The Father of Modern Mission, A Weekly Word from Jeff Fountainjeff fountain - 11 Apr 2007

“See what the Moravians have done! Can we not follow their example, and in obedience to our heavenly Master go out into the world and preach the Gospel to the heathen?”

With these words, thirty-year-old William Carey threw down copies of a magazine onto the table in front of his fellow Baptist ministers. It was England’s first missionary magazine, reporting on Moravian missions around the world: Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren.

Baptists however looked on such efforts as human attempts to interfere with God’s sovereignty, a ‘profane outstretching of the hand to help the ark of God’.  Objections were many.  The time was not ripe. The means were not available.  Distances were too far.  The dangers were too great. The Great Commission was only for the first apostles. Missions should start at home.

So when Carey proposed that at a future meeting of Baptists pastors they should consider taking concrete steps to reach out to the world’s unreached, a senior pastor curtly told him: “Sit down, young man!” And added: "If God wants to save the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine!"

Carey did sit down–and started to write. What he penned became a sort of 'Magna Carta of Modern Missions', called An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. In it’s five sections, Carey countered all the usual arguments against missions, showing that the Great Commission was not only for the original disciples, but for every generation.

To those who argued that ‘we ought not to force our way, but to wait for the openings, and leadings of Providence’ or that too many natural obstacles blocked the way, he wrote: ‘Have not the missionaries of the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brethren, encountered the scorching heat of Abyssinia, and the frozen climes of Greenland, and Labrador, their difficult languages, and savage manners?’

To others who stressed the dangers to life and limb from any contact with ‘savages’, Carey suggested that most reported barbarities had been provoked by offensive behaviour. He noted that ‘the Moravian missionaries have been very seldom molested. Nay, in general the heathen have shewed a willingness to hear the word; and have principally expressed their hatred of Christianity on account of the vices of nominal Christians.’

Shoemaker

William Carey was born in 1761, nearly three decades after the first missionaries had set out from Herrnhut, and seven years before Captain Cook sailed off on his first voyage to the Pacific.

Despite his humble beginnings in the village of Hackleton near Northampton as an apprentice shoemaker, Carey set about to educate himself while working on his shoes. When about eighteen, he became a keen believer, leaving his nominal participation in the Anglican Church to become a Baptist. He taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew, as well as several modern languages.

Maps fascinated young Carey. He made himself a leather globe which he later used when teaching geography in Moulton on Northampton’s outskirts, where he also pastored a small Baptist fellowship. As he traced Cook’s voyages on this globe, his awareness of the world outside the knowledge of the gospel grew into a compelling obsession.

On the wall of his workshop he created a huge world map, pasting sheets of paper together to represent every country of the known world. Handwritten notes on the map recorded the populations of the various continents. Of the 730 million inhabitants of the world, Carey noted, more than 400 million were pagans, and 130 million Mahommedans (Muslims).

Every effort however to convince his peers of ‘the church’s duty to attempt the spread of the Gospel among heathen nations’ met with scepticism and outright opposition. In 1789, he moved 30 miles northwards to pastor in Leicester. The same year, the first edition of Periodical Accounts of Moravian missionaries appeared, greatly encouraging Carey in his obsession.
But three more years would pass before Carey had opportunity to address the whole Baptist Association, meeting in Nottingham. His sermon, based on Isaiah 54:2,3, argued that God’s sovereignty did not negate man’s responsibility. ‘Expect great things from God!’ he preached, adding, ‘Attempt great things for God.’ 

Five months later, in October 1792, Carey and friends set up the Baptist Missionary Society. Eager to practice what he preached, Carey volunteered to be the first missionary. The following year, he embarked with his family on the arduous five-month voyage to India, never to return to England.

Community

Others came to join him: John Fountain* in 1796, William Ward and Joshua Marshman in 1799. Once more Carey looked to the Moravians for inspiration.  He planned to set up a settlement in the Danish colony of Serampore, near Calcutta. Thirty years earlier, a Moravian community had been attempted there at the request of the Danish authorities, but without success. This did not discourage Carey, however, from modelling his own mission community directly on Herrnhut’s principles:  common possessions, shared purse, equality of station for missionary and convert alike, bound by a brotherly agreement. Following the Moravian pattern, Serampore would be a community of Christians living by their own industry, demonstrating the love of Christ to the pagan neighbours.

So began one of the most remarkable mission careers in history, inspiring the start of many new mission societies, and thousands from Europe and America to follow over the next decades.

Carey–the visionary father of modern missions–had a vision that extended far beyond evangelism and church planting. It embraced the transformation of a whole nation. Not only would Carey become the founder of the Indian protestant church. Some say he became the central character in the story of the modernization of India–a story rooted in a little town in Saxony. 

* my great-great-great grandfather