SIM SWEDISH INSTITUTE OF MISSION RESEARCH PUBLISHER OF THE SERIES STUDIA MISSIONALIA SVECANA & MISSIO PUBLISHER OF THE PERIODICAL SWEDISH MISSIOLOGICAL THEMES (SMT) This publication is made available online by Swedish Institute of Mission Research at Uppsala University. Uppsala University Library produces hundreds of publications yearly. They are all published online and many books are also in stock. Please, visit the web site at www.ub.uu.se/actashop MISSIONS FROM THE NORTH Nordic Missionary Council 50 years (' ( SUPPLEMENTA Norsk Tidsskrift for Misjon Redaksjon: Olav Guttorm Myklebust 1. Ludvig Munthe: Misjonreren Lars Dahle. Oslo 1968 2. Odd Kvaal Pedersen: Afrika i dag- og i morgen? Oslo 1969 3. Olav Guttorm Myklebust: Misjon i en ny tid. Oslo 1971 4. Marie Thauland: Register 1947-1971. Norsk Tidsskrift for Misjon. Oslo 1973 5. Missions from the North. Nordic Missionary Council 50 years. MISSIONS FROM THE NORTH Nordie Missionary Co un cil 50 years CHIEF EDITOR CARL F. HALLENCREUTZ EDITORS JOHS. AAGAARD NILS E. BLOCH-HOELL UNIVERSITETSFORLAGET OSLO - BERGEN - TROMS6 @ UNVERSITETSFORLAGET 1974 Printed in Norway by Furuset Boktrykkeri, Oslo ISBN: 82-00-09344-1 STUDIA MISSIONALIA UPSALIENSIA XX CONTENTS Preface . 7 Bengt Sundkler: Nordic Missionary Council . 9 johannes Aagaard: Danish Mission in the last 50 Years 41 Nils E. Bloch-Hoell: Norway's Share in World Mission 57 Matti Peltola: Fifty Y ears of Finnish Missions . 79 Carl F. Hallencreutz: Swedish Missions- An Ecumenical Perspective 95 Karsten Nissen: Integration in Nordic Missions . 123 Lars Thunberg: The Scandinavian Alternative at the Uppsala Assembly . 147 PREFACE Erik W. Nielsen was not only the inventive Research Secretary of the International Missionary Council or the visionary Director of the Theological Education Fund. He was also a most inspiring Danish member of the Nordic Missionary Council. When this regional council was constituted in Stockholm, February 13, 1923, it already had a long pre-history, as Bengt Sund­ kler proves in his contribution to this volume. The series of Nordic Missionary Meetings from Malmo 1863 inspired the work of missions from the North. After the first European Great War, however, it was felt that co-operation in Scandinavian Mission would profit from more continous relationships within a Council. This Nordic Missionary Council was formed also to encourage a Scandi­ navian contribution to international co-operation within the newly established International Missionary Council. Erik W. Nielsen suggested that the 50th Anniversary of the Nordic Missionary Council should be celebrated with a survey of develop­ ments within Nordic missions during the period of the Council. Alas, his too early death did not allow him to see this suggestion through. However the present members of the Council took up the challenge. ln consultation with Heads of Institutes of Missionary Research in the difrferent Nordic Countries the present volume was conceived. A committee of three was given responsibilities to prepare and edit the volume. Missions from the North is here presented as a sign of deep gratitude for Erik W. Nielsen's contribution to the missionary cause of the Church of God. lt will also testify to the width and variety of Scandinavian missions. Aarhus Oslo Uppsala ] ohs. Aagaard Nils E. Bloch-Hoell Carl F. Hallencreutz NORDIC MISSIONARY COUNCIL by Bengt Sundkler Here they were at it again, this time in the festive Covenant Hall in the Tullinsgate in Oslo. Sorne five hundred of them had turned up, mission leaders and experts and ordinary, or extra­ ordinary, devotees from the Northern countries. The occasion was of special importance, for only in 1950 were they in a position to meet again, after the enforced separation of the war years. The earlier conferences in this series had been held regularly in 1925, 1928, 1932 and 1936 in the other Northern capitals. The war and its aftermath had meant an end to all that, for all those years. A Danish journalist, seated in the balcony of the Hall, was looking clown on this group of people. He had just been to Bangkok in order to attend a conference of the East Asian churches. Meeting the church leaders of the East and listening to their views, their hopes and their frustrations, he had been struck by an impression of boisterous revolutionary change in the new Asia, with its imminent dangers and immense opportunities. But here, on this Oslo balcony far from Bangkok, he was looking at these missionaries of the North, reading their more or less well­ prepared papers in subdued or somewhat anxious tones. Missions, he felt, were "in the hands of the mildest and most unpolitical people that we have, while out there missions were something that concerned nations about to be drawn into revolutionary cataclysms far greater than anything we had known in Europe" .1 One particular reason that made our journalist emphasize this impression of mildness and almost sedateness in the conference of the North, was the lack of provision for debate. The programme, he felt was loaded with lectures and did not allow for any free 9 exchange of views. His observation deserves attention. Was this lack of debate perhaps indicative of something inherent in the structure of the organization at this particular time? Nordic missions con­ ferences were somehow to be held, at certain intervals - that was the provision of the constitution. The less provocative these con­ ferences were, the more assuredly they would guarantee harmony and nice warm feelings ali round. Or-this cautious hush in the North, was it perhaps indicative of an attitude that was about to be formed at this time, in a period of the dwarfing of Europe? Did it signify the beginnings of a retreat of the Western missionary, going home to his log cabin under the northern lights? In fact, a mission horizon of the Nor th was, and is, a fundamental problem in itself. Here were the Northern mission societies of the nineteenth century, Lutheran and Reformed, big and small, ali with their particular network of relationships with particular countries in Asia or Africa: the Norwegians and Madagascar and China: the Finns and Ovambo and Japan; the Danes and Arabia or Tamil­ nad and the Swedes with their age-long bridges to Ethiopia and Congo and Tamilnad. In that perspective the mild-mannered mission­ aries of the North were somehow miraculously transformed into daring explorers in the name of their Lord, and it was in that connection that one sometimes was reminded that they, too, came from the countries of Fridtjof Nansen and of Knud Rasmussen and of Sven Hedin. For these soft-spoken little missionaries, moving so politely and circumspectly in that festive hall of Oslo were of course old and anxious by now, but, after ali, sorne of them were none other than Dr. Niels Bmnnum of Numan, the Danish doctor on the Benue river in Nigeria, or Joel Eriksson, the Swede of Mongolia fame or Dr. Karl Reichelt, imaginative explorer in the realm of the spirit, or again, Birger Eriksson of Finland and N amibia. From the balcony one could move downstairs and mix with these people and speak to them. They were Northerners, of course: Not much could be clone to that fact of origin. Y et, at heart, they some­ how seemed to be more Nigerian or Chinese than Northerners. A life-time in other elimes had conditioned and changed them. Their 10 horizon was that of East Asia or of Central Africa rather than that of the Arctic Circle. And, for argument's sake, one might hold forth that the hesitation with which they spoke at Oslo may have been caused by what seemed to them as sorne kind of unreality in this Northern situation. That scene in Oslo-in 1950, at the watershed of the century­ serves to remind us that the particular "Northern" perspective of missions, while useful and helpful, is of secondary importance, as compared with the primary concerns. AU the same, in an ecumenical situation, where regionalism and the "Six Continents" are stressed, it is of interest to see how this Northern missions fellowship emerged and grew through half a century-and more. 1. ln fact that fellowship is much older than half a century. Not 1923, but 1863 is the point of departure. It was then that the first Scandina:vian conference was .held at Malmo in Southern Sweden. This was followed by a series of five other conferences, the last in Oslo 1902. At Oslo 1902 they decided to meet again after sorne three years at Copenhagen. Political tensions between Norway and Sweden, erupting in 1905, made this impossible. But the Danes were all the time aware of their responsibility to call another Northern missions conference in their own capital. They kept on hoping in times of peace and war, for twenty long years, until at last, the Northern Missions Council was formed in 1923. This persistence, this unyielding attempt on the part of a few stubborn enthusiasts is almost as interesting as the new beginning after the First World War. It was romanticism and its bed-fellow, nineteenth century nation­ alism w hi ch produced the so-called "Scandina vianism", before the middle of the last century. lt was born in and through student rhetoric and was carried on by more practical concerns in the 1850's: Scandinavian economists and industrialists felt the need for doser co-operation. So also did the churchmen and the leaders of the newly formed or activated mission societies. 11 lt was a Dane-albeit a special kind of Dane-who took the initiative towards missionary co-operation in the North. In the com­ pact bourgeois Danish folk Church, Christian Kalkar, a converted Jew and the son of a rabbi, was a marginal person.