Discovering talents for God’s kingdom
Creative director of 5Talents Magazine from 2012, and the writer of the Missionary Story column.
Sundar Singh was fifteen, had lost his mother, and had decided to end his life on the Ludhiana line. What he did afterwards — in a saffron robe, on foot, for twenty-four years — is the argument he is still remembered for.
Elizabeth Fry was a banker's wife with eleven children who became the first woman to give evidence to a committee of the House of Commons. What she did to English prisons, and what it cost her family.
William Carey was apprenticed indoors because sunlight blistered his skin. He made a globe out of scrap leather, and did not stop for forty-one years. “I can plod,” he said, when asked to account for himself.
Pandita Ramabai was orphaned by famine at sixteen, widowed at twenty-three, and went to England to train as a doctor. Deafness ended that. What she built instead at Kedgaon is still open.
George Müller was a thief at ten and a fraud at twenty. Then he built five orphanages in Bristol, ran them for sixty years on donations he refused to solicit, and published his accounts so anyone could check him.
Graham Staines was fifteen, in Queensland, sitting through a missionary's slideshow. What he built in Baripada afterwards is still standing.
Samuel Kellogg learned the language because he was posted alone to a station outside Farrukhabad with nobody to speak English to. The book he produced gave its name to forty-four years of Hindi scholarship, and it is on sale in Delhi today.
David Livingstone is the most famous missionary Britain ever produced. By the measure he chose for himself he failed almost completely, and the most remarkable act in his story was performed by men whose names are on no gravestone.
