The Kingdom of Character: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (1886-1926)

This book tells the story of the Student Volunteer Movement, which launched modern American Protestant missions. Between 1886 and 1926 the SVM was at the center of this movement and succeeded in recruiting at least half of the missionaries of the mainline Protestant churches. The leaders of this movement expressed ideas that run the gamut of American Protestant religious emphases, from premillennialism and revivalism to the Social Gospel and ecumenism. The SVM was also a product of late Victorian culture with its emphasis on "manliness" and "character formation". The Kingdom of Character is an important book not only because it is the first scholarly study of the SVM, but because it is indispensable to understanding our Victorian past and for better understanding one of the greatest forces for modernity in this century, the American missionary movement.^R Co-published with the American Society of Missiology.