The Great Cloud of Witnesses · Gallery
The Missionaries
The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home. 35 witnesses hang on this wall, era by era down the line.
What Was Happening
The modern missionary movement runs from William Carey's 1792 call to the 1910 Edinburgh conference, though the wall also carries missionaries from centuries earlier and others who completed their service within the last few decades.
In 1792, a self-taught English shoemaker named William Carey published an argument that Christians were obligated to actively carry the gospel to people who had never heard it, and sailed for India the next year. Over the following century, missionary societies sent men and women to India, Burma, China, Africa, and the Pacific islands to translate the Bible into languages that had never had a written form, and to build the schools and hospitals that came with that work.
Missionary comes from the Latin word for sending, the same idea behind the Greek word for apostle. It names someone sent out specifically to carry the gospel into a place it had not reached, as distinct from a pastor serving a congregation that already exists. Some names on this wall reach back centuries earlier, into the missionaries who carried the same task into pagan Europe.
The cost
William Carey buried a son, watched his wife's mind break under years of strain, and lost a warehouse of translation manuscripts to fire, and kept working for forty-one years without ever returning home. Adoniram Judson spent seventeen months in a Burmese prison in irons while his wife Ann walked to the prison daily with food and hid his unfinished Bible translation inside a pillow so the guards would not find it.
Disease made West Africa's mission field so dangerous it was known at the time as the white man's grave.
Where the record is contested
Missionary work in this period sometimes traveled alongside colonial power, and some missionaries accepted or excused the abuses that came with it. Others in this same era opposed those abuses directly: Carey campaigned until Britain banned the burning of widows in India in 1829, and David Livingstone's reports helped break the East African slave trade. Both facts belong in the record together.
35 witnesses on this wall
The Martyrs' ChurchAD 100–3131 on this stretch
The Fathers & the CreedsAD 313–6005 on this stretch
Kidnapped into Irish slavery at sixteen, escaped home, then went back on purpose to the people who took him.
Won the Visigothic king to the Nicene faith and turned an entire kingdom with him.
Turned the Arian Suevi of Spain toward the Nicene faith and wrote plainly against country superstitions.
Preached to the tribes along the Danube and is the likeliest author of the Te Deum.
Baptized Clovis and with him the Franks, the opening that carried the gospel into Western Europe.
The Long MiddleAD 600–15002 on this stretch
The Puritans & Pietists1600–17301 on this stretch
The Great Awakenings1730–18001 on this stretch
The Missionary Century1790–191014 on this stretch
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A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.
Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.
Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.
Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.
Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.
Wore Chinese dress, went inland where almost no missionary of his day would go, and asked God for the money instead of asking men.
England's greatest cricketer gave away his fortune and finished in the Congo forest, a yard from hell by his own aim.
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Hid her husband's Burmese New Testament inside a lumpy pillow the prison guards did not bother to steal.
Stayed fifty years in one place and put the whole Bible into Setswana, the first complete Bible in an African language done in Africa.
Pastored across South Africa and wrote about staying close to Christ in words a child can follow.
Argued from Scripture that a woman may preach, then stood up in her husband's meeting and out-preached him.
Gave away her food and her salary in a famine and died weighing about fifty pounds on the ship home.
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Went inland alone where no trader would go and kept taking in the twin babies her neighbors were killing until the custom broke.
Stayed fifty-five years in India without a furlough, taking in children sold to the temples, and asked for no gravestone.
The Revival Streams1900–19503 on this stretch
Burned a Bible at fourteen, saw Christ three days later, and walked the Himalayas in a saffron robe until the mountains kept him.
Took sword wounds from a Boxer mob, then watched Manchuria break open in public confession he had not planned and could not stop.
Left an insurance fortune for South Africa, buried his wife there within months, and kept praying for the sick for the rest of his life.
The Church Under Fire & Into All the World1930–today8 on this stretch
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Killed at twenty-eight on a jungle sandbar by the people he came to reach - whose children now carry the message he brought.
Boiled the gospel down to four points a nervous student could actually say, and put a film of Luke's Gospel into two thousand languages.
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Drove Bibles through Iron Curtain checkpoints in a Volkswagen, praying the guards would see nothing.
Found inside a cannibal tribe's own custom of the peace child a doorway straight to the gospel.
Told that untrained young people could not be missionaries, he sent them anyway - and the movement he started now works in nearly every nation.
Preached to African crowds of more than a million under a tent he had built for exactly that purpose.
Portraits: Wikimedia Commons and resident public-domain plates: full attribution and license on every witness page.