Monday, August 11, 2008

"Home" for the Next Couple of Weeks


Shelley and Skyler departed from Paris a couple of weeks ago so Skyler could be ready for band, which started a month before school starts. (Go figure.) That left Weston and me to journey around getting some projects underway. It involved driving over 3000 km (almost 2000 miles) in northern Europe and several hundred miles in the UK.

Tonight, I unpacked my whole suitcase for the first time. I’ll be at Regents Park College, the Baptist College at Oxford, for the next two weeks.


The accommodations are your garden-variety dorm room. My room is on the quadrangle across from the library and most of the students are gone. The only students left are DPhil graduate students and many have this month to finish dissertations or they will not graduate. Procrastination must run in research arenas.

The only change to the room from when I was here in the late 1980s is that the fireplace in the room has been filled in and an electric heater fills the hearth. The weather is turning cooler and in the evenings a jacket is needed. (Cannot wait to get back to Houston’s heat and humidity!)

My days will be filled with reading the letters and documents from the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. The evenings will be filled with searching leaky wifi connections so I can get online and get caught up on what the family has been doing. (The only downside to this arrangement is that my family is not with me.)

I was able to read through some of the letters last week. It was exciting to read the letters of William Carey and Andrew Fuller. For those not up on their Baptist History, these two men launched the Modern Mission Movement. William Carey was the first Baptist missionary and Andrew Fuller was the pastor in England who raised the support to sustain the mission movement.

They really had no idea what they were doing. The theology of the day was not conducive to a mission movement, but Fuller, Carey, along with Ryland and Sutcliff were four friends who began to see things from a different perspective.

The documents are a little dusty and difficult to read as they are handwritten, the ink is fading, the writing style is a bit different from contemporary English and some of the portions of the documents are missing due to age and having been in a tropical climate. Also, they are dusty and there is a concern in the back of my mind that an inadvertent sneeze would wipe out a hunk of history. Thus could be my legacy to scholarship.

Over the weekend, Weston helped me think through a strategy for reading. Last week we organized the letters in chronological order trying to see which letters were responses to previous letters. The letters were sent on ships from England to India via the East India Company and the exchange could take up to 6 months or more. Also, it is apparent some of the letters are missing, so as Weston suggested, I’ll request Carey’s journal, as it may be the most complete accounting of his missionary career. Hopefully, it can be pieced together.

So what am I looking for? Well, I’m not sure. That is the beauty of research, you hunt. But I hold a belief that the days in which we live are transformational days and just as models in other industries have changed, the models for the modern mission movement will experience a change as well. I think the founding concepts of a movement are important. The concerns that brought about the conversations are the important seeds that can hold insight for transitions. That is what I hope to listen for in these letters. What were the concerns? What were the insights? And can those insights help to launch a post-modern mission movement? This is where I my head will be for the next couple of weeks.

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