Category: Past

David Livingstone was the most famous missionary of them all, but far from the most effective if effectiveness is measured by the number of people he introduced to Jesus. In 1838, he joined the London Missionary Society as a medical missionary. He arrived in Kurumun in South Africa in 1841 to assist in the work of Robert Moffat amongst the Bechuan people.

Livingstone, who married Moffat’s daughter Mary, soon discovered that he was more interested in exploration and then the abolition of the slave trade than in actual mission work. He spent much of the time between 1850 and 1856 exploring the Zambesi River, and in 1855 he was the first white man to see the Victoria Falls. He returned to England in 1856 and became a celebrity after publication of his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. He resigned from the London Missionary Society to pursue further exploration opportunities.

Livingstone’s motto was Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. He believed that the key to achieving these goals in Africa was to explore and open up the Zambezi River as a Christian commercial highway into the interior. Livingstone’s accomplishments as an explorer were significant, but Africa’s continuing history of poverty suggests that Livingstone’s hopes may have been misguided.

Christianity in Australia got off to an inauspicious start. The First Fleet arrived in 1788 with the first load of convicts and with the Reverend Richard Johnson appointed to the thankless task of official chaplain. A further chaplain, Reverend John Crowther, was sent out in 1790 but was shipwrecked by an iceberg in the Indian Ocean.

Reverend Samuel Marsden was the next reluctant recruit, arriving in Australia in 1794. He was given 100 acres of land and 26 convict labourers, and he soon managed to amass a considerable fortune through farming activities. He was appointed a magistrate and became well known for his unusually harsh and cruel punishments, earning the name The Flogging Parson. He disliked Roman Catholics and Irish people, and he felt that efforts in reaching Australian Aboriginals were wasted because they rejected material civilisation.

However, Marsden showed considerable interest in the Maoris in New Zealand. In 1814 he visited New Zealand and showing great courage, tenacity and resourcefulness in establishing a mission station there. Thus, although Marsden’s work in Australia is regarded as somewhat embarrassing, he is, for the most part, fondly remembered in New Zealand.

William Wilberforce was most famous for his lifelong and ultimately successful campaign to abolish slavery in England. The film Amazing Grace, now showing in Australian cinemas, is about his life. But his influence on the world went deeper than just one issue. He was one of a small group of friends who became known as the Clapham Sect. They were fully devoted followers of Jesus, and made some very significant contributions to the world.

Wilberforce was one of the founders of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (subsequently known as the Church Missionary Society) in 1799. This was right at the start of the modern missionary movement, just six years after William Carey had landed in India. The Society was at first unable to find Englishmen willing to be sent as missionaries to Africa, and over the course of the first ten years only five missionaries were sent out, all of them German Lutherans.

All five of the missionaries went to Sierra Leone, a colony where freed slaves from England were resettled. The capital of Sierra Leone is still called Freetown. Four of the missionaries were faithful to the end and died at their posts in West Africa after between two and 17 years of service. The fifth deserted and became a slave trader.

An English school teacher in the 1780s, William Carey was inspired by reading the journals of the explorer Captain James Cook, and became obsessed about spreading the good news throughout the world. This was at a time when the vast majority of Christians in the world were located in Europe, and there was very little effort being made at sharing the good news with any other cultures.

In 1789, Carey became the full-time pastor of a Baptist Church, and in 1792 he published a small book which became extremely influential, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, and later that year he was one of the founders of the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (now the Baptist Missionary Society). He then set of with another missionary and his family, and arrived illegally in Calcutta, because missions work in India was prohibited.

Although Carey’s direct missionary efforts were not particularly successful (he was in India for over 6 years before baptising the first convert, and he neglected his wife and children), he completed a number of Bible translations into local languages. His greatest legacy, however, was in inspiring others to missionary service. He was directly influential in the foundation of the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society, and indirectly influential in almost every other missionary effort of the time. Now, 200 years after his death, there are more Christians in Africa, Asia and South America than in Europe and North America.

I visited an Anglican church yesterday, and that caused me to reflect on the old prayer book which we used in services when I was a child. It was the Book of Common Prayer, published in 1662, and one of the three seminal works of English literature (the others being Shakespeare and the King James Bible).

The contents of the Book of Common Prayer were largely derived from Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII. Cranmer led a team which produced a prayer book in 1552, but he was burned at the stake in 1556 while Mary (who was a Roman Catholic) was Queen. A revised version of Cranmer’s book was published in 1559 under Queen Elizabeth, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was a further revised version.

In addition to being a great work of literature, the Book of Common Prayer contains some inspiring words. One of my favourites was a verse often spoken before the offertory: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in heaven.” If only Christians today would take this to heart!

Robert Arthington was known to his neighbours as a miser. He lived and slept in just one room of a large house in Leeds, England, and did everything he could to keep his personal expenses to a minimum. He was saving up his money for something which he considered more important.

During his lifetime (1823-1900), Robert Arthington invested heavily in British and American railways. Then he re-invested the proceeds in global mission. His particular passion was investing in spreading the Gospel as widely and rapidly as possible. Many of his investments were anonymous, but others were usually conditional on the recipients advancing into areas where the good news had never been told, particularly in Africa.

On his death in 1900, Robert Arthington left over one million pounds to missions. His expressed preferences were pioneering Bible translation work and pioneering evangelism amongst unreached people groups. Most of his bequest went to financing the work of hundreds of missionaries in Africa and Asia. Today there are more Christians in Africa and Asia than there are in Europe and the USA.

Alan Hirsch poses the question, How did the number of Christians in the world grow from as few as 25,000 one hundred years after Christ’s death to up to 20 million in AD 310? A footnote in Alan’s book The Forgotten Ways refers to Rodney Stark as the authority on these issues, so I bought and read his book The Rise of Christianity. But I found that disappointing, because his research was based on the Moonies cult, and the implication seemed to be that any new cult spreads the same way – slowly, from family member to family member, increasing at a rate of around 40% per decade.

But why do people really choose to follow Jesus? There is something compelling about who Jesus was and what he taught. His lifestyle was significantly different from that of other religious leaders. He never used power to accumulate wealth or for political or personal ends. His message was about love, serving, humility, forgiveness and repentance. If you want to get wealthy you must give everything away. If you want to live, you must die. If you want to lead you must be a servant of others.

What Jesus said and did was, and still is, significantly different from the accepted practice. But somehow it resonates with the human condition. The contrarian lifestyle proclaimed by Jesus is bold and risky, but it offers compelling answers to the questions of life’s purpose and meaning.