Accidental Diplomats: Missionaries, Money, and the World (Episode 11)

It's easy to imagine American evangelicalism as a story that happens entirely inside the United States. In this episode, John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra push past that bubble to explore evangelicals' long, tangled relationship with the rest of the world.

The episode opens with two stories drawn from recent scholarship. The first, from David Swartz's Facing West, complicates the founding myth of World Vision: American evangelist Bob Pierce is remembered as the organization's sole founder, but the humanitarian network he built on was already running under Korean pastor Kyung Chik Han. The second, from Philip Dow's Accidental Diplomats, follows Daniel Arap Moi from a ten-year-old convert at a Kenyan mission station to Kenya's second president, guided for decades by his missionary mentor and confidant, Earl Anderson.

From there, the hosts trace how American evangelicals have understood missions, humanitarianism, and their own place in the world across two centuries: the shift from cultural superiority to contextualized missiology, the 1974 Lausanne Congress and its Global South critiques of Western evangelicalism, the astonishing 20th-century demographic shift of Christianity from the global North to the global South, and the increasingly contested question of what — if anything — the word "white" is still doing in front of "evangelical." They close by reckoning honestly with the missionary movement's mixed legacy: real colonial entanglements alongside real cross-cultural courage, and a complicated set of missionary heroes evangelicals still look to for inspiration.

PEOPLE & TERMS MENTIONED

· Bob Pierce: Evangelist and founder of World Vision (1950), following a 1947 trip to China that inspired his humanitarian ministry.

· Kyung Chik Han: Korean pastor and refugee relief leader who built the orphanage and humanitarian network in Seoul that became the operational core of World Vision.

· Daniel Arap Moi: Kenya's second president (1978–2002), mentored in his youth by American missionary Earl Anderson.

· Earl Anderson: American missionary and government school inspector in colonial Kenya; longtime mentor and confidant to Daniel Arap Moi.

· René Padilla & Samuel Escobar: Latin American evangelical theologians whose critiques of Western missions at the 1974 Lausanne Congress challenged American evangelical assumptions.

· John Stott: British evangelical leader who helped mediate the global-north/global-south tensions at the Lausanne Congress.

· William Ernest Hocking: Harvard philosopher who chaired the 1932 “Re-Thinking Missions” laymen's inquiry, questioning the traditional conversion-focused model of missions.

· Bebbington's Quadrilateral: Historian David Bebbington's four-part definition of evangelicalism: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism.

· 1040 Window: Cold War-era missions term for the band of the globe (10° to 40° north latitude) considered least reached by Christianity.

· Carl McIntire: Fundamentalist radio preacher associated with balloon-borne Bible airdrops into communist territory during the Cold War.

· Paul Hiebert: Missiologist (Fuller Theological Seminary, later Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) known for bringing anthropological method into evangelical missions training.

· Walter Kim: President of the National Association of Evangelicals, cited as an example of the organization's non-white leadership.

· New Apostolic Reformation: Term used to describe an influential, loosely organized network of independent charismatic and Pentecostal leaders.

BOOKS MENTIONED

· David R. Swartz, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020).

· Philip Dow, Accidental Diplomats: American Missionaries and the Cold War in Africa (William Carey Publishing, 2024).

· David P. King, God's Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

· David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).

· Gina A. Zurlo, How Many Evangelicals in the World? A New Assessment from the World Christian Database, Review of Religious Research (open access).