🌍 World Missions — Unit 7: William Carey and the Modern Movement

Introduction: The Shoemaker Who Reopened the Commission

For nearly two centuries after the Reformation, the Protestant churches sent almost no foreign missionaries. Then, at the close of the eighteenth century, God raised up an obscure English shoemaker who would reopen the Great Commission for the whole church and set in motion what historians call the modern missionary movement — the greatest era of gospel expansion the world had ever seen. His name was William Carey, and he is rightly remembered as the father of modern missions.

I. The Shoemaker with a Map on His Wall

William Carey (1761–1834) was a poor shoemaker from the English county of Northamptonshire. He had little formal schooling, yet he was a born student: largely self-taught, by his early twenties he could read the New Testament in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and Dutch. As he sat mending shoes at his bench, he kept a homemade map of the world pinned to the wall, with notes on the peoples and lands he had read about. And as he worked, he wept over the millions in those lands who had never once heard the name of Christ. God had placed a burden for the whole world on the heart of a village tradesman.

II. The Argument He Had to Answer

The Baptists of Carey's day were strong on doctrine but weak on missionary obligation. The view that dominated their thinking held that the Great Commission had been given to the apostles only, and that if God intended to save the heathen, He would do it in His own way, without the help of human means. According to the well-known account, when the young Carey dared to raise the question of missions among his fellow ministers, an older man told him, "Sit down, young man; when God is pleased to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid or mine." This is the hyper-Calvinist error — the mistake of confusing the sovereignty of God with the idleness of man.

III. The Enquiry

In 1792 Carey answered that argument in print. His great pamphlet bore a long and pointed title: An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. The very title carried the argument — Christians are under obligation to use means. From Scripture, from history, and from the geography of his own day, Carey showed that the Great Commission still bound every Christian, and that God ordinarily works through means: through messengers who are sent, supported, and sustained. It stands among the most important documents in the whole history of missions.

IV. Expect Great Things; Attempt Great Things

In May of 1792 Carey preached a sermon at Nottingham on the words of Isaiah 54: "Enlarge the place of your tent... for you shall expand to the right and to the left, and your descendants will inherit the nations" (Isaiah 54:2–3, NKJV). From that sermon came the words that would become the motto of the modern missionary movement: "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." Carey's brethren were stirred, and within months a small band of them founded the Baptist Missionary Society to send him out — the first of the great mission societies that would carry the gospel around the world.

V. Forty-One Years in India

In 1793 Carey sailed for India, and he never saw England again. He labored there for forty-one years without a single furlough home. With his colleagues Joshua Marshman and William Ward — the famous "Serampore Trio" — he translated the Bible, in whole or in part, into more than thirty Indian languages. He founded Serampore College in 1818, the first Christian institution of higher learning in Asia. He waited seven long years for his first Indian convert, buried a child and saw his wife's health break on the field, and still he would not quit. The shoemaker had become the father of modern missions.

VI. The Century He Opened

Carey did not labor alone for long. The movement he set in motion swept across the next hundred years, until the nineteenth century became the greatest single century of Christian expansion since Pentecost. In the year 1800, perhaps one in a hundred 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 raised up native believers on every shore. One obedient shoemaker, who simply refused to believe that the Great Commission had expired, opened the door for them all.

Conclusion: Great Things from a Great God

Carey teaches us that God delights to use the obscure and the ordinary. He had no wealth, no fame, and no earthly advantage — only a burden for the lost, a settled confidence in the promises of God, and the courage to act upon them. "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." The same God who sent a village shoemaker to India is the God who calls and sends today, and He is still looking for ordinary men and women who will attempt great things in His name.

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