St Francis Magazine Vol 9, No 2 | April 2013

The 1938 Riggs Report on the Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of Moslems: an aborted beginning to the Insider Movement strategy
By Duane Alexander Miller1
After decades of Protestant mission to (or among, one might rather say) Muslims, there was precious little fruit to show for very substantial investments in time, personnel and money. This 1938 inquiry sought to investigate this issuewhy had the mission to Muslims been, on the balance, unsuccessful? And what could be done do change that? The report was composed by Henry Riggs with the aim of summarizing the findings of the 1938 research of the Near East Christian Council (NECC) which was based in Beirut, Lebanon. The report has recently been made available online2 and its complete title is Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of Moslems: Report3. Riggs was a long-time missionary in the Anatolian city of Harpoot, today called Elazig in Turkish. There he witnessed the slaughter of many of the Armenian Christians whom he served as an educator and a missionary. His recollections can be read in Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917. The manuscript was prepared in 1918 but was only recently published in book form4. Many of the findings of the report are helpful, if not revolutionary. For instance, we read that Christian teaching does not mean the same to the Moslem that it does to a Christian (Part I). It then goes onto list the classical points of contention that make the Good News of Christians foolishness (if not blasphemy) to Muslims, like the doc1

Miller lectures in church history and theology at Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary (NETS) in Israel. His blog is duanemiller.wordpress.com. 2 http://wp.me/pu7Qb-9h 3 I am indebted to my colleague Bob Blincoe for sharing this report with me. I interviewed him recently and he mentioned the document (Blincoe, Miller 2013). 4 Armenian Genocide Documentation Series, Gomidas Inst, 1997.
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trines of original sin, the incarnation, and the atonement. Another difficulty is that religious conversion is often interpreted by Muslims as leaving ones people. That is, to become Christian was to b ecome Greek or Armenian and cease to be a Turk or an Arab. The NECC inquiry sought advice and input from missionaries and Henry Riggs used that information to compose this report. People interested in contemporary mission theory will recognize the importance of this document in that it appears to be the earliest known endorsement of what is today called Insider Movement a pproach to mission to Muslims. The main section is point 6 of Part II:
It is the conviction of a large number of workers among Moslems that the ultimate hope of bringing Christ to the Moslems is to be attained by the development of groups of followers of Jesus who are active in making Him known to others while remaining loyally a part of the social and political groups to which they belong in Islam. The ideal is that there should thus come into being a church whose only head is Christ, and which does not carry the stigma of being an alien institution, drawing men away from their natural social and political connections. In spite of the stupendous difficulties in the way of such an outcome, many workers are convinced that only as the spiritual significance of Christ is thus separated from external and unhappy connections in past and present can the way be opened for the power of Christ to do its work in the Moslem world.

This is, in a nutshell, the Insider Movement strategy of mission to Muslimsnot seeking to make Muslims into Christian, but Sunni [or Shia] Muslims into followers-of-Jesus Muslims. Riggs explicitly points out that some other term than Christian must be found and some other terminology must be developed (Part II, point 8). With updated spelling, some of the specific phrases used could be straight out of a contemporary journal article, as when he talks about, b elievers who thus remain a part of their Moslem social-political group (Part II, point 11). The document was known to the meticulous historian of mission, Lyle Vander Werff in his influential book Christian Mission to Muslims: The Record (1977). Vander Werff records how in 1938, at the Tambaram conference on mission to Muslims, Henry Riggs advocatSt Francis Magazine is published by Arab Vision and Interserve 66

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ed the ideas set forth in this report. The majority at Tambaram r ejected the ideas set forth by [] Riggs (263). Riggs 1941 article in Moslem World titled Unbeaten Paths in Moslem Evangelism does appear in Phil Parshalls bibliography for New Paths in Muslim Evangelism (Baker House, 1980), though the emergence of the term insider movement is much later. I contacted Dr Parshall by e-mail5 and showed him the Riggs Report and he said he had never seen it before. In any case, even if Parshall was influenced by Riggs (and it appears he was not), he was and is not an advocate of IM. But was this document the inspiration of the contemporary IM strategy? That seems unlikely to me. Rather, this document is obscure and it does not appear in the original IM literature. For instance, the entire issue of IJFM Vol 24:1 (Spring 2007) is devoted to the topic of C5 contextualization and Insider Movements, yet neither this report nor the Riggs 1941 article is mentioned by any of the authors. Also, Matthew Sleemans careful study of the roots of IM does not even mention the Riggs Report. The same is true for Wolfes 2011 doctoral dissertation on the IM topic. It is unlikely that the Riggs Report could have influenced early IM proponents without making it into their bibliographies or being detected by scholars like Sleeman and Wolfe. This does not mean that this report is without significance, though. It does demonstrate that mission strategists have had these ideas before, indeed during a very different age of missions. It also means that the critique of the old Protestant missions of being uncreative and narrow-minded is not entirely fair. The Riggs Report of the 1938 NECC inquiry proves that the a key concept of Insider Movement missiology surfaced many decades ago, but an examination of the bibliographies of early contemporary IM advocates leads to the conclusion that they were not aware of this reality until recently. Continuity between the Riggs Report and more recent advocacy for IM as a missionary strategy cannot be established. Riggs advocacy for IM was stymied, and the strategy was
5

November 2012.
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eventually forgotten, only to be revived later by proponents who, at first, were unaware of the Riggs Report.

References
Blincoe, Bob and Duane Alexander Miller. 2013. The Day of Salvation for Muslims Everywhere: an Interview with Bob Blincoe in Global Missiology Vol 10:2, January. <ojs.globalmissiology.org/index.php/english/article/view/1133 > Parshall, Phil. 1980. New Paths in Muslim Evangelism: Evangelical Approaches to Contextualization. Grand Rapids: Baker House. Riggs, Henry H. 1938. Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of Moslems: Report. Beirut: American Mission Building. _____. 1941. Unbeaten Paths in Work for Moslems in Moslem World Vol 31, pp 116-26. Sleeman, Matthew. 2012. The Origins, Development and Future of the C5 / Insider Movement Debate in St Francis Magazine Vol 8:4, Aug, pp 498-566. Vander Werff, Lyle L. 1977. Christian Mission to Muslims: The Record: Anglican and Reformed Approaches in India and the Near East, 1800-1938. Pasadena: William Carey Library. Wolfe, J Henry. 2011. Insider Movements: An Assessment of the Viability of Retaining Socio-religious Insider Identity in High Religious Contexts. PhD Dissertation. Louisville, Kentucky: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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