From time to time our little Wycliffe blog plays host to a selection of potted biographies of missionary figures. I felt sure that the key to the great missionary life must lie in their stories.
So, after deep analysis, here’s my ‘missionary how-to’:
- Be unsuccessful. William Carey, the Bible-translating missionary to India, famously started off as a cobbler, studying languages while mending shoes. Gladys Aylward (catch her biography on January 3rd) was a domestic. David Brainerd never completed his studies because he was expelled from Yale University.
- If you get a good job, make sure it has no bearing on the work you will do in the future. CT Studd was a Cambridge student and a professional cricketer; James Fraser was an accomplished pianist; and Anthony Norris Groves was a dentist.
- Make sure that your support is generally poor. Carey’s initial enthusiasm to reach the unreached was belittled with the response, ‘Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine.’ Groves received so little support that he ended up starting the practice now known as ‘faith missions’.
- When you finally wade through your lack of experience and poor support structure, test your faith more by having very little initial response. Brainerd, Fraser and Carey saw very few responses to their call to faith in the initial years. For Adoniram Judson, it was seven years before the first convert. After years working on the Algonquin Bible translation, many of the copies and manuscripts John Eliot has produced were destroyed in a fire. And Townsend and Legters (Wycliffe founders) couldn’t even get across the Mexican border.
- Now you’ve got around to work, compound your problems with poor mental and physical health. ‘A museum of diseases’ was the epithet one doctor attached to Studd. Brainerd was both depressed and had tuberculosis, which lead to his death aged 28. Dorothy Carey tried to kill her husband twice.
- Really annoy the authorities. John Wycliffe’s translation work was so hated that he was burnt as a heretic 43 years after his death.
- If all else fails, try a good hairstyle. Check out Robert Moffat’s and Eliot’s.
The evident truth is that the key to the proclamation of the truth does not lie in the stories of men and women but in God’s Story. He chooses the clay vessels. Share God’s Story.
Disclaimer: Wycliffe Bible Translators take no responsibility for careers failed or lives lost as a result of taking this blog post too seriously.
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