The Missionary Century

A young couple sailing for Burma in 1812 packed their belongings in a crate built like a coffin, because the odds of coming home were poor enough that the crate would have a second use. Adoniram and Ann Judson knew that when they boarded.

It began at a workbench. William Carey mended shoes in a Northamptonshire village, and above the bench he kept a homemade map of the world with everything he could learn about each place written on it, population, religion, whether anyone had ever gone. He taught himself Greek, Hebrew, and Dutch while he worked. When he told the older ministers that the church owed the world the gospel, one of them is said to have told him to sit down; the story may have grown in the telling, but the mood it describes was real.

So Carey made his case in print. The Enquiry of 1792 is mostly a list, country after country, with numbers, followed by a simple argument: we have ships, we have printers, we have men; we have no excuse. That October, thirteen ministers met in a back parlour at Kettering and pledged a little over thirteen pounds to send him. That meeting invented the era's engine: the voluntary society, funded by ordinary people giving small sums on purpose. Within thirty years there were dozens of them, and they were how the century worked.

The cost came due immediately. Carey lost a child in India, watched his wife's mind give way under the strain, and in 1812 saw his printing house burn with years of manuscript inside it. He started over. The Serampore team eventually had a hand in putting parts of Scripture into dozens of Indian languages, the traditional count is around forty, and honest historians note that some of those versions were rough and were later redone. That does not shrink the work. It only means he was first, not final.

In Burma, Adoniram Judson waited six years for one convert. During a war with Britain he was thrown into the prison at Ava for about seventeen months, part of it in irons and hung by the feet at night. Ann Judson walked to the prison with food, argued with officials for his life, and sewed his Burmese manuscript into a hard, lumpy pillow no guard wanted to steal. She died not long after he was freed. The Bible in that pillow is still read.

Africa took the highest toll. West Africa was known in that generation's own grim phrase as "the white man's grave," and it was said of missionaries there that they packed their belongings in coffins because they expected to need one, a saying repeated so often that it is hard now to trace to a particular family, but the burial registers behind it are real enough. On some stations the average survival was measured in months. People kept going anyway, which is either madness or faith, and they were clear about which.

Out of that pressure came something new: the faith mission. George Müller in Bristol housed, fed, and schooled thousands of orphans across sixty years and refused on principle ever to ask a human being for money, he asked God and published the ledgers. Hudson Taylor took the same principle to inland China. The China Inland Mission would take unmarried women and workers without university degrees, wear Chinese clothes, live in Chinese houses, and tell its needs to no one but God. Both men were doing an experiment in public, and they meant everyone to check their books.

Women carried this century more than the plaques suggest. Ann Judson kept a translation and a husband alive in Burma. Mary Slessor, a Dundee mill girl who had worked at a loom from age eleven, lived alone among the Efik people of Calabar and made herself the enemy of the custom that killed twin infants, she took the babies home instead. Lottie Moon spent four decades in Shandong and wrote letters to Virginia that shamed her denomination into funding women properly; the Christmas offering named for her still runs. Amy Carmichael reached India in 1895 and began gathering children rescued from temple service into what became the Dohnavur family.

At home, the gospel went into the gutter. William and Catherine Booth left respectable ministry for London's East End in 1865 and built a movement of brass bands, soup, shelters, and open-air preaching among drunks, prostitutes, and the unemployable. Catherine preached, which scandalised people, and the Army commissioned women as officers on equal terms decades before most churches would consider it. In Darkest England (1890) argued that a man cannot hear a sermon over the noise of his own hunger, feed him, then preach.

The century's preaching heart beat in London. Charles Spurgeon came to New Park Street at nineteen and by 1861 was preaching to around five thousand people twice on a Sunday at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. What made him a missionary force was the press: a sermon printed every week for decades, sold for a penny, carried by ship and translated into many languages. Farmers in Australia and planters in the American South read the same sermon on the same month. He also trained pastors, ran an orphanage, and stood for the old gospel when it cost him friends.

Underneath everything ran the Bible societies. The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) and the American Bible Society (1816) existed to print Scripture cheaply and hand it off without argument about denomination. Missionaries reduced spoken languages to written ones, inventing alphabets, compiling the first dictionaries and grammars, and the societies printed the result by the shipload. A great deal of the world's literacy, and most of its Bible translations, trace back through this pipeline.

By 1910 the church could look at a map and see itself on every continent for the first time since the apostles, and the century had spent itself doing it, in graves at Serampore and Calabar and Ilala. Edinburgh felt like a summing-up. It was actually a handoff: already the chapels of Wales had been full for months, and something else was gathering that would not be organized by any society.