Those looking 20 years ago for missions-sending organizations or ministries “dedicated to recruiting blacks to the mission field wouldn’t have been able to come up with a handful,” according to Bishop T.P. Perrin, president of Great Commission Global Ministries, an organization dedicated to training and empowering black Americans and other people of color as global missionaries.
Today, however, Perrin, who is black, is part of a still small but growing number of independent and parachurch leaders and missions-sending agencies actively courting black Christians for long-term assignments and short-term domestic and global missions projects.
Jim Sutherland, president of Reconciliation Network Ministries in Chattanooga, Tenn., is also leading the charge but stops short of calling the work he and others are doing to mobilize and teach black missionaries a movement.
Instead, Sutherland, who is white, describes what he sees happening today as “the front end of a groundswell, mainly among independent churches.”
He added, “We have a tremendous pool of resources [among African-American churches] but for now, they are a sleeping giant that’s just beginning to stir.”
That has not always been the case.
“African Americans are not newcomers in the area of international missions. Nor is it true that African Americans are not interested in international missions,” declared David Cornelius, writing in “African-American Experience in World Mission: A Call Beyond Community,” an anthology released in August.
Historical premise
Cornelius, a former career missionary who is now director of African-American church relations of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Richmond, Va., said history and racism have punctuated the involvement of blacks in international missionary work.
Blacks were among the first American missionaries to live and work in Africa.
One of the most recognized and celebrated was Lott Cary, who was born a slave near Richmond and credited with being the first black Baptist missionary to Africa.
In 1815 Cary helped form the Richmond African Missionary Society and raised enough money to sail for Sierra Leone in West Africa in 1820.
Cary established missions there and in neighboring Liberia. The 1870s saw a renewed interest in African missions among black Americans.
The end of Reconstruction and the disenchantment of many blacks with their position in the United States encouraged the revival of a back-to-Africa movement.
But decades later, when colonial governments dominated much of Africa in the 1920s, black Americans were denied visas and barred from entering and serving as missionaries for fear that they would fan the flame of rebellion and uprising among Africans, Sutherland said.
In other instances, prospective black missionaries often didn’t meet the stringent academic, marital or religious requirements that many white mission-sending agencies (most affiliated with denominations) demanded.
Today, Perrin wants to make sure that such barriers don’t hinder blacks and other people of color who want to serve on the missions field.
And that means seeing to it that they are armed with information, conviction and passports long before they begin their careers as missionaries.
The dozen or so veteran African-American missionaries who gathered last summer for Perrin’s “Maximum Impact Networking” missions conference at the Christian Fellowship Church shared a common bond — they heard the call to build churches and homes, teach English, treat the sick and spread the gospel in far-off lands.
“The goal was never simply to have people attend this networking conference but to have people find and connect with others who have the same heartbeat for world missions,” Perrin said.
As a missionary, preacher and evangelist, Perrin has traveled the world in the past two decades. And the one question he remembers being asked the most throughout his travels was, “Where are all the black Americans?”
While blacks make up about 12 percent of the population, they make up fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. Protestant missions force globally, say Perrin and Sutherland.
Global growth
Perrin is hoping college students, young professionals, families, clergy and retirees will help swell the ranks of the estimated 250 black cross-cultural missionaries serving globally.
The first trip Cornelius ever took outside the United States was to Lagos, Nigeria, on a missions assignment. There he helped found the first Baptist church in the West African country.
Cornelius and his wife were among the first black missionaries trained and hired in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board (now International Mission Board, IMB).
“Today there are more than 30 African-American full-time Southern Baptist missionaries” working abroad, Cornelius said.
For Spencer and Maria Rogers, a young missionary couple, Cornelius is considered a pioneer and hero of black career and aspiring missionaries.
“David [Cornelius] was the first up-close and personal black missionary we ever met,” said Spencer Rogers, senior pastor of the Harvest of Praise Fellowship Church in the couple’s Burlington, N.J., home.
Representatives of IMB and other denominational and independent missions sending agencies were at the missions conference to recruit and welcome — some for the first time — prospective black and African missionaries.
What most recruiters said they found were candidates who are well-educated, well-off and looking for first and second careers.
Missions is a viable career option for many black Americans, “but in a lot of black churches, they don’t stress missions,” said Katherine Cooper, whose predominantly white Protestant church in Waldorf, Md., sponsored her when she wanted to spend two years as a missionary in Haiti.
For most in the Haitian community where Cooper lived, she was their first introduction to black America and to black missionaries.
“I taught English while I was there, but even if I didn’t do anything in the country, my presence was worth the trip. They needed to see that black Americans care about them and that we exist,” said Cooper, who is fluent in French and contemplating her next missions assignment.
Many church and missions officials predicted that conferences designed to recruit blacks will become more commonplace as America’s largely white and aging missions force retires.
More than 200 black college students served as missionaries last summer in what was billed as the largest evangelistic outreach effort ever held in southern and eastern Africa.
It was sponsored by Impact Movement, an evangelical movement for black college students and a part of Campus Crusade for Christ, a ministry known for following Jesus’ command to make disciples worldwide.
It is independent and parachurch organizations like this, not black churches, that hold the key to mobilizing African-American missionaries, said Sutherland. “The Great Commission has been the Great Omission in the black church, particularly in the last 20 years,” he added.
Such a notion is unfounded, said William Moore, chairman of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention, USA, that claims 500 black missionaries serving globally.
“We are proud of the work that we are doing overseas,” Moore said of one of the United State’s prominent black Protestant denominations.
“It also reflects on our mission and responsibility to black people. Our work internationally is an outgrowth of the work we are doing domestically.”
Raising a new generation
The black church, contend Perrin and Sutherland, has been focused on the “security and survival” of its people and community, but they want it to respond to the Great Commission.
Sutherland said he is hoping that the emergence of more “African-American evangelical pastors in the pulpit who are concerned about being Christians first and African American second” will help to teach and raise up a new generation of black missionaries.
Spencer Rogers, the New Jersey missionary, hopes to see blacks study missions work as well as preaching in the future.
“As Christians, the goal is to see the world and come to know Jesus Christ,” Rogers said.
“That’s ministry. That’s the picture, but unfortunately one that a lot of African Americans are missing from.” (BP)
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