Missions Among Puritans and Pietists

Jon Hinkson, here, offers a brief examination of and some representative examples of missionary efforts by the Puritans and Pietists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. God instigated missions among the Puritans, according to Hinkson, by turning them into pilgrims through persecution. He tells of Puritan John Eliot’s evangelistic and “civilizing” work among the North American Indians, the founding and early activity of the New England Company, and the production of the Algonquian Bible. Next, he turns to the missionary work of the Pietists. Halle and Herrnhut are the two cities most prominently featured in his account, with Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf respectively the major figures associated with each city. Hinkson goes into significant detail regarding the birth of Moravian missions and the development of their methods.

Biography

Jon Hinkson is Senior Research Fellow at Yale University’s Rivendell Institute. After growing up mostly in Africa and Europe, Jon completed degrees from Princeton University (B.A. History 1985) and the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. Divinity 1992). He now resides in New Haven with his wife and three daughters. His work at the Rivendell institute focuses primarily on contextualizing Christian faith and practice within the contemporary academy. Most of his published work, such as “Reaching the World Through the Universities,” falls within this domain and is done from an historical perspective.