Hudson Taylor

James Hudson Taylor (May 21, 1832 – June 3, 1905) was an English Christian missionary to China and the founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM, 1865; later renamed Overseas Missionary Fellowship, OMF International). Born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, the son of an evangelical Methodist preacher / pharmacist, he was converted in 1849 (age 17). He first sailed to China in 1853 (age 21) under the auspices of the Chinese Evangelization Society.

Distressed by the limitations of the conventional missionary approach (concentrated in coastal treaty ports, dressed in Western clothing, dependent on home-country financial-and-administrative support), he returned to England (1860), recovered from broken health, married Maria Dyer, and in 1865 founded the China Inland Mission with revolutionary-for-its-era principles: missionaries would live among Chinese people, dress in Chinese clothing, eat Chinese food, learn Chinese language deeply, and trust God for support without solicited fundraising ("faith mission").

By Taylor's death in 1905, the CIM had 800+ missionaries in China — substantially exceeding all other Protestant missions combined. He pioneered the principle that mission must produce indigenous-leadership-and-self-supporting-churches rather than Western-dependent congregations.