"Well before 1846, evangelicals had also begun to take a growing interest in spreading Christianity to other parts of the world. In such efforts, English-speaking evangelicals lagged considerably behind their Continental pietists colleagues. Apart from a few efforts to reach native American Indians with the gospel, significant missionary labors by English speakers did not begin until the end of the eighteenth century. The ex-American slave, David George, emigrated from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 as a dedicated preacher of revival just as that West African colony was being opened for outside settlement under the auspices of Anglican evangelicals. The next year, the English Baptist William Carey set out for India. Soon Carey’s Baptist Missionary Society was joined by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the inter-denominational London Missionary Society, and not too many years by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, along with many other evangelical bodies in what would rapidly grow into great efforts of missionary proclamation. The missionary movement was a very important expression of evangelical zeal in English-speaking countries. It became even more important for planting seeds of Christianity in other parts of the world that would grow vigorously into strong indigenous Christian churches. At the start of the twenty-first century, evangelicals remain important in the broader Christian histories of Britain and North America. But the great story of recent past has been the flourishing of evangelical churches and movements in other parts of the world. Evangelicals from around the world continue to come to Britain, the United States, and Canada for training, but so now do missionaries from the Two-Thirds World arrive to spread the gospel among fellow immigrants in the West, and also to evangelize among Western pagans. To be sure, the newer evangelical churches of the world also face many difficulties of their own-instability, lack of wise leadership, shortage of educational resources, ethnic violence, numbing poverty, and more. But from these churches insights, practices, songs, and doctrinal emphases have also begun to flow back toward the original evangelical homelands. As one recent commentator has written with a focus on the Pacific: “New Zealand Maori, like other indigenous peoples, valued evangelical Christianity for its acknowledgement of the supernatural. The results may put pakeha [New Zealanders of European descent] back into the beginners class of spiritual things.” The theological explorations in the chapters that follow reflect wisdom from three centuries of evangelical life, but are also alert to the recent changes that have once again made evangelical Christianity an international and multicultural religion of great, if also complex, vitality."
January 1, 1970