George Liele: The Freed Slave Who Sailed First

George Liele was born a slave in America, long ago, before there were any missionary societies in the world at all. He worked on a plantation and knew the deep sorrow of belonging to another man. But one day George heard the good news that Jesus loved him and had died to set him free — free in his soul, whatever chains were on his body — and his whole life changed. He became a preacher, and even while he was still a slave he began telling others, black and white, slave and free, about the Saviour.

George preached so well and so faithfully that his master, who was a Christian, set him free to do it. Then the master died, and some tried to force George back into slavery. To keep his freedom and his family safe, George agreed to work off the cost of his passage on a ship, and in this way he sailed far away to the island of Jamaica, out in the warm Caribbean Sea.

Now here is a thing that few people noticed at the time. George Liele left his own country to carry the gospel to another land years before William Carey ever set sail for India. A man who had once been a slave became one of the very first people ever to go out from America as a missionary.

In Jamaica, George preached to the enslaved people on the sugar plantations, who suffered terribly and whom almost no one else cared for. He baptised hundreds of them and built the first Baptist church on the whole island. The rulers did not like a black man gathering the slaves to worship, and they threw George into prison and even put him in chains. But he would not stop, and the little churches he had planted only grew.

George Liele never became famous like the missionaries who came after him. He wrote no great books and had no society behind him — only his freed heart and his love for people the world had thrown away. Yet the work he began in Jamaica went on and on after him, and some of the churches he founded still stand today. He had shown that no one is too lowly, and no past too hard, to be sent by God — and that a man who had once been a slave could carry to others the greatest freedom of all.