Adoniram Judson

1. 1792A shoemaker publishes his case, and a society is bornIn May, William Carey printed *An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens*, 87 pages arguing that the Great Commission still binds the church. That October, thirteen ministers met in a back parlour at Kettering and founded the Baptist Missionary Society with a little over £13 pledged.
2. 1793Carey sails for IndiaThe East India Company would not carry missionaries, so Carey went out in June on a Danish ship and reached Calcutta in November. He would serve forty-one years and never once come home.
3. 1804The British and Foreign Bible SocietyFounded in London in March to put Scripture into every language at a price ordinary people could pay. Bible societies became the quiet engine of the whole century, the missionaries translated, and the societies printed and shipped.
4. 1807The slave trade abolished, and Morrison reaches ChinaIn March, after twenty years of losing votes, William Wilberforce and his allies carried the bill that ended the British slave trade. The same year Robert Morrison arrived at Canton, where teaching a foreigner Chinese was a capital offence; he worked in secret and gave China its first Protestant Bible and dictionary.
5. 1812The Judsons sail, and Serampore burnsAdoniram and Ann Judson left Salem in February, the first American foreign missionaries sent out by a board. In March a fire at Serampore destroyed Carey's printing house, type, paper, and years of manuscript. He wrote that the loss was heavy but the ground was already cleared, and began again.
6. 1825George Müller is convertedA German student with a record of lying and petty theft went along to a small Saturday prayer meeting in a private house in Halle, mostly out of curiosity. He walked out changed, and spent the next seventy years proving in public that God answers prayer.
7. 1840Livingstone sails, and the Burmese Bible is doneDavid Livingstone, a Scottish mill worker who studied medicine at night, left London in December for southern Africa; he had wanted China, but a war closed it and Robert Moffat's talk of "the smoke of a thousand villages" turned him south. That same year Judson finished revising his Burmese Bible, first completed in 1834, twenty-one years after he landed.
8. 1854Hudson Taylor lands at ShanghaiHe was twenty-one, under-funded, and arrived in the middle of a civil war. Within a few years he had done what no missionary did, put on Chinese dress and gone inland, away from the treaty ports and the protection of gunboats.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→