Mary Slessor

1848–1915ScottishPresbyterian missionary

The Dundee mill girl who went alone into Okoyong, stopped the killing of twins, and ended up judging court cases barefoot.

Summary

Mary Slessor lived 1848–1915, and was Scottish. This wing places Mary Slessor in The Missionary Century, 1790–1910.

Lived 1848–1915, Scottish.
Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
Hangs on The Missionaries.
Tradition: Presbyterian missionary.

The life

Mary Slessor went into a Dundee jute mill at eleven, working half the day and schooling the other half, and taught herself to read with a book propped on the loom. She sailed for Calabar in 1876 and quickly grew impatient with the safe coastal stations. She moved inland to Okoyong, alone, where no trader would go, lived in a mud house on native food, and learned Efik until she dreamed in it.

The custom there held that twins were cursed and must be killed and the mother driven out; Slessor took the babies, took the mothers, and kept taking them until the custom broke. She settled blood feuds, faced down armed men, and was eventually made a British vice-consul, presiding over a court barefoot with a rescued child on her hip. She died at Use in 1915 after thirty-eight years, and West Africa buried her as one of its own.

What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1790–1910

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.
1859The '59 Revival, and Spurgeon's foundation stoneAwakening ran through Ulster and Wales after a season of prayer meetings begun in New York two years earlier; contemporaries counted converts in the tens of thousands, though the figures were estimates made in the moment. In August the foundation stone was laid for Charles Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, which opened in 1861 and seated around five thousand.
1865The China Inland Mission and the Salvation ArmyIn June, walking the beach at Brighton in anguish over inland China, Taylor wrote in his Bible that he was asking God for twenty-four workers, a mission that would ask no one but God for money. The same summer William and Catherine Booth opened a mission in London's East End; it took the name Salvation Army in 1878.
1873Livingstone dies on his kneesHe was found on the morning of May 1 at Chitambo's village, kneeling by his bed. His African companions Chuma and Susi buried his heart under a tree, dried his body, and carried it roughly a thousand miles to the coast so England could bury him in Westminster Abbey.
1885The Cambridge SevenSeven young men from Britain's most privileged circles, including the cricketer C. T. Studd, gave up sport, money, and careers and sailed for China with the Inland Mission. Their farewell tour of the universities sent a wave of students into missions on both sides of the Atlantic.
1904Clouds gathering over WalesIn the autumn a young miner named Evan Roberts began meetings at Loughor, and within months chapels across Wales were full night after night. Reports of about a hundred thousand converts in a year are the era's own estimate, not a count, but the world was watching, and the next era was already breaking.
1910EdinburghIn June, some 1,200 delegates met in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference under the chairmanship of John R. Mott. For the first time since the apostles the church could look at a map and say it was genuinely worldwide, and the delegates from the younger churches asked, politely and firmly, when they would be treated as equals.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→

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Why this one hangs here

Went inland alone where no trader would go and kept taking in the twin babies her neighbors were killing until the custom broke.

Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.

Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall

William Carey1761–1834

A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.

Adoniram Judson1788–1850

Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.

George Müller1805–1898

Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.

David Livingstone1813–1873

Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.

Horatio Spafford1828–1888

Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.

William Booth1829–1912

Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.