A History of Christian Missions By Stephen Neill
Stephen Neill’s A History of Christian Missions is a sweeping, chronological portrait of the missionary movement from the beginnings of Christianity to the mid-twentieth century. Written by a seasoned missionary, bishop, and scholar, Neill’s book aims less at polemic than at comprehensive narration: he wants readers to understand how missionary enterprise grew, how it changed, and how it interacted with the political, cultural, and ecclesial forces of each age. The result is a readable, at times brisk and opinionated, narrative that stitches together geography, personalities, theology, and the often awkward encounter between the gospel and imperial power.
Neill organizes his material largely by eras and regions. He opens with the missionary impulse of the early church: the apostolic age, the movement of Christianity out of Judea into the Hellenistic world and Rome, and the formative patterns of evangelism, church planting, and organization that shaped later outreach. From there he follows a roughly chronological route through the growth of Christianity in the East (including Syriac and Nestorian missions that penetrated Central Asia and China), the establishment and spread of monastic and episcopal structures, and the medieval missionary efforts of the Byzantine and western (Roman Catholic) world. He treats each major region — Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania — in turn, tracing how local cultures, trade routes, and political changes influenced missionary strategy and the shape of local churches.
A major strand in Neill’s narrative is his attention to the diversity of missionary actors. He does not confine the story to nineteenth-century Protestant societies; he gives substantial space to Syriac Christianity, to Byzantine and Orthodox initiatives, to Roman Catholic missions from the medieval period through the Age of Discovery and the Counter-Reformation, and to the countless denominational and independent movements that emerged after the Reformation. He balances biographies of well-known figures (William Carey, David Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Matteo Ricci, Francis Xavier) with institution-level history — missionary societies, seminaries, and the ways churches back home shaped sending patterns. This ecumenical breadth is one of the book’s enduring strengths.
The nineteenth century — what Neill and many historians call the “Great Century” of missions — receives especially careful treatment. He situates the explosion of missionary activity in the interplay of evangelical revival, European imperial expansion, improvements in travel and medicine, and the rise of organized missionary societies. Neill narrates how the optimism of the era, the confidence in Western science and Christianity, and new methods (stationing single-denomination missions, founding schools and hospitals, translating the Bible) produced rapid expansion but also embedded missions in unequal power relations. He neither romanticizes nor wholly condemns the period; instead he shows how achievements (church foundations, education, medical advances) were inseparable from cultural insensitivity, paternalism, and frequent complicity with colonial regimes.
Running through the book are Neill’s reflections about method and consequence. He is alert to the theological motives for missions — the biblical mandate, the missionary’s sense of calling, evolving understandings of conversion and church polity — and he is equally attentive to practical methods: evangelism, medical missions, education, translation, and social reform. Importantly, Neill traces the development of arguments about indigenization and self-governing churches, showing how twentieth-century missionary reflection moved from transplanting Western forms of Christianity toward nurturing autonomous indigenous churches. He highlights tensions: when mission work helped produce local leadership and syncretic forms of faith, when it suppressed local expressions, and when missionaries debated the proper balance between cultural adaptation and doctrinal fidelity.
Neill also engages the difficult moral and political questions that haunt missionary history. He treats the relationship between missions and empire candidly: missions often rode the same ships as traders and colonial officers, and missionaries sometimes acted as both critics of and collaborators with imperial structures. He is unsparing about abuses and misjudgments, yet he refuses to reduce the missionary movement to a simple instrument of empire. Instead, Neill insists on a nuanced verdict: missions brought both liberation (education, medical care, spiritual resources, new institutions) and forms of domination (cultural denigration, economic entanglement, institutional control). Readers will find his judgments rooted in close historical description rather than abstract denunciation.
A final major theme is the evolution of missionary theology and ecumenism. Neill charts how the missionary enterprise helped produce global Christianity and, in doing so, fostered conversations about unity, cooperation, and world Christianity that culminated in the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. He is attentive to the theological questions that colonial encounters raised — how to read Scripture in radically different cultural contexts, how to ordain indigenous clergy, and how to structure churches so they could live as local expressions of the universal faith. In these chapters readers see Neill’s own commitments as a participant in the ecumenical conversation.
Strengths of Neill’s book include its scale and its balanced tone: he is erudite without being unreadable, and he refuses to let theological preference blind him to historical complexity. The book’s sweep makes it especially useful as a single-volume introduction: students, pastors, and informed readers can grasp the large patterns of missionary history and identify regions or periods for further study. Critics, however, point to limitations typical of a mid-twentieth-century account: some readers today want deeper attention to indigenous voices, gendered perspectives, and postcolonial critique than Neill provides; others note that his reliance on European and missionary sources can leave certain local perspectives under-represented. Still, even critics acknowledge the book’s lasting value as a foundation for more specialized, critical studies.
In short, A History of Christian Missions is a narrative both panoramic and reflective: panoramic in its geographic and chronological reach, reflective in its constant effort to weigh accomplishments against costs. It remains widely read because it combines a storyteller’s gift for narrative with a missionary-scholar’s care for detail and judgment. For anyone wanting a clear, historically grounded account of how Christianity moved around the world — and how that movement changed both the West and the societies it touched — Neill’s book is still a good place to begin.
This Book by Chapters
Introduction: The Meaning and Motive of Christian Missions
Neill begins by defining “mission” — the church’s outreach to the world in obedience to Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations.
He distinguishes between:
He reviews biblical foundations, from the Great Commission to Paul’s journeys, and surveys how theology, geography, and historical circumstance shaped the church’s sense of mission.
This introduction establishes the pattern Neill follows: to treat mission as a spiritual, cultural, and historical phenomenon intertwined with world events.
Chapter 1 – The Missionary Movement in the Early Church
Covers roughly 30–500 CE.
Chapter 2 – The Eastern Missions and the Expansion of Christianity in Asia
Focuses on Syriac and Nestorian missions from the 5th to 14th centuries.
Chapter 3 – The Medieval Western Missions
Covers roughly 500–1500 CE.
Chapter 4 – The Roman Catholic Expansion (1500–1800)
The great age of Catholic world missions following the voyages of discovery.
This chapter ends with the waning of Catholic missionary vitality under Enlightenment rationalism and political upheaval.
Chapter 5 – The Protestant Awakening and Early Missions (1500–1800)
Chapter 6 – The Great Century (1800–1914)
Neill calls the nineteenth century “the Great Century of Missions.”
He divides it into major regions:
a. India and the East – Carey, Henry Martyn, Alexander Duff, and the establishment of schools and Bible translations.
b.China – Robert Morrison, Hudson Taylor, the China Inland Mission, and the impact of the Opium Wars.
c. Africa – The work of Livingstone, Moffat, the London Missionary Society, and Anglican missions (CMS).
d. Pacific and Americas – Polynesian missions, and Protestant expansion in Latin America.
He stresses:
Despite enormous growth, Neill also notes the seeds of later disillusionment: Western paternalism, denominational rivalry, and cultural arrogance.
Chapter 7 – The Twentieth Century: From Expansion to Ecumenism
Covers roughly 1914–1960.
Neill closes with cautious optimism: Christianity has become truly worldwide, yet must continually reform its understanding of mission in humility and service.
Epilogue – Reflections on the Future of Mission
In later editions, Neill adds an epilogue summarizing lessons learned:
Summary of the Book’s Arc
Across seven chapters, Neill narrates: