Pastor, Missionary & More

“You are a good man; we will not harm you.” Roger Williams was face to face with the fierce Native American warriors. There was fighting all around him, and the town was on fire.  Roger was an old man now, and the Indians still respected him. Perhaps he was the only white man in the colonies that they trusted. This time, however, his peace-making efforts had been swept aside.

Roger Williams was a pioneer in politics, theology, church-planting, anthropology, and linguistics. He is best known as the governor of Rhode Island, the founder of the First Baptist Church in America, and an early advocate of religious liberty. He is less known for laying the groundwork for missions among the Native American tribes of New England.

Born in England c. 1603, Williams was converted as a young man. In college, he studied theology, Greek, and Hebrew. His separatist views brought the persecution of the archbishop, and he sailed for America in 1630. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Puritans were not as separated from the Church of England as they professed to be. There was no religious liberty. The state enforced the doctrines of the church. They persecuted Baptists and Quakers. They treated the Indians as inferior and took their land by force.

Williams pastored two different churches during a five-year period. His own churches loved him, but the community hated him for his outspoken views.  He strongly opposed the unfair treatment of Native Americans, urging that the colonists pay the Natives for the land. He also preached the right of every man or woman to follow his or her own conscience in religious matters.

The Salem court sentenced Williams to banishment in the winter of 1635.   He fled on foot into the snowy forest. He walked 105 miles to an Indian village where he was accepted into their homes for the winter. The following spring, he was joined by his wife and ten of his friends, and together they founded Providence Plantation, and eventually Rhode Island colony.

Williams was a true friend to Indians and settlers alike. As a peacemaker, he saved the colonies on several occasions. He studied the Algonquin language and wrote a linguistic key called, A Key into the Language of America. This book also contained many pages of cultural notes, touching every aspect of culture—from salutations to death and burial. He laid the groundwork for Bible translation and the missionaries who would come after him.

Near the end of his life, Williams saw his own town of Providence burned to the ground and many of his friends killed in King Phillip’s War.  However, he lived to see peace restored and the town rebuilt.

A Road Builder

Alexander Mackay was born in Scotland in 1849 and surrendered his heart to Christ as a young boy. Reports of David Livingstone, a fellow Scotsman and missionary in Africa, inspired young Mackay. He was interested in mechanics and building and went to engineering school, but he longed to serve God, too. In 1875, a letter published in the local paper spurred Mackay to action. The letter was written from Uganda by Henry Stanley: “King M’tesa has been asking me about the white man’s God… Oh that some practical missionary would come here…who can cure their diseases, build dwellings, and turn his hand to anything.”

Four months later, Mackay was on a ship for Africa. The first thing he did was build a road 230 miles through the jungle to Lake Victoria. Mackay identified his pioneer ministry with that of John the Baptist, preparing the way for the coming of the Savior. The road he built through the dense jungle was symbolic of the spiritual inroads he would make into the dark land of spirit worship. Mackay wrote: “This will certainly yet be a highway for the King Himself; and all that pass this way will come to know His Name.”

Uganda was one of the larger kingdoms in Africa. Mackay was welcomed into the court and invited to preach before King M’tesa himself. The king wanted to learn about the white man’s God because, in contrast to the Muslim slave traders, the white men he met did not exploit the Ugandans. The king and his court were impressed by Mackay’s skills such as carpentry and basic medicine. Men, women, and children began to repent and believe in Christ. Mackay began translating and printing portions of the New Testament. The king spoke of being baptized. But Mackay knew there was no repentance in his life as he was unwilling to give up his 300 wives, involvement in slave trade, and other cruel vices.

Opposition began to mount against Mackay because he preached against the king’s vices; and the Arab slave traders—who hated Mackay for interfering with their business—flattered the king and spread lies about Mackay. An era of persecution began with the beating and torturing of Mackay’s converts. King M’tesa died, but his son M’wanga was even more wicked.

Mackay toiled on and a few years later, at the age of 41, he succumbed to a tropical fever.  But within thirty years of his death, the king and tens of thousands of Ugandans were Christians, and the slave trade was abolished.

Gentle Giant

The patient stirred. Dr. Wallace tried to soothe him in his Tennessee-accented Cantonese. The patient was waking from an abdominal surgery. They alone were left in the upper story of the Stout Memorial Hospital in Wuchow, China. Everyone else had taken refuge in the basement when the air raid alarm had sounded. The year was 1938, and the Japanese were invading China. Just then there was an explosion on the roof directly above them—and doctor and patient were thrown to the floor! Miraculously, neither were hurt.

Bill Wallace heard God’s call to be a medical missionary at seventeen years of age while tinkering in his garage one summer afternoon. For the next ten years, he did not cease to prepare himself until he was an excellent surgeon in the residency program at Knoxville, TN. At that time, Dr. Beddoe, administratorof the Southern Baptist mission hospital in Wuchow, China, sent a desperate plea to the mission board: “We must have a surgeon!” Bill Wallace sent in his application for missionary service the same month.

Dr. Wallace was a humble servant, a man of action and not a man of words. But his presence brought a new vitality to the mission hospital. “The Chinese had heard sermons before, but [now] they began to see one, and that made the difference. ..Sometimes his soft, stuttering witness to [God’s love] was more effective than the most eloquent evangelist’s plea. ” The influx ofpatients increased by 50%, and there was spiritual revival. While Wallace was saving lives with his scalpel, God was saving souls.

The hospital survived the Japanese invasion, while Wallace, a handful of other missionaries, and the Chinese staff continued the work. Dr. Wallace operated day and night, sewing up the mangled bodies of the victims of war. Later on furlough, Wallace was asked why he would return to Wuchow. He simply said, “It’s where I’m supposed to be.” By the time Wallace was forty, the Communists were persecuting Christians. Many missionaries left. Wallace chose to stay. Now the beloved doctor who stood so tall for Christ was a threat to the communist agenda. They planted a gun under his pillow and arrested him. After weeks of public accusations, humiliation, and torture,the night guards beat him to death in his cell. Chinese Christians erected a shaft over his grave with the inscription, “For me to live is Christ.

1 Quotations from Bill Wallace of China, by Jesse C. Fletcher

Labor until Life Ends

Nathan Brown, the oldest of five boys, was born on June 22, 1807, to devout Baptist parents. At age nine, he was convicted of his sinful condition after attending local revival meetings, trusted Christ as his Savior, and was subsequently baptized in a stream.

Brown graduated from Williams College at the top of his class and married  Eliza Ballard on May 5, 1830. They moved to Brandon, Vermont, where he edited a religious newspaper. As he prepared to print letters from Adoniram Judson, the Lord  burdened him and his wife for Burma. “What Christian,” he wrote, “can read the late appeals from Mr. Judson, and not feel a desire to go? I cannot think of staying back.”   After seeking his pastor’s and parents’ advice, he resigned his job and entered Newton Theological Institution.  He and Eliza sailed for Burma under the Baptist General Convention on December 22, 1832.

Mr. Brown worked two years in Burma with Adoniram Judson. Then he was sent to Assam, India, where he translated the first Assamese New Testament, baptized numerous converts, planted Baptist churches, and appointed national assistant pastors. Due to shattered health, the Browns returned to the U.S. in 1855. Mr. Brown wrote, “One of the hardest partings (and I have had many) I ever experienced. The native women and girls wept as if their hearts would break. We sorrowed most of all that we should see each other’s faces no more. … If God in mercy restores my health so that I can again be useful, I will return and labor for them till life ends, with all my heart.”

Mrs. Brown died in 1871. Mr. Brown later remarried, and at age 65, he and his second wife went to Yokohama, Japan, to assist in church planting and Bible translation. Brown resigned from a translation committee that insisted on translating baptism with the Japanese word for sprinkle. He began his own translation, completing the very first Japanese New Testament in 1879. He died in Japan at age 77, leaving eight Baptist churches and numerous converts. The Bible he completed is an accurate translation and is still referred to today. May we also “labor till life ends.”

“As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in. Now therefore give me this mountain…” (Joshua 14:11-12a)

Work Cited: Brown, Elizabeth, W. The Whole World Kin: A Pioneer Experience Among Remote Tribes, and Other Labors of Nathan Brown.   

Baptist Bondslave

It was 1782, and George Leile didn’t see any other way: to escape slavery once more, he had to become another kind of slave. Years ago, his former master, Henry Sharp, had graciously freed Leile so that he could wholly pursue preaching the gospel in the Savannah area. But now that Sharp was dead, his family sought to re-enslave Leile. And so he struck a deal. To escape to Jamaica with his family, he would become the indentured servant of Colonel Kirkland.

Arriving in Jamaica in 1783, at the age of 33, Leile paid off his debt within a year and immediately set off to spread the gospel. The fiery preacher, who God had made so successful in Georgia, now had greater success than ever. He preached to the slaves and to the free; and with the help of some other immigrants, started Jamaica’s first black Baptist church. God’s hand was on his ministry, and within only a few years the church grew to over five hundred members! But such dedication to God often comes with a price, and his could have cost him his life.

With the Church of England well established on the island, there came a time when the Anglican planters rose up in opposition to Leile’s work. They often interrupted his meetings, and persecuted him and his congregation in various ways. Eventually, he and his preacher friends were imprisoned. Accused of preaching “sedition” among the slaves and against the Church, they faced capital punishment. Most, including Leile, barely escaped the death sentence; but sadly, one was hung.

God encouraged Leile, however, and he did not quit. He continued to pastor the congregation, and trained men to preach the gospel in the more remote areas. Influential friends in Britain secured the funds for his ministry; and eventually, they even erected a permanent building for the congregation.

Leile, the first Baptist missionary to Jamaica, died in 1828. But the work God had begun with him in Jamaica bore yet more fruit! In the same spirit as Leile, the church had sent out over fifty missionaries to Africa by 1842. That’s how God works: He used a man born a slave in America, and sent him to Jamaica, to one day set captives free in the land of his forefathers.

iMissionaries

“Picture a teenage girl in a school cafeteria…. She’s slouched in a chair popping bubble gum. The whole world passes her by, yet she doesn’t even notice. Why? Because she’s tuned in to that little thing in her hand—a cellphone. Most likely she’s texting, instant messaging her friends, or browsing Facebook. Picture a young man on a computer in an internet café somewhere in a third world country. Or how about a young college freshman browsing the web on a laptop? The new generation coming along is radically different from you and me. I’m a young man myself and can barely recognize or connect with this new generation. But what if we could present the gospel to each of these people through their medium of communication? ….We can!” (~Jared Rowe)

This is the need Jared Rowe saw, and the vision God gave him. When most people saw a predicament—a problem of the modern generation—God showed Jared a possibility. All his life, he had been intrigued by computers and set out to learn their inner workings. As the world of the web was opened up to him, he saw potential for the Gospel, and an idea was born—to “reach the masses right where they are”.

Together with his brother-in-law, Marlin Zimmerman, he created the iMissionaries website, designed to enable you to evangelize through the internet. With 16 major social media sites around the world and 1.5 billion active users on Facebook alone, it’s an open mission field that reaches into the places most people can’t go with the Gospel—from American schools to closed Muslim nations. iMissionaries walks even the most basic computer user through a simple process to place Christian ads on Facebook and other social networking sites. People around the world can click these ads and read Christian material in their own language. In the short time these ads have been being placed on Facebook, thousands of people have clicked and viewed these materials in such countries as Algeria, Iraq, Thailand, Ukraine, Indonesia, and Singapore.

However, while we do encourage you to check out iMissionaries.org and get involved in placing ads around the world, iMissionaries is only a product of a deeper motive. A greater challenge—a more far-reaching action—is that of thinking outside the box. Climb out of the rut of the typical perception of missions and use what tools you do have—no matter how unconventional—to reach out with the Gospel. Ask God, “What can I do?”

She Hath Done What She Could

Fourteen-year old Attie Bostick sat in rapt attention, listening as her older brother, a missionary to China, preached on Mary anointing the feet of Christ with the most precious thing she had. “She hath done what she could.” Attie could not forget those words and years later would say, “That day God spoke to me, and said that I would not be doing all I could unless I was willing to go to China, too.”

Attie was born in 1875 (the sixteenth of seventeen children) on a rural farm in the foothills of North Carolina. Despite “the humbleness and crowded conditions of the home,” her parents “still found time to take in and entertain preachers and missionaries whenever they were in the vicinity.” This early contact influenced the hearts of three Bostick children toward missions.

Attie arrived in China in the summer of 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion was at its height. Hundreds of missionaries were killed during this time, and many fled the country. Attie stayed unharmed in Shanghai with a missionary family until the danger was over, then  joined her brother (G.P.) at Taian in Shandong Province. Later, she worked in Pochow with her brothers and then at Kweiteh. Attie served as a Baptist missionary with the Gospel Mission  and  the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board for a total of 43 years.

The church and school that was started in Pochow is still in existence today, and the number of souls who have come to Christ has multiplied greatly. She wrote of the work in Pochow: “The work for 1935 included holding revival meetings, instructing candidates for baptism, and teaching the Bible in several churches. Although muddy roads made travel difficult, many Chinese attended these meetings. Some women who still had bound feet walked as many as fifty miles to hear the gospel message.”

On December 8, 1941, at age 66, Japanese forces arrested Attie and  interned her for two years before releasing and repatriating her to the U.S. In a farewell letter to a Chinese Christain, she wrote, “God’s grace has abounded and He who watches over the sparrow has abundantly cared for me.” Truly, God abundantly cared for Attie through all 43 years she served Him in China.

Quotations from: Called To China: Attie Bostick’s Life & Missionary Letters From China

The Story of One

Ellie sat on the rough church bench clutching a small paperback book in her hands. Her brilliant white smile revealed her excitement as she spoke to me in Melanesian Pidgin, the trade language of Papua New Guinea. “This story strengthens my heart!” she exclaimed. The irony of her simple words silenced me for a few minutes. Ellie and I had just finished reading two chapters in a Pidgin biography of George Müller—a man who had been born two hundred years ago on the other side of her world but whose story was still living.

Most American believers know Müller only as the man who, through prayer, supported hundreds of orphans in England. But for many, his story dies there and is set on a shelf as admirable but impossible to replicate. As materialism engulfs our culture, believers increasingly look to their modern “stuff” to fulfill their needs. However, if we seriously look at Müller’s principles for living in complete dependence upon God, his stories of answered prayer will light a blazing fire of faith in our hearts, just like they did for Ellie.

George Müller grew up in Germany and was saved at the age of twenty; however, through the stories and encouragement of many missionary friends, he traveled to England at twenty-three to join the London Missionary Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. Müller learned English and Hebrew and planned to go to Israel, but God closed all doors leaving England and began to teach Müller to seek direction daily by faith.

Over the years, Müller refused to receive a salary from the churches that he pastored and determined to discuss his needs with God only. As the orphanage ministries began, Müller also refused to go into debt or use money that had been appropriated for other needs. Through unusual sources and uncommon circumstances, God always supplied the answer to his prayers. And whatever was bestowed upon Müller personally, he faithfully gave it to God’s work. For over sixty years of ministry, he was merely God’s steward.

The story of this man of prayer is really only one out of millions that could be told. George Müller responded to others’ testimonies of God’s faithful provision and thus encourages hearts around the world. We in turn can respond and leave a legacy, for that is the power of the story of one.

To Whom Does the Prophet Refer?

Solomon Ginsburg asked his father—a Jewish rabbi—this question when he was only thirteen. Despite being soundly slapped in the face, his interest in the prophesy of Isaiah 53 did not die. As a young man, Ginsburg left his native Poland for London, England. There, a fellow Jew found him on the street and explained Jesus as the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah. After reading the New Testament, Ginsburg trusted Jesus Christ as his Savior, but was promptly disowned and cursed by all his relatives. He bore it gladly, recalling that Christ had been made a curse for him. Even several assaults by orthodox Jews in London could not dissuade him from his new-found faith.

As Ginsburg considered what the Lord would have him do with his life, he remembered the Jews’ biggest stumbling block to accepting Christianity. They pointed to the Catholics who worshipped and prayed to idols, and proved to their children that no people who broke one of the Ten Commandments possessed the “true religion.” Now that Ginsburg knew the truth about the saving blood of Jesus, he decided to spread the glorious news in Brazil, a bastion of Roman Catholicism.

Ginsburg first spent several months in Portugal studying Portuguese until he was fluent in both the language and the beliefs of the Roman Catholics. He wrote two tracts and dispersed hundreds of copies before he departed for Brazil, literally fleeing from Portuguese Jesuits. To support himself in Brazil, Ginsburg printed and sold Bibles, tracts, and other material everywhere he could. Using his Jewish business skill of persuasion, he accosted Catholics along the road, on the train, in prisons, and even coming out of Mass. As Ginsburg simply preached Jesus and His cleansing blood, soon hundreds and then thousands trusted Christ. He traveled from town to town holding open-air meetings or playing hymns on his little organ in the middle of the marketplace. When one of Brazil’s most notorious murderers asked Ginsburg to come to his house to tell him more about Christ, Ginsburg gladly went, though many warned him of the great risk. Hearing the gospel, the man fell down weeping over the guilt of his sin and confessed Christ as his Savior.

In thirty years of ministry, Ginsburg helped to establish 820 self-sustaining Baptist churches with over 20,000 members. Although his family had forsaken him, and he faced persecution even in Brazil, the simple joy of knowing his Messiah carried him through it all.

For more information, visit wholesomewords.org/missions/iginsburg.html.

When the Fantasy Wears Off

After Maude Cary heard of the heathen in Morocco, no physical or spiritual trial could deter her from joining the missionary work in North Africa. Just before her twenty-third birthday, Maude and four other co-workers embarked for Morocco with the promise to spend their life’s energies evangelizing the Muslims and Berbers. As they departed, they sang, Anywhere with Jesus I can safely go; Anywhere He leads me in this world below; Anywhere without Him dearest joys would fade; Anywhere with Jesus I am not afraid. Surely there would be opposition and heartaches, but Maude thought only of exciting campaigns to bring the gospel to wild tribes!

Within the first few weeks in the city of Fez, the mud, physical labor, language study, and tedious household chores began to choke Maude’s spiritual fervency. She wrote that life no longer seemed “what it was on the way to Fez. The Saviour’s face does not seem so real.” In addition to her inner struggle, Maude’s co-workers chided her for pride, inattention, and idle talk. After two years, she felt that her work had been a complete waste even though she had fluently learned Arabic.

However, the Lord had already prepared many fiery trials to purify her faith. The wild Berbers, who had once seemed so enchanting, now repeatedly attacked the cities, sometimes protecting the missionaries and other times nearly killing them. Maude dreaded quitting and, instead, plunged into more work with a constant prayer for humility. She taught Bible classes for Jewish and Muslim children, translated hymns into Arabic to sing for willing ears, visited the rich and the lowly until her shoes fell apart, and tended to ill co-workers even through her own weakness.

Once the French had subdued the Berber tribes in 1910, Maude used her new fluency in Berber to set up new mission stations over the next several years. Co-workers came and went, but soon a steady trickle of converts were discipled and began ministering alongside their beloved missionary. Although an engagement to a fellow missionary fell through, Maude continued faithfully. She took only two furloughs in fifty years and was one of the four single women who continued the mission stations through World War II. The fantasy had long since passed, but Maude Cary found purpose and rest in Christ.

Anywhere with Jesus I am not alone; Other friends may fail me, His is still my own: Tho’ His hand may lead me over dreary ways, Anywhere with Jesus is a house of praise.