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The Certificate track answers the multiple choice. The Associate adds the fill-in-the-blank questions; M.Div. and Th.M. add those and the short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass.
The Missionary Century and the Pulpit Princes
Orientation: When the Gospel Went Around the World
Unit 8 closed in 1750 with the gospel burning hot in awakened hearts across Britain and the American colonies. The next 150 years would carry that fire around the entire world. The nineteenth century is the greatest single century of Christian expansion since Pentecost. By 1800 perhaps 1% of the world's Christians lived outside Europe and North America. By 1900 the gospel had reached every continent, planted churches in hundreds of languages, and produced indigenous Christians on every shore. The same century that sent the missionaries also produced the most extraordinary generation of pulpit preachers since the sixteenth century. Spurgeon, Moody, Finney, Phillips Brooks, Alexander Maclaren, William Booth — the pulpit princes whose voices shaped the modern church.
This is the fourth of the four great centuries of Christian preaching. The first century invented preaching. The fourth century perfected it under Chrysostom and Augustine. The sixteenth century recovered it under Luther and Calvin. The nineteenth century globalized it. The same press that printed Tyndale's New Testament now printed Bibles in five hundred languages. The same gospel of grace that burned at Aldersgate now burned in Calcutta and Cape Town and Seoul. The Great Commission of Matthew 28 was being obeyed at a scale the church had never seen.
Unit 9 will give us six landmarks. William Carey and the founding of the modern Protestant missionary movement. The missionary giants — Judson, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Mary Slessor. Andrew Murray and the South African revival. The pulpit princes in Britain and America. The Salvation Army. And the suffering remnant — the missionary martyrs of the century, who paid the price the missionary advance always costs.
"Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." — William Carey, Nottingham, May 1792I. William Carey and the Founding of Modern Missions
William Carey (1761–1834) was a Northamptonshire shoemaker and self-taught linguist who became the father of the modern Protestant missionary movement. Largely self-educated, by his early twenties Carey could read the New Testament in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and Dutch — while still cobbling shoes. He pastored a tiny Baptist congregation and read everything he could find about the world beyond Europe. The maps on his cobbler's wall showed continents he believed were waiting for the gospel.
The English Particular Baptists of Carey's day were strong on Reformed doctrine and weak on missionary obligation. The dominant view was that Christ's command in Matthew 28 had been given only to the apostles and that the conversion of the heathen would come, if at all, by direct sovereign action without human agency. When the young Carey raised the question of foreign missions at a ministers' meeting, an older minister allegedly told him: "Sit down, young man! When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine." Carey sat down. He did not stop thinking.
In 1792 Carey published his great pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. It demolished the hyper-Calvinist argument by showing from Scripture, history, and current geography that the Great Commission still bound every Christian. In May 1792 he preached a sermon at Nottingham on Isaiah 54:2–3 that became the founding text of the modern missionary movement. Two phrases from that sermon have echoed for two centuries: "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." Months later, the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Amongst the Heathen (the Baptist Missionary Society) was founded. In 1793 Carey sailed for India.
Carey served forty-one years in India without a single furlough home. He never saw England again. With his colleagues Joshua Marshman and William Ward (the famous "Serampore Trio") he translated the Bible or portions of it into more than thirty Indian languages. He founded Serampore College in 1818, the first Christian institution of higher learning in Asia, training Indian and missionary leaders. He fought for the abolition of sati (widow-burning) and helped persuade the British colonial government to outlaw it in 1829. He buried two wives and several children in India. He never made converts in great numbers; that was not his calling. His calling was to lay the foundation, and he laid it.
The cost was heavy. His son Peter died at age five from dysentery. Carey's first wife Dorothy went insane in the Indian heat after the deaths of several of their children and lived in mental darkness until her own death twelve years later. Carey buried two wives in India, Dorothy in 1807 and his second wife Charlotte in 1821; his third wife, Grace, outlived him. When asked late in life what he hoped his obituary would say, he answered: "A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall." The man whose voice had launched a missionary century saw himself only as a beggar saved by grace. The shoemaker had become the father of modern missions.
II. The Missionary Giants: Judson, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Mary Slessor
Carey's example produced a generation of missionaries who fanned out across the world.
Adoniram Judson (1788–1850), the first American Protestant foreign missionary, sailed with his bride Ann from Boston for India in 1812. Converted to Baptist convictions on the voyage, the Judsons were forced to leave India and settled in Burma in 1813. For seven years Adoniram preached without a single convert. The first Burmese baptism finally came in 1819. Judson gave Burma a translation of the entire Bible into Burmese (completed 1840) that has remained in use for nearly two centuries. During the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–1826 Judson was imprisoned for twenty-one months in the Let-Ma-Yoon (Death Prison) at Ava, where he kept his manuscript translation of the New Testament hidden in a pillow. Ann nursed him at the prison fence at the cost of her own health and died in 1826 at age thirty-seven. Judson buried two wives and several children in Burma. By the time he died at sea in 1850 there were several thousand Burmese Christians, and the Karen people had become majority Christian — a status they have largely retained for nearly two centuries.
David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish missionary, explorer, and abolitionist who opened the interior of southern and central Africa to the gospel and to international attention. A doctor and ordained Congregational minister sent by the London Missionary Society in 1841, Livingstone preached, planted churches, mapped river systems, and exposed the Arab-driven slave trade still operating in central Africa. His Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) became one of the best-selling books of the century. Livingstone disappeared into central Africa in the 1860s; the journalist Henry Morton Stanley was sent to find him in 1871 and famously greeted him with "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone died in May 1873 in present-day Zambia, kneeling at his bedside in prayer. His body was carried over a thousand miles to the coast by his African companions and shipped to Westminster Abbey for burial. His heart, by his companions' decision, was buried in Africa. Livingstone's sustained call for both the gospel and the suppression of slavery shaped British missionary policy for the rest of the century.
James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), founder of the China Inland Mission, opened the interior of China to Protestant missions when most other agencies were confined to the coastal treaty ports. A young English doctor converted at sixteen and sailed to China at twenty-one, Hudson Taylor adopted Chinese dress, ate Chinese food, and lived among Chinese people in a way that shocked his European colleagues. In 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission with no guaranteed salaries, no denominational backing, and a faith principle that the mission would simply ask God for the workers and the funds. Within fifty years the CIM had over a thousand missionaries spread across every Chinese province. Hudson Taylor's prayer life was famous. His most quoted sentence: "God's work, done in God's way, will never lack God's supply."
Mary Slessor (1848–1915), a Scottish mill girl turned Calabar missionary, transformed the Okoyong region of southeastern Nigeria. Working alone among peoples that had been considered too dangerous for missionaries, Slessor stopped tribal warfare, ended the practice of killing twin babies (regarded as cursed), opened schools, and was eventually appointed by the British colonial government as a vice-consul to settle disputes. Tribal chiefs called her Eka Kpukpro Owo — "the mother of all the peoples." She refused European furniture and lived in a mud hut. She died in Nigeria in 1915 still serving the people who had once thought white women could not survive in their forests. The Mary Slessor whose face appeared on the Scottish ten-pound note had become one of West Africa's own.
III. Andrew Murray and the South African Revival
The missionary century also produced fresh outpourings of revival in territories where the church had already been planted but had grown cold. The most influential pastor-revivalist of the century in the southern hemisphere was Andrew Murray (1828–1917), a Dutch Reformed minister in South Africa whose books on the deeper Christian life have shaped evangelical devotion for the past century and a half.
Murray was born in the Cape Colony to a Scottish missionary father and a Dutch Reformed mother, educated in Scotland and the Netherlands, and ordained at twenty-one. In 1860, while Murray was pastoring at Worcester in the Cape, an extraordinary revival broke out in his congregation. The trigger came at a youth prayer meeting in his church on a Sunday evening in April 1860. A young African man named Wuster rose and asked permission to pray. Permission was granted, and as he prayed in trembling Afrikaans, a sound came over the gathering — what observers described as a rushing wind — and the entire room broke out in prayer at once, weeping, confession, and crying out to God. Murray himself, called over from his study by the noise, tried at first to restore order; he raised his voice and called out, "Mense, wees stil!" — "People, be quiet!" The roar continued. Murray finally said simply, "God is a God of order; this cannot be of Him," and left the room. Within hours he came to a different conclusion. The revival spread from Worcester to congregation after congregation across the Cape Colony.
The Worcester Revival of 1860 produced thousands of conversions, deepened the prayer life of the Dutch Reformed Church, and launched a generation of pastors and missionaries from the Cape. It also turned Andrew Murray himself into an apostle of the deeper Christian life. Over his long ministry he wrote some 240 books and tracts, including Abide in Christ, The Spirit of Christ, The Prayer Life, and Humility, which have remained in print continuously and have been read by Christians around the world ever since. Murray's writing is patient, biblical, and saturated with the simple call to live in Christ moment by moment. His combined influence as revival pastor, missionary advocate, and devotional writer made him one of the most quietly influential men of the missionary century.
The lesson of Worcester is the lesson of every revival the church has known: God moves when His people pray, often in ways that look at first like disorder, and often through the unexpected voice — a young African layman in 1860, a Welsh coal miner in 1904, a Korean church elder in 1907. Pastor, do not despise the prayer meeting. The next great move of God may come through a young person you have not yet noticed.
IV. The Pulpit Princes: Spurgeon, Moody, Phillips Brooks, Maclaren
If the fourth century gave the church four preachers to remember — Chrysostom, Ambrose, the Cappadocians, Augustine — and the sixteenth gave us four parallel figures — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox — the nineteenth century gives us four pulpit princes whose voices shaped a global English-speaking Protestantism: Spurgeon, Moody, Phillips Brooks, and Alexander Maclaren. Add Charles Finney for the American revivalist tradition and William Booth for the urban poor, and you have the six greatest preaching voices of the missionary century.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) is the prince of preachers. Converted at fifteen in a snowy Methodist chapel where a substitute lay preacher pointed him to Isaiah 45:22, Spurgeon was preaching to thousands by sixteen and pastoring London's New Park Street Chapel by nineteen. The congregation grew so fast that they built the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861 to seat six thousand. Spurgeon preached there for thirty-eight years to standing-room crowds week after week, often twice on Sundays, often without amplification, with a voice that carried clear to the back gallery. His sermons were taken down by stenographers and printed weekly; the collected Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit runs to sixty-three volumes and is the largest body of sermons by any single Christian author in church history. His Pastors' College trained nearly nine hundred ministers in his lifetime. He fought the Down-Grade Controversy in the 1880s against the rising liberalism in the Baptist Union, paying the price of his denominational standing for the truth of Scripture. He died at fifty-seven, exhausted, having preached an estimated 3,500 sermons. Spurgeon's preaching was Reformed, expository, Christ-saturated, and pastoral all at once. He preached Christ in every text, sometimes by the most surprising route. "From every text in the Bible there is a road that leads to Christ; and my dear brother, your business when you get to a text, is to say, Now, what is the road to Christ? I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it."
Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899) was Spurgeon's American counterpart, a former shoe salesman from Massachusetts who had no formal theological education and who preached to perhaps a hundred million people in his lifetime. Converted in a Boston shoe store in 1855 by his Sunday school teacher Edward Kimball, Moody moved to Chicago and built a Sunday school for street children that grew into one of the most influential ministries of the century. After the Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed his church, Moody and his musical partner Ira Sankey began the great evangelistic tours of Britain (1873–1875) and the United States that brought tens of thousands of conversions. Moody was plain, direct, and warm. He never tried to be a polished preacher. His sentences were short, his stories homely, his target the working-class masses of the new industrial cities. He founded the Northfield Schools in Massachusetts and what would become the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1886, both still operating. Moody never wore the title of Reverend; he stayed a layman to the end.
Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), Episcopal rector at Trinity Church in Boston and later (briefly) bishop of Massachusetts, was the most influential American Episcopal preacher of his century. Brooks's Lectures on Preaching, given at Yale Divinity School in 1877, contains his famous one-sentence definition of preaching that has been quoted by every preaching textbook since: "Preaching is the communication of divine truth through human personality." Both halves matter. Divine truth, not human opinion. Communicated through human personality, not delivered in some artificial pulpit voice. Brooks's preaching was warm, elevated, pastoral, and intellectually serious. He also wrote one of the best-loved Christmas hymns in the English language: "O Little Town of Bethlehem," composed in 1868 after a visit to the Holy Land. Brooks died at fifty-seven of complications from diphtheria; the boys who attended his funeral in Boston wept in the streets. The man who had defined preaching had also embodied it.
Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910), Scottish-born Baptist pastor of Union Chapel in Manchester for forty-five years, was the most respected expository preacher of the late Victorian era. His Expositions of Holy Scripture, in seventeen volumes, covers nearly the entire Bible and remains in print as a working pastor's reference. Maclaren preached three sermons a week, every week, for nearly half a century, working through Scripture book by book in the Reformation pattern. He was called "the prince of expositors," a title most preachers would not have accepted while Spurgeon was still alive. His genius was the patient, exact unfolding of the meaning of the text combined with warm pastoral application. The pastor today who studies Maclaren is studying the most disciplined book-by-book expository preaching of the modern era.
Two more voices: Finney and Booth
Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), former lawyer turned revivalist, led the Second Great Awakening in the burned-over district of upstate New York in the 1820s and 1830s. Finney introduced the controversial "new measures" — the anxious bench, protracted meetings, female prayer in mixed gatherings, immediate appeals for decision — that have shaped American revivalism ever since. His theology was sharply Arminian and his methods aggressively pragmatic; conservatives criticized both. His fruit was undeniable: tens of thousands of conversions, lasting reforms in education and abolitionism, and the founding of Oberlin College.
William Booth (1829–1912), founder of the Salvation Army, took the gospel to the Victorian urban poor whom the established churches had largely abandoned. Booth and his wife Catherine Booth began their ministry in the slums of London's East End in 1865. By 1878 they had organized their workers along military lines and called their movement the Salvation Army — uniforms, ranks, brass bands, soup kitchens, women preachers, and the Cross at the center. Booth's gospel was straight evangelical conversion combined with practical mercy: "Soup, soap, and salvation." By 1900 the Salvation Army was operating in dozens of countries on every inhabited continent and had become the most visible Christian presence in many of the world's worst slums. It still is.
Why these are the fourth great century
Five marks made the recovery of preaching in the nineteenth century parallel to the marks of the fourth and sixteenth. First, the original languages: every one of these princes worked from Hebrew and Greek text. Second, the vernacular: not Latin but English, French, German, Afrikaans, Tamil — every preacher in the language of the people. Third, expository, often through whole books: Maclaren most rigorously, Spurgeon thematically Christ-saturated. Fourth, the gospel of grace: every one of them preached Christ crucified for sinners and received by faith alone. Fifth, at the cost of life if necessary: not as often in the British and American pulpits, but constantly on the missionary fields where these same preachers' converts went. The voice of the British pulpit and the voice of the suffering missionary were one voice, in two locations.
V. The Suffering Remnant: The Missionary Martyrs
The missionary century was also a martyr century. The advance of the gospel into pagan, Hindu, Muslim, animist, and Confucian-Buddhist territories produced more Christian martyrs than any century since the third. The price of every great new mission field was paid first by the missionaries who went and the indigenous converts who followed.
John Williams of Erromanga (1839)
The London Missionary Society sent John Williams to the South Pacific in 1817. For twenty-two years he sailed the islands of Polynesia, planting churches in Tahiti, Samoa, Rarotonga, and a dozen smaller islands, and translating Scripture into local languages. On November 20, 1839, Williams and a young colleague, James Harris, landed on the New Hebrides island of Erromanga hoping to begin missionary work there. Within minutes of stepping ashore they were attacked and killed by islanders who had been recently raided by European sandalwood traders and who could not distinguish missionaries from raiders. Their bodies were eaten. The news shocked Britain. But Erromanga did not stay closed. Within three decades a Presbyterian mission led by John Geddie and his successors had planted churches across the New Hebrides; Geddie's epitaph reads: "When he landed, in 1848, there were no Christians here; when he left, in 1872, there were no heathens."
The Uganda Martyrs (1885–1887)
The Anglican Church Missionary Society arrived in Uganda in 1877. Within a few years a remarkable revival was sweeping the court of the young king of Buganda. When the throne passed in 1884 to the new king Mwanga II, who feared and resented the Christian influence, the persecution began. The young men of the royal court, pages, often teenagers, who had been converted under Catholic and Anglican missionaries, refused to participate in the court's homosexual practices. On June 3, 1886, Mwanga ordered them executed. Twenty-six pages, both Catholic and Anglican, were burned alive together at Namugongo outside the capital. They walked to the fire singing. The eldest, Charles Lwanga, was burned slowly from the feet up; he repeated through the pain, "My God, my God!" The youngest was thirteen. Within three years of the killings, the church in Uganda was growing so fast that observers called it one of the most rapid Christian expansions since Pentecost. Today Uganda is the most Christian country in mainland Africa. The Uganda Martyrs are commemorated every June 3 by Catholics and Anglicans alike, and Namugongo is one of the great pilgrimage sites of African Christianity.
The Boxer Rebellion (1900)
By 1900 the Hudson Taylor and other missions had brought tens of thousands of Chinese to faith. Resentment of foreign influence in China — political, economic, and missionary — finally exploded in 1900 in the Boxer Rebellion, a millenarian Chinese movement that targeted both foreigners and Chinese Christians. Across northern China, Boxers swept through villages massacring missionaries and converts. About 30,000 Chinese Christians were killed in 1900 alone, by some counts — the largest single-year loss of Chinese Christian life in the country's history up to that point. Among the foreign missionaries killed were 189 Protestants and many Catholics, including dozens of women and children. Hudson Taylor's China Inland Mission alone lost 58 missionaries and 21 missionary children. The CIM's response set the tone for a generation: it accepted no compensation from the Chinese government for its losses, declaring that the witness of suffering belonged to Christ. Within thirty years of the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese Christianity was growing faster than ever before. The Boxer killings did not destroy the Chinese church. They watered it.
Carey's son, the Judson children, and the cost of going
The personal cost was carried by every missionary family. William Carey's son Peter died at five of dysentery in India. The Judsons buried multiple children in Burma. Hudson Taylor's first wife Maria died at thirty-three; he buried four of his eight children before they reached adulthood. John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides after Williams, buried his first wife and infant son within a few months of their arrival on the island of Tanna in 1859. He dug their graves himself with the boards of their packing crate; the natives stood watching from the trees, expecting Paton to give up and leave. He stayed. The graves of missionary wives and missionary children dotted every mission field of the nineteenth century. The price of the gospel's going to the nations was paid first in the cemeteries of the missionaries themselves.
The lesson of the missionary martyrs is the same as the lesson of every era of the suffering remnant. The Promise of Matthew 16:18 is being kept, but it is being kept by people willing to die. "Then He said to them all, 'If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me'" (Luke 9:23). The missionary century took the cross daily, around the world, and watered every continent with martyrs' blood. The harvest of the twentieth century — which we will meet in Unit 10 — would be reaped on what they had sown.
"They shall walk with Me in white, for they are worthy." — Revelation 3:4VI. Why This Matters for Ministry Today
First, the Great Commission is still binding. The hyper-Calvinist who told Carey to sit down was wrong, and the church paid for that error in two centuries of missionary inaction before Carey corrected it. Pastor, your church has not finished her Great Commission obligations. Send. Pray for goers. Train cross-cultural workers. Adopt a people group. Do not wait for someone else to obey what Christ commanded all of us.
Second, expect great things from God; attempt great things for God. Carey's two phrases are still the operating motto of biblical missionary thinking. Both halves matter. Expect great things — the work depends on God's power, not yours. Attempt great things — the work requires your obedience, not your spectator status. Do not let small expectations or small attempts drain the power of the Great Commission out of your church.
Third, preaching is the communication of divine truth through human personality. Phillips Brooks's definition is still the gold standard. Divine truth, not human cleverness or current opinion. Through human personality, not through an artificial pulpit voice or a borrowed style. Be a faithful expositor in your own voice, the voice God has given you. Spurgeon was Spurgeon, Moody was Moody, Maclaren was Maclaren. The pulpit prince you are called to be is yourself, faithfully preaching the Word.
Fourth, the suffering remnant follows the missionary advance. The Erromanga sands. The Namugongo fires. The Boxer killings. Carey's wife and son. The Patons' graves on Tanna. Where the gospel goes, suffering follows. Train your people. Train your missionaries. Do not promise them that following Christ overseas will be safe; it has never been safe. The Lord who sends them is the Lord who suffered for them. They will, like Him, often suffer.
Fifth, revival comes through prayer and through unexpected voices. Wuster, the young African layman in Andrew Murray's Worcester. The Welsh coal miners we will meet in passing. The Korean elders of 1907. God moves through people the institutional church does not see coming. Pastor, do not despise the prayer meeting. Do not despise the young layman. The next great move of God may be standing in the back row of your service tonight.
Closing: A Century That Touched Every Shore
The nineteenth century opened in 1800 with the gospel still substantially confined to Europe and the Americas. It closed in 1900 with the gospel preached on every inhabited continent, the Bible translated into hundreds of new languages, indigenous churches planted from Calabar to Korea, and the great pulpit princes of London and Boston and Manchester being heard around the world through their printed sermons. Carey had begun it. Spurgeon and Moody and Brooks and Maclaren had thundered it. Andrew Murray had prayed it. Hudson Taylor and Mary Slessor and the Judsons and the Livingstones had carried it. The Boxer Rebellion and the Uganda fires and the Erromanga sands had paid for it.
By 1900 the church was global. She was about to enter the most violent century in her history. Pass this examination, and we will meet the twentieth century in Unit 10 — the Pentecostal explosion of Azusa Street, the global-South shift, Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg, the most martyred century in Christian history, and the question of whether the twenty-first will be the fifth great century of preaching.
Unit 9 Examination
Certificate track: the 20 multiple-choice questions. Associate: multiple choice and the 10 fill-in-the-blank questions. M.Div. and Th.M.: multiple choice, fill-ins and the 10 short-answer questions. 90% of each part is required to pass. If you do not pass, the exam waits a short time before you can try again.
Multiple Choice — 20 Questions
Short Answer — 10 Questions
M.Div. and Th.M.: all five assigned readings are part of the course. Their separate exam is required after activation; see its page for the current rule. Honors remains optional and does not replace the exam.
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