21. The Modern Missionary Movement: Families in Cross-Cultural Ministry
CHAPTER 21
The Modern Missionary Movement
Families in Cross-Cultural Ministry
As a child I imagined missionaries were super saints. As an adult I have come to realize they are beset with sins and flaws and failures like everyone else.
A 2010 cover story in Christianity Today exposes the dark side of missionary work. It tells of the horrific abuse of children at a West African school for missionary kids, Mamou Alliance Academy. Here things had gone very wrong for decades. How much Alliance leaders knew during this time and how much cover-up and foot-dragging occurred once they were informed is unclear. But with large numbers of victims coming forward, officials agreed to investigate, and an effort to come clean has been in process since the 1990s.
My own connection with the Academy is as indirect and distant as it is profound. In the late 1950s, when I was thirteen, I spent a week at Pigeon Lake Bible Camp in northern Wisconsin. Back in those days, mornings were devoted to preaching and Bible study, afternoons to recreation, and evenings to evangelistic meetings. The guest speaker for the week was a missionary from West Africa. At the end of his message on the last evening there was a double invitation—the usual one for salvation and then the clincher: all those who would commit themselves to be missionaries were to stand up.
I will never forget the tension of that night. The room was filled with teen campers sitting on benches, all anxious for the meeting to end and the campfire to begin. The missionary, however, was not about to let us escape so easily. Millions in Africa and elsewhere around the world were going to hell for want of someone to tell them of Jesus. How could any of us say no to God’s call? As the pressure mounted, I remained seated, trembling and clutching the bench. To go to Africa for my whole life was terrifying. But if I didn’t go, I’d be sending people to hell. I wavered as guilt engulfed me.
There is someone out there God is speaking to, the missionary intoned. If you don’t say yes now, there may never be another chance. I stood. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. For the next decade I was haunted by this “call,” determined to become a missionary. It never happened. Short-term, yes, but not a career missionary.
Over the decades I wondered about that missionary speaker, his name imprinted on my memory. Then sometime ago his name popped off the page as I read that he was among those who had molested little children at Mamou.
World Christianity … is the result of the great missionary expansion of the last two centuries. That expansion, whatever one’s attitude to Christianity may be, is one of the most remarkable facts of human history. One of the oddities of current affairs … is the way in which the event is so constantly ignored or undervalued.
LESSLIE NEWBIGIN
World Christianity has its origins with the apostle Paul and evangelists in the centuries following. Later Nestorianism spread as far east as China, and the age of Catholic missions corresponded with the age of discovery. Worldwide Protestant Christianity is the result of the great missionary expansion of the nineteenth century begun by William Carey and others. It is remarkable that this phenomenon is so constantly ignored in history texts, even church history texts. Today the Christian faith in the Southern Hemisphere is very different from that which was planted by missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the origins of this rapidly expanding movement are, almost without exception, traced to those evangelical missionaries of generations past.
Nineteenth-century revival movements and social outreach were closely identified with overseas missions. The same individuals—whether Charles Spurgeon or D. L. Moody—were involved in evangelism and humanitarian outreach both at home and abroad. A missionary from Syria wrote to Susannah Spurgeon that the “1500 copies of Sermons” that her fund had sent were “distributed to school children … after they had been exhorted by their teachers to read them to their parents.” Moody was a powerhouse behind the Student Volunteer Movement that originated at Cambridge University and spread throughout universities across America. Long before Spurgeon and Moody spurred overseas evangelism, however, pioneer missionaries like William Carey and David Livingstone were setting the stage for others to follow, including Hudson Taylor, Mary Slessor, Lottie Moon, Kanzo Uchimura, and Eliza Davis George.
Protestants had gotten off to a slow start in the overseas mission venture in part because their centers of strength were found largely in land-locked countries. The sea-faring nations of Spain, France, and Portugal were solidly Catholic, and missionary monks and friars accompanied explorers and merchants. Thus, as continents were colonized and countries were claimed by European powers, the natives in the New World were evangelized and baptized into Catholicism. In the eighteenth century, Dutch Reformed, Danish Lutherans, and Moravians had ventured out in mission forays but on a much smaller scale. And even with the expansion of the British Empire, Anglicans and other Protestants were typically more concerned with trade and colonization than with missions.
PARADE OF HISTORY
The Protestant parade to foreign lands was slow in getting underway, but by the late nineteenth century the sparse militias had turned into a vast army. Pearl Buck described the militant march to the mission field in colorful terms: “No weak or timid soul could sail the seas to foreign lands and defy death and danger unless he did carry religion as his banner.” As this missionary parade advanced into unknown regions, religion—Christianity in capital letters—was the banner. In China, Pastor Hsi led the parade through towns and villages with his “gospel cart” emblazoned with “Holy Religion of Jesus” in Chinese characters.
Theological presuppositions frequently factored into the equation. The Protestant emphasis on the sovereignty of God and predestination caused some to wonder what part human effort played in salvation. Some argued that Jesus’ commissioning of disciples to “go into all the world and preach the gospel” (the Great Commission) was fulfilled by the apostles, who, according to tradition, spread out as far as Spain, North Africa, and India. This commission, it was argued, was not given to succeeding generations.
Church historian Gustav Warneck (1834–1910) wrote that he missed “not only action, but even the idea of missions” in the lives of the Reformers, insisting that “fundamental theological views hindered them from giving their activity, even their thoughts, a missionary direction.” Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884–1968), author of a multivolume history of missions, also saw a lack of missionary concern among the Reformers. In his survey of the history of Christian missions, Stephen Neill maintained that the Reformers showed little concern for “the progress of the preaching of the Gospel through the world.” In recent years historians with Reformed leanings have challenged this account, though sometimes with less-than-convincing arguments.
Luther had argued in his commentary on Haggai that it was crucial for “the kingdom … to be spread throughout the world to all nations,” but he and his followers failed to put the missions mandate into practice. Calvin’s record on overseas missions barely exceeds that of Luther. The work for which he is best known, the Institutes, includes very little that could be considered mission theology. In his commentaries he gives a nod to missions because the text demands it. In reflecting on Isaiah 12:5, for example, he argues that it is the church’s responsibility to ensure that the gospel is not “concealed in a corner” but is “everywhere proclaimed.” Likewise, he asserts in a sermon that “it is not enough for us to have an eye to our own salvation, but the knowledge of God must shine generally throughout all the world.”
In defense of Calvin, historians point to his sending out evangelists in Catholic regions to bring the Reformed message. He sent ministers—the Venerable Company of Pastors—from Geneva back to his homeland of France as well as to Italy, Germany, England, and Scotland. They traveled, often under cover of darkness, and planted churches in attics and barns and caves. In 1556 ministers M. Pierre Richier and M. Guillaume sailed to Brazil at the directive of Calvin to serve as chaplains to Huguenots who had settled there. But outreach to “the heathen” would be largely ignored for more than two centuries.
The history of modern missions is inescapably bound with the history of colonialism. As with Catholic missionary efforts in the preceding centuries, nineteenth-century Protestant missionary endeavors followed the flag. The expansion of the British Empire (“on which the sun never sets”), as well as colonization by the Dutch and other Western Europeans, occurred simultaneously with the expansion of Christian missions. Thus the modern missionary movement sends mixed messages—one that symbolizes the conqueror, and the other that symbolizes the cross. Historians have often emphasized the former, speaking of missions and imperialism and exploitation in one breath. But there is another side of modern missions that portrays sacrifice and self-denial and fierce opposition to colonial exploits.
EVERYDAY LIFE
Letters from the Field
For nineteenth-century missionaries, letter writing was the only means of communication with family and supporters. But before the advent of airmail, letters from overseas often took months to reach their destination. Writing letters, however, was no mere pastime; it was a primary function in the vast enterprise of Christian missions. Letters served to raise funds and recruit more missionaries, but they were also very personal in nature.
Some letters carried the devastating news of death, often months after the fact. Others reveal shocking information, as when Andrew Fuller, head of the Baptist Mission Society, opened his mail in 1795. “Mrs. Carey has given us much trouble and vexation,” wrote Dr. John Thomas. “She has taken it into her head that C[arey] is a great whoremonger, and her jealousy burns like fire unquenchable…. She has made some attempt on his life.”
Letters, of course, went both ways. Letters and packages often crossed in the mail, as was the case for Narcissa and Marcus Whitman, missionaries to Native Americans in the Oregon Territory. In 1839, when their two-year-old Alice wandered away on a Sunday afternoon and drowned, news did not reach family back in New York for many months. A year after the tragedy, Narcissa opened a package from her mother, only to find little dresses and shoes for a toddler who would never wear them.
Ann Judson was America’s premier missionary letter writer. Her letters were filled with the drama of missionary life in Burma, and each installment was widely printed in church magazines and newspapers. When her husband was imprisoned in a dungeon for more than a year, her newsy letters were devoured and financial support soared. A Baptist agent in New York reported the response of one young woman to Ann’s most recent missive printed in the New York Baptist Register: “I heard a deep sigh from the young woman … with her cheek bathed in tears, and handing me a quarter of a dollar (all the money she had) with trembling she said, ‘Will you send that money to Burma?’ … and pointing to the letter, turned away to weep.”
Lottie Moon, a Southern Baptist missionary to China, wrote letters—often laced with sarcasm—pleading for more recruits: “It is odd that a million Baptists of the South can furnish only three men for all China. Odd that with five hundred preachers in the state of Virginia, we must rely on a Presbyterian to fill a Baptist pulpit [here]. I wonder how these things look in heaven. They certainly look very queer in China.”
After David Livingstone had sent his wife and children back to England while he himself remained in Africa, he expressed in writing what he could not say in person:
My dearest Mary—How I miss you now, and the dear children. My heart yearns incessantly over you. How many thoughts of the past crowd into my mind. I feel as if I would treat you all more tenderly and lovingly than ever…. I never show my feelings; but I can say truly, my dearest, that I loved you when I married you, and the longer I lived with you, I loved you the better.
Such a profile fits the majority of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionaries. When new recruits died within months of entering Africa (“the white man’s graveyard”), more missionaries were sent to fill their places. Livingstone’s words were typical: “It is a venture to take wife and children into a country where fever—African fever—prevails. But who that believes in Jesus would refuse to make a venture for such a Captain?” Ann Martin Hinderer expressed similar sentiments when she and her husband went to Africa in 1852 to serve as Anglican missionaries: “I had a strong desire to be a missionary…. When I see what is the need, I feel that if I had twenty lives I would gladly give them to be the means of a little good to these poor … people.”
That missionaries risked their lives to preach the gospel is not debated, but that they were on the leading edge of humanitarian outreach is often ignored. William Carey fought hard against cultural practices such as suti that presumed a wife would be burned on a funeral pyre at her husband’s death. Mary Slessor battled against the practice of twin murder. David Livingstone waged war against slave traffic; Lottie Moon, against famine. Although some imagined that their work would be strictly evangelism, rare were the missionaries who were not deeply involved in health care and social causes.
In the early decades of modern missions, women served alongside their husbands, often in independent ministry, as was true of Ann Judson. Sending agencies viewed them merely as ministers’ wives. But as single women clamored to be a part of this grand enterprise, the Women’s Missionary Movement was born. Initiated in 1861, it spawned some forty “female agencies” in the next four decades, and by the turn of the century women—single and married—outnumbered men by nearly two to one in many areas. It became a vast network encompassing millions of women on the home front supporting thousands of women serving abroad. Fading away in the twentieth century, the movement was subsumed under denominational or independent mission board control. Men were in charge, and never again would women have such a prominent role in developing mission strategy and overseeing worldwide evangelism.
Four years after the first female agency was launched, Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission. The first of dozens of “faith” mission agencies, its recruits, with no salaries, raised financial support “by faith.” Taylor welcomed single women into the ranks and focused on inland tribal groups, as did later faith missions, including the Sudan Interior Mission, the Africa Inland Mission, New Tribes Mission, and the Regions Beyond Mission. Most of the missionaries were trained in the burgeoning Bible institutes of the early twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth century, spurred by the preaching of Moody, the Student Volunteer Movement was born. Capturing the hearts and minds of university students, this movement focused its mission outreach primarily on the educated elite of India and East Asia. Without Bible institute or seminary training, the missionaries became more liberal as time passed and the movement eventually died a natural death. Missionaries were by nature evangelistic and evangelical. Those with a liberal or modernist bent often opposed converting people to Christianity, so the era of modern missions is largely a story of evangelicals. Mission outreach is also a story of family life. Unlike their Catholic predecessors, Protestants took no vow of celibacy. Marriage and family created major cross-cultural stress that was virtually unknown among their peers in the homeland. One after another, missionary families were broken by death and dysfunction.
William Carey: Shoemaker and Missionary Hero
Often labeled the father of modern missions, William Carey (1761–1834) influenced generations of Protestant missionaries by his self-sacrifice and his staying power among the “heathen” of Bengal for some forty years. He stands out as a judicious team leader of the misnamed “Serempore Trio” composed of himself, William Ward, and Joshua and Hannah Marshman—a team whose efficient division of labor served as a model for future mission enterprises.
Born in Northamptonshire the son of a weaver, Carey became a shoemaker’s apprentice and then opened his own shop. But poverty pursued him and his growing family. On the side he served as a licensed minister in a tiny Baptist church. Fascinated with seafaring discoveries—particularly the voyages of Captain Cook—he took to heart the message of Jesus to “go into all the world and preach the gospel.” Joining with other Baptist ministers, he helped to organize the Baptist Missionary Society and volunteered to serve with Dr. John Thomas on the society’s first mission venture.
William Carey
In the following years he became a legend in his own time, serving some four decades in India without home leave. His dozens of translations, though raw and seriously flawed, would become a mark of his brilliance, and the fire that destroyed them would become a landmark tragedy in missions history. With his colleagues he developed schools and humanitarian programs. A recognized Sanskrit scholar, he was often involved in the “secular” work of translating Hindu writings—much to the chagrin of some of his supporters back home. The accomplishments of the Serampore mission (located in a Danish territory near Calcutta) were wide-ranging and noteworthy.
But for all his renown as a multifaceted missionary, Carey was far less successful in the arena of family life. Indeed, it was this aspect of his ministry that has most marred his image—and not just since the late twentieth century when family issues assumed a high priority. In Carey’s own day there were those who questioned his seeming insensitivity to family concerns. He was nineteen when he married Dorothy (“Dolly”), who was then in her mid-twenties. As was true of many women of low social standing in that era, she was illiterate and signed her name with an “X” on the marriage register. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Dorothy had snared the town’s most eligible bachelor. He was a “poor journeyman-shoemaker,” and his own mother was appalled by their abject poverty when she visited them shortly after their marriage.
Despite their financial hardships, Dorothy supported his pastoral ministry to the point of being rebaptized as a Baptist—a noteworthy decision, considering her devout Puritan upbringing. But her support for his ministry had its limits. When he announced that he had volunteered to serve in India, she adamantly refused to join him. There is no evidence that he had previously shared his dreams with her or that he had sought to make her a partner in his passions for missions. Her opposition to serving overseas has been perceived by critics not only as a lack of wifely submission but also as an indication of spiritual weakness. But considering the immediacy of the departure, the permanency of the cross-cultural move, and the woeful lack of funding, it is not difficult to understand her frame of mind. Even if they were to survive the dangerous sea voyage, the disease-ridden tropical climate of India would be their home and perhaps their graves.
A BROTHER’S LETTER
Mudnabatty, March 11, 1795
My Dear Sisters,
Many changes have taken place with me since I left England…. Though I have abundant cause to complain of my leanness from day to day … I am surrounded with favours, nay, they are poured in upon me; yet I find the rebellion of my heart against God to be so great as to neglect, nay, forget him, and live in that neglect day after day without feeling my soul smitten with compunction….
With the natives I have very large concerns…. I have so much knowledge of the language as to be able to preach to them for about half an hour, so as to be understood, but am not able to vary my subjects much…. I hope in time I may have to rejoice over some who are truly converted to God.
Poor Peter is removed from us by death. —I have had much better health here than in England….
I am,
Your affectionate brother,
W. Carey
In the spring of 1793 Carey abandoned his pregnant wife and two little children (taking his older son Felix with him) and boarded the Oxford on the Thames to begin his voyage to India. But the voyage ends almost as quickly as it begins. Accompanied by Dr. and Mrs. John Thomas and their daughter, Carey is devastated when officials turn them back, refusing to allow Thomas to leave the country until he has paid his debts. The delay, however, affords more opportunity for both men to pressure Dorothy (now having given birth to another child) to join them. She reluctantly agrees and sets sail with her husband and little ones. Storms at sea and appalling living conditions in India turn unhappiness into deep depression. Then the death of five-year-old Peter in 1794 pushes her over the edge. Not long after, she is described by an observer as being “wholly insane.”
But such a description of Dorothy’s condition is misleading. She suffers from delusions—particularly that her husband is having affairs with other women—yet she is not entirely out of touch with reality. Indeed, at times she is coherent and believable enough to convince others of the charges. Sometimes she follows her husband into the streets berating him; at times she is seen attacking him physically; at other times she talks and acts rationally. But as the years pass, her condition worsens to the point that Carey confines her in a locked room. He works on his translations, according to an observer, “while an insane wife, frequently wrought up to a state of most distressing excitement, [is] in the next room.”
During these years their sons fend for themselves. Carey is consumed with his work and is lax in discipline. “The good man saw and lamented the evil,” Hannah Marshman wrote, “but was too mild to apply an effectual remedy.” She provides a motherly influence, and William Ward takes Felix under his wing. At sixteen the boy begins preaching to the native people, and six years later, in 1807, his father ordains and commissions him to serve as a missionary in Burma. Later that same year Carey made the following entry in his diary: “Tuesday, Dec. 8, 1807. This evening Mrs. Carey died of the fever under which she has languished some time. Her death was a very easy one; but there was no appearance of returning reason, nor any thing that could cast a dawn of hope or light on her state.”
FORM OF AGREEMENT
Many mission ventures have fallen apart for lack of common purpose and honest supervision. Carey established a Form of Agreement that has valuable practical lessons for today. The expectations were clearly enumerated, and regular meetings offered times of accountability and venting grievances. Read three times yearly, it summed up the guiding principles:
1. To set an infinite value on men’s souls.
2. To acquaint ourselves with the snares which hold the minds of the people.
3. To abstain from whatever deepens India’s prejudice against the gospel.
4. To watch for every chance of doing the people good.
5. To preach “Christ crucified” as the grand means of conversions.
6. To esteem and treat Indians always as our equals.
7. To guard and build up “the hosts that may be gathered.”
8. To cultivate their spiritual gifts, ever pressing upon them their missionary obligation, since Indians only can win India for Christ.
9. To labour unceasingly in biblical translation.
10. To be instant in the nurture of personal religion.
11. To give ourselves without reserve to the Cause, “not counting even the clothes we wear our own.”
In May of 1808, just five months and a day after her death, Carey marries Charlotte Rumohr, a Danish woman not connected with the mission. She had moved to India for health reasons and had become a baptized believer through his ministry. Described as petite, elegant, well-educated, cultured, and wealthy, she is the same age as Carey—forty-six—at the time of their marriage. For Carey she is a dream come true. But their marriage so soon after the death of Dorothy creates no small scandal in the mission community. So agitated are some of the missionaries that they circulate a petition against it. Carey brushes them off, and he and Charlotte form an effective partnership, working together on translations and parenting the younger children. When she dies in 1821, after thirteen years of marriage, he writes: “We had as great a share of conjugal happiness as ever was enjoyed by mortals.” Two years after her death, now sixty-two, he marries Grace Hughes, a widow seventeen years younger than he is.
To view Carey’s home life only in terms of the nuclear family is missing the fundamental dynamics of his extended family relationships, however. After locating in the Danish settlement of Serampore in 1800, he formulated a pattern for communal family living whereby all members of the mission would share meals and devotional times and live out of a common treasury. The purpose was to bring family life and ministry together to enhance both. Earlier Carey had written, “Our families should be considered nurseries for the Mission.”
Carey ranks high as a team leader. He spoke well of his colleagues, focusing on their positive traits rather than their faults. The mission operated by a strict set of expectations. Wake-up call in the morning is 6 a.m. The Benedictine motto Ora et labora (pray and work) might well have been Carey’s. He spends his early morning hours in meditation and prayer while at the same time tending his large garden, complete with flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees. (He was known in India and back home as a first-rate horticulturalist.) At 8 a.m. breakfast is served, followed by the day’s work, when each of the missionaries conduct their own assignments—the Marshmans in various facets of educational ministry, William Ward working the printing press, and Carey primarily involved in translation work. The main meal of the day is taken in mid-afternoon, and all are then active in evangelistic outreach—both home visitation and street preaching, with Carey, Marshman, and Ward singing their own “Hindu” Christian ballads, printed and distributed to curious bystanders. Lyrics are contextualized for their hearers:
In serving vain idols, why thus spend my days,
Since nought but destruction attends all my ways?
The Lord of the world did descend from on high
And was born in our nature all sin to destroy
Seeb, Doorga, and Kallee, could give me no aid,
THE JUDSONS AND KO THA BYU
Unlike the work of Carey, that of the Judsons in Burma continued through the generations and to this very day. Like Carey, Adoniram Judson had three wives: Ann, Sarah, and Emily. But the Judson women were equal partners in every sense of the word. Remembered as America’s first missionaries, Ann and Adoniram sailed from Boston in 1812. Ann set forth her agenda soon after her arrival in Burma: “I desire no higher enjoyment in this life, than to be instrumental of leading some poor, ignorant females to the knowledge of the Saviour.” During her husband’s imprisonment on suspicion of being a spy, she defended him before government officials and wrote gripping letters to supporters back home. When she died in 1826, she left behind a grieving husband and a portfolio of biblical translation work. Adoniram would continue the work, though not without bouts of mental illness and religious doubt. “God, to me, is the Great Unknown,” he confided. “I believe in him but I find him not.”
In the following years, with the assistance of wives Sarah and later Emily, he built up the work in Burma and completed the translation of the Burmese Bible. Through his convert, Ko Tha Byu, thousands of the despised Karen people were converted to Christianity. Indeed, after a revival broke out, Ko complained that his house was broken down as a result of people pressing in to see him. A colleague wrote to Adoniram requesting assistance: “We are in distress and send to you for relief. For the last several days, our house and the house of Ko Tha Byu, ten cubits square, have been thronged…. Karens are thronging in from many places.” In the generations since the Judsons served in Burma, Christian ministry has been largely conducted by native workers, many serving as missionaries beyond their regional borders.
No Debta nor Debbee, of off’ rings were made,
No Brammhan, or Yogee….
I now lay all down at Christ Jesus’ feet,
And trust, though a sinner, I mercy shall get.
In many respects, Carey was ahead of his time in his appreciation for Indian culture and his efforts to develop a well-rounded and comprehensive Christian ministry. He was both confident and humble. But his leadership did not transfer to the next generation of missionaries. The fault lay on both sides. As new candidates arrived—including his own nephew, Eustace Carey—tempers flared and sides were drawn when a new competing mission venture was established. The newcomers accused the old-timers of being authoritarian; the old-timers accused the newcomers of being selfish and unwilling to submit to proper authority—an all-too-common story in mission history. Carey would live to see his work largely in shambles. He would not live to see his reputation soar and biographies multiply as he is turned into the father of modern missions.
David Livingstone: Africa Explorer
The most celebrated missionary of the nineteenth century—perhaps of all times—was David Livingstone (1813–1873), who was barely a missionary at all. He was the great explorer to Africa who became the darling of Victorian England when he returned from his excursions and filled lecture halls with his gripping tales of adventure. He had dreamed of being a missionary when he was a youth working fourteen-hour days in the textile mills of Blantyre, Scotland. Having heard reports of Karl F. A. Gutzlaff smuggling gospel tracts and scripture portions into port cities of China, he vowed to carry on with the work. However, the outbreak of the Opium War frustrated his plans.
David Livingstone
Enter Robert Moffat. A great missionary patriarch from Kuruman in Southern Africa, Moffat is the featured speaker at an evening church service. His appeal is gripping: “There is a vast plain to the north where I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been.” Within months Livingstone is on his way to Africa, only to discover Moffat’s vast exaggerations. The region is sparsely populated, prompting Livingstone to begin a series of exploratory expeditions looking for natives and new terrain, though always returning to the Moffat mission compound at Kuruman for rest and recovery, once after being mauled nearly to death by a lion. During one of his visits he courts Mary Moffat, daughter of Robert and Mary. Referring to this occasion, he later recalled that he had “screwed up” enough “courage to put the question beneath one of the fruit trees,” proposing marriage to this “sturdy” and “matter-of-fact lady.”
If the bride imagined that marriage would mean stable mission work like that of her parents, she quickly learned otherwise. Livingstone is a traveling man, an explorer who cannot settle down in one place. In the following years, she is often left alone to care for their little ones. He bemoans her frequent pregnancies as comparable to the output of an “Irish manufactory,” obviously ignoring his own culpability. After seven years of frequent separations and difficult living conditions, he accompanies Mary and the children to the coast and ships them back to England. In the months and years that follow, she is described as friendless, homeless, penniless, and drowning her sorrows in alcohol.
I have been following a narrative [Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa] of great dangers and trials, encountered in a good cause, by as honest and as courageous a man as ever lived…. The effect of it on me has been to lower my opinion of my own character in a most remarkable and most disastrous manner. I used to think I possessed the moral virtues of courage, patience, resolution and self-control…. I find that (these) turn out to be nothing … my self-esteem oozed out of me.
Charles Dickens, 1958
Meanwhile, Livingstone pushes deeper into the interior, seeking a trade route along the Zambezi River. He dreams of transforming southern Africa, guided by his mission philosophy, “Commerce and Christianity” (as opposed to Robert Moffat’s philosophy, “the Bible and the Plough”). He is incensed by Portuguese and Arab traffic in human cargo and is convinced that his efforts will counteract such degradation. In the end, however, his exploration and map-making only serve to aid the slave trade. Nevertheless, when he returns to England in 1856 (nearly five years after parting from Mary and the children), he is greeted by cheering crowds. His heroic tales of trekking the wilds of dark Africa capture the collective imagination of his countrymen.
With the publication of his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, he establishes his reputation as a heroic explorer—a reputation that lasts more than a century. But his return to Africa in 1858, now commissioned by the government (having resigned from the London Missionary Society), does not lead to a glorious finale. His health and personal relationships and grand strategies are strained to the breaking point. During his final fifteen years, he returns to England only once. Africa is now his home, and his closest companions are Africans who accept the cranky, toothless, bearded old man for who he is. His dream of finding the source of the Nile remains unfulfilled. He dies kneeling in prayer—a fitting legend for this legendary man. His closest African companions, Susi and Chuma, bury his heart in Africa and deliver his sun-dried, mummified body to the coast, where it is transported to England.
Dignitaries come in droves to pay their respects at the state funeral at Westminster Abbey. So also do his family, including children who hardly know him. For the seventy-eight-year-old Robert Moffat, it is a somber event. He walks slowly in front of the cortege bearing the casket of the man who decades earlier caught the vision of “a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been.”
Hudson Taylor: Father of Faith Missions
The Opium War (1839–1842) that prevented Livingstone from going to China paved the way for Hudson Taylor and other missionaries to enter. The East India Company needed a market for its opium, and China was a perfect choice. The only problem was that Chinese emperors had adamantly opposed such trade. Smuggling opium into coastal cities was a major industry, and missionaries like Gutzlaff smuggled Scriptures in with the opium. But smuggling was not the solution. So the Royal Navy settled the issue, and China, in defeat, signed the Treaty of Nanking permitting opium—and missionaries—to legally enter five treaty ports.
J. Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), was born in Yorkshire, England, the son of Amelia and James Taylor, a pharmacist and Methodist lay preacher. Growing up in an atmosphere of Christian piety, he was captivated by China missions as a youth. After studying medicine and serving in urban mission work in London, he sailed for China in 1853, sponsored by the inept Chinese Evangelization Society. Depressed by his inability to learn the difficult language, he spent his early years in lonely, aimless wandering. Resigning from the mission did not improve his prospects. He was robbed of all his belongings and ridiculed when he decided to “go native,” wearing Chinese dress, complete with dyed hair and a pigtail.
Hudson Taylor
Taylor’s fortunes take a turn for the better in 1857 when he meets Maria Dyer. He falls desperately in love but is bitterly opposed by a defiant, headstrong guardian, who vows her young charge will never marry this uneducated, unordained, uncouth stranger with no mission connections or credentials. But Taylor prevails, and in 1858 they are married. Two years later they return to England with their young daughter for a lengthy furlough (during which time four more children are born, one dying at birth). It is here in 1865 that Taylor is convinced that God is calling him to establish his own society, the China Inland Mission (CIM). Molded around Taylor’s own personality and experiences, the CIM is to be an independent mission that appeals largely to England’s massive laboring classes, both men and women. As such, Taylor avoids competition with other mission agencies. His previous experience with ineffective mission operations prompts him to establish headquarters in China, where he is personally in control (eventually, as a virtual dictator). Mission recruits, serving by faith alone, are offered no salary or set support.
“China, China, China is now ringing in our ears in that special, peculiar, musical, forcible, unique way in which Mr. Taylor utters it.”
C. H. Spurgeon
The Taylors return to China with their four children and fifteen raw recruits, including seven single women. During the furlough, Taylor had publicized the work and had made many new friends and gained numerous supporters.
PREPARATION FOR CHINA
After concluding my last service about ten o’clock that night, a poor man asked me to go and pray with his wife, saying that she was dying. I readily agreed, and on the way asked him why he had not sent for the priest, as his accent told me he was an Irishman. He has done so, he said, but the priest refused to come without a payment of eighteen pence, which the man did not possess as the family was starving…. Up a miserable flight of stairs into a wretched room the man led me, and oh, what a sight there presented itself! Four or five children stood about, their sunken cheeks and temples telling unmistakably the story of slow starvation, and lying on a pallet was a poor, exhausted mother, with a tiny infant thirty-six hours old moaning rather than crying at her side….
“You asked me to come and pray with your wife,” I said to the man; “let us pray.” And I knelt down. But no sooner had I opened my lips with, “Our Father who art in heaven,” then conscience said within, “Dare you mock God? Dare you kneel down and call Him ‘Father’ with that half-crown in your pocket?” … I put my hand into my pocket and slowly drawing out the half-crown, gave it to the man…. Not only was the poor woman’s life saved, but my life as I fully realized had been saved too.
Hudson Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret
The sea voyage to China allows time for the missionaries to stir up a revival among the ship’s crew. But it also affords time for feuding among themselves. The “germs of ill feeling and division” were rife. “The feeling among us appears to have been worse than I could have formed any conception of,” Taylor wrote. “One was jealous because another had too many new dresses, another because someone else had more attention. Some were wounded because of unkind controversial discussions, and so on.” Taking each one aside, Taylor “privately and affectionately” staves off a near collapse of the infant China Inland Mission.
But the dissention is not over. When recruits realize that other English missionaries are ridiculing their native dress, some rebel. Harmony is temporarily restored in the summer of 1867 when eight-year old Gracie, whom her father idolized, becomes ill and dies. The mission comes together in grief, but greater crises are still to come. In 1868, the mission house in Yangchow is attacked and set on fire by angry citizens. Maria and others barely escape with their lives.
Although Taylor had not expected British protection, some politicians in England charge that the attack is provocative and demand that the Royal Navy crush China once and for all. Though shots are never fired, the Times of London despairs that England’s “political prestige” has been injured and blames it on “a company of missionaries assuming the title of the China Inland Mission.” The adverse publicity is devastating. Support plummets, prospective recruits lose interest, and Taylor becomes so depressed that he nearly succumbs to “the awful temptation” of taking his own life.
Besides the Yangchow uproar, Taylor is undergoing a spiritual battle: “I hated myself; I hated my sin; and yet I gained no strength against it.” The more he seeks spiritual wholeness, the less he finds: “Every day, almost every hour, the consciousness of failure and sin oppressed me.” He is at the point of a mental collapse when a friend shares his spiritual secret in a letter: “To let my loving Savior work in me His will…. Abiding, not striving or struggling.” Convinced he has discovered the secret, he testifies that “God has made me a new man.” But the trials continue, most devastating a scandal involving him and two single women who are living in the family home. Rumors spread by a disgruntled missionary lead to an investigation. Both Jennie Faulding and Emily Blatchley deny intimacy beyond “good-night kisses.” Jennie is transferred elsewhere in China, and Emily accompanies three of the Taylor children to England for their education. Only months later, Maria dies in childbirth.
Later that year Taylor sends word that he will be returning home for a visit. As a surrogate mother, Emily secretly hopes that he will also return home to marry her. But in the meantime, Taylor renews his close friendship with Jennie, now twenty-seven, and when he returns to England, they are engaged to be married. The news devastates Emily. “I feel sure from what I know of my own nature that I should, if I had had the chance, have been Mrs. [Taylor],” she writes in her diary. “And so it is in love and mercy my God cut off my flowing stream at which He perhaps saw I should drink too deeply. Such a sweet sweet stream, such a painful weaning! Therefore such a great blessing must await me for Jesus to bear to see me have so much pain.” Taylor returns to China with Jennie, and the following year Emily dies—some say of a broken heart.
Jennie is a strong, independent woman, on one occasion returning to China alone to head up a humanitarian program while he stays in England recuperating from illness. But Taylor does not let sickness deter him. He is determined to reach all of China with the gospel: “Souls on every land are perishing for lack of knowledge; more than 1,000 every hour are passing away into death and darkness.” His solution is to recruit one thousand evangelists, each of whom would reach two hundred and fifty people a day. Then the whole of China could be evangelized in less than four years. Although this fanciful dream is not fulfilled, his mission outreach exceeds that of other Protestant agencies. By 1895, after three decades, the CIM has more than six hundred missionaries serving throughout China.
More dark days are ahead of him and the CIM, however. In June of 1900 orders come from Peking to execute foreigners and exterminate Christianity. The greatest disaster in the history of Protestant missions follows. Nearly two hundred missionaries and their children are killed, many of them with the CIM. Ill in Switzerland, Taylor is shielded from the worst of the news. He returns one last time to China in 1904, where he dies a year after his arrival.
Mary Slessor: White Mother of West Africa
Among those inspired by the life and death of David Livingstone was Mary Slessor (1848–1915), who ventured alone into Calabar, a remote area of present-day Nigeria. She was one of the thousands of women who flooded into foreign missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scottish Presbyterians sponsored her even as they had sponsored her hero David Livingstone. Indeed, by the time she ventured into Africa in the mid-1870s, denominational mission boards were beginning to open the doors to women.
Like Livingstone, Mary Slessor had grown up in poverty and had worked long hours in textile mills as a child. Unlike the Presbyterian missionary wives serving in Calabar, she lacked sophistication, and in her leisure time she preferred climbing trees to attending afternoon tea parties. Her initial assignment was to teach in a school at Duketown, but dissatisfied with the social niceties and ample lifestyle of the other missionaries, she convinced the mission director to assign her to a post in the interior, where she adopted the African way of life. She ate native food and lived in a mud hut with her adopted African children—often children who were deemed demonic and rejected by their families.
In the following years she served as a teacher and medical specialist among the local people. On Sundays she traveled on a circuit deep into the jungle, preaching to any who would listen. But always restless, she was convinced that her calling was to preach in an even more remote area. In 1888, with the help of a local chief, she moved “up country” to the Okoyong district. “In the forenoon I was left alone with the mud and the rain and the general wretchedness,” she wrote. “I looked helplessly on day after day at the rain pouring down on the boxes, bedding, and everything.” There was no privacy. Packed tight in the tiny hut with a mud floor were two girls and three boys as well as the locals who “crowded in on every side”—not just men, women, and children, but also “goats, dogs, fowls, rats and cats all going and coming indiscriminately.”
For more than a quarter century she would continue her multifaceted ministry in a region where no missionary had ever gone before. In 1892 she became the first British vice-consul to Okoyong, serving as a highly respected judge among the people. Twelve years later she moved on to an even more remote tribe, always considering her work as paving the way for other missionaries rather than church planting. She turned down a marriage proposal and was unable to work effectively with single women who joined her. Africa was her home, and Africans were her people. Today she continues to be remembered in Nigeria as the great Mother Slessor. Of her legacy, journalist Mary Kingsley wrote:
This very wonderful lady has been eighteen years in Calabar; for the last six or seven living entirely alone, as far as white folks go, in a clearing in the forest near one of the principal villages of the Okoyong district, and ruling as a veritable white chief over the entire district. Her great abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribe a unique position, and won her, from white and black who know her, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done, no man can fully estimate. Okoyong, when she went there alone … was given, as most of the surrounding districts still are, to killing at funerals, ordeal by poison, and perpetual internecine wars. Many of these evil customs she has stamped out…. Miss Slessor stands alone.
PICTURED ON A TEN-POUND NOTE
It is safe to conclude that aside from David Livingstone, no Protestant missionary has been more celebrated, more romanticized, more critiqued and mythologized than Mary Slessor, in print (over three dozen biographies and scholarly studies …), in film, in music, and on stage. With a term of service that began in 1876, she was honored in the British Isles long before her death in 1915, while in the “field” her ministry was sought, even begged for, a privilege few missionaries have enjoyed the world over. In Scotland, her face adorns the ten-pound note, and in a Dundee museum her adventures are pictured in a stained glass window. In Nigeria, where she was trusted with the role of Vice Consul, a local judge for Pax Britannica, her name is everywhere—on a hospital, a chapel, a women’s shelter, a school, a road. In 1956, Queen Elizabeth II placed a wreath on her grave.
Shirley Nelson, “Along Came Mary.”
OPIUM ADDICT TURNED MISSIONARY
Xi Sheng Mo (c. 1836–1896), known by China missionaries as Pastor Hsi, was a Confucian scholar and opium addict who became a Christian through the ministry of the China Inland Mission. “I tried to break it [opium] off by means of native medicine but could not,” he later recalled. “At last I saw, in reading the New Testament, that there was a Holy Spirit who could help men. I prayed to God to give me His Holy Spirit. He did what man and medicine could not do; He enabled me to break off opium smoking.” Xi opened a small drugstore selling cures for health problems, but soon addicts were coming. As the numbers grew, he opened an “opium refuge.” As word of his success spread, more refuges were opened. To support the ministry he sold his property, and his wife sold her expensive wedding garments and jewels. In the following years some forty refuges were established. “On account of many onslaughts of Satan,” he wrote, “my wife and I for the space of three years seldom put off our clothing to go to sleep in order that we might be the more ready to watch and pray.” A recognized poet, he wrote hymns that were culturally appealing to his listeners. He and his wife traveled separately, each involved in refuge ministries, sometimes not seeing each other for months on end. His “gospel cart” was emblazoned with the Chinese characters reading “Holy Religion of Jesus.”
Charlotte Digges “Lottie” Moon: Patron Saint of Southern Baptist Missions
Like Mary Slessor, Charlotte Digges “Lottie” Moon (1840–1912) found sponsorship through a denominational mission board, the Southern Baptist Convention. Born on a plantation in the American South, she sailed for China in 1873, only to find that opportunities for single women were severely limited. As a refined “Southern belle,” she balked at her assignment. Feeling called to “go out among the millions” as an evangelist, she was instead stuck in a school of forty “unstudious” children. What a “folly” this was. “Can we wonder,” she seethed, “at the mortal weariness and disgust, the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure, that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls.”
As a competent woman, she resented her second-class status. “What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work…. What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.” Despite opposition, she moved to the outpost of Pingdu and launched an evangelistic campaign, initially targeting women. But soon men were showing interest as well. “Such eagerness to learn! Such spiritual desires!” she reported. “Something I had never seen before in China.” The first baptisms in Pingdu had come in 1889, and during the next two decades that region became the most successful Baptist evangelistic center in China, largely due to her focus on training and ordaining national leaders. Despite loneliness and opposition from male directors, she was convinced of her calling. “Surely there can be no deeper joy,” she wrote, “than that of saving souls.”
Her enthusiasm and her appeals to Baptists back home not only brought missionaries to China but also raised much-needed funds. The first Christmas offering in 1888 brought in generous gifts. In the years that followed the offerings increased, but not enough to feed hungry people during a famine in 1911. Overwhelmed, she withdrew funds from her own bank account to buy food and gave hungry children every morsel in her pantry. When it was discovered that she had quit eating and that her health was rapidly failing, arrangements were made for her to return home. But she died aboard ship a week after her seventy-second birthday in 1912. Significantly, she died on Christmas Eve. In her memory the “Lottie Moon Christmas Offering,” sponsored by Southern Baptist women, has continued for decades to bring millions of dollars annually for overseas missions.
The sacrifices made by Moon and other women missionaries were exceeded only by the sacrifice of native women evangelists. These were typically impoverished, illiterate women who traveled a circuit as Bible women because they carried the Bible in their heads through a vast store of memorized verses. In many cases their children were grown, but leaving aged parents behind was an enormous sacrifice, especially in cultures where honoring one’s parents was a profound obligation. Without Bible women, missionary women would have been stymied not only in evangelistic and Bible-related activities but also in health and humanitarian ministries.
Lottie Moon
Kanzo Uchimura: Leader of Japanese Independent Churches
As Lottie Moon was dying aboard ship at a port in Kobe, Japan, Kanzo Uchimura (1861–1930) was struggling to preach a gospel message that was culturally relevant. Born in Tokyo the son of a Confucian scholar, he enrolled at the Sapporo Agricultural College founded by William Smith Clark, an American educator. Through Clark’s evangelistic zeal, the first class of students had been converted and had signed a covenant to evangelize succeeding classes of students. By the time Uchimura entered the school, Clark had returned home, but like his classmates Uchimura became part of the Sapporo Band. Though baptized by a Methodist missionary, he simply considered himself a Japanese Christian. However, when he planted a church with mission support and was later told that he must return the money if the church was not Methodist, he gave the money back and severed his ties with missionaries.
MARY McLEOD BETHUNE AND MISSIONS
One of seventeen children born into a family of sharecroppers in South Carolina, Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) is remembered as a leading American educator. She might have been a missionary to Africa but for the endemic racism of the era. Having been financially supported by a Quaker woman, she graduated from Moody Bible Institute. But when she applied to mission agencies, she learned that there were no openings for black missionaries in Africa. The enforced segregation of travel and living arrangements would create too many problems. Denied mission service, she went on to establish a college (now Bethune-Cookman University) and hospital in Florida and helped to found the National Council of Negro Women.
This incident spurred him to form the non-church movement in Japan, much to the chagrin of Western missionaries. His response to them was in keeping with his cultural understandings. “Why blame me for upholding Japanese Christianity while every one of them upholds his or her own Christianity?” he demanded. “Is not Episcopalianism essentially an English Christianity?” Methodists, too, were culturally oriented, as were many other denominations: “Why, for instance, call a universal religion ‘Cumberland Presbyterianism’? If it is not wrong to apply the name of a district in the state of Kentucky to Christianity, why is it wrong for me to apply the name of my country to the same?.”
More than a minister and evangelist, Uchimura was a writer and scholar whose works kept his reputation alive long after his death. In addition to a twenty-two volume biblical commentary, he published The Biblical Study, a monthly journal. He was also a social critic who challenged Western—and particularly American—influence on Japanese Christianity and culture in general. He lamented that Christianity had been turned into a religion of numbers and money:
Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value…. To them big churches are successful churches…. To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers! … Mankind goes down to America to learn how to live the earthly life; but to live the heavenly life, they go to some other people.
Eliza Davis George: African American Missionary to Liberia
Founder of the Eliza George Baptist Association, Eliza Davis (1879–1979) grew up in Texas in a large family, her parents having risen from slavery to share-cropping. She excelled in her studies and was permitted to enroll at Central Texas College with the dream of becoming a missionary to Africa. But African Americans were not welcomed in such roles by mission agencies. In her sense of calling, Davis envisioned Africans before the judgment seat of Christ crying out, “But no one ever told us you died for us!” When she sought support, however, she was informed that there were no openings for her in Africa. After she had appealed to the board of the Texas Baptist Convention, however, the trustees found her testimony and determination so convincing that she was accepted as a candidate and commissioned to Liberia. Arriving in 1914, she worked with another single woman in the interior, where they conducted evangelism and established the Bible Industrial Academy, enrolling dozens of boys.
Despite positive developments, Davis was ill-prepared to oversee a broad-based mission program, however. And news from home was not good. The Texas Baptist Convention had separated from the National Baptists, who were in charge of the work in Liberia, putting Eliza’s ministry in limbo. Then comes word from the Convention that her work in Africa is being terminated. An ordained minister and his wife will take over her leadership of the Bible Industrial Academy and the newly planted churches.
Although her work is hardly a model of fiscal responsibility, the decision has all the signs of underlying racism and sexism. Feeling vulnerable and utterly alone, she makes a critical decision that will haunt her for years to come. She agrees to marry Thompson George, a native of British Guyana who is working in Liberia with a Portuguese company. Having previously shunned his advances, she now sees him to be the only solution to her problem. Turning her work over to others who know nothing of the people and her ministry is more than she can endure, so she marries a man she does not love. George joins her in the work, but his alcoholism and his desire for sexual intimacy create problems. Yet despite marital conflicts, they together conduct an effective ministry for many years.
In 1939 George dies, freeing Eliza from the bonds of a bad marriage. By 1943 she is supervising four substations in addition to the main mission complex, receiving a small stipend from the National Baptist Convention. Now approaching her sixty-fifth birthday, she again receives a directive from the Convention insisting that she return home and turn the work over to others. A letter informing her of this decision indicates concern for her health, but she knows otherwise. She records the facts in a terse sentence: “In 1945 the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention of America saw fit to discontinue my services as a missionary.”
From that point on, she worked “by faith,” supported largely by “Eliza Davis George Clubs” in the United States. Her mission acquired thousands of acres of land, and by 1960 there were twenty-seven churches in the Eliza George Baptist Association. She actively served into her nineties and lived to age one hundred. She had become famous in Liberia, twice honored by Liberian presidents for her service to the country. She left behind mission stations and churches, but was virtually unknown in her homeland—one of thousands of missionaries whose names are all but forgotten.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, long-time professor of Religion at Yale, identified the modern missionary movement of the nineteenth century as the “Great Century” of missions: “Never before had Christianity been as widespread; never before had so many missionaries been sent; never before had so much money been given for missions; never before had humanitarian efforts been as diverse and widespread.” Protestants were making up for their slow start in world missions, and this remarkable expansion continued to accelerate throughout the twentieth century.
What if …
What if William Carey had stayed home, honoring his wife’s wishes? Might he, like A. B. Simpson a century later, have established a large mission society? Failing to convince his wife to serve with him in China, Simpson founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance that commissioned thousands of missionaries to foreign lands.
What if David Livingstone had waited and gone to China as he had planned? How might African Christianity be different today without his profound influence on Africa mission outreach?
What if the leaders of the Women’s Missionary Movement had maintained their leadership roles as the agencies merged with denominational missions? Would mission agencies be different if they had a strong feminine influence?
How have Mary Slessor, Lottie Moon, and Eliza David George changed the course of missions?
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Beck, James R. Dorothy Carey: The Tragic and Untold Story of Mrs. William Carey. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson. New York: Free Press, 1980.
Buchan, James. The Expendable Mary Slessor. New York: Seabury Press, 1981.
Buxton, Meriel. David Livingstone. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Chung, Jun Ki. Social Criticism of Uchimura Kanzo and Kim Kyo-Shin. Seoul: University Bible Fellowship, 1988.
George, Timothy. Faithful Witness: The Life and Mission of William Carey. Birmingham: New Hope, 1991.
Hutchinson, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lutz, Lorry. When God Says Go: The Story of Eliza Davis George. Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 2002.
Pollock, J. C. Hudson Taylor and Maria: Pioneers in China. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976.
Ransford, Oliver. David Livingstone: The Dark Interior. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
Robert, Dana L. American Women in Mission, 1792–1992. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996.
Tucker, Ruth A. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004.