William Carey: The Father Of Modern Missions

Introduction

William Carey’s name is synonymous with the word missions. In fact he is often referred to as the “father of modern missions”. He was not by any means the first missionary to go abroad but he had such a desire to see the commands of the great commission being fulfilled that he inspired many other missionaries such as Adoniram Judson, Henry Martyn and David Livingstone which has continued down to the present day1. So much has already been written about his life, work and mission. More than fifty biographies have been written about him since his death over a hundred and eighty years ago. This paper will simply take a brief look at some of his achievements over the course of his life, looking both at the early part of his life that

It was during the time which has become known as the Age of Reason. It was a time when a lot of churches were becoming very liberal and turning away from the doctrines of the Bible and the early church. This included heresies such as denying the doctrine of the trinity and the authority of the Scriptures which had been pillars of early church doctrines. Many of the General Baptists had begun to turn to Arianism and became Unitarian churches. Also, the Particular Baptists were in disarray and out of them emerged a man by the name of John Gill who became the leading Baptist theologian of his time. He was a staunch defender of Calvinism and one of the leading apologists. However one of the doctrines that he did hold to was eternal justification which was the idea that God at a particular point of time in eternity past chose the elect and that that time was the point of their salvation and their justification. This had the result of the withdrawal of the free offer of the gospel to anyone and instead the gospel should only be offered to the elect. This also resulted in people checking inside themselves to see if they were one of the elect rather than responding to and believing the gospel message itself. Because of Gill’s influence many of the Particular Baptist churches stopped offering the gospel freely and so many churches became very closed

Andrew Fuller, a very prominent Baptist theologian of the time, became convinced that the gospel should be freely offered to all and indeed outlined his reasons from Scripture in a book in 1784 entitled “The gospel worthy of all acceptance”. William Carey read his book and also became convinced of the need to preach the gospel freely to all. Indeed Carey took it even a step further by being convinced that the gospel needed to be preached to all mankind. This earned him a rebuke from one of the senior baptist ministers when he raised the question of whether it was the duty of all Christians to spread the gospel throughout the world to which he was told “Young man, when God wants to convert the world, He will do it without your help or mine”3. However even this stern rebuke did not prevent him from his vision of worldwide evangelisation and mission and in 1792 he published his work entitled An enquiry into the obligations of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathens. This along with Fullers work started to work in peoples hearts to realise the need there was to go into all the world with the gospel. Carey was one of the first missionaries along with John Thomas to go. But by the time of his death in 1834, there were “50 missionaries serving in 18 mission stations throughout India”4. This was an enormous achievement