1938 riggs report and insider movements

St Francis Magazine Vol 9, No 2 | April 2013

St Francis Magazine is published by Arab Vision and Interserve 65

The 1938 Riggs Report on the “Near East

Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of

Moslems”: an aborted beginning to the Insider

Movement strategy

By Duane Alexander Miller1

After decades of Protestant mission to (or among, one might rather

say) Muslims, there was precious little fruit to show for very substan-

tial investments in time, personnel and money. This 1938 inquiry

sought to investigate this issue—why had the mission to Muslims

been, on the balance, unsuccessful? And what could be done do

change that? The report was composed by Henry Riggs with the aim

of summarizing the findings of the 1938 research of the Near East

Christian Council (NECC) which was based in Beirut, Lebanon. The

report has recently been made available online2 and its complete title

is ‘Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of

Moslems: Report’3.

Riggs was a long-time missionary in the Anatolian city of Har-

poot, today called Elazig in Turkish. There he witnessed the slaugh-

ter of many of the Armenian Christians whom he served as an educa-

tor and a missionary. His recollections can be read in Days of Trag-

edy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917. The

manuscript was prepared in 1918 but was only recently published in

book form4.

Many of the findings of the report are helpful, if not revolution-

ary. For instance, we read that “Christian teaching does not mean the

same to the Moslem that it does to a Christian” (Part I). It then goes

onto list the classical points of contention that make the Good News

of Christians foolishness (if not blasphemy) to Muslims, like the doc-

1 Miller lectures in church history and theology at Nazareth Evangelical Theological

Seminary (NETS) in Israel. His blog is duanemiller.wordpress.com. 2 http://wp.me/pu7Qb-9h 3 I am indebted to my colleague Bob Blincoe for sharing this report with me. I

interviewed him recently and he mentioned the document (Blincoe, Miller 2013). 4 Armenian Genocide Documentation Series, Gomidas Inst, 1997.



trines of original sin, the incarnation, and the atonement. Another

difficulty is that religious conversion is often interpreted by Muslims

as leaving one’s ‘people’. That is, to become Christian was to be-

come Greek or Armenian and cease to be a Turk or an Arab. The

NECC inquiry sought advice and input from missionaries and Henry

Riggs used that information to compose this report.

People interested in contemporary mission theory will recognize

the importance of this document in that it appears to be the earliest

known endorsement of what is today called ‘Insider Movement’ ap-

proach to mission to Muslims. The main section is point 6 of Part II:

It is the conviction of a large number of workers among Moslems that

the ultimate hope of bringing Christ to the Moslems is to be attained by

the development of groups of followers of Jesus who are active in mak-

ing Him known to others while remaining loyally a part of the social and

political groups to which they belong in Islam. The ideal is that there

should thus come into being a church whose only head is Christ, and

which does not carry the stigma of being an alien institution, drawing

men away from their natural social and political connections. In spite of

the stupendous difficulties in the way of such an outcome, many workers

are convinced that only as the spiritual significance of Christ is thus sep-

arated from external and unhappy connections in past and present can

the way be opened for the power of Christ to do its work in the Moslem

world.

This is, in a nutshell, the Insider Movement strategy of mission to

Muslims–not seeking to make Muslims into Christian, but Sunni [or

Shi’a] Muslims into ‘followers-of-Jesus’ Muslims. Riggs explicitly

points out that some other term than ‘Christian’ must be found and

‘some other terminology must be developed’ (Part II, point 8). With

updated spelling, some of the specific phrases used could be straight

out of a contemporary journal article, as when he talks about, ‘be-

lievers who thus remain a part of their Moslem social-political

group’ (Part II, point 11).

The document was known to the meticulous historian of mission,

Lyle Vander Werff in his influential book Christian Mission to Mus-

lims: The Record (1977). Vander Werff records how in 1938, at the

Tambaram conference on mission to Muslims, Henry Riggs advocat-



ed the ideas set forth in this report. “The majority at Tambaram re-

jected the ideas set forth by […] Riggs …” (263).

Riggs’ 1941 article in Moslem World titled ‘Unbeaten Paths in

Moslem Evangelism’ does appear in Phil Parshall’s bibliography for

New Paths in Muslim Evangelism (Baker House, 1980), though the

emergence of the term ‘insider movement’ is much later. I contacted

Dr Parshall by e-mail5 and showed him the Riggs Report and he said

he had never seen it before. In any case, even if Parshall was influ-

enced by Riggs (and it appears he was not), he was and is not an ad-

vocate of IM.

But was this document the inspiration of the contemporary IM

strategy? That seems unlikely to me. Rather, this document is ob-

scure and it does not appear in the original IM literature. For in-

stance, the entire issue of IJFM Vol 24:1 (Spring 2007) is devoted to

the topic of C5 contextualization and Insider Movements, yet neither

this report nor the Riggs 1941 article is mentioned by any of the au-

thors.

Also, Matthew Sleeman’s careful study of the roots of IM does

not even mention the Riggs Report. The same is true for Wolfe’s

2011 doctoral dissertation on the IM topic. It is unlikely that the

Riggs Report could have influenced early IM proponents without

making it into their bibliographies or being detected by scholars like

Sleeman and Wolfe.

This does not mean that this report is without significance,

though. It does demonstrate that mission strategists have had these

ideas before, indeed during a very different age of missions. It also

means that the critique of the old Protestant missions of being uncre-

ative and narrow-minded is not entirely fair.

The Riggs Report of the 1938 NECC inquiry proves that the a key

concept of Insider Movement missiology surfaced many decades

ago, but an examination of the bibliographies of early contemporary

IM advocates leads to the conclusion that they were not aware of this

reality until recently. Continuity between the Riggs Report and more

recent advocacy for IM as a missionary strategy cannot be estab-

lished. Riggs’ advocacy for IM was stymied, and the strategy was

5 November 2012.



eventually forgotten, only to be revived later by proponents who, at

first, were unaware of the Riggs Report.

References

Blincoe, Bob and Duane Alexander Miller. 2013. ‘The Day of Salva-

tion for Muslims Everywhere: an Interview with Bob Blincoe’

in Global Missiology Vol 10:2, January.

<ojs.globalmissiology.org/index.php/english/article/view/1133

>

Parshall, Phil. 1980. New Paths in Muslim Evangelism: Evangelical

Approaches to Contextualization. Grand Rapids: Baker House.

Riggs, Henry H. 1938. Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the

Evangelization of Moslems: Report. Beirut: American Mission

Building.

_____. 1941. ‘Unbeaten Paths in Work for Moslems’ in Moslem

World Vol 31, pp 116-26.

Sleeman, Matthew. 2012. ‘The Origins, Development and Future of

the C5 / Insider Movement Debate’ in St Francis Magazine

Vol 8:4, Aug, pp 498-566.

Vander Werff, Lyle L. 1977. Christian Mission to Muslims: The

Record: Anglican and Reformed Approaches in India and the

Near East, 1800-1938. Pasadena: William Carey Library.

Wolfe, J Henry. 2011. Insider Movements: An Assessment of the Vi-

ability of Retaining Socio-religious Insider Identity in High

Religious Contexts. PhD Dissertation. Louisville, Kentucky:

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

1938 riggs report and insider movements

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