Oberlin Band (China)

The Oberlin Band was a group of Christian missionaries in China from Oberlin College in Ohio. Members of the Oberlin Band worked in Shanxi province from 1882 until 1900. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the 15 missionary men, women, and children of the Oberlin Band were among the foreign missionaries executed by order of the provincial government or killed by Boxers and soldiers.

The missionaries of the Oberlin Band were associated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also called the American Board.

In the 19th century Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio was prominent for its reformist social agenda and Christian fervor. Oberlin was the first American college to regularly admit African-American students. Its abolitionist activism led one historian to call Oberlin the "town that started the Civil War."

After the Civil War, Oberlin turned much of its attention to the spread of the Christian gospel of salvation around the world. "Let us arise..." said one theologian, "to grapple...with the stupendous work of supplanting the...empire of Satan". Christianity and civilization were believed to be synonymous by many in the Christian world. "We contend that a true Civilization cannot exist apart from Christianity," said a missionary journal. Thus, a missionary could foster the blessings of both Christianity and civilization in the non-Christian countries, the largest of which was China, ruled by the Qing dynasty. "Three hundred to four hundred millions of souls are here crowded together [and] nine-tenths of these multitudes are still unreached by the gospel." Underlying the enthusiasm for missionary endeavor was the theory that it was essential to convert the world to Christianity to anticipate the coming of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ foretold in the Bible.

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