Arthur Glasser

Engineer and Military Chaplain

Arthur Frederick Glasser was born on September 10, 1914, in Paterson, New Jersey, in the United States. He attended public schools and also Augusta Military Academy. He grew up in the mainline Presbyterian church, and in 1932, at the American Keswick conference held in New Jersey, he was converted to evangelical faith—a conversion that changed the direction and the career of his whole life. He graduated from Cornell University in 1936, from Moody Bible Institute in 1939 and from Faith Theological Seminary in 1942; in the 1930s he also worked for several years as an engineer with the Dravo Corporation. During the Second World War he was a US Navy chaplain attached to the Marine Corps in combat. In 1942 he married Alice Oliver, and they had three children. In 1946 he wrote his first book, And Some Believed, which recorded his experiences with the Marines in the South Pacific.

1945 to 1951

In the year the war ended he came to China as a missionary of the China Inland Mission, and he stayed until 1951. These six years were the most turbulent period for the China Inland Mission—and indeed for the whole Protestant missionary enterprise in China: the government of China changed, missionaries were expelled, and a mission that had worked there for eighty-six years since 1865 had to withdraw entirely. He was not an onlooker but was in the middle of it. Frank Houghton (华福兰), who is also in this database, was the General Director of the China Inland Mission who oversaw this withdrawal; Leslie Lyall (赖恩融) and Otto F. Schoerner (石爱乐) also lived through the same period.

From the Mission to the Lectern

After returning to the United States he was North American director of the China Inland Mission for nearly fifteen years, and during that time he taught at Columbia Bible College and Westminster Theological Seminary. After the China Inland Mission was reorganised as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), he served as its home director until 1970. That same year he moved to Fuller Theological Seminary as dean of the School of World Mission—the school was later renamed the School of Intercultural Studies, and he eventually retired from it as dean emeritus. He received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from Covenant Theological Seminary in 1966, and in 1970 he earned a Master of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. After retiring in 1980 he went on teaching and mentoring students until he moved to Seattle in 1999.

Making Mission a Field of Study

For many years he was editor of the journal Missiology, and he served as president of the American Society of Missiology. He was one of the founders of missiology as an independent academic discipline—a judgement that is no exaggeration: before him, mission was mostly discussed as one of the church's activities; after him and his contemporaries, it became a field of research with its own methods, literature and scholarly community. He was also long engaged in the work of evangelism among Jewish people. In 1983 he and Donald McGavran (马盖文) co-wrote Contemporary Theologies of Mission, which sets out the positions of the various schools.

Announcing the Kingdom

In 2003, when he was nearly ninety, he completed his major work, Announcing the Kingdom: The Story of God's Mission in the Bible, which presents the work of mission as a core component of the Christian faith rather than an added activity. The book also drew controversy: although he consistently emphasised mission and the uniqueness of Christ in salvation, his open treatment of Acts chapters 10 and 17 led some reviewers to question whether he leaned toward universalism; others were uneasy about his emphasis on evangelising the Jewish community. These debates themselves show that the book was read seriously. He died in Seattle on December 8, 2009, at the age of ninety-five.