Our Access Heritage

A look at missions through the centuries

In 1731, Ludwig von Zinsendorf, a German count who had turned his estate in Saxony into a refuge for persecuted Moravian Christians, traveled to Holland for the coronation of a new king. At the palace, Zinsendorf struck up conversation with a slave named Anthony from Saint Thomas, a Dutch colony in the West Indies.

“Tell me, how did you come to hear of Christ?” the count asked.

“I first heard when I was on the ship coming to Europe,” the slave replied.

The count was baffled by the slave’s admission. He had assumed the colonies to be saturated with gospel ministry since they had been settled by Christian nations. But Anthony told a story about a slave he knew whose master had cut off his ears on the church steps when he caught him learning against the door straining to hear the sermon.

“The white people on Saint Thomas do not want their slaves to hear about Jesus Christ,” Anthony explained. “They fear the message will fill their heads with new ideas and cause them to rebel.”

Zinsendorf asked Anthony to travel with him to Saxony and share his testimony with the exiles on his estate. The Moravians were moved by the account and began to pray with Zinsendorf for missions’ opportunities in the colonies. The following August, two missionaries offered themselves to be sold as slaves to secure a spot on a ship bound for the West Indies, giving up their freedom in hopes of sharing the gospel with the slaves on board.

As this harrowing story illustrates, world missions hinges on access. Church leaders have long realized the need to couple their passion for cross-cultural evangelism and church planting with creative strategies to secure a relevant and lasting presence in unreached places.
In the 18th century, colonialism, for all its shortcomings, provided a natural bridge to the mission field and a cloak of legitimacy for European Christians seeking to spread the gospel abroad. When William Carey journeyed to India half a century after the Moravian’s venture in the West Indies, he and the thousands who followed him relegated much of their ministry to territories controlled by the British East India Company and other Western countries with Protestant sympathies however superficial they were in practice.

It wasn’t until Hudson Taylor set out for China that missions began to shake off its colonial presumptions. Taylor’s goal was straightforward: “To evangelize the whole of China.” In order to accomplish it, Taylor would have to veer from the eastern coast inland—to a vast region untouched by Western civilization and without its safety net and social strictures. He donned traditional Chinese garb and cut his hair in a pigtail, the style of the commoners. By 1905, the year Taylor died, the China Inland Mission had brought 800 missionaries to the country, founded 125 schools, and set up 300 missions across 18 provinces.

But Taylor’s model of setting up mission stations within countries has encountered obstacles in recent decades. The vast majority of unreached people groups, as presented at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Switzerland, live in countries where access is minimal and Christian ministry is often illegal, socially unsavory, and strategically illogical.

From the apostle Paul’s first missionary journeys to the faith-filled experiments of Count Zinsendorf and Hudson Taylor, God has been making good on his promise in Acts 1:9 to spread his gospel to the ends of the earth. In each era, the message is the same, but the methods of spreading it must morph with the changing global realities.

As students and humanitarian aid works, missionaries have had some success penetrating restricted countries in recent decades. But as governments begin catching on to these tactics and cracking down on religious freedom on college campuses and village streets, creative new methods are needed to spread the Christian message. From a historical perspective, now is a particularly opportune time to pursue business-as-missions.

To learn more about how Access Partners approaches Business-as-Missions, read the following white papers:

Hand in Hand: Implementing Business as Mission to facilitate church planting
Catalyst and Collaborator: The Strategic Role of a Business Director in Frontier Cross-cultural Missions

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