The history of twentieth-century missionary activity is undergoing a renaissance. Rising interest in globalization and its effects alongside heightened awareness of the role of religion in contemporary international affairs has prompted scholars from a variety of fields to analyze both the local and transnational implications of missionary encounters. William Lawrence Svelmoe's A New Vision for Missions makes significant contributions to this growing body of literature.

Through this lively and meticulously researched biographical study of one of the foremost missionary leaders of the twentieth century, Svelmoe revises several influential axioms about the intersections of evangelical faith, overseas engagement, and American culture. In his work as the “visionary founder of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, the largest, most innovative, and most controversial Protestant mission of the twentieth century” (ix), Svelmoe contends, William Cameron Townsend created a “new kind of missionary” (259) and “new ways of being evangelical” (243). Because of his relentlessly pragmatic willingness to work across (and, in fact, to tear down) conventional boundaries that separated “faith missions” from denominational boards, Anglo-Americans from indigenous Guatemalan Indians, capitalist entrepreneurs from Latin American socialists, untutored missionary recruits from elite academics, and Protestants from Catholics, “Uncle Cam” (as he was affectionately known) deserves to be recognized as one of the “key players” in the emergence of a more ecumenical, moderate, educated, and socially engaged strain of American evangelicalism over the course of the twentieth century. The “linguistic missionaries” Townsend influenced and trained through his work with the Central American Mission, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, Svelmoe asserts, “have led the way for evangelicals from isolation to cooperation, from cultural naiveté to sophistication” (317).

By placing Townsend and the Wycliffe Bible Translators alongside more recognizable figures and institutions such as Billy Graham and Fuller Theological Seminary, Svelmoe argues that missionaries were at the forefront of reshaping conservative evangelical priorities in the mid-twentieth century. Because missionaries in general—and Townsend in particular—faced enormous political, social, and cultural barriers in their efforts to evangelize indigenous peoples in places like Guatemala and Mexico, they often became “impatient with fundamentalist proprieties” (37) and “tended to move beyond their more rigid brethren at home to focus on what they considered the essentials of salvation” (132). In addition to avoiding theological arguments and denominational squabbles in favor of an ecumenical faith that elevated devotional experience and academic prowess over doctrinal precision, Townsend and his colleagues in the field were also willing to blur the line between evangelism and social concern at a time when their supporters in the United States were striving to distinguish the two kinds of ministry in an effort to disassociate themselves from the perceived perils of Protestant modernism. “Despite the taint given to social work in the struggles between liberals and fundamentalists at home,” Svelmoe notes, “conservative evangelical missionaries on the field hardly skipped a beat, continuing, until the Depression slowed them somewhat, to construct schools, hospitals, orphanages, and even … coffee-curing plants” (169).

While Svelmoe shows that evangelical missionaries like Townsend were more concerned with the physical and social “welfare” of the people they sought to convert than scholars have previously recognized, he simultaneously challenges prevailing assumptions about missionary entanglements with various forms of American imperialism. By prioritizing evangelization even as they expanded the range of social ministries that they offered, conservative Protestants associated with faith missions rarely equated Christianization with “civilization.” In fact, Svelmoe argues, many evangelical missionaries “had an ambivalent view of U.S. economic power and influence in the world” (68) and “were often the first” to expose the complicity of American business and political leaders in perpetrating injustice and violence against indigenous people (190). Directly countering accusations that Townsend conspired with U.S.–based oil companies to “wrest land away from Latin American Indian groups” (345), Svelmoe painstakingly and persuasively documents Uncle Cam's lifelong respect and concern for the people with whom he lived and worked. From his earliest days in Guatemala, Townsend relied on the expertise of native speakers and treated them as partners and even “mentors” (34). While he assured Latin American governments that his efforts to translate the Bible and to promote literacy in indigenous languages would ultimately further their nationalist goals of incorporating Indians into the broader Spanish-speaking milieu, Townsend simultaneously “valorized Indian culture” and hoped that his approach would enable Indians to “protect themselves and advance themselves economically and in social standing” (181–82). Accordingly, Townsend advocated segregating Indian congregations from Spanish-speaking ladino churches in order to insulate Indian Christians from racial prejudice and allow them to develop independent leadership capabilities.

Svelmoe presents his most convincing argument against the charge that Townsend was guilty of “promoting genocide of the Indians” (318) in his discussion of Uncle Cam's cooperative relationship with Mexican revolutionaries such as President Lázaro Cárdenas. Townsend's public advocacy of Mexican socialist leaders and their policies during the 1930s and 1940s—a period of increasing concern about the “threat of international communism” among both American evangelicals and the U.S. government (244)—belies the notion that Townsend was “in league” with American business interests or the CIA (318). In fact, Svelmoe contends, Townsend's rhetorical and actual association with the American left marks him as real evangelical maverick who encouraged his broad constituency “to support the interests of a foreign country over the interests of their own” (284).

Svelmoe's recounting of Townsend's fascinating story thus successfully amends a number of truisms about evangelical missions and culture in the twentieth-century United States. My only real complaint about the book is that Svelmoe's arguments and their implications are deeply embedded within the narrative rather than explicitly stated in a critical scholarly introduction, conclusion, or even in the footnotes. Perhaps the lack of overt analysis and effort to situate this story within a broader set of scholarly conversations was intentional: Svelmoe's dramatic approach certainly appeals to the general reader. From an academic perspective, however, Svelmoe's failure to interpret Townsend's views on race in relation to recent historical and theoretical work on the subject (to take just one example), is disappointing. Svelmoe's decision to cover only the first forty-five years of Townsend's life in this biography is also curious. Svelmoe ends his account almost four decades prior to Townsend's death in 1982, and just at the point when Wycliffe Bible Translators was founded. Although Svelmoe's defense of Townsend and his ministries is persuasive, the case would have been even stronger had he carried the narrative forward through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when Latin American governments underwent profound upheavals. Perhaps Svelmoe is at work on a sequel? This reader, for one, would like to know the rest of the story.