Lausanne World Pulse – Learning from Ants: A Look at Evangelists and Cross-cultural Missionaries

Robert Morrison was the first Protestant missionary in China (sent by the London Missionary Society in 1807). He arrived in Macao and ministered in China for nearly thirty years. He translated the Bible into Mandarin by 1818 and translated a dictionary by 1821. He faced numerous pressures. Imperial edicts against foreigners forced him to hide in his house. He died in 1834 having seen only ten converts.
Amy Carmichael did not see hundreds of thousands of converts, either. She was rejected by the China Inland Mission in 1892—for “frailty.” She went as a Keswick missionary to Japan, but decided that was not where God wanted her and eventually ended up in India in 1895. By 1899, she had developed a ministry rescuing children who had been dedicated by their families to serve as temple prostitutes; she eventually founded a society called the “Sisters of the Common Life.” She served for fifty-six years without furlough, took in more than one thousand children in her orphanages and wrote over thirty-five books.
Gladys Aylward was likewise rejected by mission agencies for service in China. She decided to go on her own and saved up her own money and traveled by train from London across Europe and Russia, through battle zones (China and Japan were at war at the time). She ultimately reached Yangchen where she helped a retired missionary woman at an inn for muleteers. She learned Mandarin (in spite of the fact that mission agencies had been sure she was too uneducated to do that), evangelized surrounding villages and took in orphan children. She became a Chinese citizen in 1936 and, when warfare in the region became too intense, led her one hundred orphan children over a hundred miles to a safer province.
Adoniram Judson was the first American missionary to Burma (modern Myanmar). He served for thirty-seven years with only one home leave. During his ministry, he translated the Bible, planted one hundred churches and saw eight thousand converts. The believers continued to grow and multiply after his death, and Burma eventually attained the status it now holds: the country with the third largest number of Baptist believers worldwide.
Hudson Taylor served in China for over fifty years, where he founded a missionary society, bringing nearly eight hundred missionaries to the country and personally baptizing an estimated fifty thousand converts. The largest part of this happened late in his missionary career. His legacy was the China Inland Mission (today’s Overseas Missionary Fellowship) and what would eventually become millions of believers in China. Taylor was also one of the first Protestant missionaries to contextualize the gospel into Chinese culture (adopting Chinese dress, language and food). He was one of the first to accept single and married women as missionaries—including Lottie Moon, who become a prominent figure in Southern Baptist churches and the inspiration for an annual fundraising campaign.
Samuel Zwemer’s story is told by J. Christy Wilson in “The Apostle to Islam: the Legacy of Samuel Zwemer” (International Journal of Frontier Missions, Oct-Dec 1996). Zwemer and his friend James Cantine wanted to go to a “needy field.” They looked for the most difficult field they could find and chose Arabia. No society would sponsor them, saying it was foolish for them to go to such a resistant people. Zwemer said, “If God calls you and no board will send you, bore a hole through the board and go anyway.” They went to churches and raised their own support, forming the Arabian Mission. In 1890, they headed to Beirut to learn Arabic. During Zwemer’s ministry he traveled extensively through the Muslim world, distributing tracts and Bibles; at many conferences he was an outspoken advocate for mission to Muslims. Still, the work he started remains unfinished.