Thursday, August 1, 2019

David Nasmith (1799-1838) and Missional Ecclesiolgy


David Nasmith of Glasgow, Scotland (1799-1838), along with friends, founded over sixty Christian societies.[1] He began life in manufacturing as an apprentice. Yet, he hoped to become a foreign missionary and at times applied to go to Africa and the South Seas but was turned down because of his lack of education. Instead, he became the “Apostle of City Missions.” His evangelistic zeal was channeled first through outlets in Glasgow where he devoted his time to evangelism and charitable work which included visiting prisons. He once spent a whole night in a prison cell with two men who were to be executed the following day.

At age fifteen, Nasmith and some of his friends founded three youth societies to support foreign missions, tract distribution, and the Bible Society. In 1821, he became secretary of the Religious Societies of Glasgow. In 1824 he founded the Young Men’s Society for Religious Improvement.
In 1826, Nasmith founded the Glasgow City Mission which took Chalmers’s pattern of district outreach further. Chalmers' experiment in St. John’s, Glasgow, published in The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1821–26), provided a model of urban mission based on lay visitation.[2] Thomas Chalmers (1780-1843) had advocated “district visitation” for evangelism and Sunday school at the time when the Industrial Revolution was leading to a rapid urbanization of Scottish society.[3]
Nasmith made the work inter-denominational by enlisting the support and involvement of all evangelical churches, and aiming to encourage the unchurched to attend an evangelical church and recruited laypeople fulltime instead of using volunteers to carry out the evangelistic work.[4] Not only were the paid workers more dependable but several came from the working class and were better-equipped to minister to the city’s poor.
When Nasmith founded Glasgow City Mission, the objective of the society was “to promote the spiritual welfare of the poor of this city, and its neighbourhood, by employing persons of approved piety, and who are properly qualified to visit the poor in their houses.”[5] At the society’s first annual meeting, the message to the missionaries was: “You will convert the houses that [are] tenanted by men of the foulest passions, into churches of the Redeemer, where the Lord the Spirit will dwell and the God of Salvation will be loved and served. You will arrest the progress of vice and promote the interest of virtue. You will make our poor, our ignorant, our degraded population stand forth in all that freshness and fairness of moral and of spiritual excellence.”[6]
Besides the Glasgow City Mission, Nasmith founded the Edinburgh City Mission in 1832, and the London City Mission in 1835.[7] With his vision for city missions, he toured Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France, addressing local church leaders and encouraging them to form city missions and other societies.[8]
In this period of denominational rivalry, even among evangelicals, the London City Mission was founded in 1835 as an interdenominational organization. Nevertheless, it had a shaky start. While its committee was drawn from eight denominations, some people in the Church of England were suspicious, and even hostile toward the society. Therefore, Nasmith stayed on as secretary for over a year to smooth over any suspicions or feelings of rivalry.
Nasmith clearly possessed a remarkable ability to organize mission work. A. G. Callant said, “As a founder of missions, it would be hard to find his equal.”[9] However, Nasmith was not simply keen at founding mission societies. In one occasion he stated his conviction that “every church shall be a missionary body, and every member a missionary.”[10] He called churches to awaken from their slumber in order to evangelize their neighborhoods.
At the founding of the Manchester City Mission in 1837, Nasmith said: “If we expected the poor to flood to our churches, we were greatly mistaken, and if we wanted our places of worship to be crowded, we must carry the Gospel to the homes of the poor.”[11] Moreover, the object of this mission was “not to make people Protestants or Roman Catholics, Baptist, Episcopalians, Methodists or any other sect,” but “to unite all denominations of Christians, and by one strong effort, to pluck sinners as brands from the burning.”[12]
Besides the city missions, Nasmith helped to train Sunday school teachers in the United Kingdom, and in New York and Philadelphia. He died at the age of forty in Guildford, Surrey, England. He was not merely credited, however, with founding city missions but also the young men’s Christian societies that came into an association of the YMCA under George Williams.


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Excerpts from: John Campbell, Memoirs of David Nasmith: His Labours and Travels in Great Britain, France, the United States and Canada (London: J. Snow, 1844).

David [Nasmith] was the means of promoting inquiry into the spiritual condition of the city population on the part of many who had never previously thought a moment on the subject. The zeal of some sentimental people promised, at first, to take a practical turn. “Some of the Lord’s people here [in Ireland],” says David, “are speaking of forming a mission church with a pastor, teachers and evangelists; whose object it shall be, not only to edify those who may be associated in church fellowship, but to go forth and preach the gospel and plant churches in the cities, towns, and villages of Ireland, considering that every church is a missionary body. If this is of the Lord, it will prosper; if not, may it come to nought. Christ Jesus to be the bond of union, and not Presbyterianism, Independency, or Episcopacy. A union of saints is exceedingly desirable into one church of Christ, and a striving together for the advancement of the glory of God, and not our own opinion.” … David plainly states that his missions were merely an artificial substitute for the churches of Christ, which are the natural missionary societies, the proper instruments for diffusing the Gospel, both at home and abroad. In a letter, about the same time, written to Mrs. Connell, the valued relative of Mrs. Nasmith, David reverts to this important principle. “I long,” says he, “for the period, when the churches of Christ, instead of these voluntary associations, formed for this purpose, shall become missionary bodies. There is a considerable shaking in that respect, in this place, not amongst the churches, but amongst individuals, as to the duty of churches. A church was formed yesterday week, of which Mr. Pope is pastor, upon such a basis I mean, upon Scripture principles; but the principle that every member is, in his or her sphere, to become a missionary. Stir up your Christian friends to think of this!”[13]
“These societies are of two classes, the natural and the artificial; the former Christian Churches, and the latter voluntary associations of Christian men. In the order of nature, conventional movements are first, and absolutely necessary. There is no other means of operation in a district of country, or in a locality of a town or city, where churches do not exist, or do not exist in number and strength sufficient to act congregationally upon the population around them. But these are only temporary expedients, which must ultimately give place to measures based on other principles. In proportion as churches come to exist in numbers and means adequate to the work of evangelizing their vicinities, the necessity for artificial combinations will gradually subside, and may at length be safely dispensed with. In them the Spirit of God resides; through them, as the principal means, he will subdue the world, and complete the conquests of the Head of the Heathen. Every church, like the glorious gospel, of which it is the depository, may be likened unto fire and leaven, which operate by assimilating to themselves their kindred elements, when such elements are brought into contact. Churches ought, at all points, to act on surrounding unbelievers, and at once to absorb the faithful into their several fellowships ; or, to change the figure, the armies of the cross, like other armies, require their advanced guards, their spies, and pioneers, such as missionaries, itinerants, and other classes of labourers; but the conquests of that cross are to be completed, its authority and government established, and its empire upheld, by its own organized masses that is, by Gospel Churches.”[14]




[1] John Campbell, Memoirs of David Nasmith: His Labours and Travels in Great Britain, France, the United States and Canada (London: J. Snow, 1844).
[2] D. W. Bebbington, "Missions at home" in M. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 422–3.
[3] C. G. Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland Since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 97, 102-4.
[4] Bebbington, "Missions at home," 422–3.
[5] Delores Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith and the City Mission Movement, 1799 – 2000, 27.
[6] Burger, Practical Religion, 28.
[7] A. G. Callant, Saint Mungo’s Bells; or Old Glasgow Stories Rung Out Anew (David Bryce & Son, 1888).
[8] Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland, 103.
[9] Phyllis Thompson, To the Heart of the City (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985).
[10] Nasmith, 215-216; Cf. Scharpff, History of Evangelism, 94.
[11] Manchester Guardian, May 3rd, 1837, in Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith, 46.
[12] Manchester Guardian, May 3rd, 1837, in Burger, Practical Religion: David Nasmith, 46.
[13] Campbell, Nasmith, 188-189; 190-191.
[14] Campbell, Nasmith, 449-450.

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