The Birth of Modern Mission

Church History — Steve Gregg

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The Birth of Modern Mission

Church HistorySteve Gregg

Steve Gregg discusses the birth of modern mission, which began in the 19th century with revivals in England, Europe, and America. While the first missionaries in the United States were Roman Catholic Jesuits, Protestant missions gained momentum with the Moravian Pietistic movement. William Carey, a shoemaker turned missionary, faced opposition and objections to his work in India, but persisted and saw success in baptizing converts and publishing dictionaries and grammars in various languages. Hudson Taylor, another notable missionary, evangelized in China and inspired self-sustaining missions. Despite negative aspects of the period, such as the erasure of native cultures, the impact of these missionaries is still felt today.

Transcript

Last time I began with a set of notes that I handed out, which was called Revivals and Foreign Missions in the 19th century. As it turned out, and I predicted it would be this way, we were only able to take half of that subject, that is the revivals of the 19th century last time, and that left for us this week the study of the rise of the modern missions movement, as it would be called. We live in an age where foreign missions has always been, in our lifetime, always been a part of evangelical Christianity.

If you were raised in evangelical churches, you no doubt have been aware of, you might know some people who are missionaries. Your church probably has sent out missionaries or supports missionaries, or reads letters that come back from missionaries, or posts them on the bulletin board, and even occasionally probably has missionary speakers come in and giving a missionary challenge. This was at least a part of my life growing up in the Baptist church, and it's hard to imagine that there was ever a time when that wasn't part of the evangelical movement.

But as a matter of fact, at the beginning of the 19th century, Protestant Christianity was confined to Europe and America, and many Protestants were not even thinking in terms of taking the gospel elsewhere. In fact, some of them thought it was sacrilegious to carry the gospel to the heathen. And so there arose in this same century, when the revivals were occurring in England and in Europe and in America, that we've talked about last time, during that same time there were many men who were feeling a call to foreign missions.

And the leader of that group was William Carey. When I say the leader, it's not as though the others were part of some organization that he headed up, but rather he was usually called the founder or the father of modern missions. Because he was the first Protestant to really make an appeal to the church at large, to the Protestant churches, to begin addressing the problem of the heathen who had never heard the gospel.

Now, before William Carey's time, there were some missionary efforts, mostly by the Roman Catholic Church, back in the 16th century, the same century that the Reformation was taking place. There was also the Counter-Reformation, where there arose the Jesuit movement. It arose partly to stamp out the Protestant movement, and partly to spread the Catholic faith throughout the world through foreign missions.

We talked many weeks ago about Francis Xavier, probably the greatest Catholic missionary of all time. He ministered in many Asian countries. And there were others like him, of the Jesuits, that were committed to laying their lives down to take the Catholic faith to foreign lands.

And the first missionaries in the United States were Roman Catholic Jesuits also. But Protestant missions really didn't get a start until a couple centuries later. Now, I should say with this one caveat, and that is that the Pietists, remember in the Lutheran Church in Germany, there arose the Pietistic movement as a movement within the Lutheran Church, sort of a church within the church.

And one of the main movements that arose out of the Pietistic movement in Germany was the Moravian movement, formerly the Hussite Brethren, who fled to Germany and stayed in the estate of Count von Zinzendorf. And he became their spiritual leader of a community of about 300 Christian refugees who had come to Germany. And they had a great revival in the 18th century.

They had a tremendous impact on John Wesley before his conversion. And they were really the pioneers of Protestant missions. The first Protestant missionaries were actually before the time of William Carey.

And they were the Moravian missionaries from the Zinzendorf estate, which was called Herrnhut. And yet there was a difference between the Moravian Pietistic missions and those that later became the more common in the evangelical circles. And that is that the Moravians had a burden for the unsaved Europeans in the European colonies abroad.

There were many places in the 18th century where Europeans had traveled from Europe and had established colonies and very pagan lifestyles, very ungodly. And the Moravians had a burden largely for the unsaved in these colonies. And so when they went, they established Moravian churches in these European colonies and evangelized the people.

And they basically developed an island of Christianity in these pagan nations. But still, the indigenous pagans all around them were largely unreached. And the modern missions movement that came along through the influence of William Carey and others after him had as its goal the evangelization of whole countries.

Not just the European enclaves that were in those countries, but actually reaching out to the natives, the barbarians, the total pagans who had no European ancestry at all. And this had really not been done by Protestants. It had been done by Jesuits, Roman Catholic missionaries before this.

But Protestants had for two centuries after the Reformation done almost nothing in that way, almost three centuries afterward. And that's where we come to the influence of William Carey. He actually began to have influence on this before the beginning of the 19th century.

But his first converts that he made in India were converted in the year 1800, right at the very beginning of the 19th century, and began what we call the modern missions movement. William Carey and many after him flooded the pagan lands of Asia and Africa. I shouldn't say flooded as if they were overwhelmed by the missionaries.

But compared to before, there was this explosion of missionary activity, of European and American missionaries going out to Africa and to Asia, to various countries, to spread the gospel and having tremendous impact. It is said by Kenneth Scott Laderet, who's one of the, I suppose, greatest authorities on church history, about the 19th century, he said, Never had any other set of ideas, religious or secular, been propagated over so wide an area by so many professional agents, maintained by the unconstrained donations of so many millions of individuals. That is to say, although other ideologies had spread in the world, Hinduism, for example, throughout India, it had not spread by such a large number of people who were making it their career to go out and spread this and who were supported by unconstrained donations.

Even in the Middle Ages, there was Catholic conquest of pagan lands, Muslim lands, for example. But this wasn't really missionary activity. Basically, people were forced to convert to Catholicism at the edge of the sword.

And this was sponsored by the church, which was linked with the state, so that state and church monies were available to sponsor these crusades. But here we're talking about voluntary missionary societies began to develop at the instigation of William Carey and his contemporaries, some of his friends. And these were groups that basically sponsored missionaries and sent missionaries, commissioned them and supported them on free will donations.

They were not government sponsored, which, of course, we would think it's strange today for a government to sponsor missionaries. That's just not part of the modern church era. But prior to this time, it was the state church would be sponsoring the Catholic missionaries.

But here we have in the 19th century, the rise of what's called the voluntary mission society. And this is a I would say it's probably the first para church movement. I might say something about para church movements as they're so called today.

The word para is a Greek preposition that means alongside. And so something is paramedical is a group of people who work alongside the medical profession. Para church means working alongside the church.

And there are a host of organizations in our day. We take them for granted. I mean, again, it's one of the most obvious phenomena of our evangelical world that we live in.

That there are missions agencies and and crisis pregnancy centers and Christian colleges and so forth. They're not sponsored by any particular church. There's prison fellowships.

There's all kinds of para church ministries. Now, a para church ministry is not under the auspices of a particular church and not sponsored by a particular church. It is usually started by and run by volunteers, usually laymen.

Unlike the church, which is led by people who usually have gone through specialized training and and are ordained in a denomination. And there's the the the general structure and government of the church and the functioning of the nurture of the saints in the church. Para church organizations usually rise up to fill some kind of a vacuum, some kind of a need that the church is not addressing.

And usually it's it's laymen. It's not always laymen. There's often clergymen to get involved.

But in many cases, it is laymen who get an idea that someone's got to do something about, you know, these homeless people on the street. And so they start a rescue mission. Somebody's got to do something about the heathens.

So they start a missionary agency, Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth with a Mission, Navigators, as I said, Prison Fellowship, Crisis Pregnancy Centers. All of these are different organizations that fall into the category of para church. Our school here is, of course, para church because we're not sponsored by or founded by any particular church and our structure is not that of a church.

And these voluntary para church organizations are the order of the day today. In fact, arguably more of the more of the work of the Great Commission and more of the work of ministry could be said to be being done by such agencies today than is being done by organized churches. Which is not to say that organized churches are doing nothing.

There are churches that have various forms of outreach and support missionaries. But there are the hugest missionary organizations like Wycliffe and Youth with a Mission who have tens of thousands of missionaries out there are para church organizations. There's been great controversy even to this day as to the legitimacy of such organizations.

Because there are some people, usually pastors of churches, who say that this is really the work for the local church. And that the para church organizations are really competing with the local church for the contributions of church members and for the talents and time of church members. Because a pastor of a church today often doesn't have very many enthusiastic helpers in his congregation.

And the people in his congregation who are enthusiastic are sometimes giving their money to Billy Graham Association or to some radio ministry or to some mission agency. Or something that's not part of the church leaving very little money to give to their local church. And also it's typical for the most zealous, the most gifted, the most motivated church members also to volunteer their time and their talents to para church ministries.

And so pastors often find themselves in competition for the talent and the money and the time of their people with these ministries. But the first voluntary para church ministries that started were these societies, these mission societies that began in the early 19th century. And when that happened, a great number of missionaries began to be sent, which wasn't happening before because the churches were not sending them.

One of the reasons is because the Protestant churches were very heavily dominated by Calvinistic theology. And even William Carey, who is the father of modern missions, when he was still in England contemplating going to India as a missionary and urging other people to do so, he was discouraged from doing so by his fellow Protestant Calvinists. He was actually told by a well-meaning Calvinist minister, he said, If the Lord wants to convert the heathen, he can do it without your help.

That's what William Carey was told by one of the Protestant clergy of his day. If the Lord wants to convert the heathen, he can do it without your help. In other words, because of the Calvinist idea that God was sovereign to the point of controlling everything that happens, they apparently assumed that God probably didn't want the heathen saved or else he would have had them born in Europe where they'd hear the gospel.

And if he wanted them saved, I guess he could send an angel to them or something. Now, modern Calvinists would not take that approach exactly. Modern Calvinist view would be that God ordains not only the ends but also the means, and that he does want to convert the heathen and he wants to do it through missionary efforts.

But Calvinism as a theological system understood in the early 19th century did not have any rationale for modern missions. And William Carey and others were sometimes discouraged by that. But he broke free from that mentality.

William Carey was born in 1761, and he lived until 1834. He was born the son of a poor weaver who was also the village schoolmaster. And because his father was the schoolmaster, he received his elementary education under his father at the village school in Pollersbury, England.

At 14 years old, he became an apprentice to a shoemaker, and he continued that trade until he went on the mission field to India. He was basically a shoemaker and eventually a preacher as well, supporting himself with shoemaking. He continued his independent studies while he was a shoemaker, buying books, sometimes going without food in order to have enough money to buy books.

He studied Latin and Greek and many other languages. He was a master of foreign languages. In fact, before he was 20 years old, he could read the Bible in six languages and mostly self-taught.

And this was even before he was converted. He was converted when he was about 18 years old in 1779, actually through the witness of a fellow shoemaker that he was associated with. And he was baptized four years later.

I don't know why he wasn't immediately baptized, but four years after he came to faith in Christ, he was baptized in 1783. He joined the Baptist Church, and that's the English Baptist Church, of course, being in England. And shortly after that, he began to preach as well as working in the shoemaking shop.

And he would make shoes and he would also teach, tutor, and so forth, to support his ministry of preaching. While he was doing this, he was always continuing his studies. He was very fascinated with the lives and works of some contemporary missionaries of his time, David Brainerd being one of them, who was in the United States.

Actually, David Brainerd was the son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, married Jonathan Edwards' daughter, and was a missionary to the American Indians. He died young of tuberculosis, I believe it was, because he'd pray in the snow. He'd just get down on his face sometimes in the snow and pray for hours, and he got sick doing that.

He preached to a lot of Indians. And William Carey was interested in following the missionary efforts of men like David Brainerd and another man named John Elliott. But his real heroes were the explorers who were discovering new worlds.

He followed with great interest the progress of Captain James Cook, who, of course, discovered Australia and many of the Pacific Islands and Hawaii. And one of his heroes was Christopher Columbus. And he was obviously a man who not only was fascinated with foreign languages, because he knew many of them, self-taught, but he was also interested in the world at large.

It's not surprising that once he became a Christian and a preacher that he began to turn his interest toward evangelization of the world and travel. In 1792, I believe it was, he became the pastor of the Moulton Baptist Chapel in England, and he began preaching about the need for foreign missions. And in that same year, he published a book called An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen.

In those days, books had longer titles than we have on our, you know, longer than our table of contents. But that was the name of his book, An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. Now, in that book, he answered the five major objections that he found people were making when he would suggest that Christians ought to go to the heathen and evangelize them.

And there were five objections he kept hearing, and so he wrote this book to answer those objections. One objection was that the distance, they were too far, they were too remote. It was too expensive to get there and too difficult to travel there and so forth.

The second was the people were too barbaric and too uncivilized. Another objection was that there was great danger to the missionary to go to some of these people who were savages, sometimes cannibals. A fourth objection was that there would be difficulty of supporting missionaries in the foreign field.

And a fifth objection was that these people spoke languages that were unintelligible to Europeans and would be very difficult to learn. And so these were the things that people were saying in order to counter his suggestion that they ought to go to the heathen and evangelize them. But he answered that merchants face all those obstacles when they travel internationally and sell their goods to sell beaver pelts in Asia or in Africa.

A merchant would go through all these hazards and would face all these things and have to learn languages and so forth. And he said that what they do for a few dollars or for a few pounds of money, we should be willing to do for the souls of men. He preached a famous sermon in the year 1792.

That sermon was called, Expect Great Things from God and Attempt Great Things for God. And it was the same year that he and some friends of his co-founded the English Baptist Missionary Society. So this would be the first parachurch society for sending out missionaries, the English Baptist Missionary Society founded by William Carey and some of his companions.

He sailed to India himself the next year in 1793. And he had all kinds of problems. First of all, India in those days was controlled by the English East India Company, which was basically a commercial company which hundreds of years earlier, actually in 1600, Queen Elizabeth had chartered this company.

And there were lots of East India companies. There was the Dutch East India Company, the Danish East India Company, the English and the French East India Companies. And these were basically national commercial interests that developed when these routes to India and the Far East were discovered.

And these companies largely controlled politically and economically the various portions of India and Asia that they were in. And the English East India Company was not sympathetic at all to the idea of Englishmen evangelizing the Indians. They thought it was a waste and foolish and they figured it was not something they wanted to support.

And he received quite a bit of opposition from them. They did not permit him to settle in Calcutta, so he had to move somewhere else. Later on, Adoniram Judson, planning to go to Calcutta, was not permitted to go there by the East India Company and instead he went to Burma.

But he received for years opposition to his work from the East India Company. He also had other problems. His wife had some kind of mental problems.

All the histories I've read about him have not been specific. It just says that she had mental illness and she eventually died in India while he was there. But apparently it was very, very hard on him with his wife in that condition.

Also, his children got sick and some of them died in India. That's always a trial. And quite a few of the missionaries that we'll be looking at, Adoniram Judson and Hudson Taylor, they lost wives and children on the mission field as well.

These men usually outlived their wives and sometimes outlived some of their children for some reason. But he had all kinds of hardships in India. And he worked from 1794 to 1799 as the superintendent of an indigo factory.

Indigo today is made from something like, I forget, coal tar or something. But in the old days indigo was a blue dye made from an indigo plant in India. And he worked as the superintendent of an indigo factory to sort of be a tent-making missionary, as we'd call them today, someone who goes to a foreign country and doesn't just live off donations, but actually gets a job in the country and becomes part of the community as a working member of the community.

And that's what he did. He was quite insightful as a pioneer missionary. But after that period of time, after 1799, he purchased his own indigo plantation, a small one, and he started a mission base there.

But in 1800, because of the opposition he was receiving from the East India Company, he moved from Calcutta to Serampore, which became his base of operations for the rest of his life and became almost legendary as a missionary base because he was joined in Serampore by two of his friends, William Ward and Joshua Marshman. And these three men were sort of the dynamic duo of early missions. Their activities and successes in India were reported back in England and other places and inspired a lot of other people to go on the mission field because these men were seeing tremendous fruit in their work.

The reason he went to Serampore was because it was under another jurisdiction. It wasn't under the English East India Company, but it was under the Danish flag there, and the Danish allowed him to work there. When he was joined by his friends, William Ward and Joshua Marshman, he devoted himself from that time on to teaching and preaching and printing.

He did not, in other words, work in indigo business anymore, but went into full-time ministry. Printing became the major part of his influence in that area because he and his friends translated a great deal. You remember, he was quite a foreign language buff even when he was a kid, able to read the Bible in six languages before he was 20.

Well, while in this particular mission location, he and his companions translated the whole Bible into six languages and portions of the Bible into 24 other languages, as well as writing and publishing grammars for several languages. A lot of these Asian languages had not been reduced to writing, or at least not in such a form as Europeans could learn them for the sake of doing missionary work there. And so a lot of the missionary work was, first of all, reducing a language into writing and then translating the Bible into that language and making dictionaries of these languages in English, mixing them together.

This is still what a lot of missionaries have to do. There's many thousands of languages still in the world that have never been decoded by Christian missionaries, and that's what people like Wycliffe Bible Translators are continually doing. Those of us who are familiar with a group like YWAM, which sends missionaries out on three-month outreaches to get their feet wet in missions and get a little taste of it, in a group like YWAM, if someone is 10 years on the field, we call them a long-termer.

But a Wycliffe missionary, 10 years, he's hardly getting started. He takes 30 years just to learn the language of the people, and then he starts doing his translation work maybe. These figures may not be exact, but it's very time-consuming to learn languages that have never been written before, to go into a tribal people and try to think of some letters that correspond with the sounds those people are making, try to reduce the sounds into writing, and then figure out what they mean.

And that's a major work, and that's the kind of stuff William Carey did too, but he got a great deal done. He baptized his first convert, including his oldest son Felix, in the year 1800. And he spent 41 years in India as a missionary.

He was one of the most successful missionaries of all times. He and Marshman did much translating, as I said, publishing the whole Bible in six languages, and portions of it in 24 more. He translated many Indian classics into English.

He believed that it was very important for missionaries to learn the thought processes of the local people, so he was fascinated with the study of Hinduism. He was not interested in studying Hinduism to see what validity there was in it, but he knew that the Indian people had been steeped in Hindu thought for millennia, perhaps, and he wanted to understand all the intricacies of Hindu thought. So he took classics of Indian literature and translated them into English for himself and other English-speaking missionaries to learn more about how these people thought.

He also published dictionaries and grammars of various languages, and the Serampore Press, under his leadership, made the Bible accessible to 300 million people. That is, through the various languages that they published the Bible in, there were 300 million people represented by all those languages who were now able to read the Bible because of their efforts. That would be a rather satisfying career to look back on and say, well, there are 300 million people in the world now who can read the Bible because I lived and did what I did here for these 41 years.

He did much to advance horticulture and agriculture in India also. There's something important to realize, is that sometimes, in retrospect, the people who are rewriting history try to make missionaries out to be people who came and destroyed native cultures. It is true that many times missionaries did import their Western culture along with the gospel.

That was very common to do. A lot of them didn't know any difference. They just thought European Christianity was what Christianity is.

So sometimes it's not unheard of for missionaries to go into some tribal area where everyone's running around naked and get them in suits and ties before long and wearing European dress. While this is, of course, naive on their part to think that Western culture is synonymous with Christianity, yet the criticisms are often not very balanced. For one thing, the critics may not appreciate the fact that it is better for people to wear Western clothes than none at all.

It's not necessary for people to wear Western clothes in order to be Christians, but for people to be running around naked is not really biblical either. And when people are converted, they need to be discipled. And many things in their original cultures do have to be confronted.

Frankly, I think there should be more things about American culture confronted by the American church. But be that as it may, it should not be a matter of criticism if missionaries go into an area and it changes the culture of the people. It should change the culture of the people.

And only the modern pagan Westerners today find it an occasion to criticize that these pagan cultures were damaged or destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Hawaii, for example, today there's a movement back toward the old native cultures where they used to sacrifice people in the volcano. They're not going to start doing that again anytime soon, I don't think, but there's a general feeling in Hawaii that Christianity ruined the native culture.

But the native cultures, if you study the Hawaiian history, were barbaric and a great deal of hideous things were part of the religions of the native Hawaiians. And this is true in many places. Yeah, Christianity does interfere with people's way of life.

And as I say, it should interfere with Americans' way of life more than it does because there is no earthly culture that is sacred. And there's not any real reason other than sentimentality that cultures need to be preserved intact if their behaviors that are parts of them are in conflict with Christian principles. Because Jesus is the King of kings and Lord of lords, and he's got crown rights over the whole earth.

All authority in heaven and earth belongs to him. And if the behaviors of certain peoples of the earth, even if it's our own nation, are in conflict with the things that are the will of God expressed through Jesus Christ, those things have got to be confronted. And among Christians, they have to be changed.

But the other thing I wanted to say about the way that these missionaries have sometimes been bad-mouthed by those who rewrite history to try to make the missionaries look bad is they almost never tell how much good the missionaries did. There are many social changes that came to India and to Africa through the efforts of missionaries, which all of us would have to say are very good, I mean, very important. And, for example, not only did William Carey promote horticulture and agriculture in India, he also, through his labors, was very influential in ending the practice of burning widows.

In India, before Carey came, it was customary that when a man died, his widow was not supposed to live any longer than he. So when the funeral pyre was built to burn his dead body, his live widow was put on the funeral pyre and burned with him. In some cases, his widow had never even married him.

She was just betrothed to him. She would be a child even. There were child widows that were burned on the funeral pyres of men that they were supposed to marry, but the guy died.

And this practice was common in Hinduism. And William Carey was very much a factor in bringing an end to this practice in India. It's not done anymore.

Not legally, anyway. And this is the kind of cultural change that missionaries often bring. And if those who want to criticize world missions want to say, well, they shouldn't interfere with the culture, then they're in essence saying India was better off when they were burning widows with the bodies of their husbands.

But these people are simply anti-Christian. It's obvious that anyone who looks objectively at the effect of missions would have to say there's far more good been done than evil. And I'm not sure there's really been much in the way of evil done by missionaries.

He had advocated two great principles of missions. And as the father of the modern missions movement, he influenced missionary thinking for a long time afterward. One thing he advocated was the equality of missionaries and the natives.

That the missionaries were not some kind of racially superior group, white people, and the natives some kind of lesser subhuman group, which was how many Europeans thought about it. But there was an equality between the European missionaries and the dark-skinned people to whom they went that Cary insisted upon. And frankly, even today there is some abuse in this area.

Not so much that missionaries think themselves to be racially superior. I don't know if there's any of that in modern missions now. Maybe there is, but I'm not aware of it.

But it's very common for missionaries to live in a way that is more comfortable, that is more Western, more separated from the people to whom they go, and therefore basically to have their own kind of American or European kind of enclave in some kind of a village or something. I have friends who were for a few years missionaries in Sri Lanka, and they said they were the only missionaries there who actually lived in the village with the people. All the other missionaries lived up in the missionary compound, up on the hill and lived American lifestyles.

But that's still very common. It's not so much that the American missionaries think themselves superior probably. It's just that they're not always willing to change their lifestyles in order to relate with the people.

But William Cary was very much an advocate of equality of the missionaries and the people to whom they went. And he was also an advocate of self-sustaining missions. This is not so much economically, but in the sense of raising up native pastors and leaders.

Until this time, when the Catholics, for example, would establish a mission, it was not uncommon for them to keep supplying leadership from Europe. And Protestants do that too in some missionary agencies. But William Cary was strongly advocating that the native people need to be raised up to run their own mission eventually.

It's not for people to always have a relationship with Europeans or with Americans who are always their patriarchs, but rather that as soon as possible, an indigenous church that's self-sustaining should be developed. Now, in the notes I've given you, the next person I mentioned is James Hudson Taylor, usually referred to as Hudson Taylor. I don't know why I put him next because chronologically, most of the other people in your notes came before him.

And it was not very wise of me to mention him in this particular order, but since he's there, we'll talk about him next. Hudson Taylor was also an English missionary, but he did not go to India, he went to China. And he was not the first missionary to China.

I think Robert Morrison was earlier than he and had translated the Chinese Bible and made a Chinese dictionary. And it was through these means that Hudson Taylor learned the Chinese language while he was still in England. He used the Chinese Bible and Chinese dictionary and taught himself the Chinese language before he ever went on the field.

He was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England in 1832 and he studied medicine and became a medical doctor. He also studied theology. And while he was in England, he was raised in a family.

His father was not in the ministry or anything like that. I think his father ran a shop, if I'm not mistaken, a market or something. But his father was always talking to his children about China and the needs of the heathen in China.

And Hudson Taylor, growing up, was always hearing this and he got converted at a fairly young age and eventually felt like he was called to go and take the gospel to China. And so he studied medicine. He wanted to be of use in China as a medical missionary and theology so that he might be qualified to preach the gospel.

But there were some things distinctive about Hudson Taylor. There were other missionaries to China, but he was distinctive. Missionaries up to that point had only evangelized Shanghai and the coastal areas of China.

No one had yet penetrated inland China. The missionaries who had gone to China had established missionary bases on the coast and they were Western in their dress and Western in their ways and they were satisfied that they were now in China. But there were the multitudes in inland China that no missionary had gone to.

And Hudson Taylor had several things that were different about him. One is he wanted to penetrate inland China, though the other missionaries in Shanghai were not particularly interested and didn't encourage him in this area. Another thing is he kind of scandalized them because he began to wear the same clothing the Chinese wore.

Instead of wearing European clothing, he began to wear the traditional Chinese clothing. He even shaved his head and grew a long ponytail out of the top of his head. And for the rest of his life he looked like a Chinaman, although he was an Englishman.

And that bothered the other missionaries because, first of all, they were Western in culture and style and everything and he just seemed like an oddball to them. But he found that the Chinese people were much more open to him. Now, another distinctive of Hudson Taylor's ministry was that he was a friend of George Mueller.

And like George Mueller, he had convictions about fundraising. He did not believe he should raise funds. He believed that he should just trust God and pray.

And he was a pioneer in this particular respect. He did not have support guaranteed to him. And he just prayed that God would move people to send him money.

And he actually knew that this would be very difficult in China. So while he was still doing his medical training in England, he began to adopt this lifestyle in England, even though he was not yet in the ministry. He wanted to do all that he could to prove to himself that this way of life works and that God would really supply for him.

He said in his journals that it wasn't that he had any doubt that God would be faithful, but he wasn't sure he'd have the faith to live that way. And so he wanted to try it in England where there was less risk so that he wouldn't just experiment with this way of life in China and to his own doom. And there are stories in his journals about how he was working under a medical doctor in his office who paid him twice a year but was quite forgetful.

And the doctor who employed him actually told him, Remind me when your paycheck comes due. But Hudson Taylor had a policy he wouldn't do that. He'd only tell God his needs.

And usually the guy forgot his paycheck for weeks or months at a time and overdue. And usually Hudson Taylor was living on a shoestring. And there are several inspiring stories really about how God, at the most crucial moment, would remind this man of the need when Hudson Taylor was just praying that he would because the timing was so essential.

If you've studied anything about George Mueller and his orphanages in Bristol, England, you know this kind of story. Mueller's life is full of this kind of story. Actually, George Mueller helped support Hudson Taylor.

Mueller, as well as supporting 10,000 orphans, distributed at the expense of his ministry hundreds of thousands of Bibles and supported quite a few missionaries. And he sent frequent support. I don't think it was regular and predictable, but he sent frequently support to Hudson Taylor's mission in China.

And so Taylor was one of the pioneers in this idea of going on the mission field without any guaranteed support and without telling people your needs. And people often said, Oh, Mr. Taylor, you have such great faith. And he says, I don't have great faith.

He just says, I have a God of great faithfulness. And he just wouldn't allow himself to be commended for this because he just saw himself as feeble and helpless and totally in the hands of God. And yet he saw the faithfulness of God on a regular basis, meeting his needs.

He had gone to Shanghai in 1854. That's when he first went to China. Now, for the first six months, he actually lived in the home of Dr. Medhurst, who had written a book called China, which had earlier influenced Hudson Taylor to go to China.

So he got to live with the author of this book for six months. And as I mentioned, he adopted Chinese style of dress and followed his policy of trusting God through prayer alone for the provision of finances. For about five or six years, maybe seven years from 1854 to 1860, he worked there in Shanghai and Ningpo and Swatow.

But eventually he found himself just not in step with the mission that had sent him, which was the London Missionary Society. And so he retired from the society and worked as an independent in China and eventually, of course, started his own missionary society. But we're not quite to that point yet.

He worked at a hospital. Actually, he was given the charge over a hospital since he was a medical doctor. And while in Ningpo, he married in 1858 a missionary's daughter.

Her parents were missionaries in China, and her name was Maria Dyer. She's the first wife of Hudson Taylor. She died in China.

He buried her. He married again later on. But he returned to England in 1860, where he stayed for five years.

And during that time in England, he translated the New Testament into the Ningpo dialect. He also wrote a book about China and recruited 16 new missionaries to go back to China with him to start a new missionary society called the China Inland Mission because he was going to take the gospel inland to China, which no one was doing yet. This organization still exists.

In fact, John Cook, who has spoken here recently, was born in China with parents who were working with this particular agency. It's not called the China Inland Mission anymore, though I believe it was when he was born. These days it is called the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, OMF.

And it was the first interdenominational faith mission. That is, it was the first one to require missionaries to live by faith, and it was not associated with any denomination. He returned to China in 1866, and as the director of the China Inland Mission, he traveled widely both in China and in Europe promoting missions to China and recruiting others.

In 1905, but when he died, there were 250, excuse me, 205 mission stations with the China Inland Mission. There were 849 missionaries in China that he had recruited. Almost a thousand missionaries were there.

And there were 125,000 Chinese Christians in inland China as a result of his work. So once again, at the end of a career, it's kind of nice to be able to look back and say there's 125,000 Chinese people saved because of my coming here, and 850 missionaries in China who weren't here before because of my recruiting. I guess the impact I would hope this information would have on you would be to think, you know, at the end of my life when I look back, what impact will my life have had on the kingdom of God, and what can I do, what kind of decisions can I make now about my life that will make me look back and say it is good that I did what I did.

It's good for the kingdom of God. Certainly, William Carey and Hudson Taylor are among those that could look back on their life's work and say, wow, you know, God has really got a lot of people in heaven today because of me. Hudson Taylor, when he had first come to China, was asked by one of his elderly converts, an older Chinese elder of his town, he said, the Chinaman said to Hudson Taylor, have your people, where you come from, have they known about this Jesus for very long? And Hudson Taylor said, oh yeah, for hundreds of years.

And the old Chinaman said, well, why didn't they come sooner? He said, my grandfather was a devout Buddhist, and he practiced Buddhism every day, and he died without knowing about Jesus. Why didn't your grandfathers come over here and tell him about Jesus, if they knew for hundreds of years? And that really cut Hudson Taylor to the heart to realize how negligent the European Protestants had been, and it really motivated him to recruit more missionaries to go to China and other places. We come next to Adoniram Judson.

He was actually the first American missionary to be sent out, a Protestant missionary. He was a Baptist. Not when he left, though.

When he left the shores of America, he was a Congregationalist, but before he got to Asia, he had changed his mind about baptism and became a Baptist. He was born at Malden, Massachusetts, and he graduated as valedictorian of Brown University, and he also attended a theological seminary called Andover Theological Seminary. Between college and seminary years, he actually began to lose his faith.

He began to backslide, but he had a friend who was not a Christian who died suddenly and shockingly, and kind of shocked him into the realization that he had to get right with God, and he committed himself to God, went to theological seminary, and while he was in seminary, two years after the death of his friend, after his conversion in 1810, he and several fellow seminary students became interested in world missions. They actually went to England with the mind to form a relationship with the London Missionary Society, the same society that Hudson Taylor had worked with and that some of these other missionaries we're going to talk about were working through, but no relationship was established. I didn't learn in what I read about this the details of why that didn't happen, but two years after that, in 1812, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was founded in America.

It was a congregational organization, and Adoniram Judson along with four other men were appointed to go to India by this organization. Twelve days before he left for India, he was planning to go to Calcutta. Adoniram Judson got married to a woman named Anne Hasseltine, who was the first wife of his to die on the mission field.

I think he buried three wives on the field and about six or seven children of his, if I'm not mistaken. We read his biography to our children some years ago, and I don't remember all the details. All I remember is it seems like his wives and children were falling like flies.

It's incredible. It's so heartrending to read the biographies of these men because he endured great suffering himself too, but the greatest suffering certainly must have been the death of his family members, of which many died in his case. In route to Calcutta, both Adoniram Judson and one of his companions named Luther Rice changed their views about baptism and left the congregational movement and became Baptists.

Rice did not go on to India. He went back to America, and he founded the American Baptist Missionary Union. Adoniram Judson was the first missionary, I think, that was commissioned by them.

He was not able to settle in Calcutta because of opposition he received from the East India Company there, and instead he went to Rangoon, Burma, arriving there in 1813. He initially made his home with the family of Felix Carey, who was William Carey's oldest son, and got along pretty well with him and began to study the Burmese language. Now, Adoniram Judson is a good example of a patient missionary because he spent three years writing a grammar of the Burmese language after he cracked the language.

Just exactly three years after he arrived there, he finished a grammar of the Burmese language. It was another three years before he felt he knew the language well enough to preach in it. So, after he had been a missionary for six years, he preached his first sermon and got his first convert.

It is said that the mission society that sent him used to write letters to him during those six years when he had not made a convert yet. And they said, What are the prospects, Mr. Judson? Any prospects of Burmese people getting saved? And he'd write back and he'd say, The prospects are as bright as the promises of God. And he just kept laboring in the language until he had his first convert after six years.

Can you imagine going someplace and ministering for six years? Of course, he wasn't ministering the whole time. He was learning the language a lot of the time, but still making the sacrifices of living in a foreign culture with the hardships and the sickness and all that for six years before you see any fruit at all of your ministry. But he persevered.

And he moved from Rangoon to Ava, which is the capital of Burma. And about that time, the Anglo-Burmese war was starting, about which I know very little, but it was apparently a war that made him as an Anglo in bad favor with the Burmese people. And he was actually put in jail for 17 months in a third-world jail.

I mean, it's a pretty bad situation. He suffered terribly there. His health was bad.

Eventually that ended and he was released. He began a ministry with the Karen people who were on the border of Burma and China. And he did that in 1830.

He completed a translation of the whole Bible into the Burmese language in 1834. In all of his years on the mission field, he took only one furlough back to his homeland, back to America. And that was a bit over a year long, this furlough.

It was 1845 to 1847. But he returned to Burma and spent the remaining years revising his earlier English-Burmese dictionary, working on the Burmese-English portion of it. His health being bad, he did what the conventional wisdom of the time was to do and take a sea voyage.

He thought that the sea air would help get him back into shape. But he died at sea and was buried at sea. And that ended his ministry in 1850.

But there are hundreds of thousands and were, as a result of his ministry, hundreds of thousands of Burmese were saved through his efforts because of his translation of the Bible into their language and because of his discipling Burmese Christians, some of whom became great preachers. One of his earliest Burmese converts became a tremendous evangelist and went to many Burmese villages and converted thousands of his countrymen. So, Adnarum Jethro suffered a great deal, losing wives and children on the mission field and his own life, too, eventually, as well as spending time in prison and so forth.

But he saw many saved as a result of his efforts. We'll turn our attention now to missions in Africa. Africa in the 19th century was the dark continent.

In fact, even earlier in the 20th century, it was pretty much the dark continent. There are still parts of Africa that have never been explored. And it was an impenetrable wilderness for the most part, as far as the modern Europeans were concerned in the 19th century.

And among the earliest missionaries to go there were Robert and Mary Moffat. Actually, Robert went first. He was born in 1795, and he was Scottish and received a very meager education.

Shortly after his conversion, he applied for missionary service with the London Missionary Society. And I guess they gave him some special instruction and then accepted him. And they sent him to Cape Town, South Africa.

At that time, Cape Town had only been under British control for three years. It was basically populated by cannibals. Cape Town was... We think of Cape Town in South Africa as a fairly white-dominated country until recent developments.

Of course, that's the country where apartheid has been publicized and the tremendous segregation between whites and blacks there. But Cape Town, South Africa was largely made up of cannibalistic tribes. The British had come in about three years earlier, and Robert Moffat was sent there by the London Missionary Society.

He had some interesting success. He ministered in the midst of several cannibalistic tribes, and he went off to Namaqualand, I guess that's how you say it, which was the home of a notorious and dreaded outlaw named Afrikaner. And to everybody's astonishment, he converted the outlaw and brought him back to Cape Town as a Christian.

And so he became pretty... He was an impressive missionary, and he became pretty well-known for that. He went then to Lataku in 1820, where he was joined by Mary, who came over from London just to marry him. I guess they'd known each other back in England, and she decided that she would marry him, so she came to South Africa to marry him there.

And they were missionaries together after that for the rest of their lives. They established missions at a couple of African locations that are hard to pronounce, like Betuwana Land and Inyati. And they returned to England for five years in 1839 to further the cause of missions in Africa.

And at that time, one of the people who heard them speak was David Livingstone. And he was inspired to go to Africa. He was earlier thinking to be a missionary to China.

But he decided to go to Africa, and he eventually married their daughter, Mary, and was therefore their son-in-law. Robert and Mary, the mother Mary, not the daughter Mary, returned to Africa in 1843, where they translated the Bible into Sechvanna. And they returned to England when they were very elderly in 1870 and spent the remaining years still advancing the cause of missions in Africa for the rest of their lives.

They wrote two books about African missions. One is called Labors and Scenes in South Africa, and the other is called Rivers of Water in a Dry Place. And their work in Africa inspired one of the most famous missionaries of all, and that is David Livingstone, who lived from 1813 to 1873.

He's known as much for being an explorer as a missionary. He started out as a missionary with the London Missionary Society when he went to Africa, but eventually he retired from that and spent the rest of his life exploring in Africa and became a world-famous explorer. But even when he was no longer working with the Missionary Society and was better known to the world as an explorer than as a missionary, he was still spreading the gospel.

He was still there in Africa for the kingdom of God's sake. He was born in Scotland to a poor family, and the first time he made wages working, he bought with his first wages a Latin grammar and began to educate himself in Latin. In fact, that was just the beginning.

He educated himself fairly well so that he was able to enter the University of Glasgow when he was 17 years old, and there he studied medicine and theology. And his goal was to go to China as a missionary, and he joined the London Missionary Society. And one reason he didn't go to China, besides the fact that he heard Robert and Mary Moffat speak about Africa, and that inspired him, was because the opium wars were going on in China, and the London Missionary Society didn't want to send him there at that time, so they sent him to South Africa instead to join the Moffats in 1840.

He married their daughter in 1845. Now, he first established a mission at Mabatsa, which was 200 miles north of where the Moffats were working, in 1843. And then three years later, in 1846, he established a mission 40 miles further north, and then he moved another 40 miles further north and established another mission.

He kept moving northward. They started in South Africa, and he kept moving more into the interior. And he got fascinated by, I guess, curiosity, about the people that lived in Central Africa that had never been penetrated by Western people.

No European had ever explored Central Africa. But David Livingston was drawn to what he called the smoke of a thousand villages. I guess at night, over the dense jungle, he could see these individual columns of smoke rising, where he knew there were villages under those columns of smoke, and all he could see is the tree canopy cover with the smoke columns above it, and he said the smoke of a thousand villages was calling to him to explore.

And so eventually he sent his family home to England and began to explore Central Africa, making a very famous trip that made him a world-famous explorer, a 1,400-mile trek with African guides traveling from the west coast to the east coast of the African continent. During that time, he discovered Lake Nigami and Victoria Falls. He also made precise geographical and scientific observations opening Central Africa to the modern world.

When he returned to England, briefly, he was famous. He returned as an acclaimed, famous explorer in Africa. But he didn't stay in England to enjoy his fame.

He was drawn back to Africa to do more of the same. But he resigned from the London Missionary Society in 1857 and he returned to Africa with three goals in mind. One was that he wanted to make Christ known in Africa.

Secondly, he wanted to discover the source of the Nile River. And thirdly, he wanted to eradicate slave traffic in Central Africa. The practice of slave trading, he called it this open sore of the world.

He hated the slave trade. Apparently what happened was that when people in certain villages wanted some easy money, they just invaded a weaker, more defenseless village and took captive all the men and the women and made slaves out of them and sold them and made money off them. And what David Livingston thought was that if more legitimate forms of trade and commerce could be brought to these villages, they wouldn't be so tempted to go off and kidnap their neighbors and sell them as slaves.

They could make a living in ordinary trade. And so he wanted to open up commerce and trade into Central Africa to the tribes there. Not so he could exploit them, as some cynical critics of missions might suggest, but so that he could diminish the incentive they had to kidnap each other and sell each other as slaves.

He hated slavery and was a great worker against it. He discovered the Great Lakes of East Africa in 1858 and for five years he was lost to the world. No one knew what happened to him.

Everyone's heard the expression, Dr. Livingston, I presume. This is apparently the line that was said when he was finally found. No one knew.

He just disappeared for five years. And the editor of the London Herald dispatched a guy named Henry Morton Stanley to go out and find Dr. Livingston in Africa. So this guy went out and he searched for him and he finally found him and wrote a book about how he found Dr. Livingston in Africa.

I mean, it would not be easy. It's a big continent. The guy's out in the jungle somewhere.

And he found him in Lake Tanganyika. And a couple of years later, David Livingston died. He was found by his native helpers actually on his knees in a praying position and dead.

And they carried him out of the jungle. A long distance they carried his body out so he could be buried in Westminster Chapel in England. And so that's where his remains are to this day.

Now, these missionaries that I mentioned were just a small sampling, really. There was a very large number of missionaries and some of the ones I didn't mention could in some ways be more heroic. There were a lot of missionaries that would go out at great cost themselves and they'd last a few months before they'd die of tropical diseases or they'd be martyred by tribal peoples or something like that and they aren't remembered anymore.

But they were heroic missionaries nonetheless. And of course, the missions movement has continued into the 20th century and is bigger than ever. There are more missionaries out there than of course there have ever been if you include short-termers.

And the gospel is spreading and being translated into more languages than ever before. So this movement that began in the 19th century simply has mushroomed, really, and is continuing to this day. The legacy, really, of William Carey and those kinds of people has continued in the form of voluntary missionary societies and for that matter, the whole concept of parachurch ministries and the evangelical awareness that there's a world out there that needs to be converted.

So that is where it began. So the 19th century had some very positive things happening. It had some negative things happening too.

But there were great revivals going on in Europe and in America during that time and as well there was this missions movement blossoming at the time. Next time, we will also talk about a movement that arose near the end of the 19th century which I don't think is a very good one and that would be the rise of liberalism in the church, first in Germany and eventually in Britain and America. And in reaction to that was the rise of fundamentalism.

And I don't know, maybe next time we will even get a chance to talk about the rise of Pentecostalism at the beginning of the 20th century. But we have only two more sessions to finish up and it requires a great deal of selectiveness on my part as to what things to cover. But certainly the rise of the liberal theology is a necessary thing for us to consider because modern evangelicalism has largely been shaped as a reaction to liberal theology.

More than we know. Many of our assumptions about what normal Christianity is are reactions that fundamentalism had to liberalism. And we need to look not only critically at liberalism, but we need to look analytically at fundamentalism and see whether there is a pendulum swing there and whether some of the stuff that we take for granted as evangelicals needs to be re-evaluated as well.

But we will stop with that note and I would certainly encourage you to read missionary biographies. They are thrilling, they are heart-rending and they are inspiring. And many wonderful missionaries have been inspired to go and do great things for God because they read the biography of another missionary.

So let me encourage you to do so. We do that with our children all the time.