William Carey (1761-1834) was a shoe cobbler in England who preached on Sundays and studied Latin, Greek, and French. But he was burdened with the desire to preach the gospel to the heathen. He challenged the local preachers, “was the command given to the Apostles to tech all nations not obligatory on all succeeeding ministers?” The chairman of the meeting told him “sit down, young man,sit down. You are a miserable enthusiast. Certainly nothing can be done until another Pentecost…When the Lord wants to convert the heathen He will do it without your help or mine.” Such was the thinking of Baptist Calvinists who believed that the Holy Spirit worked directly on converting people (the “I” irresistible grace in “TULIP”. In spite of the opposition, he started “the particular Baptist society for propagating the gospel among the heathen.” It took 5 months on a ship to get to India. He never saw England again. Poverty, illness, and loneliness in India took its toll—hardships compounded by the fact the Thomas family (the doctor who came to India with Carey) was living in relative affluence in Calcutta. William complained in a letter that Dorothy and her sister were “continually exclaiming against” him. His wife had a mental breakdown adn died and she was often described as mad or insane. His child died. He lost his monetary support from England. He faced an India full of the Hindu caste system, superstition, and squalor. 9/10 of the population lived in poverty.

He saw the practice of suttee. Wives were tied to their husband’s dead body as they both burned on pyres of wood in open air as she also died. Or widows were even buried alive with their husband’s dead body. Many girls from 8 to 12 years oldd were married off by their fathers receiving a dowry from the marriage. Carey was eventually able to end suttee. He saw infant sacrifice, infants put in baskets in the trees exposed to the weather and deadly ants, or even torn from their mothers and thrown to alligators and sharks. He was able to stop infant sacrifice. He saw a leper burned by his mother and sister. He started a leper hospital to take care of lepers. But “Carey saw India not as a foreign country to be exploited, but as his heavenly Father’s land to be loved and saved… he believed in understanding and controlling nature instead of fearing, appeasing or worshipping it (as the Hindus did); in developing one’s intellect instead of killing it as mysticism taught.” (From Wikipedia)

From AI:”Carey arrived in India and spent 41 years in India without a furlough. His mission included about 700 converts in a nation of millions, but he had laid an impressive foundation of Bible translations, education, and social reform. He has been called the “father of modern missions” and “India’s first cultural anthropologist (one who studies human cultures.” He was a botanist who taught the people many methods for growing better crops. He was a postmillennialist Calvinist Baptist, probably doing his part to make society better for a thousand years after which Jesus would supposedly return.

“As the Danish pioneers had found a century earlier, Indian converts came slowly—from both Hinduism and Islam. Carey himself did not baptize his first convert, Krishna, till December, 1800—seven years after his arrival in India.” Most of his sermons were met with indifference, amusement, or hostility. He built Serampore, a college for the training of native ministers of the gospel.

“Appointed in 1801 to teach Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi at Fort William College, Carey translated the Bible into Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese, and Sanskrit. He also translated parts of it into 29 other languages and dialects.” India eventually came to honor Carey’s accomplishments in India by putting his image on a stamp in 1993.

There is no telling how many Indian people were converted to Jesus as a result of his translations of the Bible into native Indian languages. Can you imagine taking your shoes to a poor cobbler to get them worked on, not realizing that the cobbler would one day be called the father of modern missions? He had, for the most part, much suffering and grief during his 41 years in India but never gave up.William Carey’s famous motto was “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God“. 

AI: “Although there had been other Protestant missionaries before him, particularly among the Moravians, and the Catholic church never ceased mission work, Carey is called the father of modern missions because his eloquent plea, and personal example, inspired Protestants everywhere to mission endeavors. His efforts and writings, particularly his essay “An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens,” are seen as foundational to the modern missionary movement.”

I have become cynical about churches in the U.S. Should spreading the gospel not be the primary mission of the church? “While the exact percentage varies, studies suggest that a significant portion of church contributions, around 11%, are spent on missions, with a smaller portion, around 6%, specifically allocated for overseas missions. “Only 0.1% of all Christian giving is directed toward mission efforts in the 38 most unevangelized countries in the world.” – Barrett and Johnson, 2001. Churches spend a significant portion on personnel (49%), facilities (23%), programs (10%). I would encourage you to give your tithe (I hope you are at least tithing which only 12% of born again American do; most give 2-3%. to charity or church) to one of the many organizations that help the poor and oppressed all over the world, especially in 3rd world countries, like Healing Hands. Several of them print Bibles and children’s Bible story books, like EEM.

I was especially impressed with my long time friend Rex Watson and Baja Missions. They already have many churches they work with in the northern Baja, but Rex wants to expand to all the Baja, which would include sending 2 missionaries to work full time in the south Baja. They are raising money to fund that project if you can help. Baja Missions has a website at https://www.bajamissions.us/ if you want to check it out. They have many projects in the Baja to help the poor with clinics and they are spreading the gospel there.

It’s kinda ironic. Those Baptist preachers who discouraged Carey from going to the heathen, saying that the Holy Spirit would evangelize India without their help if the Holy Spirit wanted that done! B/c of their Calvinistic beliefs,they couldn’t see that the Holy Spirit was working through William Carey to get them to send missionaries to the heathen in India. That’s what happens sometimes when we let our theology blind us to the working of the Holy Spirit all over the world. Not just Calvinism. In the church I was raised in, preachers told us that the work of Billy Graham all over the world preaching the gospel was not valid b/c he didn’t preach baptism like my church taught. Some would say that Mother Teresa was not even a Christian b/c she was baptized as a baby and not as an adult. My church would say that a church that didn’t do the Lord’s Supper every Sunday or that used instrumental music in their worship was not the true church. All that was due to legalistic theology.

So, “expect great things from God, attempt great things for God”. Maybe you are just a stay home mom, a teacher, a mechanic, a construction worker, a janitor. Carey was a cobbler and look what great things he was able to accomplish for God. Let your mind imagine some great thing that God could use you for. Focus on that instead of the daily trivia that we deal with.