William Carey: Missionary-Evangelist

"Shoemaker by trade, but scholar, linguist and missionary by God's training,"William Carey was one of God's giants in the history of evangelism! One of his biographers, F. Dealville Walker, wrote of Carey: "He, with a few contemporaries, was almost singlehanded in conquering the prevailing indifference and hostility to missionary effort; Carey developed a plan for missions, and printed his amazingEnquiry; he influenced timid and hesitating men to take steps to the evangelizing of the world." Another wrote of him, "Taking his life as a whole, it is not too much to say that he was the greatest and most versatile Christian missionary sent out in modern times."

JAMES HUDSON TAYLOR

                                   JAMES HUDSON TAYLOR
                                                1832 - 1905

James Hudson Taylor was born into a Christian home in England where zeal for Christ was the mainspring. Born in 1832, Taylor's parents had prayed: "Dear God, if You should give us a son, grant that he may work for You in China."That prayer was answered in 1854. Taylor, having spent several years studying medicine and theology while learning invaluable lessons of dependence on God, traveled by ship to China to begin his work as Christ's ambassador. He labored for six years in Shanghai and Ningpo. He then returned to England where he worked on translating the New Testament into the Ningpo dialect and prayed for God to send missionaries into inland China. He formed the China Inland Mission in 1865 and returned to China where he labored in Christ's vineyard for forty years. At his death in 1905, there were 205 missionary stations with 849 missionaries and 125,000 Chinese Christians in the China Inland Mission. A noted present-day theologian said of Taylor: "James Hudson Taylor was a tough, warmhearted, businesslike Yorkshireman, in whom by the grace of God, vision, passion, devotion, love, initiative, wisdom and sheer guts combined in heroic proportions. Taylor was a spiritual giant whose acquaintance we latter-day Christians do well to make."