ABSTRACT
This is the origin of the missionary movement. It was a model of Christian activity entirely foreign to the mainstream of European experience. In consequence, it needed new structures to express it. In Catholic Christianity, where the movement began, there were already institutions which could be adapted to serve the new purpose, and the religious orders developed new forms and functions. A Protestant missionary movement emerged in due course. Protestant concepts of Christendom were not basically different from Catholic, and the sixteenth-century Reformation left the foundational assumptions of European Christianity essentially untouched. But the structures to give effect to the missionary movement took much longer to develop. The Catholic movement had been able to develop on the basis of the religious orders, but the Reformation had slain the goose that laid that particular golden egg.
