William Carey, the pioneer of Modern Missions

[0:00] Okay, William Carey, where this guy's not going to sit very well, was extremely influential in where he came from.

[0:13] So we go back to the early church, the apostles scattered through the known world and took the gospel with them. 400 years later, Constantine officialized Christianity in Rome, and the church stopped doing missions.

[0:30] And stopped for many centuries. And William Carey came along in the late 1700s and gave a rebirth to missions.

[0:40] And I have a connection. William Carey went to India. And I grew up in India.

[0:52] This is Bombay, or Mumbai, as it's called today. And here's Chennai, or Madras, as it used to be called. And my father went to India as a missionary.

[1:06] And several years later, my mother went to India as a missionary. And they met in India and got married. And they lived right in between Bombay and Chennai in Hyderabad.

[1:16] So Bombay is the capital of Maharashtra. Madrasa is the capital of Tamil Nadu. Hyderabad is the capital of Andhra Pradesh. Now we had a team. If you were at missions lunch last Sunday, we had a team of young people from our church that went to India.

[1:32] And they were right about here. And this is right on the border between Arista and Andhra Pradesh here. And so that's where that team was. That's where I grew up and I went to school down here.

[1:43] William Carey and his work were up here in Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal, where a number of the rivers that flow on the south side of the Himalayas empty into the Bay of Bengal.

[1:55] So there's just a little bit of history and background. Now, during my talk today, if you see me sitting down, it's because I have some back issues right now and experience a little pain every now and again.

[2:08] If I'm lying on the floor and I'm writhing in pain, it is because I am in pain. And I'll continue to talk while I do that. It was Sunday morning in December 1892.

[2:24] And the missionaries' prayer time had just begun before their morning service. When in came a messenger from the governor, Lord Bentic of Calcutta, and interrupted the service with a very important announcement.

[2:42] And that was that the proclamation had been declared that Sati would now be an illegal observance in India. Sati was a tradition that Hindus had, where when the man died, the husband died, the wife would then throw herself on the funeral prior and be burned along with him.

[3:05] But keep in mind, the wife probably was not anywhere near the age of the husband. Because what would frequently happen would be that older men would marry young wives.

[3:18] But in the culture of India in those days, and still today to some degree, widows were the very lowest level of society.

[3:29] They had no means of supporting themselves. Why is this important in the life of William Carey? Because for 30 years, William Carey, after he saw the first time somebody throw themselves on the prior in Brenslau, had, just as Wilberforce had done in England, against slavery, had petitioned, both in India and back in England, that this practice be changed.

[3:56] This may not be the greatest achievement of William Carey's life, but it was certainly a very monumental one. And certainly had the biggest impact as far as the quality of life for thousands of people that this would mark.

[4:15] Now, I have heard, even in not that many years ago, that there are times when sati actually still does take place in India. It's been replaced by a different phenomena, which is wife burning.

[4:29] Which is, when the husband hasn't died, he wants to get rid of his wife. But anyway, we won't go there today. William Carey was a simple shoemaker, a cobbler, who ended up having a tremendous impact on the whole direction that Protestant missionaries would have ever since he first set sights on going to the mission field.

[4:54] The impact that he has today carries on. And we see Carey Institutes, we see other organizations that have come out of what William Carey did.

[5:06] But even a great man like William Carey had his beginnings. And rarely does a man come up from nothing. There are other influences that are there.

[5:18] And so, Dr. George Smith says that there were others before him. And he could trace his lineage to Eliot. For it was in his life and work that molded David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, and Adoniram Judson, and William Carey, and others who followed him.

[5:39] But even Eliot had those who influenced him. And if you look back in the life of Eliot, you can go back to Hooker, the Puritan in England who had a tremendous impact even on Eliot.

[5:52] So there's this thread that we can follow. And you can see a great man like Carey come and have a huge impact on one country and on missions around the world.

[6:03] But there are those that took the steps before them and led them to where they went. On the south side of Watling Street, which was on an old Roman road, three miles from Towncaster in the county of Northampton, stands a little village called Paul's, or Puri of St. Paul, or Paul's Puri.

[6:31] And in this little village, on August the 17th in 1761, in a very humble cottage, to a couple of very meager means, an eldest son was born, William Carey.

[6:47] And when Carey came into this world, his father didn't have much estate, didn't have very many means. He was a weaver. Had been apprenticed to be a weaver. And bear in mind that England at this time is just making the transition into the Industrial Revolution.

[7:04] So a weaver would work at home, produce the cloth that he was producing, and take it to his wholesaler and sell it that way. They were not organized yet into factories.

[7:19] When William Carey was about six years old, his father took a new position. He became the parish clerk, which was a paid position, and also a schoolmaster, a schoolteacher.

[7:34] And so young William got the benefit of having a very solid, rudimentary education. In addition to that, William's father had a great love of books and loved to read.

[7:46] And it seems that he was able to pass this on to young William as well. He was held in very high esteem by his neighbors.

[7:57] And young William thrived under this tutorage. William Carey's grandfather had also been the parish clerk before that.

[8:08] So there was a tradition of this coming down through the family. William had a tremendous love of nature. And he would go out and collect insects.

[8:21] And he had collections of insects at home, collect botanical things, and things like that. And both of these interests followed him all the way through his life. He started the first horticultural society in India.

[8:35] He always had a magnificent garden wherever he lived. He loved nature. He loved to see what God had created. And keep in mind that this is happening at the same time, that an explosion is happening in science.

[8:49] And the world, the new world, is being discovered. And Carey fit right into that. He was a very studious individual on top of that. And when Carey set his mind to discover something, it is said, his sister reports that he couldn't let something alone until he had plumbed the depths of it, until he understood it well and fully.

[9:10] He was not an individual of an exuberant personality. In fact, he was kind of plain in many ways. He claimed that his own greatest attribute was that he was a plotter.

[9:27] And if something needed to be done, he would get it done and he would plod through. The story is told that when he was a young man, his love of nature led him to see up high in the tree, a chestnut tree, a bird's nest.

[9:43] And he wanted that bird's nest for his collection. So he scampfered up the tree and fell out of the tree. Undeterged, he brushed himself off and scampered up the tree again and fell out of the tree.

[10:00] Rumped his bruises a little bit and climbed up the tree a third time and fell out of the tree and broke his leg. Several weeks later, bandage still on his leg, his mother left him alone.

[10:15] When she came home, he had a very big grin on his face. And he said, Mother, I did it. I got it. I got it. And he had bandages and all gone up the tree because he had to finish what he had started.

[10:31] And this would be a trait that would serve Kerry very, very well as he went on later in life. When he was 14, or some accounts say he was 17, it was time for him to be apprenticed.

[10:49] And Kerry had a skin condition that when he went out into the sun, he had a reaction. And it became very obvious that he would not be able to work outdoors.

[11:02] And this is interesting for a man who's going to end up in India, the land of sun and often cloudless skies. Interestingly enough, the skin condition left later on in life and the same problem did not bother him.

[11:16] But it was decided that instead he should become an apprentice to a cobbler. And so at 17 or thereabouts, he moved to Hackleton, a town nine miles from his village, and became an apprentice in the trade for which he ended up becoming called the Consecrated Cobbler.

[11:38] In his employment with his, as a cobbler, his employer had a commentary of the New Testament.

[11:51] And due to his love of books, Carey opened this up and discovered for the first time letters in the Greek language. And again, that persistence and that curiosity came to play.

[12:06] And he said, I have got to understand what these funny little markings mean. So he taught himself Greek as he was there working on the cobbler's bench.

[12:20] And he went on much more than that. And Carey is interesting in that God sometimes gives individuals tremendous gifts. And God obviously gave Carey a tremendous gift for languages.

[12:36] He had a love of languages just for the sake of them being languages. Now, growing up in Hyderabad, the language of the area is Telugu.

[12:47] And I grew up in a little village, 2,000 people. It was the only white family there. All my playmates were other Indians. And so I learned Telugu as a little boy.

[12:58] And I'm sure that this is the cause of all kinds of misadventures in my life, my learning difficulties. English. Because I'm sure I never learned English properly and I'm still struggling with it.

[13:10] And I went to a British boarding school, took Latin and French. A year later they suggested that I start at the beginning again with Latin and French.

[13:23] And finally we started Latin a third time over. After the third time they said, forget it, this kid doesn't do languages, let's try German. Oh, what a disaster it was.

[13:37] But for Cary, God had put in him the ability to absorb languages and there was this great love of languages as he went along.

[13:50] Now, as an apprentice, one of the jobs that Cary had was every now and again he'd have to go and collect the money that was owed to his boss. And as Christmas came up, it was a tradition that as the bills were being collected, the people paying the bills would have a little extra for the apprentices.

[14:10] And as Cary went to the ironmonger and collected the money, the ironmonger made him an offer and he said, what would you rather have?

[14:21] Six spoons or a shilling? For those of us that aren't familiar with old English money, it would be like offering him today maybe five dollars or ten dollars or it would be more like a nickel or a dime.

[14:35] Cary wasn't a pretty smart kid, he was, I'll have the shilling please and took the shilling. Later on in the day as he continued to collect the bills, he discovered that the shilling was a fake.

[14:53] However, since he had collected his master's bills from this individual, he thought, well, I'll just switch shillings and the shilling that I got given is what got paid to my master, the other shilling was mine.

[15:08] And he went out and spent some of the money. Came back, gave his master the money and his master in time discovered it and sent his other apprentice to inquire what was the real cause.

[15:22] And it turned out that Cary had been taken. this caused incredible embarrassment for him. And Cary says that his one weakness in life was lying.

[15:36] But this event was very, very emblazoned on him and seared him. And he made a deal with God and he said, God, if you get me through this, I'll never do anything like this again.

[15:52] And it had a tremendous impact and began for Cary for him to see the darkness of his own heart.

[16:04] Now, the co-apprentice of Cary was a man by the name of John War. And he was a young, devout dissenter. So I'm going to take a little segue again here. We're going to go to what's happening in the church in England at this time.

[16:17] So over a century ago, we've had Henry VIII take the church, of England out of the Catholic church. At the same time in Europe, there's all kinds of reformation movements that are happening, the Huguenots, the Lutherans, the Anabaptists.

[16:33] In England, we've got Puritans and other groups that are happening there. And in England at this time, the state church, the Church of England was the church, and anybody else was called a dissenter.

[16:47] And there were those who felt that, yes, England had made a good move in leaving the Catholic church, but they hadn't gone far enough. And a lot of the other groups felt that the church needed to go further.

[17:00] Well, this young man, this co-apprentice of Carey's, was a dissenter. And he had a great burden for Carey.

[17:10] And even though Carey's father had been the parish clerk in that, man, it was clear to him that Carey had not really had discovered a personal relationship, was not walking with God.

[17:25] And so he loaned Carey all kinds of books and had all kinds of discussions with him, during which time Carey came to realize, he said, I had pride sufficient for a thousand times my knowledge.

[17:39] I always scorned and seemed to have the worst discussions and always got the last word in arguments, but then was often afterwards convinced that my fellow apprentice had the better argument, and I felt a growing unease, but had no idea that nothing can happen until there is a complete change of the heart.

[18:01] He described his own experiences similar to that of David Brainerd or Martin Luther. Brainerd said, I had a very good outside, but my heart was exceedingly sinful.

[18:12] And Luther said, all my austerities, all the deprivations that he went through, did not change my heart. Carey said, my heart was hard and proud.

[18:24] Nothing but a change of heart could do me any good. And so it was that as Carey, as he worked away on the cobbler bench, as he studied his books, came to the point where he realized that he needed a change of heart and ended up becoming a dissenter himself, left the Anglican church and joined a Baptist group.

[18:52] And on October the 5th, 1783, he was baptized by Dr. Ryland in the River Ninn in Northampton. And Dr.

[19:03] Ryland made a note in his diary that day, and his note says, this day baptized a poor journeyman cobbler. His message that day that he preached was on Matthew 19, verse 30.

[19:23] Many that are first shall be last, and many that are last shall be first. Very interesting. So, Kerry came to this change, started attending a Baptist church, and immediately started taking the gospel to the people around him, and immediately had this change of heart where he became concerned about the people that are around him.

[19:52] And as he worked at his cobbler's bench, he not only learned Greek, but he added to that French, Latin, Dutch, Hebrew, and there was one other language that's not in the list.

[20:06] He ended up having seven languages under his belt as he was a cobbler. Part of his business relationship was he ended up marrying the daughter of his boss.

[20:21] And this was one of the sad chapters in Kerry's life, because his wife did not have the same passion. She did not care about any of the fact she resisted going to India. And she didn't have the same spiritual inclination that he had.

[20:34] And ended up being rather a burden to Kerry in England down the road. Kerry was not yet 20 years old when he got married.

[20:46] So maybe he rushed into that. And it certainly was one of the harder parts of his life. Kerry preached his first sermon in Hackleton, and his mother went to hear him.

[20:59] And she declared with confidence that with time he would become a great preacher. His father also listened to the sermon, but from outside the church.

[21:12] He didn't want to go inside as a good Anglican. He didn't want to get caught in Baptist premises. And his father said that he confessed that he was highly pleased with what he saw with the young Kerry.

[21:29] And pretty soon Kerry started speaking and he was given a congregation in Onley, another town close by. And during this process ended up being able to leave being a cobbler for a period of time.

[21:47] Ended up also becoming a school master. But only did that for a year. He found he didn't have the ability to impose discipline on the young people.

[21:59] And the school master that had been there actually came back and the students naturally gravitated back to him. But during all of this time, Kerry kept on, he went back to being a cobbler again.

[22:13] And if you had gone into Kerry's workshop, you would have seen on the wall a bunch of pieces of paper pasted together. Because the new world is being discovered at this time, and Captain Cook's adventures are being published.

[22:28] And if you had looked at Kerry's map that he'd pieced together on his wall, it would have had India, so many souls, Hindus, it would have had Burma, so many people in their religion.

[22:44] And Kerry had this immense interest for the whole world and what was going on, and cared very much that people were not being taken the gospel, that the good news wasn't being taken beyond their borders.

[23:01] Before the end of 1768, Mr. Kerry, accompanied by another minister of the same age, went to a minister's meeting in Northampton.

[23:15] And at the end of that meeting, a Mr. Ryland, it was Dr. Ryland who baptized Kerry. This Mr. Ryland is the father of the doctor Ryland, wanted to have some discussion, and as was common in that day, he said to Kerry and the other young man, he said, put forward a subject for discussion.

[23:38] And Kerry refused to, and he made all kinds of excuses, but he was pressured and pressured. So finally, he came forward and he said, my point of discussion is whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not obligatory to all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent.

[24:01] And at that point, the Mr. Ryland responded and said, young man, sit down, when God is pleased to convert the heathen world, he will do it without your help or mine.

[24:14] And that was the attitude that Kerry faced when it came to missions. And it was not just among the dissenters, it was also among the established church as well.

[24:26] And if you take a look at what was happening around the world in missions at this time, there were mission movements that were happening. The Catholics were actually on the move into the discovered, the new world, the world that was being discovered.

[24:39] North America and the islands and other areas. The Moravians, a little group near Austria and Europe, who had a tremendous impact, were also on the move.

[24:53] But the Reformation, yet at this point, was still very internal and had not expanded its horizons to see that the rest of the world needed to be brought under the influence of the gospel.

[25:10] So, after having this rather abrupt encounter with his first public disclosure of the burden that he had on his heart for the rest of the world, Kerry continued to go forward publicly.

[25:27] And at successive meetings of the Baptist Minister's Society, that would be like our general synod, he continued to bring this up. And the Baptist Missionary Society was formed.

[25:40] They agreed, yeah, this is something that we've got to do. They met again the next year. And Kerry gave a very famous sermon based on Isaiah, in which the text talks about expanding the tense to include more, and the gospel going to the Gentiles.

[26:01] And Kerry preached this message, and the theme of his message was, expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.

[26:15] Those two themes have come down and are associated with Kerry to this day. And at the end of the meeting, they all met again and said, okay, yeah, well, you know, we've got to consider what we're going to do about this.

[26:28] And Kerry got up and grabbed a hold the moderator's arm and said, not another year, do not let another year pass without us doing something.

[26:39] So they made a resolution and they said, yeah, we've got to do something, but didn't do anything. But they said to Kerry, why don't you go ahead and put your ideas into a pamphlet and we'll publish it.

[26:52] And so that was done and Kerry again is famous for that pamphlet. I'm just noting the time here and wanting to get to India.

[27:07] About the time that Kerry was baptized, there was a Dr. Thomas that went to India in the employment of the company called that worked in India.

[27:22] British India Company, that's right. And he was a surgeon. And what he encountered in India touched his heart. He was there for two years.

[27:33] He came back to England, went back to India again with the purpose of converting the heathen and publishing the Bible in Bengali. His skills were more as a doctor.

[27:44] He's an interesting character. He's going to be closely connected with Kerry. He's dogged all the way through his life by poor finances. He's in debt to everybody. And his creditors are always just one step behind him.

[28:00] But anyway, he comes back to England and he has this burden for India. He's been there. He started translating the Bible into Bengali.

[28:11] But he doesn't have the skills. He's a doctor. He's not a linguist. And God brings Kerry and I can't remember his name.

[28:24] Yes, together. Thomas, Dr. Thomas. And he brings them together and their lives are intertwined after that. So they proceed, they plan to go to India, but Kerry's wife doesn't want to go to India.

[28:42] So the plan is that Kerry's going to go to India, he's going to set up a mission there, and then he's going to come back and get his family. But they have trouble getting their booking to go to India.

[28:52] and Kerry comes back and he pleads with his wife several times and finally she consents as long as she can take her sister along with her, she will go to India.

[29:03] They get on the British ship that's going to take them to India, only to discover that the ship will not take them because they do not have a job in India with the British India Company.

[29:16] And they control everything. So they are kicked off the ship just before it's about to sail. And, you know, here they have their whole focus has been on getting to India and they're kicked off the ship.

[29:32] And they go to a coffee shop and the waitress hands Dr. Thomas a piece of paper and has a name and an address on it.

[29:44] And it is a ship, a Dutch ship, that is going to go to India. And the Dutch ship wouldn't have any qualms of taking somebody who doesn't have a job.

[29:58] The only issue is they didn't get refunded their full fare. And they only have a little bit over 300 pounds left. And it's going to cost them about 700 pounds to go on the ship.

[30:10] So they do some artful negotiating and end up all getting on that ship sailing around the Cape of Africa, go through a tremendous storm that tears the masts off the ship.

[30:21] Kerry was out on the deck. He thought this was it. This is God's called me to drown in the wild forties down below the Cape of Africa.

[30:33] They do end up making it to India and manage to get off the ship in India without any problems with the British authorities but have very little finance.

[30:46] This is a small little Baptist group that is saying we want to send you guys to India and they have very low finances. Calcutta is an expensive place to be.

[30:57] They've got a large group. Kerry's got several kids at this point. His wife, his wife's sister, Dr. Thomas. And it becomes very apparent that their money isn't going to last them in Calcutta for very long.

[31:13] So, Kerry had in his mind the model of missions that he wanted to adopt was similar to the Moravians. And what the Moravians did was the Moravian church would gather together, they would put some money together, buy you a one-way ticket.

[31:29] And you went. You had your ticket, you got there, from there on you looked after yourself. And Kerry liked this idea. That was what he envisioned what they would do.

[31:41] And the Moravians were very effective. They did agriculture, they did all kinds of things to survive as they took the gospel. So, Kerry discovered there's an area in here where all of these rivers, the Ganges and the other rivers come into a delta down here.

[32:01] This is called the Sundarbans, this area along his very low swampy. When a cyclone comes through the Bay of Bengal, all through Bangladesh, which is over here, this has tremendous flooding because it's all very, very low.

[32:17] And the Sundarbans were notorious for tigers and other kinds of things like that. It still are today. It's a very wild area. But land was cheap.

[32:30] So, Kerry went and took his wife and his family to the Sundarbans and they built a house out of bamboo and tried to start a farm. It was not a very successful operation, didn't ever really get off the ground.

[32:46] When one of Dr. Thomas' former acquaintances came and bailed them out and they went north of Calcutta to work on indigo farms, so indigo being a dye, was a plant that was grown and processed.

[33:04] So, Thomas ran one indigo farm and Kerry ran another indigo farm and this was successful for about four or five years. This is how they made their living.

[33:16] things continued to progress. Kerry had learned the language, learned Bengali, they were preaching, they were beginning to do translation work, but no converts.

[33:31] The north of India, to go back into a little bit of history again, Thomas, the apostle, is traditionally believed to have come to Kerala in the south of India and there is a very, very ancient church in the south of India, along with a Jewish community as well.

[33:48] So, we had the influence of the gospel coming to India but that never really expanded and never filtered into the rest of India. It was kind of an isolated church there in the south. The people in the south half of India are actually ethnically different from the people in the north half of India.

[34:03] The people in the south half of India are Gravidian in their background and have very dark skin. The people in the north half, because of successive invasions coming from Europe and Central Asia, are more Aryan.

[34:20] And as Islam came, there's Muslim influence, Portuguese influence in the south of India as well. But there are more Muslims in the north of India and a much more virulent variety of Hinduism.

[34:37] And so while the church has thrived in South India, North India was a graveyard for missionaries. Many missionaries went and labored for decades and saw very, very little in the way of results.

[34:54] animals. So, Carrie and Thomas are working away but they have no converse. There's nothing really that's changed in that way.

[35:06] And there was a great flood one year and it wiped out the indigo plants. And it was about the same time, about the turn of the century, that Carrie's wife also became insane.

[35:16] and became a very large burden. I'm sure going to India, raising your kids, seeing a couple of her children die in India, the illness that they encountered and things like that must have been a tremendous weight upon her.

[35:37] But she then became a further burden for Carrie going forward. It was in March of 1799 that Carrie first saw a widow being burned.

[35:55] After the indigo fields had flooded, Carrie and Thomas actually started their own indigo farm. But that lasted less than a year or two.

[36:07] And at the same time, the Missionary Society sent five new missionaries out to join them. Two of which would become extremely influential and be very, very closely connected with Carrie from then on.

[36:23] The problem was that now they were having a problem with the British government. And the five new missionaries could not come and join Thomas and Carrie because of the visa, their employment situation.

[36:39] However, the Dutch had a little, little enclave very tiny little plot of land and said, hey, you can come and you can set up in Sarampur and we will protect you.

[36:53] And Sarampur then becomes the focus of their ministry for the rest of their time in India. The first man who actually declared himself a Christian, and there's different accounts of this, they're not all consistent, was a man by the name of Fakir.

[37:13] Given that name, it tells me that he would have been a Muslim, just from the name. And the missionaries were extremely joyful, and there was a great round of praise, they sang praise God from whom all blessings flow.

[37:31] But before Fakir was baptized, he asked if he could go and say goodbye to his friends. So Dr. Thomas was very worried about this, and Carrie were, so they decided to go with him, and they went back to his village, and when they got there, he said that he just wanted to go three days to see his friends and say goodbye, and they never saw him again.

[37:59] They don't know what happened, but the most likely thing, given that he probably was a Muslim, was that he was either kidnapped until he recanted or was killed.

[38:15] So what a great discouragement, their first convert, a convert for hours, and then disappears. However, they continued to persist, and one day a worker came along, and he had dislocated his shoulder, and came to Dr.

[38:36] Thomas for some help. His name was Krishna Paul, and on being healed and helped by the doctor, he came back and had a very inquiring mind, and wanted to learn more about what these Christians were all about.

[38:50] He ended up getting baptized. That caused a riot. His wife couldn't be baptized with him. It took a while, and in the first baptism that took place in the Hooghly River, the villagers lined one side of the river, and all the foreigners were lined up on the other side of the river because this was an unheard of event in India.

[39:15] This was something brand new that was beginning to happen. Things began to proceed from there. Kerry got employment.

[39:27] Because of his ability with languages, he ended up being employed by several different colleges and educational institutions in Calcutta, which was 18 miles or so.

[39:40] He would go down the river for four days and then come back to Sarampur and continue his ministry. One of the two men that came to join Kerry was Mr. Ward.

[39:55] Now, Kerry had actually met Mr. Ward in England before he went to India, and Ward was a printer. And Kerry had said to him, young man, someday we're going to need your services in India.

[40:09] And sure enough, Ward did come and join him and was brilliant. The other man was Marsham, and Marsham was a real intellect. By the time he was 19 years old, he had read 500 books.

[40:21] Now, keep in mind that books aren't as readily available back at this time as they are today. And some people worried that his Christianity was too intellectual and not practical enough.

[40:32] But this trio, Kerry, Marsham, and Ward, focused in on translation. They created dictionaries.

[40:43] They published the Bible in many, many different languages and slowly began to see the church grow.

[40:54] Just one note in regards to marriages. Kerry's wife did die, and he remarried a Dutch woman who was a countess, but it had some illness when she was very young and was an invalid as a result of that.

[41:13] but what a difference these two marriages were because his new life was fully behind him and what he was doing in his vision for what he saw for India and translating the scriptures into all of these different languages.

[41:30] And even though she was frail in body, she was a tremendous encouragement to him to help him keep that going forward. She ended up passing away, and Kerry did marry a third time, which was also a very helpful and good relationship, which his third wife outlived him.

[41:51] In the midst of all of this, so Kerry is getting paid a salary by the British government because he's working in these colleges, and so were Martian and Ward.

[42:13] And remember, England's a long way away. It took five months for boats to come and go back. So communication is really poor. There's not really very much money flowing from England.

[42:26] In fact, Kerry and Marshall and Warden, they're earning a lot more. And they, as a model of what they wanted to do, they wanted to live in common. They wanted to live as simply as possible so that they could have as much money to put back into their ministries as they could.

[42:42] And when you take a look at what they actually plowed back into their ministries, it is really phenomenal. But although this created some tensions with the board back in England, and the board was very concerned that they had lost their vision for missions and that they had become like everybody else in England who had gone to India, were there because India was the jewel in the British Empire.

[43:12] It was riches galore, a mine to be plundered. and it got bad enough to the point where Carrie actually, Carrie and their group in Siampour broke away from the mission society.

[43:28] And that rift did not actually get healed until after Carrie passed on. So there were tremendous tensions during all of this, but in all of this they continued their work, continued doing their translation and publishing work.

[43:43] And then one day there had been some workmen that had been working and Ward had stayed late and as he was working he smelled smoke.

[43:55] And a fire had started in where they stored all the paper for the printing operation. And bucket chains were organized quickly and after hours of fighting the fire it appeared as if the fire was out.

[44:13] Carrie was off in Calcutta in the college at this point. And so in the small hours of the morning when it appeared the fires were out somebody went into the building and was just checking on things and opened a window or a door and left it open.

[44:33] And in minutes the fire reignited and was not able to be put out and destroyed all of the work. Manuscripts that had taken years to produce were lost.

[44:50] And so Marsham went down to Calcutta to tell Ward what had happened and to tell Carrie what had happened and Carrie was just silent.

[45:04] It was so devastating what had happened. However, being a plotter, he got up and the next day they carried on.

[45:16] And in the end the work that Carrie and his team did was absolutely outstanding. When Carrie died there were in connection with the mission that he had founded some 30 missionaries 40 native teachers, 45 stations and substations and approximately 600 church members.

[45:41] In addition to this, one must remember that he was the cause of the forming of the English Baptist Missionary Society. And as a result of that society forming, other societies sprang up all over the place.

[45:55] This was the real beginning of the missionary movement in the 1700s and 1800s. So we see coming out of this, Adoniram Jensen going to Burma, just down here.

[46:09] We see shortly after this, Hudson Taylor going to China. This was a time of great awakening in the church of the vision for the lost.

[46:23] We've discovered the new world, yay, but what about the souls of these people that we've discovered there? As he was dying during his last illness, Carey said to Alexander Duff, he said, Mr.

[46:37] Duff, you've been saying much about Mr. Carey and his work. After I'm gone, please do not speak of Dr. Carey, but rather of my wonderful savior.

[46:51] And on his tombstone he asked that it contain nothing other than the line from Isaac Watts, one of his favorite hymns, a wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on thy kind arms I fall.

[47:10] William Carey. Does anybody have any questions? I need a comment, having been a Baptist for most of my life, so William Carey is a familiar ground in a way.

[47:25] the textbooks that he wrote to teach people the English languages that were there are still used to train Baptist missionaries in the Indian language.

[47:36] Isn't that interesting? And Telugu is one of them. Yeah. Thank you. And amazing, I, there's a list of all of the, oh, that proclamation that Sati was banned, and Carey was given the job of translating that into Bengali.

[47:56] To him, that was a very proud moment. Was there any notable preachers or organizers that came out of their ministry that were indigenous to the area?

[48:19] The first, the first convert, Krishna Paul, became, he was a poet, ended up writing Bengali hymns, became a pastor himself and started a church.

[48:36] As I mentioned earlier, the north of India was much more difficult, much more barren. The church took a long time to really get going there. In the south of India, right around Hyderabad, more modeled on the Brethren movement.

[48:51] There was a man by the name of Buck Singh. We ran into his organization quite frequently. Buck Singh had tremendous growth, very simple, teaching lay people, giving them a foundation in scripture and then sending them out.

[49:15] That was very, very powerful. Are you familiar with Watchman Nii at all? Have you ever heard of Watchman Nii? Yes. There's some tremendous parallels between Buck Singh and Watchman Nii.

[49:27] Very interesting. During this time, too, what's happening in the south of India, I don't know if any of you are familiar with Donover Fellowship, which was Amy Carmichael. Amy Carmichael is a very good Sunday school story.

[49:40] Amy Carmichael is this little Irish girl who gets up and looks in the mirror and has heard, if you're praying, God will answer your prayers. She looks in the mirror and she sees brown eyes looking back at her.

[49:53] She wants blue eyes. Very firmly she gets down and she prays to go and take her brown eyes and give her blue eyes. Looks in the mirror expecting to see blue eyes looking back at her.

[50:05] There are those brown eyes. She learned from that. God sometimes says no. The reason being, she had a very effective ministry among the temple prostitutes, the girls that were sold into the temples and she actually, because she had brown eyes, she would wear a sari, cover herself and she looked like an Indian.

[50:25] She would go into the temples and she would steal the children out. Tremendous ministry in the south of India. This is happening a little bit later, a little bit after this time. But a lot of the indigenous movements in India are in the south and south Indians where the church is quite so.

[50:42] Kerala, the state right down here, Kerala is very unique. Highest literacy rate in India. The population is one-third Muslim, one-third Hindu, one-third Christian.

[50:54] And that's again the area where Thomas' church was first started. But the church in south India is beginning to get a vision for north India and is sending missionaries to north India.

[51:06] And that is definitely happening. But persecution is still there. The school I went to, I went to school with some kids.

[51:20] One of their peers, so one of my peers, one of my age, they became a missionary in India too, in Arissa, the state just above Antakaradish here.

[51:32] Arissa is a very militant state. it's kind of Maoist leaning. But the Staines family, this is the kids that were a little bit older than me, and a couple of their children were burned in their vehicle by some radical Hindus.

[51:51] That was nine years ago. So there's tremendous opposition still to Christianity in areas. Was there an evangelical outreach to the Dutch in that area where they first went to?

[52:12] The Dutch invited them, didn't they? Yes, yes. Certainly the countess, when she came under Carrie's teaching, was one of the first to be baptized.

[52:26] baptized. And the Dutch actually were a little quicker in allowing missionaries to go where they were setting up the Dutch Empire.

[52:41] Now there was a change. There was a change in India. In 1816, the charter for the British India Company had to be renewed.

[52:55] And because of force put on by Wilberforce on the parliament in England, at that point, the mandate opened up to missionaries to be able to go into India along with the trading activities, the business activities of the East India Company.

[53:18] Harvey? Does the man and Mr. Kerry have much of a profile in local Indian history? Yes. If you go in that area, you've got to keep in mind that communications weren't great.

[53:34] But if you were to go to North India still, there are colleges and things like that are still there. He had a tremendous burden for education, not just for religious education, but to see education being carried out.

[53:48] They started many, many schools. To this day, during Ramadan, which is just over, we ended up going to a Pakistani restaurant in Surrey.

[54:04] One of the men there said he had gone to a missionary school in India. He said, we all want to go to the missionary schools because that's where you get the best education.

[54:16] This was a young man in his 20s, so that's still true to this day. Where the missionaries have gone, they have set up schools that have been very, very influential.

[54:30] Somebody else had to... Stephen, could you say something about his impact on England because I have a picture that he really stayed in India. And so how did his influence...

[54:43] He never went back to England. He got on the ship, went to India, and never went back to England. this is... You know, that's the way that...

[54:54] His influence was... I don't know how great the influence was in his lifetime. Especially...

[55:06] missionary societies, though. But yeah, all the other missionary societies which were even being founded before he left. You know, given... He came out and when he preached his sermon, attempt...

[55:20] Expect great things from God, attempt great things, that spawned. And that was in the context of missions. And that, in its pamphlet form, got published and distributed widely.

[55:32] And so we saw student movements and other movements that were that sprang out of that. And given the influence that Brainerd and others had had on him, and that Cary then had on Adoniram Judson and others, you know, there is some good preservation of letters and things like that that were done.

[55:56] But the trio, Marsham, Ward, and Cary, and the Cienpour trio they're called, you know, they triggered many, and I think a lot of it had to do with the translation work that they did.

[56:12] They, I mean, when you sit back and you think, you know, Sharon Thompson's been in Africa and it's taken, you know, how many years to produce a translation of the Bible there?

[56:28] Cary did about 18 languages, translated them, but not just translating the Bible. They were creating their own dictionaries. He created a Sanskrit lexicon.

[56:43] You know, the volume, the sheer, you know, sit down and here's another word, another word, another word. The volume that these guys produced was just astounding.

[56:54] And I think that was the legacy that they really left. And it wasn't just that they were doing that. They didn't do that to the exclusion of some practical things as well.

[57:06] And what, you know, you look back, I mean, it's just what they achieved is for, you know, when you think of being a cobbler, it was that, you know, those glimpses that we get in his youth of that persistence, that curiosity, that desire to learn and to go forward like that, that just drove this man to become, and Marshmall and Ward were equally incredible.

[57:35] I mean, if Kerry hadn't been there, they would have, you know, just on their own merits, they would have both been very, very tall men. They really stood out.

[57:48] Is there a reason why he chose such a difficult part of India to go to? Because, you know, the British East India Company ruled about a third of India and their own army created their own laws.

[58:02] It wasn't until the 1800s that the empire took forward the work of that group and they had been in India since shortly before the Hudson Bay Company came to Canada, same kind of charter.

[58:14] The Dutch had a similar arrangement, create a trading group and settlement will follow. But this ongoing battle was trying to get any understanding, let alone help, from the East India Company.

[58:31] They didn't spend any time on PR or trying to get people on their side and it was certainly a thorn in the flesh. So why did they go there? Yeah. Well, you know what?

[58:42] That's a very, very good question and when you take a look at it, Kerry didn't know where he was going to go and where he was going to end up until he ran into Dr. Thomas.

[58:53] And that was what crystallized it to be India. And that's where Dr. Thomas had been. Calcutta was where the administrative center was for the East India Company.

[59:05] So it wasn't a conscious choice of this is going to be our target market. They followed the flow.

[59:18] There was no one person in India. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. What happened to Dr. Thomas? He did end up dying in India. And, you know, he was extremely influential for Kerry.

[59:35] Kerry. But he had, you know, there were times where his debts got in the way and he'd have to go and he'd have to work to try and, you know, stave off his creditors and things like that.

[59:49] He certainly had a big heart, but his finances became a real, bogged him down. But he did, you know, he was very loyal and very faithful to Kerry.

[60:05] Like, they stuck together until Thomas passed on. Harvey. Excuse another question. I can't help it.

[60:16] Did they assume, like, was this an issue, did they assume local dress, local customs, was that an issue with them, or were they kind of, were they okay with their Englishness in all of its forms?

[60:29] Anything there. Yeah. They didn't do a Hudson Taylor. I think Hudson Taylor was really the first one who went, hey, if I want to reach the Chinese, I'm going to wear a pigtail and adopt Chinese dress.

[60:46] So they were very much British. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you know that there is a theological college attached to the UBC campus.

[61:00] Oh, yeah. So it isn't just in India. No. No, his influence has been, and as you say, his work, his translation work and language work is still used.

[61:14] You know, God, every now and again, picks out an individual and puts tremendous abilities and talents in that individual and carry, his linguistic ability was his shining strength in life and what did it from.

[61:31] Just one question. The personal approach in these exotic places, is that out of the date now because indigenous evangelical television seems to be getting into the hundreds, especially in the Middle East.

[61:51] Yeah. So they can hide from their own social pressures. Yeah. And do we, is that taking over?

[62:03] It is, Sheila and I were talking earlier about Turkey. I went to Turkey in 1977 and 1979 with Operation Mobilization on summer teams doing literature work and other work.

[62:24] Turkey is supposedly an open country. You can be a Christian there. You can propagate Christianity. But we were doing some of this work at night because we didn't want to start a riot.

[62:37] And the focus of what we were doing was to get people to sign up for a Christian correspondence course. Basic, elementary, information about Christianity through correspondence.

[62:50] The reason being very difficult to have people on the ground in Turkey at that time. There were a few missionaries that were there but they had to be very, very careful. The church in Turkey is growing and it is primarily the result of media.

[63:04] The church throughout the Arab world, which is, as I look at it, this is the toughest nut to crack for us. The church throughout the Arab world is growing and it is a direct result of media.

[63:16] But I think at the end of the day, you need that person to be there and to identify and to help you answer the question.

[63:29] That's discipleship. The mandate is go and make disciples. It's hard to make disciples. Certainly, you can do it on a relationship level, like through email, but certainly a television program doesn't address my questions and my needs.

[63:49] It might be able to reach a general curiosity or things like that. I think it's an extremely important tool, but not the answer.

[64:00] Thank you very much. coul warnings. To celebrate my Lorenzen baby's heart, I will be camped at ad hoc.

[64:13] It might be sometimes money, but Venus thinks that to have becoming mental and to be able to support the Putin, who Clark Howard,isty of power,