A tish of the Boyan Hasidic dynasty in Yerushalayim on Sukkot, 2009. Photograph by Eli Segal, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Men of an inland tribe at war practice in a forest clearing. Image supplied for this exhibit.
Two who carried the Besuras HaGeulah to those under chet kadmon, and died at their hands. Jim Elliot was speared by Waorani warriors on the Curaray River in Ecuador in January 1956. William Tyndale, translator of the Scriptures into English, was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde near Brussels in 1536. Illustration supplied for this exhibit.
In one sentence: the atonement wounds have been healed by His resurrection, but the tribulations of missionaries that come with bringing His Saving Wounds before the nations are not all healed, and Paul gladly takes his portion of them (Col 1:24) so the body of Messiah bears less. William Carey (1761–1834) William Carey was an English shoemaker turned Baptist pastor who became the most influential figure in the launch of the modern Protestant missionary movement. He is often called the “father of modern missions.” From cobbler’s bench to mission theorist. Carey was born in Paulerspury, Northamptonshire, and apprenticed as a shoemaker. He had little formal schooling but taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch and French, reportedly with books propped up beside his workbench. He also kept a homemade world map annotated with populations and religions. He became a Particular Baptist pastor in Moulton and later in Leicester. The 1792 turning point. In that year he published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. It was a landmark tract. It argued that the Great Commission still bound the church, and it used statistics and geography to survey the unreached world. His sermon at Nottingham on Isaiah 54:2–3 gave the movement its motto: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Within months, the Baptist Missionary Society was formed at Kettering. It became the template for the voluntary mission societies (LMS, CMS, the American Board and others) that followed over the next few decades. India and the Serampore Mission. Carey sailed for Bengal in 1793. The East India Company was hostile to missionaries, so in 1800 he moved to the Danish enclave of Serampore. There he formed the “Serampore Trio” with Joshua Marshman, a schoolmaster, and William Ward, a printer. The Trio’s model was ahead of its time: Bible translation as the core strategy. The Serampore press produced Scripture in roughly 40 languages and dialects. Carey himself oversaw complete Bibles in six languages: Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Hindi, Assamese and Sanskrit. He oversaw New Testaments or portions in about 29 more. A fire in 1812 destroyed manuscripts, type and dictionaries, and the team rebuilt them. Linguistic scholarship. Carey wrote grammars and dictionaries for several Indian languages. He was professor of Bengali, Sanskrit and Marathi at Fort William College in Calcutta for about 30 years. He is credited with helping shape modern Bengali prose. Education. Serampore College was founded in 1818, and a Danish royal charter in 1827 allowed it to grant degrees. Social reform. He campaigned against sati (widow-burning), which was banned in 1829. He also opposed the ritual infanticide practiced at Sagar. Science. He was a serious botanist and founded the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India. Indigenous church principles. The mission aimed to be self-supporting, to study Indian culture seriously, and to train Indian preachers. The results came slowly. The first Bengali convert, Krishna Pal, was baptized only in 1800, seven years after Carey arrived. Some early translations were hasty and later needed heavy revision. Even so, his combination of translation, scholarship, education and church planting set the pattern for nineteenth-century missions. Dorothy Carey (1756–1807) Dorothy Plackett was a farmer’s daughter from Piddington who married William in 1781. She was unable to read or write at the time, and she signed the marriage register with a mark. Her life is remembered largely as the hidden cost of her husband’s calling. Reluctance to go. When William resolved to go to India, Dorothy refused. She had three small sons and was pregnant with a fourth, and she had never travelled far from home. William initially planned to leave without her. At the last moment she was persuaded to come with the newborn, on the condition that her sister Kitty came too. Suffering in Bengal. The family met poverty, repeated moves, malaria and dysentery. In 1794 their five-year-old son Peter died. Mental illness. Dorothy then sank into a severe mental illness. Her symptoms included delusions that William was unfaithful, and outbursts against him. For her last twelve or so years she was largely confined at home while the mission work went on around her. She died at Serampore in 1807. Why she matters historically. For more than a century, biographies of Carey mentioned Dorothy only in passing. James Beck’s 1992 book Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey brought her story to the fore. She has since become a central case study in mission studies. Her story is used to examine the cost of mission to families, the question of a spouse’s genuine consent to a calling, the neglect of children (the Carey boys were partly raised by Hannah Marshman), and the need for what is now called “member care.” Readers today often hold Carey’s achievement and Dorothy’s tragedy together, as a reminder that the heroic narrative had a human price.