Education as Mission: Opportunity and Efficacy
G Durance
2026.05.27
Christ’s final instruction to His disciples and subsequently to the Church was not simply to proclaim and convert, but to go, baptize, and teach. Teaching here was about more than head knowledge: it was about obeying all He taught about life and holiness, about relationships and service. In short, it was about obedience to truth which was known and understood in all its applications. This is a profound teaching assignment, and it should be the highest priority of Christ’s followers. Across the centuries when the Church prioritized its educational mandate, it catalyzed personal transformation and cultural renewal; derivatively and consequently, it protected orthodoxy and birthed movements that benefited every level of society.
The current call for “education as mission” is far from being an auxiliary or modern fad; rather, it is a call to proven strategy which has been one of the most effective vehicles for furthering the work of the Church. By examining historical precedents across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, it becomes evident that both formal and informal education are closely associated the long-term flourishing of the Gospel.
Education as Mission: William Carey (India)
The appropriate use of education as an effective missionary method is seen in the work of William Carey and his colleagues Joshua Marshman and William Ward in Serampore. Arriving in Calcutta in the late 1790s, Carey faced seemingly insurmountable personal and political obstacles. His family was plagued by chronic dysentery, a disease that tragically claimed the life of his five-year-old son, Peter. Furthermore, his wife suffered a severe mental breakdown within two years of their arrival, enduring a tragic delusional disorder and violent outbursts for twelve years before her death in 1807.
Politically, the monopolistic British East India Company strongly opposed Carey’s presence, fearing that Christian teaching would cause religious and social unrest that might disrupt their lucrative business. Forced to seek cover, Carey found refuge in a small Danish colonial outpost in Serampore (now part of the greater Kolkata metropolitan area); there he began his printing, translation, and educational work.
Rejecting the prevailing cultural and colonial mindset, Carey and his colleagues established more than one hundred free schools that educated thousands of children regardless of their gender, religion, or social standing, thereby weakening the traditional caste system and breaking down gender and religious barriers. These schools taught reading, writing, mathematics, and history in local vernacular languages rather than English. This required the creation of original textbooks for both teachers and students, a monumental task Carey undertook successfully, in part because of his remarkable ability to communicate well in many languages.
In addition to these primary schools, Carey founded Serampore College in 1818. It provided a high-level education in both Western sciences and Eastern literature to all students, regardless of their religious faith. Though the British authorities initially viewed him with hostility, Carey’s academic and linguistic ability, as well as the visible results of his work, convinced them of the merits of his cause; he went on to teach the future leaders of British India, standardized the Bengali language, and created the first comprehensive dictionaries in Bengali and Marathi. He also founded the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, which taught farmers the essentials of agricultural science.
The enduring effectiveness of this strategy became clear in the long-term resilience of the Indian Church. By focusing on thorough training and discipleship rather than quick conversion statistics, Carey reshaped the intellectual life of the region. Consequently, when Britain left India in 1947, the well-grounded indigenous church remained vibrant and independent. Today, Serampore College remains a prestigious institution, serving as an academic umbrella for over sixty affiliated theological colleges and seminaries across the region.
Carey also demonstrated that an educational platform can be leveraged for vital legislative reform, most notably in his battle against sati—the practice of burning widows on their husbands' funeral pyres. Through meticulous research, Carey published academic texts proving that sati had no mandatory basis in ancient Hindu scriptures. By educating both the local populace and British administrators on this reality, his advocacy directly influenced Governor-General Lord William Bentinck to officially ban the practice in 1829.
Following the paradigm shift initiated by Carey, a young Scottish missionary named Alexander Duff arrived in Calcutta shortly before Carey’s death to build on his educational work and to pioneer a complementary strategy known as "intellectual evangelism." While Carey worked broadly across all social strata, Duff believed that targeting the intellectual elite was also key to dismantling India’s social evils. Duff's contribution was to provide a rigorous, higher-level liberal arts and scientific education, taught through an intentional Christian worldview. By engaging the young intelligentsia, Duff’s schools aggressively challenged the philosophical foundations of the rigid caste system and birthed an articulate class of Christian thinkers who carried the Gospel into the highest corridors of Indian society.
Education as Mission: Henry Appenzeller (Korea)
The impact of Western Protestant missionaries in Korea from the late 1880s through the early twentieth century stands as another clear example of the Holy Spirit using educational work to bring explosive growth to the church, and through that, socio-cultural reform.
In the decades preceding this era, Christian cross-cultural workers faced severe hostility in Korea, leaving no apparent avenue for introducing the Gospel to the "Hermit Kingdom." However, toward the close of the nineteenth century, a political opening emerged. A progressive faction of Korean reformers traveled abroad and discovered that their nation required radically different medical and educational infrastructure to be competitive in a modernizing world. Eager for American assistance to facilitate national reform, King Gojong granted unprecedented permission for non-proselytizing, humanitarian services to begin working within his kingdom.
In the sovereignty of God, this opening was secured through a dramatic medical event. In late 1884, a Presbyterian medical missionary named Dr. Horace Allen saved the life of a prominent prince who was a close relative of Empress Myeongseong. Out of profound gratitude, the king appointed Dr. Allen as the court physician and officially permitted the establishment of a Western hospital. This royal favor quickly extended to education, paving the way for the arrival of Methodist pioneer missionary Henry G. Appenzeller, his wife Ella, and their Presbyterian colleague, Horace G. Underwood.
Arriving in the spring of 1885, these early workers faced strict royal prohibitions against public preaching, church planting, and baptisms. Evangelism had to be pursued covertly, prompting the pioneers to intentionally utilize schools as a legitimate, non-threatening framework to establish the church. For Henry Appenzeller, this educational focus was highly providential. Raised with deep evangelical piety in Pennsylvania, he experienced a profound spiritual conversion at a revival meeting in West Chester at age eighteen. Following a brief career as a public school teacher, he attended Drew Theological Seminary, graduating with a strong desire to serve as a foreign missionary. Although the Methodist Mission Board initially feared he lacked the diplomatic maturity required to establish foreign congregations, it ultimately approved his deployment because of his combined experience in the classroom and his theological training.
Upon arriving in Seoul, Appenzeller and his contemporaries encountered an educational structure that reinforced rigid social hierarchies. For centuries, Korean higher education had been strictly monopolized by a traditional Confucian elite and conducted entirely in classical Chinese characters (Hanja), rendering literacy completely inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Appenzeller and his missionary colleagues were about to systematically undermine this intellectual monopoly. In 1885, he founded the first Western educational institution for boys, which the king christened Pai Chai Haktang (“Hall for the Rearing of Useful Men”). A year later, Mary F. Scranton, with the assistance of Ella Appenzeller, established Ewha Haktang (“Pear Blossom School”) for women. Driven by a deep conviction that every soul mattered, Scranton famously opened her school with just a single female student, willingly defying a patriarchal culture that deemed the education of girls unnecessary.
The impact of these twin institutions became revolutionary. By teaching Western science, history, geography, and Bible entirely in Hangul—the native, vernacular Korean script—the mission schools bypassed the elite Confucian system and opened their doors to women, outcasts, and the lower classes. Literacy spread rapidly across the peninsula. Because the Bible and foundational academic texts were suddenly accessible in the common tongue, the transformative message of Christ’s Gospel reached all levels of society, and many became believers.
As the educational programs expanded, initial government opposition to the Gospel declined. Appenzeller was soon able to transition from covert operations to overt ministry, establishing Chungdong First Methodist Church, the first Protestant congregation in Korea. Embracing a holistic approach to literacy and discipleship, he joined the Board of Bible Translators to help translate the Scriptures into the Korean vernacular and, in 1897, he founded the country’s first Christian newspaper, The Korean Christian Advocate.
The legacy of this nineteenth-century missional strategy remains remarkably visible today in contemporary South Korea. By 1910 the network of mission schools grew exponentially, reaching approximately 800. The modest schoolhouses of the pioneer era evolved into the bedrock of modern Korean society, with Pai Chai and Ewha expanding into world-class universities alongside vast networks of secondary schools. Today, the Appenzeller-Scranton legacy comprises between 350 and 400 distinctly Christian educational institutions, including approximately 40 Christian colleges and universities, six theological institutes, and an array of primary and secondary schools. While state funding policies over the late twentieth century prompted a shift toward public education, a vibrant independent and international Christian school movement continues to flourish to preserve authentic biblical integration.
In summary, Appenzeller’s Spirit-anointed educational strategy directly fueled the growth of the Korean Church. His initial “school for the rearing of useful men” has blossomed into the multi-million-member Korean Methodist Church, part of a remarkable demographic shift that sees roughly 30% of the nation now identifying as Christian. In this way, education did not simply act as a passive, secondary tool; it was the tool the Spirit used to establish the Church and create the intellectual, moral, and institutional foundation of the modern, democratic state we know today. Historians like J. Earnest Fisher noted in the 1920s that mission schools introduced a radical "revaluation of the individual." Concepts of popular sovereignty, civic responsibility, and individual rights before God were taught explicitly in the curriculum, directly challenging the rigid social hierarchies of traditional Confucianism and demonstrating that the schoolhouse is often the most effective engine of permanent church growth.
Education as Mission: Mary Slessor (Calabar, Nigeria)
A great deal has been written about the pivotal role of education as mission in Africa. Historically, mission schools were utilized primarily to teach biblical truth and equip national leaders for church ministry; however, whether intentionally or otherwise, they also became powerful engines for social transformation and the birth of modern independence movements. Throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public or colonial educational infrastructure was virtually nonexistent. Consequently, Christian missionaries became the primary architects of literacy across the continent, inadvertently establishing the foundational frameworks for both a native clergy and a burgeoning civil servant class.
The diversity and impact of these educational strategies are evident across the continent. Here are a few noteworthy examples. On the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), the Swiss Basel Mission Society introduced a network of schools focused on vocational and agricultural training, intentionally designed to foster economic independence so that local communities would no longer rely on foreign agencies or colonial governments. In West Africa, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther—a liberated Yoruba slave who became the first African Anglican bishop—worked tirelessly to democratize literacy. He preserved and elevated the Yoruba language by compiling its first grammar, translating the Bible, and establishing a robust network of African-led schools throughout the Niger territory. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Church of Scotland established the Lovedale Missionary Institution. Lovedale pioneered a racially integrated, rigorous academic and vocational curriculum that emphasized Christian ethics while actively challenging the social hierarchies of the era.
As a direct consequence of this widespread missional activity, vernacular languages were preserved, literacy spread widely, and an equipped African leadership class emerged. Virtually all the founding fathers of sub-Saharan Africa were products of Christian mission schools. For example, Nelson Mandela was educated at Healdtown Methodist Independent School and both Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were products of Roman Catholic mission schools; each of these leaders later credited their formative educational environments with instilling in them the core concepts of universal human rights, individual dignity, and national self-determination.
This educational legacy becomes even more striking when contrasted with alternative political trajectories on the continent. While one of East Africa's most notorious dictators, Idi Amin, was educated in an Islamic regimental school, his political predecessors and contemporary Ugandan leaders—such as Milton Obote—were the products of prestigious Christian institutions like King’s College Budo and Busoga College Mwiri. Ultimately, it was the distinctive message of the Christian mission schools—the revolutionary assertion that every individual was created in the image of God and possessed inherent, God-given rights—that provided the intellectual and moral framework that led to decolonization and African independence.
The modern religious and social landscape of Southern Nigeria cannot be understood apart from the pioneering educational mission work of Mary Slessor. Arriving in Calabar in 1876 under the auspices of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Slessor enacted a transformative methodology that seamlessly bound the mandate of the Great Commission to the democratization of learning. Inspired by the life of David Livingstone, she recognized that church planting and true discipleship required an intellectual foundation rooted in the local culture rather than the uncritical imposition of Western civilization. Through an educational program that emphasized vernacular literacy, vocational training, and female equality, Slessor did not merely proclaim Christian ethics—she cultivated the very ground from which a modern Christian church and a self-governing nation would grow.
To understand the profound nature of her educational program, one must look to Slessor’s own formative years. Born in 1848 in the slums of Dundee, Scotland, she was raised by a devout mother and an alcoholic father. By the age of eleven, she had to endure long, daily shifts in a local textile mill to help sustain her impoverished family. She taught herself to read and eventually volunteered as an evening teacher for rough youth in her community. When she deployed to West Africa at the age of twenty-seven under the auspices of the Presbyterian church, she carried a critical asset: a firsthand understanding of how literacy and practical skills could break the cycle of human poverty and suffering.
Upon her arrival, Slessor rejected the normal European missionary strategy which saw missionaries congregate in safe, comfortable, coastal compounds. Instead, she pushed deep into the illiterate interior rainforests of Calabar, fully integrating her life with the local Efik and Okoyong peoples. She lived in a traditional mud hut, ate native food, traveled barefoot through the jungle, and mastered the local language to a degree that astonished the native speakers. This radical identification earned her the deep affection of the local populace, as well as the respect of the British colonial government, which eventually appointed her vice-consul and magistrate for the region, allowing her to introduce the concept of peaceful arbitration in place of tribal warfare.
Slessor's core missionary strategy centered on the establishment of primary schools in remote, unreached villages on land she personally helped to clear. Her educational philosophy was built upon the conviction that conversion to Christianity and literacy leading to discipleship went together. The Presbyterians understood that for a church to become truly indigenous and mature, believers needed to read and interpret the Word of God for themselves. Slessor rejected the idea that becoming a follower of Christ meant adopting European clothing or cultural forms. Instead, her schools utilized the vernacular language, thereby ensuring the indigenous language medium was preserved alongside the colonial language (English).
The curriculum in these village schoolhouses was explicitly holistic, combining Christian ethics with highly practical, locally relevant skills. Slessor placed a radical, unprecedented emphasis on the education of women and girls, teaching them literacy and domestic micro-economics. To ensure the permanence of her mission, Slessor used her classrooms to train native assistants. As local assistants were equipped to manage a village school, Slessor would move further into the interior to repeat the process, creating a cascading effect of literacy and evangelism across the region.
Furthermore, Slessor used her educational platform to combat systemic human rights abuse driven by deep-seated superstition. Most famously, the local culture held that twins were a demonic curse; twin infants were routinely stuffed into clay pots and left to die in the forest, while their mothers were exiled from the community. Slessor used her schools to teach basic human biology and the Biblical concept of individual dignity, thereby dismantling the myth of demonic involvement. She turned her home into a crowded sanctuary for rescued infants, providing a living object lesson of how to love and care for the weak and defenseless. Her advocacy led to the outlawing of infanticide.
The ongoing legacy of Mary Slessor’s thirty-nine years of work fundamentally reformed the educational philosophy of West Africa. She was a passionate proponent of efforts to found what became the Hope Waddell Training Institution in Calabar in 1895. Established by her mission as the first post-primary school in eastern Nigeria, it intentionally rejected the traditional focus on Latin and abstract theology in favor of teaching industrial, agricultural, and technical sciences. This prestigious institution went on to educate the foundational architects of Nigerian independence, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first President of Nigeria, and the first Governor of Eastern Nigeria.
Today, a vast network of schools, including the Mary Slessor Academy in Calabar, stand on the exact out-station locations she hand-cleared over a century earlier. While Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist missions also constructed large educational networks across southern Nigeria—aided by a stable British environment which facilitated travel and communication—it was Slessor’s indigenization that prepared the interior for the explosive, self-sustaining growth of the Church. Her memory is honored across the nation, from a major roadway in the state capital to a dedicated female residence hall at the University of Nigeria. Ultimately, Mary Slessor demonstrated that fulfilling the Great Commission does not mean winning temporary, transient converts: it means building a grounded, equipped disciple whose service to the Church extends to the community and even the nation.
Education as Mission: Europe
The Palace School at Aachen (782)
Famous schools in Greece dating back twenty-four centuries remain legendary today. Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, the Epicurean 'Garden,' and Zeno’s Stoa continue to influence pedagogical theory and shape modern philosophical thought much as they did in ancient Athens. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more enduring legacy from the classical era than the ideas emanating from its leading educational schools. However, as the gravitational pull of Rome declined, classical education waned, and throughout the early Middle Ages, formal schooling virtually disappeared.
Again, in the fortuitous will of God, notable Christo-centric reforms occurred. Among the most brilliant of these occurred in Charlemagne’s court at the palace school he established in Aachen. The master pedagogue of this venture was Alcuin of York, a Northumbrian scholar and monk who revived the study of the seven liberal arts. Alcuin insisted that the clergy be thoroughly educated to become effective shepherds and to counter the emergence of heresy. His tireless efforts ensured that corrupted Latin texts were corrected, manuscripts were made more legible using a uniform script, and thousands of ancient Christian and classical manuscripts were preserved. It is difficult to imagine how Christianity as we understand it would have survived if Alcuin had not secured our link to the past through the palace school. It is also noteworthy that Alcuin was operating in a cultural setting that did not initially value the reforms he introduced. Not only could Charlemagne himself not write, but few of the ruling nobility were literate and the clergy were largely indifferent and even oppositional. This makes the point that the preservation of truth may require intentional intervention and energic commitment in the face of a disinterested populace.
Early Modern Europe
Medieval revivals, often found in monastic movements, also included important educational initiatives analogous to Charlemagne’s. By analyzing the spiritual and pedagogical influence of a late medieval group like the Brethren of the Common Life, it is possible to see at a granular level the role education can and did play in bringing profound beneficial change to the church and Europe. Rooted in the Devotio Moderna, a movement centered on personal piety, biblical literacy, and a daily imitation of Christ, the Brethren quietly planted seeds for both the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation through their influence on a series of influential schools across northern and western Europe. Among the most famous of these were the schools in Deventer, Pforzheim, and Sélestat.
The origins of the Brethren of the Common Life can be traced back to Gerard Groote of Deventer, a deeply religious reformer who countered the speculative scholasticism of his day by emphasizing a living faith. Groote and his followers believed that the moral purity, love, and compassion of Christ should be daily realities in His followers. These ideas were famously summarized in one of their student’s seminal works, The Imitation of Christ (Thomas à Kempis), a devotional masterpiece which is still widely read. Critically, Groote possessed an unshakeable conviction that society could be reformed along Biblical lines if young people received a proper education. To that end, he and his followers wove Biblical teaching into every subject, utilizing the vernacular to explain essential spiritual truths to the layman. They also strove to foster a spiritually disciplined atmosphere in their students’ dormitories.
As a loosely structured organization, the Brethren’s influence extended far beyond their formal membership, shaping independent educators who adopted their methods. One such spiritual adherent was Louis Dringenberg. In 1440, the city council of Sélestat found itself navigating a rapidly changing mid-fifteenth-century economy. Determined to modernize their local school to prepare young boys for new economic and social realities, the council appointed Dringenberg as rector. Dringenberg brought the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of the Devotio Moderna into the Alsace, earning him recognition as the father of lay instruction in southwest Germany.
Dringenberg’s foundational work was carried forward and expanded by a succession of three brilliant rectors, culminating in the administration of John Sapidus, a dedicated teacher and friend of Erasmus. Together, these rectors transformed the Sélestat Latin school by implementing radical pedagogical innovations aligned in many ways with the Brethren’s aspirations: they divided students into classes based on achievement, shortened the school day to avoid fatigue, utilized high-quality teachers, produced new textbooks, and introduced gentler methods of discipline to stimulate genuine student interest. Above all, the four reforming rectors sought to see their graduates become genuine, pious followers of Christ.
The success of this missional model was phenomenal. Though Sélestat was a modest city of only three to four thousand inhabitants, by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the construction of a new school building in 1500 allowed the student body to swell to over nine hundred boys. Less than ten percent of these students were locals; the rest traveled from across Europe, including France and Italy, attracted by the school's reputation for combining academic excellence and unparalleled pedagogical skill.
The true measure of Sélestat’s impact, however, lies in its graduates, who went on to help define the spiritual and intellectual trajectory of Europe. By playing down the visual obligations of ritualistic sacraments and elevating direct engagement with both the Scriptures and safe classical texts, the school functioned as an incubating laboratory for Christian scholarship. Its graduates became imperial secretaries, chroniclers, historians, and prominent educators like Jacob Wimpheling, the leading pedagogue of the German Empire in the pre-Reformation era.
An expansive web of connections spun out from the Brethren's educational orbit, directly nurturing the minds that would reshape Western Christendom. Their institutional footprint was evident not only in Sélestat, but also at Pforzheim, where the renowned scholar Johannes Reuchlin oversaw a reformed curriculum that would graduate both his own great-nephew, Philipp Melanchthon, and the Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier. Elsewhere, the Brethren’s schools directly educated the vanguard of the Reformation: Erasmus studied at Deventer, and Martin Luther spent a vital formative year at Magdeburg. Even John Calvin was swept into this informal network as a teenager at Paris’s Collège de Montaigu, studying under Jan Standonck, a principal thoroughly trained by the Brethren. Through these synchronized channels of academic and spiritual formation, the Brethren’s missional reach extended across all theological divides—shaping Martin Bucer at Sélestat, Pope Adrian VI at Zwolle, and Ignatius of Loyola, who walked the halls of Montaigu and built his Spiritual Exercises upon the foundation of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Indeed, through these secondary networks, virtually no major reformer remained untouched by the continent-wide spiritual movement known as the Devotio Moderna and its primary institutional expression, the Brethren of the Common Life.
The Protestant Era in Europe
1. The Geneva Academy (1559)
Much could be said about the historical impact of “education as mission” within the Roman Catholic tradition. Unlike Protestants—and Evangelicals in particular, at least until recently—the Roman Catholic Church has long maintained education as a primary, non-negotiable objective of its global missional strategy. While the eventual decline of this educational urgency within the Protestant world stems from various complex historical causes, the early architects of the Reformation understood that education of both the laity and the clergy was vital to their cause.
One of the preeminent examples of this early Protestant commitment is John Calvin’s Geneva Academy. Established in 1559 and led by its brilliant first rector, Theodore Beza, the Academy was designed specifically to forge a highly educated, theologically articulate leadership class by seamlessly integrating classical humanism with Biblical truth. Because Geneva served as a prominent city of refuge for displaced Protestants, individuals from across the European continent were exposed to Calvin’s rigorous educational praxis. John Knox, who studied within this system, reportedly declared the Geneva Academy to be "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles." From this single institutional source emerged the leaders who established the Reformed Church in Scotland, fueled the Huguenot movement in France, and provided the direct Puritan impetus that profoundly shaped the civic and ecclesiastical foundations of early America.
2. The Halle Foundations / Francke Foundations
A century later, an educational movement was founded in Germany that would exert a parallel influence across the German-speaking world. In 1695, Pietist pastor August Hermann Francke established a modest school for poor and orphaned children in Glaucha, near Halle. Mirroring the core convictions of the Brethren of the Common Life two centuries earlier, Francke sought to provide an academically thorough education infused with a genuine Biblical spirituality and a call to active discipleship.
His holistic approach proved highly attractive, and within a short time, his modest start-up grew into a massive educational community encompassing schools for all social classes, orphanages, a printing press, and a medical laboratory. This unexpected phenomenon became the epicenter of the Pietist resurgence in Europe and served as the birthplace of the modern Protestant missionary movement. The Halle Foundations trained and deployed the first cross-cultural Protestant missionaries and deeply shaped the spiritual life of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who subsequently championed the global missionary endeavors of the Moravians.
Education as Mission: North America
William Tennent’s "Log College" (1726)
Three decades after Francke established his school near Halle, a Presbyterian minister named William Tennent constructed a twenty-by-twenty-foot log cabin in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania where he planned to educate his four sons and a group of young men who wished to go into Christian ministry. At the time, the Presbyterian church had strict requirements about the need for their ministers to have a formal education. Tennent determined to use a high-quality classical curriculum featuring the study of multiple languages and theology, while simultaneously placing an emphasis on personal conversion and evangelistic zeal.
Although his rudimentary facility and unconventional program were initially mocked by critics as merely a “log college,” its graduates included several preeminent itinerant preachers who took leading roles in the First Great Awakening, a revival that revitalized the American church. Furthermore, Tennent's academy profoundly influenced the trajectory of higher education in the United States through its alumni and supporters who went on to establish numerous preparatory academies across the American frontier. The log cabin college itself became the College of New Jersey and is known today as Princeton University.
Education as Mission: TeachBeyond Case Study
The strategic effectiveness of 'education as mission' remains an essential and highly effective component of the Great Commission. Indeed, the global landscape for Christian education presents an opportunity that is arguably greater and more urgent today than at any other point in history. The following accounts from TeachBeyond missionaries offer compelling and inspiring evidence of this enduring reality.
[The following is my transcription of a recorded message 05.23.26; dates, names, and places are not published.]
Shortly after TeachBeyond adopted education as a strategic platform to proclaim the Gospel and equip disciples in accordance with the Great Commission, my wife and I were assigned to work in a country that was aggressively opposed to Christian witness. Because we were internationals, we were permitted to establish a church for our own worship. Once we did, we began to pray together for an opportunity to plant other churches in various parts of the country, including one specific region where Christ was virtually unknown. We prayed for five years, but nothing opened up. Although various individuals traveled to that city for business reasons and gathered together small groups of believers, which we hoped would become permanent, these initiatives petered out almost immediately.
Meanwhile, a respected businessman in the country where we served had thought for ten years since becoming a Christian that the best way to introduce the Gospel to his nation was through education, rather than through typical models of church planting. In his mind, starting a Christian school would be the key to transforming his country. In fact, his specific vision was the reason TeachBeyond sent us to this country. Yet, despite his forward-looking strategy, our prayers for the city did not initially include a request for an educational opportunity.
This was due, in part, to the fact that the city was an unlikely place to start an international bilingual school, which was our specialty. It lay well outside the major metropolitan area where our community lived and worked. Furthermore, the local Christians there faced serious government opposition and financial hardship. In God’s will and timing, two national business partners who worked alongside us wanted us to investigate the possibility of starting a school which they would support. For them, the school was as an economic and social enterprise, rather than what we would traditionally consider a missional activity.
As we began to explore this possibility, my local language skills were still limited. While this was often a liability, in this case it strangely proved to be fortuitous beyond my wildest imagination. The story began in early February during an exploratory trip to assess the city's educational potential. Because I did not have a translator with me, I was only able to follow the various discussions in a general way. Finally, the local residents and our business colleagues turned to me and asked, "What do you think?" I replied, “Conceptually, opening a school in this area is a good idea.” I left the meeting knowing it would be several years before the situation matured to the point where we could begin serious project negotiations.
However, on May 15th, the couple with whom we had spoken phoned my assistant to say, "We think your boss should make sure the teachers arrive by the end of June in order to get the school properly ready for the September startup." My assistant replied, "My boss hasn't told me anything about this. I have no idea what you're talking about." She ended the call, walked directly into my office, and asked, "Why didn't you tell us about our new school?" Stunned, I asked, "What school?" "The one in X city," she replied. I was completely flummoxed. How could they have possibly thought I was committing to such a tight timeline? It was already May 15th; launching a school by September was an absolute impossibility. In fact, launching a school in September a year from then was an impossibility.
Our prayers immediately took on a great deal of urgency. By way of background, I should add that this happened to be the first year we were not short of staff in any of our ongoing projects. I was incredibly relieved because we finally had everything in place across the country for a smooth, proper launch. Since it can normally take up to two years to find, fund, equip, and deploy a new recruit, our staffing situation already felt like a miracle. In hindsight, it felt as though the Lord saw my budding sense of self-sufficiency and said, "Oh, he's getting comfortable. It is time for him to learn to trust me for the truly impossible."
The shock was enormous: we now had to find two teachers and a head of school and have them on the ground within forty-five days. So, we prayed with fervency and desperation. The very next day, I received an unexpected email from two individuals in South Africa. They wrote, "You know, it's crazy, but somehow we were given your name as the guy who is always looking for teachers. We would like to start working as soon as possible. Do you have anything available for us? We have just arrived in your country, and while we are not staying near you, we are willing to move wherever you want us to go in order to be a part of what you are doing." To say that my colleagues and I were flabbergasted would be an understatement.
We still desperately needed a head of school, but our contacts in the target city wrote to say they had identified a local leader whom they believed could manage the role, so it seemed our needs were temporarily met. However, just ten days before the school was scheduled to open, our contacts wrote back with alarming news: student enrollment was critically low so they urgently needed us to send an international head of school who could provide the institutional prestige necessary to attract families. In that culture, the optics of “international standards” were paramount to securing baseline enrollment.
When this new impossibility emerged, I remember thinking to myself, Now I know how Jonah must have felt. I had a deep sense that God would indeed perform a miracle and provide an appropriate overseas leader within that impossibly short span of time, but I felt incredibly conflicted. On one hand, it would be a tremendous testimony to His favor, power, and presence. On the other hand, it would create enormous, simplistic expectations among our national community that all we ever had to do was ask, and instant miracles would happen. It sounds strange to say, but living in a land of impossibility is incredibly stressful if your heart is not entirely yielded to the Lord. I realized I desperately needed to discover the rest which comes entirely by faith and is not reliant on circumstances or personal disposition.
Sure enough, the very next day, two individuals whom I knew well phoned me from the other side of the world. "Hey," they said, "our fall plans just fell through. Three years ago, when we visited you, we wanted to stay and help but couldn't. Is it possible that you have a head of school position open right now?" A few days later, they landed in the country.
That’s a great story, but it isn’t the whole story or even the most remarkable and important part of the story. One of the leaders who arrived was only working part-time, and he quickly asked, "Where are we going to attend church?" When I told him, "There is no church here," he responded without hesitation: "Well, then, I'm going to march down to a little facility I know near the school that has permission to host public meetings and see if we can rent it." Due to strict government regulations, this small public space was approved for community activities because it could be easily monitored by local officials, unlike a private home where authorities could not observe what was happening.
Because it was deemed safe by the state, our tiny staff of four led by the part-time teacher held our first weekend service there in September. In November, our leader sent me a photograph with a note that read, "We just had the most incredible service—we baptized twenty new believers, and, by the way, our Alpha course is completely full." The picture they sent showed forty-five people packed into the small room. Later that same year, weekly attendance reached about ninety people. Fully half of them were brand-new believers, each representing an amazing story of God’s redemptive work in their lives.
After five long years of prayer, we finally established a permanent Christian presence in that city—not through conventional methods, but through a school. We had tried various other strategies, but God chose to use education to build His church. Why? Part of the answer lies in the reality that the school allowed the Gospel to be heard and experienced within the natural context of daily relationship. Our educational team was able to move into a community where foreigners normally could not and would not live. It was through these dedicated individuals that the Holy Spirit touched hearts that were finally ready to hear and respond to the truth. This “strategy” positions the classroom as a uniquely redemptive space that fosters the relational flourishing of the whole person in community. Therefore, for us, education was the most effective tool for pioneer church planting.
Conclusion: Obedience and Urgency
When the Church evaluates its modern priorities, history offers a definitive, unshakeable verdict: education is at the core of what Christ called us to do; it is not an auxiliary option to the Great Commission but the approach the Holy Spirit naturally uses to effectively communicate Gospel truth. From Alcuin’s palace school to Slesser’s village hut and William Tennent’s log college, education in its many forms has proven to be a remarkably effective way to bring transformation to individuals and communities. Each of these historic examples demonstrates that utilizing education for missional purposes is far more than a secondary humanitarian strategy; it is one of the most effective ways to further the work of the Church. By treating the classroom as an intentional incubator for spiritual devotion and intellectual rigor, our spiritual forebearers successfully planted resilient churches, protected theological orthodoxy, and reshaped nations. If the contemporary Church desires to foster lasting spiritual renewal and exert a life-giving, permanent influence on modern society, it must reject a bifurcated view of faith and intellect, once again placing high-quality, Biblically integrated education at the absolute center of its global missional strategy.