“The Whole Gospel for the Whole Man in the Whole World”: Holiness Missionaries and the Healing of "Heathen" Suffering

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, faith missionaries began to flock to “foreign fields” intending to “send the full gospel to the neglected millions of heathen lands.”  Aiming to distinguish themselves from Protestant denominations that linked “Christianization and civilization,” these radical evangelicals rejected missionary programs that seemed to value education over evangelism, poverty relief over proselytizing.  As a result, historians have often characterized faith missionaries as parochial preachers who focused exclusively on spreading the message of spiritual salvation without concern for the physical or social needs of the people they sought to convert.  This paper explores radical evangelical encounters with, attitudes about, and responses to suffering in missionary contexts from the 1880s through the early twentieth century.  Focusing primarily on “ministries of compassion” run by holiness and pentecostal women in China, Egypt, India, and Turkey during this period, I argue that many faith missionaries embraced a Christian gospel that encompassed not only spiritual redemption, but also physical healing and sometimes even the amelioration of social ills.  Evangelistic outreach, while indeed a central concern, was often inextricably, if uneasily, linked with relief and disaster efforts, the development of educational and medical programs, and attempts to combat some forms of systemic oppression.  Even as the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy racked the American Protestant community during the 1920s, rending apart the “evangelical united front” that had maintained a fragile consensus on matters of social concern until this point, many faith missionaries continued to participate in and promote ministries to alleviate suffering as an integral part of their “gospel witness.”  Shedding light on the ambiguous connections between "humanitarianism" and holiness missions in the early twentieth century places the emergence of evangelical internationalism in broader historical perspective and provides a wider  frame for current deliberations about the nature and significance of faith-based humanitarian interventions.