Biographies
16 authors · 8 books
Men and women who left home to take the gospel to other peoples — to the forests of colonial America, India, China, Calabar, Rwanda and Ecuador. Many of their lives are told here in full, and some wrote books of their own.
David Brainerd (1718–1747) was a young missionary to the Native American peoples of colonial New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Expelled from Yale for his zeal, he gave his brief life to prayer and itinerant preaching among the Delaware and others, seeing a remarkable awakening shortly before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-nine. His diary, published by Jonathan Edwards, became one of the most influential missionary memoirs ever written.
William Carey (1761–1834) was an English cobbler and self-taught linguist whose 1792 call to missions helped launch the modern missionary movement. He gave forty years to India at Serampore, translating the Bible into six Indian languages and campaigning against sati, and is remembered as the “father of modern missions.”
Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809–1891) was a Yoruba boy from Osogun captured in a slave raid in 1821, rescued by the Royal Navy from a slave ship and landed at Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he was baptized in 1825. Educated by the Church Missionary Society, he became the first African ordained in the Anglican Church (priest, 1843) and, in 1864, its first African bishop.
David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish mill boy turned missionary-explorer of Africa who crossed the continent, exposed the East African slave trade as “the open sore of the world,” and died on his knees in what is now Zambia. Famous as an explorer, he counted almost no converts — and that honest tension is part of what makes his devotion so striking.
James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) was an English missionary to China and founder of the China Inland Mission. Converted at seventeen while his mother prayed for him miles away, he gave his life to reaching China's unreached inland provinces, pioneering a faith-mission that took no debt and solicited no funds but told every need to God in prayer.
Lottie Moon (1840–1912) was a Southern Baptist missionary who gave nearly forty years to China. Her letters home pressing for prayer, for laborers, and for a Christmas offering for missions built the foundation of Baptist mission giving; she died worn out amid famine and war on Christmas Eve, 1912.
Mary Slessor (1848–1915) was a Dundee mill girl who became a missionary to Calabar in what is now Nigeria. Living among the people and speaking their language, she fought the killing of twins, rescued and raised many children, and became a magistrate in the interior — remembered as “everybody’s mother.”
C. T. Studd (1860–1931) was an England cricketer who, after his conversion, gave away a fortune and joined the “Cambridge Seven” as a missionary — serving in China, India, and finally the Congo, where he founded what became WEC. A man of fierce, uncompromising, and at times difficult zeal, he lived by the conviction that no sacrifice could be too great for Christ.
John “Praying” Hyde (1865–1912) was an American Presbyterian missionary to the Punjab, remembered above all as a man of prayer — a leading figure of the Sialkot Convention from its first year and one of the moving spirits of the Punjab Prayer Union, remembered as a man who asked God for a soul a day. Much of his vivid reputation comes from Francis McGaw’s 1923 devotional book “Praying Hyde,” written after his death.
Amy Beatrice Carmichael, born in 1867 in Millisle, Ireland, was a Protestant missionary in India. She served for 55 years without furlough, founding the Dohnavur Fellowship to rescue children from temple prostitution. Known for her deep devotion and writings on prayer, she authored 35 books and remained in India until her death in 1951. Her work continues through the ongoing ministry she established. Carmichael's life demonstrated radical obedience to Christ's call and cultural adaptation.
Dr Joe E. Church (1899–1989) was an English CMS missionary doctor at Gahini Hospital in Rwanda whose two days of Bible study and prayer with the Ugandan layman Simeoni Nsibambi on Namirembe Hill in September 1929 are remembered as the spark of the East African Revival. He served in Africa for over three decades and always insisted the Revival was God’s work, not his own.
Gladys Aylward (1902–1970) was an English parlourmaid, rejected by the missionary society, who spent her savings to travel overland alone to China in 1930. She ran an inn that told Bible stories and led about a hundred children over the mountains to safety during the Japanese invasion — insisting she was not God’s first choice, only a willing one.
Helen Roseveare (1925–2016) was a British missionary doctor who built hospitals and trained African medical workers in the Congo. Beaten and raped during the 1964 Simba rebellion, she spoke of it as being “trusted” by God with suffering, returned to Congo to rebuild, and taught for the rest of her life that the cost is swallowed up in the privilege of knowing Christ.
Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) was widowed when her husband Jim and four others were killed by the Waorani of Ecuador — and then went to live among the very people who had killed him, seeing many come to Christ. Through decades of writing and teaching on suffering and obedience, she became one of the most trusted voices of twentieth-century evangelicalism: “do the next thing.”
Jim Elliot (1927–1956) was an American missionary speared to death, with four companions, by the Waorani of Ecuador — the people he had come to reach and had resolved not to fight. His journal line, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” and the later conversion of the Waorani made his brief life one of the most influential in modern missions.
Lawrence Barham was a British Anglican clergyman and CMS Ruanda Mission missionary who, turned away from China, sailed to central Africa in 1928 and gave his life to Kigezi and Burundi. A front-rank European figure of the East African Revival, he founded the Kabale Bible school that became Bishop Barham University College; his closeness to the Revival cost him a bishopric in 1946, which he finally received in 1964.
Among the best-known are William Carey in India, Hudson Taylor in China, David Livingstone in Africa, Mary Slessor in Calabar, Amy Carmichael in India, and Jim and Elisabeth Elliot in Ecuador.
The China Inland Mission was founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865 to take the gospel into China's interior provinces. Its missionaries wore Chinese dress and trusted God for their support without appeals for money.
Mary Slessor's life, from a Dundee mill to the villages of Calabar, and Gladys Aylward's journey across Siberia to China are two of the most gripping.
