Robert Moffat

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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→