Missionary

A missionary is sent, and the sending is the whole of the office: the word is simply the Latin for the same idea the Greek gives as apostle.

Sent across a boundary

What distinguishes the missionary is the crossing of a boundary, of place, of culture, or of religion, to carry the faith to those who do not hold it, whether in a distant land or a near one, so the office is defined by its outward and boundary-crossing direction rather than by a particular rank. Missionaries may be clergy or lay, members of religious orders founded for the purpose or sent by mission societies, and their work has ranged from preaching and conversion to the founding of schools, hospitals and translations.

A history of light and shadow

The missionary movement, especially the great Christian expansion of the modern centuries, is inseparable from the history of European empire, and an honest account holds together its genuine religious motivation and its entanglement with colonial power, since missions both served and sometimes resisted the colonial order, and their record includes both the preservation of languages and cultures and their suppression. The sending of missionaries is not confined to Christianity: Buddhism spread across Asia through comparable sending, and modern Islam and other traditions maintain missionary activity of their own. The office, in every case, is that of one sent across a line to bring a faith to those beyond it.

Formal missionary training and sending organisations are a relatively late development: for most of Christian history missionaries were simply clergy or members of religious orders assigned to a new field, without any specialised preparation beyond their ordinary formation. The nineteenth century voluntary missionary society, funded by subscription and independent of any single denomination's hierarchy, changed that, and the twentieth century added dedicated training in linguistics, translation and cross-cultural adaptation, most visibly through organisations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators, which have built much of the world's descriptive linguistic scholarship on previously unwritten languages as a by-product of Bible translation work.

Access has become the central practical problem of the modern office. Many countries restrict or forbid missionary visas outright, and missionaries working in those settings often enter as teachers, aid workers or businesspeople, a practice called tentmaking after Paul's own trade, which raises its own ethical questions about disclosure that missionary organisations debate openly. Short-term mission trips, lasting days or weeks rather than years, have also become a large part of how Western churches now practise mission, a shift from the career missionary model that some mission scholars welcome as broadening participation and others criticise as producing limited lasting impact for the resources spent.