
Mary Slessor
James Stephen
John V. Taylor
James M. Thoburn
M. M. Thomas
William Cameron Townsend
Johannes Verkuyl
William Vories