ABSTRACT
Almost without fail, early Protestant missionaries expressed the hope that the day would soon come when their services were no longer needed because Chinese Christians were ready to assume control. Whether the field was Africa, the Middle East, or China, mission boards initially assumed that making available the Gospel of salvation and effecting a few conversions would set up self-perpetuating waves of conversions. During the 1860s Rufus Anderson, corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, had enunciated the goal of self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating churches and toward the end of the century the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions had adopted the slogan, ''the evangelization of the world in this generation."l The era of missions would presumably be brief and self-limiting.
