Last month, we considered the amazing and prolific ministry of William Carey, one of the true pioneers in world missions. His passion to spread the Gospel in India has inspired thousands to heed the evangelistic call, and millions to rally behind them in support. Two of those who caught the missionary flame were a couple very important to our history as American Baptists: Adoniram and Ann Judson, pioneering missionaries to Burma.
Adoniram first met Ann Haseltine at a meeting of a Congregationalist mission-sending agency, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The meeting was held at Ann's father's home. Over dinner, Judson was taken by Ann's beauty. On the other hand, she wasn't particularly impressed by him. But over time, his strong desire to take the Gospel to an unreached population won her over.
Just two weeks after their wedding, the Judsons boarded a ship bound for India in February of 1812. Adoniram had been deeply inspired by the missionary accounts of William Carey, and was excited to meet him face to face. But on the long ocean voyage, Judson took some time in close study of the Greek New Testament. He was concerned that Carey might challenge him about his acceptance of infant baptism; he wanted to find good evidence that the Baptists were wrong in that regard. Instead, he wound up proving to himself that infant baptism was a false teaching--that only believer's baptism was taught in the Bible. You can imagine the discomfort for a Congregationalist missionary to suddenly find himself a Baptist! This discomfort was magnified in his wife, who pled with him to content himself with his former beliefs. She warned that if he became a Baptist, she would follow suit. However, dedicating herself to the study of Scripture (probably to guide her husband back to the "right road,") she herself came to affirm believer's baptism.
Such a radical change would come at a high price for them both. Ann feared for the possible loss of friends, and the couple would now be at cross-purposes with the Congregationalist mission board who sent them. Leaving behind one's family, home and country would be difficult enough; what would they do now that they were closing the door on their denomination and source of funding?
The Baptist missionaries in India were great blessings to them at this time. William Carey and his team members welcomed the Judsons warmly. William Ward baptized the husband and wife by immersion, along with the colleague who met them in India, Luther Rice. (In what can only be described as providential, Rice undertook his own study of the Greek New Testament aboard his own ship, and came to the same conclusions as the Judsons!) Carey and his friends would help them through the transition; the Judsons and Rice wrote letters of resignation to their mission board, and Rice returned to America to start the work of raising financial support among the Baptists. He would never return to the mission field; his work as a fundraiser was so effective that he elected to remain in America to continue the work. He'd been on the ground in India; he was able to give share firsthand stories of the great work being accomplished by the Lord in India, as well as the difficulties missionaries faced, and their reliance on support back home.
Luther Rice had in his mind a great vision for mission support. Rather than traveling from city to city and making his pleas to individual churches, he worked to establish a great mission-sending convention, comprised of Baptist delegates sent from every state. This organization was initially known as the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions. That's a rather long and unwieldy name, so eventually they chose to go by the name, the "Triennial Convention" -- because they gathered every three years. The convention voted to support the Judsons in their work. Later the Triennial Convention was reorganized into the Northern Baptist Convention, which was renamed the American Baptist Churches USA in 1972. That’s right—this is where our denomination came from! We’ll tell more of that story another time.
The issue of financial support was being handled, but the hardships and spiritual warfare that so often accompany missions work were still a reality for the Judsons. The British East India Company made it extremely difficult for the Judsons to minister in India, which caused their relocation to Rangoon, Burma. They truly had to start from scratch; they had no training in the Burmese language and no written text to help them learn. Much of their early work had to focus on slowly mastering the language. Their firstborn son died tragically in 1816.
Adoniram's time with his family was cut short when, in 1824, war erupted between Burma and Britain. The Burmese government became paranoid that western powers had agents in the country "spying" on them. They rounded up all white males in their country and imprisoned them. Adoniram spent two years away from his family, enduring torture at the hands of his captors. Ann's actions at this time were heroic. She visited her husband in prison often, bringing food. When she wasn't there, she relentlessly lobbied the government for his freedom, hardly giving the officials a moment's rest. When Britain gained victory and Adoniram was released, it wasn't long until Ann died from exhaustion and the stress of persecution they had experienced; she contracted cerebral meningitis which she had no strength to fight. While still grieving his wife, Judson was further struck low by the death of their daughter in 1827. All this took place in the context of very meager results from his Gospel labors. Less than two dozen Burmese professed faith in Christ during this time. For those of us who haven't been on the foreign mission field, it's hard to appreciate the spiritual and emotional stress that come against the Lord's servants.
It is a difficult, but wondrous paradox to learn that in the midst of what looks like crushing defeat, the Lord can work more powerfully than we could have imagined. When the Apostle Paul pled with God to take away his “thorn in the flesh,” God responded that it was in His greater purpose for the thorn to stay. He reassured Paul that His strength was made perfect in Paul’s weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). When Job lost everything, yet kept His faith in God, the Lord vindicated his faith by blessing him more abundantly than before. So it was with the Judsons; in spite of loss and apparent failure, the Lord made their ministry exceedingly fruitful over time. God blessed Adoniram with more missionary colleagues to support and strengthen him. The Burmese might have been hard-hearted toward the Gospel, with few converts. Still, there was the Karen people, a tribe who had been brutally oppressed by the majority Burmans—so much so that they lived in hiding among the hills and forests. But when Adoniram’s new colleague, George Boardman, preached the Gospel to the Karens, that tribe readily came to Christ in great numbers. The first day, 34 of them were baptized by Boardman and his colleague, a Mr. Mason. By then, only 22 Burmans had become Christians in more than a decade of Judson’s ministry. By 1890, however, about 1,200 Burmese had converted to Christianity and 30,000 Karens professed faith and were baptized. The rapid growth of the church brought about the foundation of the Karen College and Theological Seminary in Rangoon (1872). And since then, a thriving Baptist community of Karen, Burman, and other tribespeople has arisen, numbering over 500,000.
Before their troubles began in 1824, Ann was a powerful missionary force in her own right. She was passionate about evangelism, and she and Adoniram adopted orphan girls in terrible poverty as their own. To lift little girls out of extreme poverty, she started a girls' school. She was quite a scholar herself: in 1819, she translated the Gospel of Matthew into Thai. She also helped her husband in his Bible translation work by doing the translations of Daniel and Jonah into Burmese. For the benefit of prospective supporters back home, she also wrote A Particular Relation of the American Baptist Mission to the Burman Empire in 1823. This was a powerful call to action. This, and many letters sent back to the States, brought a sense of reality and urgency for the continuing support of missions. Many biographies written about her, and she is considered the most influential woman missionary in American History.
Though his soul-winning work was slow, and he languished in prison far too long, Adoniram’s work to translate the Bible into the Burmese language (completed 1834) was crucial to all that followed. He composed a Burmese-English dictionary which remains the standard text today. After Ann’s death, he and his colleagues established a church and Christian School at the city of Moulmein (Mawlamyine, present-day Myanmar). God gave him two more wives to be his companions in ministry: Sarah Hall Boardman (widow of George Boardman), who died in 1845, and Emily Chubbock, who married him in 1846 and was his wife until his own death in 1849.
I wish I could share much more about the lives of this remarkable man, and about his first wife, but we must close for this month. There are also many more facets to our identity as Baptists, but I want to discuss one more before I close out our series: the Associational Principle. As I’ve already mentioned, associations were formed to pool resources and send out missionaries. They were also formed for fellowship and for the training and credentialing of approved ministers. Next month we’ll turn our lens to examine the formation and growth of associations to close out our survey of Baptist identity.
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