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The seemingly little-known Catholic priest George Tuckwell was a convert who spent a significant part of his priestly ministry in Auckland and Sydney. His story is an interesting example of [...]

The Baptists of the northern United States arrived in Mexico shortly before the Southern Baptists. They had not yet formed as a convention, a step they would take in 1907. But they had a vibrant missionary society, and they had well organized schools to train women for missions. (1), Susan Jones and the Baptist Missionary Training School The Baptist Missionary Training School was established September 5, 1881, in Chicago by the Women's Baptist Home Missionary Society. The rationale for [...]

Much of what has been written on the life of Henrietta Hall Shuck, the first American female missionary to China, functions as little more than hagiography. (1) ********** Some scholars [...]

In 1908, his twenty-third year as missionary to Korea, Horace Grant Underwood wrote The Call of Korea. For Underwood, the call was as urgent as ever. In his introduction, A. [...]

In the late nineteenth century, China's Hunan Province was considered one of the country's toughest mission fields. With its deeply entrenched Confucianism and widespread xenophobia, Hunan was a source of [...]

The year 2012 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the origins of the U. S. foreign missionary movement. Much attention was rightly paid to Adoniram Judson, the most famous member [...]

The most important legacy of my grandfather Charles W. Forman is the Forman Christian College, a flourishing coeducational institution with over 6,300 students in Lahore, Pakistan. Among its graduates the [...]

Abel Bingham was a Baptist missionary who served in New York from 1821-1828, and in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, from 1828-1855. During that time, he had a profound impact on [...]

Apolo Kivebulaya--the 'Pathfinder,' 'Greatheart of Africa,' 'Apostle of the Pygmies,' and 'African Saint' --was, as these the titles of some of his biographies suggest, much admired by a British missionary [...]

Theodor Grentrup of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) planted seeds of twentieth-century Catholic missionary research and cultivated them with so much passion and intellectual engagement that we continue [...]

J. C. Heinrich (1884-1945) is a missionary whose work and legacy have gone largely unnoticed by mission scholars. He was a member of the Sialkot Mission of the United Presbyterian [...]

Mary Josephine Rogers, who became Mother Mary Joseph, founder of the Maryknoll Sisters, was one of the most extraordinary women in mission of the twentieth century. I refer the readers [...]

Helene de Chappotin, born May 21, 1839, in Nantes, France, was the youngest child of an upper-class Catholic family. She enjoyed a happy childhood with her siblings and first cousins. [...]

George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901) was among the most remarkable missionaries of the late Victorian era. During his three decades in Taiwan (1871-1901), he received little substantive assistance from other Canadian [...]

Ta-Teh Hsiu-Shih (1905-82), (1) later named Thaddeus Yang An-Jan and hereafter referred to by his shortened pen name, Thaddeus Yang, was one of the first indigenous priestly vocations for the [...]

Philip Beach Sullivan (1898-1957) was part of a trend toward professionalization among the China Christian colleges during the 1920s. The institutions, most of them originally founded as aids to evangelism, [...]

'In my early years in Changchow there were still some of Dr. Fahmy's students in practice in the town, and plenty of people, patients and church members, who remembered him [...]

On March 6, 1865, Franz Mayr was born to Georg and Maria Mayr, farmers in the tiny village of Obernussdorf in the mountainous Austrian Tyrol. Mayr suffered from kyphoscoliosis, a [...]

The Congregation of Holy Cross, a Roman Catholic religious order established in 1837 in France, provided missionaries to foreign lands almost from the outset. In 1840, religious were sent to [...]

James W. C. Dougall was born on April 8, 1896, in the town of Auchterarder in Perthshire, Scotland. (1) He grew up in a strongly Christian home. His mother was [...]

Jacob A. Loewen was a missionary, anthropologist, translator, and writer. As a young boy in a Mennonite village in the USSR, Jacob Loewen could not in his wildest dreams have [...]

English missionaries Lee and Susannah Compere came to the area of what is now Alabama in 1822, then spent a decade caught up in the tensions between white, black, and [...]

The Cherokees probably arrived in what are now Arkansas and Oklahoma as permanent residents in the 1780s. By 1809, an estimated one thousand Cherokees lived west of the Mississippi, having [...]

Although only a minor prophet in the record of Anglican mission history, Francis Thomas McDougall (1817-86) deserves more than honorable mention in the continuing assessment of nineteenth-century European missionary attitudes. [...]

The missionary career of Olav Guttorm Myklebust (1905-2001) began in South Africa. There he spent eight years together with his wife, most of the time as principal of the Umpumulo [...]

Born into slavery on March 15, 1843, in Noxubee County, Mississippi, to Indiana Dixon, Richard Henry Boyd was given the name Dick Gray. He was named Dick after his maternal [...]

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the name of Rudolf Lechler (1824-1908) became almost synonymous with the Basel Hakka Mission in Guangdong, China. Unlike most Protestant missionaries in [...]

John Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), born in 1592 at Uhersky Brod in eastern Moravia in the Kingdom of Bohemia, was the youngest of five children born to Anna and [...]

In the spring of 1834, as he neared the end of his first tour of Protestant missions in India, Anthony Norris Groves (1795-1853) declared, 'My earnest desire is to re-model [...]

The 1913 centennial report of the American Marathi Mission in India included a large photo with the caption 'Samuel B. Fairbank, D.D., Missionary, 1846-1898. Evangelist, Writer, Translator, Editor, Scientist, Agriculturist.' [...]

John Duncan was born in 1796 in Old Aberdeen, Scotland, to parents who were members of the Associate Presbytery, or Secession Church. When John was nine years old, he entered [...]

In the nineteenth century, Western decorum dictated that the proper place for a woman was in the home, where she would either be married or assisting in caring for a [...]

Harry Strachan and Susan Beamish Strachan, his wife, were the innovative missionary couple who founded the Latin America Mission (LAM) on July 24, 1921. Harry (1872-1945) was born of Scottish [...]

Intelligent, vigorous, visionary, and dedicated to his calling, Adoniram Judson was for several generations of American Protestants the first among American overseas missionaries. His premier standing was earned by the [...]

Born the fourth son of a merchant in the small town of Huntly in northeastern Scotland, James Legge (181597) grew up in a Congregational home that maintained a strict but [...]

Methodist missionary George Brown is well known because of his establishment of three major Pacific Island churches and restoration of a fourth. He was a major figure in the Methodist missions in Oceania during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contrary to the intense fire usually found in Methodists, he did not care much for theological arguments. Instead, he merely trusted in what the Christ will lead him on his day-to-day activities.

Melvin L. Hodges was an instrumental participant in the global expansion of the Pentecostal missions. Despite not having a high school diploma nor formal theological education, he helped in the training of thousands of missionaries and of even more pastors and evangelists from developing nations. He was well-liked by Protestants belonging to other sects. He also recognized the changes undergone by the Catholic Church through Vatican II and wanted the Pentecostals to provide spiritual guidance to the Catholic charismatic renewal.

William Carey was an essential contributor to the development of the missions for the spreading of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. The Unity of the Brethren, otherwise known as the Moravians, exerted great influence on Carey in that he wanted to emulate the enthusiasm of the Moravians in spreading Christianity all over the world. He also use the Moravian mission community as model for his own mission settlements.

Missionary James Johnson was born to Yoruba parents in 1839. In 1847, he entered the CMS school in St. Matthews Parish, Waterloo, and after four years, proceeded to the CMS grammar school and to the Bouray Bay Institution where he graduated. He was appointed superintendent of CMS' stations in Yorubaland in 1876, and a member of the CMS finance committee in 1888. By 1889, Johnson's pastorate had nearly absorbed all the churches in Lagos, Nigeria, and had a missionary branch with stations outside Lagos. He spent his last few years as an assistant bishop of Western Equatorial Africa.

Missionary Jean Andrew Moise de Menasce was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1902. He made friends with philosopher Jacques Maritain and Islamist Louis Massignon in Paris, France, which helped him discover God and Jesus Christ. After being baptized on May 19, 1926, de Menasce wrote a study on Jewish Hasidic holiness entitled 'Quand Israel aime Dieu.' In the 1950s, he published an analysis of Hendrik Kraemer's 'Christian Message in a Non-Christian World,' and translated and edited the Book of Daniel for the 'Bible de Jerusalem.'

The missionary work of G. Sherwood Eddy in India and China prior to World War I is described to demonstrate the shift in the attitudes and views of Protestant missionaries. Eddy initially exhibited Western ethnocentrism and a sense of superiority in his approach to mission. But his experience with other cultures and the results of his ministry caused him to reexamine his principles and concept of mission. He recognized the value of other religions and their completion in Christianity. In response to nationalism, he worked for the development of indigenous church leaders and agencies.

When Mary Josephine Rogers was a junior at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, she had a profound religious experience that would mark her life forever. On a warm June evening in [...]

'It is dangerous to become an evangelist because it is so apt to put one beyond the reach of salvation!' So wrote Robert Mackie in 1935.(1) Often he said, 'I [...]

Born to a slave mother about 1798 in Princeton, New Jersey, Betsey Stockton was the first unmarried woman missionary ever sent by a North American mission agency beyond the borders [...]

The rapid growth of the Christian churches of Korea has attracted attention in recent years. Researchers explore the contrast of growth in Korea as compared with the limited growth in [...]

In March 19, 1912, Friedrich Schwager, member of the Roman Catholic missionary order Society of the Divine Word (S.V.D.), wrote to his superior general: 'If you, Reverend Father, so severely [...]

Claudius Buchanan has been credited with playing the decisive role in opening India to Christian missions in the early years of the nineteenth century.(1) By the twentieth century, however, he [...]