By Larry Rosenbaum
A few weeks ago, I picked up a book that was sitting in our living room and began reading it: From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: a Biographical History of Christian Missions by Ruth Tucker. I had glanced at the book from time to time, but 500 pages is a lot to read. Once I started, I found the book fascinating and before long I had finished.
As I read about Christian missionaries from the book of Acts to the present, I was most impressed with the suffering and sacrifice so many have endured for the Gospel. In the Congo, only one in four missionaries would survive their first term of service. They would see their wives die, their children die, or they would leave their families behind and not see them for many years. They were murdered and sometimes cannibalized by the people they were trying to reach, but most died from diseases such as malaria.
In 1876, Alexander Mackay led a team of eight English missionaries to Uganda, responding to an invitation by King Mtesa for missionaries. By the end of the second year, only Mackay was still alive. There was tremendous persecution of the church there, led by the King who killed 30 Christian boys one year for not submitting to his homosexual passions. Mackay died of malaria in 1890 at the age of 40, but by that time the Uganda church had grown to 65,000!
The book is filled with similar examples of sacrifice. In some cases, missionaries saw much fruit to their labors. In other cases there was little apparent fruit. William Carey labored for seven years in Bengal, India without a single convert. He spent many years translating the Bible into native languages, only to have his work destroyed in a warehouse fire. His first wife was totally opposed to the missionary work. After she lost her 5 year old son, she became totally deranged. Carey’s missionary team had many conflicts and ended up splitting over personality clashes. Despite all this, he inspired hundreds of Christians to enter missionary work. Carey was called the “father of modern missions” because of the way he approached missionary work–being sensitive to the culture of the people he was reaching, instead of trying to substitute western culture.
Why the sacrifice? The only thing that could possibly motivate people to make such sacrifices was the prospect of saving people from eternal Hell. As A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance wrote, “A hundred thousand souls a day/ Are passing one by one away,/ In Christ less guilt and gloom./ Without one ray of hope or light,/ With future dark as endless night,/ They’re passing to their doom.”
Several of our states even include evangelism in their charters as their reason for existence. Virginia’s charter opens with the King blessing the colonists “in propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance.” The Massachusetts Bay charter pledged to “win and incite the natives of the Country to the Knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of Mankind, and the Christian faith.” The seal of the colony was an Indian crying “Come over and help us.” Connecticut’s charter maintained that “evangelization” was the “onlye and principal end” for the colony’s existence. Similar statements about the need to convert the Indians are in the charters of Pennsylvania and other states. How far have we moved from our origins!
