Mission to 'nominal Christians': The policy and practice of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and its missionaries concerning Eastern churches which led to the organization of a Protestant church in Beirut (1819-1848)

In 1819, nine years after its formation, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions launched its first missionary venture to western Asia. The original objective was to impart the perceived salutary and benevolent influences of Christianity to the peoples of the region. From the very start, Jews, Muslims, and the so-called "Nominal Christians" of the Middle East were targets of its missionizing activity.; Early on, the missionaries found that their brand of evangelical Christianity was better received by the Christian inhabitants of the Levant than any other people. They thus began to formulate a distinct policy towards these Christians. Its aim was reviving and converting them without causing them to leave their churches of origin. Until the early 1840s, the officers of the Board in Boston were in agreement with this policy. After 1844, the Board, represented by its secretary Rufus Anderson, began to press its missionaries everywhere to organize self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating indigenous churches. This in effect obliterated the distinction made earlier between work among "nominal Christians" and other groups.; The missionaries in Beirut, who essentially agreed with Anderson on the nature of evangelical Christianity and the purpose of its foreign missionary enterprise, proved willing to accommodate his emerging theories. However, their low estimation of the piety of their converts which did not meet their "evangelical" expectations, prevented them from acting immediately and forming a church. In 1848, however, and after the pressure from Boston and other parties increased, they hurriedly organized an indigenous church in Beirut.; The events and ideas which led to these developments have been the subject of preliminary studies by ecumenically-minded scholars since the 1930s. By using the Beirut Church as a case in point, and through a study of all the available original documents, this dissertation examines the circumstances which led to the emergence, elaboration, and eventual modification of mission policy towards eastern churches from 1819 to 1848.