The World His Parish: William Taylor and the Mapping of the Methodist Missionary Tradition

This is a well-researched and detailed book about the nineteenth-century Methodist missionary William Taylor (1821–1902). Taylor University in Indiana is his namesake, and he travelled with personal letters for safe passage from US presidents. He converted thousands, started churches and schools in Africa, Asia, and South America, and raised up hundreds of missionaries to follow in his footsteps, some of whom were instrumental in the early Pentecostal movement. Based on the author's dissertation about Taylor, the book is the first complete biography of him. Through this contribution, Tzan is able to offer a very complete picture of Taylor and correct some false perceptions. The writing is dense but accessible. In addition to covering the trajectory of Taylor's life and missionary travels, the book has ample footnotes for the scholar who likes to follow the sources for further reading. Taylor was one of the first Protestant missionaries in South America, India, and Africa. He preached in Valparaiso, Chile, during a stopover as he travelled on a steamship from New York City to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Once in California, he preached to the opportunists, immigrants, and sailors on the Western frontier. Taylor was a revivalist and a millennialist, appropriate for his context in the late nineteenth century. He also had an entrepreneurial quality and when in debt, he published books about his adventures and went on lecture series to pay his debts and send money back to his family on the East Coast. Primarily an historical book, Tzan does enter into relevant theological debates in the nineteenth century; for example, the debate on entire sanctification, namely Taylor's understanding of sanctification as sacrifice as opposed to Asbury Lowrey's understanding of sanctification as empowerment, which has implications for the birth of the Pentecostal movement.The book also makes a few relevant social commentaries on issues such as race and gender, but, for the most part, attempts to describe Taylor as the person he was in his own context until the conclusion, where Tzan offers a critique, some perspective, and comparisons with the Anglican missionary Roland Allen. Taylor lived through the US Civil War and was in Africa at the time of the 1884–5 Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference, but did not comment on it. His approach was as a Methodist pragmatist, defined as ‘a willingness to embrace any means offered by the world to share their message’ (238). This could mean, in some cases, collaboration with colonial powers. Taylor did share, however, the Wesleyan foundational belief in universal grace, namely that all people have access to God's grace and are in need of hearing the Good News.The early Taylor was a proponent of Paul's missionary method of a ‘tent-maker’, meaning that he wanted to be self-sustaining. However, later in his career, Taylor entered into more formal relations with the Methodist Mission Board and accepted support. Toward the middle of Taylor's missionary career, he developed a huge following from his writing and speaking tours and began to recruit younger missionaries to continue and advance his work. In all, hundreds of missionaries signed up and Taylor placed them in new missionary settings in Africa, Asia, and South America. The absence of information about William and Anne Taylor's personal life in the book is intriguing and suspicious, especially when reading contemporary missionary histories (e.g. William and Clementina Butler) that highlight the role of missionary wives. Taylor travelled without his wife and children and returned only occasionally on brief furloughs. Later, Taylor's son joined him in Africa.In this detailed and well-researched work, Tzan has written a complete biography spanning from Taylor's childhood in Virginia to his final days as a bishop for Africa. The book contains helpful insights into a missionary who was representative of the modern missionary movement. It is ideal for mission scholars and church historians, but too in-depth for novice or casual readers. The book is not a critique of missions' colonial past, nor a criticism of racism. The author accepts Taylor for who he was in his own context and in many cases uses Taylor's own words to describe him. In conclusion, Tzan answers many unanswered questions about William Taylor for mission historians, and corrects some misperceptions, while also opening new areas for future research.

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