The 1938 Riggs Report on the ‘Near East Christian Council Inquiry on the Evangelization of Moslems’: An Aborted Beginning to the Insider Movement Strategy

After decades of Protestant mission to (or among, one might rather say) Muslims, there was precious little fruit to show for very substantial 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 to change that? The report was composed by Henry Riggs with the aim of summarizing the findings of the 1938 research of the Near EastChristian Council (NECC) which was based in Beirut, Lebanon. Many of the findings of the report are helpful, if not revolutionary. 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 on to list the classical points of contention that make the Good News of Christians foolishness (if not blasphemy) to Muslims, like the doctrines 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 become 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. This is a report from the 1938 meeting of Protestant and evangelical missionaries who gather in Beirut to discuss the lack of progress in relation to their missionary works among Muslims over the decades. The brief work proposes a new strategy that resembles what are called today Insider Movements (IM’s) in evangelical missiology.