BMS Timeline

Many Baptists in 18th century Britain had little interest in evangelism, convinced that God would save the elect and there was nothing to be done that could help.  But a number of ministers struggled with this theology and began to argue against it, including William Carey, a Baptist minister in Leicester, who published his Enquiry in 1792.

 

Carey argued that the global commission given to the apostles was still binding on the Church. He also championed the anti-slave trade movement, commenting that ‘a noble effort has been made to abolish the inhuman Slave-Trade, and though at present it has not been so successful as might be wished, yet it is to be hoped it will be persevered in, till it is accomplished.’

As a result of Carey’s Enquiry and the work of his colleagues, 12 ministers and others gathered in a house in Kettering on 2 October 1792 and ‘The Particular Baptist Society for  Propagating the Gospel amongst the Heathen’ was founded, later known as the Baptist Missionary Society.  An offering for the new Society was taken up in Andrew Fuller’s snuff box and minutes of the meeting were recorded.

William Carey and John Thomas were the first two BMS missionaries and the first English nonconformists to travel to India with the sole purpose of evangelising the national population.

 

Carey was 32, a Baptist minister and former shoemaker who had not previously left England. He sailed there with his wife Dorothy, her sister and their four young children. John Thomas had already worked as a surgeon in Bengal.

 

Carey wrote about his early days as a missionary in a journal which he later sent back to the Committee in England.
 

William Ward and Joshua Marshman and their families arrived in India in 1800 and settled in the Danish colony of Serampore just north of Kolkata. Along with William Carey, they were often referred to as the Serampore Trio.

 

Carey spent much of his time translating the Bible. Over the years he managed to translate the entire Bible into six languages and parts of it into a further 29 languages.

 

Ward was a printer by trade. He constructed a press and printed literature including Carey’s Bible translations, dictionaries and grammar books.

 

Marshman and his wife, Hannah, designed and shaped education within the mission. They opened schools for the children of Europeans as well as a free school for Bengali boys. Within a few years, the mission had established 100 schools, teaching around 10,000 pupils.

 

In 1807, the year of the abolition of the slave trade, one of the founding members of BMS, John Ryland, wrote to William Wilberforce and added to the letter his hope of sending missionaries to Jamaica to work with the slaves: ‘I cannot but think it to be of great importance to send some one out speedily to Jamaica: I have waited for several years with anxiety.’ Seven years later, in 1814, BMS workers finally arrived in Jamaica.

 

As in India, an important trio of missionaries emerged: Thomas Burchell, James Phillippo and William Knibb. They faced hostility from plantation owners who did not want their slaves to receive any form of instruction. The Baptist missionaries were ashamed of the social conditions of slavery and were active in campaigning against it.

BMS began to produce The Missionary Herald, a monthly magazine of its missionary intelligence, in addition to its annual reports and periodical accounts. It has been published ever since without a break with a number of name changes, becoming engage in 2008.

In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. One and a half million Britons signed petitions in the last stage of the anti-slavery campaign to see the Bill become law. The Emancipation Act took effect on 1 August 1834.

 

In India, the Serampore Trio were overjoyed: ‘This latter news has rejoiced us all, but especially Carey. For many years, in his every prayer, he has been pleading for the destruction of slavery. In no public question has he taken a deeper interest. When the particulars of the measure were named to him, with tears in his eyes he thanked God, though in some points it falls short of his benevolent wishes. He proposed that for one month we should give special thanksgiving to God in all our meetings – a proposition with which we cheerfully complied.’ (letter from Joshua Marshman)

Slaves finally gained full freedom in the West Indies as the apprenticeship system was abolished. Although all slaves in the British Empire had been emancipated from 1 August 1834, they were still indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system which proved to be just as harsh, if not worse, than slavery.

 

In Jamaica, BMS missionary William Knibb marked the day of emancipation. Before a packed congregation, he pronounced: ‘The hour is at hand; the monster is dying; and then as midnight struck: The monster is dead; the negro is free.’ The following day, a coffin was buried containing a slave chain and whip.

Following the growth of the work in the Caribbean, Jamaican Christians urged BMS to start a mission to western Africa, desiring to share the gospel with their fellow Africans. As recently freed slaves, they proclaimed: ‘We have been made slaves for men; we can be made slaves for Christ.’ In 1843, a group of BMS missionaries and Jamaican volunteers sailed for Africa.

 

The work over the years in tropical Africa was difficult. Missionaries encountered cannibals and much idolatry, as well as the daily threat of disease and death. Africa was known as the ‘white man’s grave’ and Congo had the highest death rate of missionaries, earning it the nickname ‘the shortcut to heaven’.  In spite of this, there remained many enthusiastic volunteers for service. At times, missionary mortality surpassed the rate of recruitment and replacement.

The political situation in the mid-19th century opened the way for both traders and missionaries to enter China and BMS’ first volunteers arrived in 1860.

 

BMS work in China lasted for 90 years and involved nearly 400 missionaries who took part in evangelism and church work, medical mission, famine relief work, education, translation work and the distribution of Christian literature.

Officially, women were part of BMS as missionaries’ wives and often did not even appear in the records. But several missionary wives in India began outreach to Indian women in zenanas (private apartments) and, as the work grew, the women sought backing from BMS.

 

As a result, ‘The Ladies’ Association for the support of Zenana Work, and Bible Women in India in connection with the Baptist Missionary Society’ (later called the Baptist Zenana Mission) was formed in 1867 with the main purpose of raising funds and supporting the work in Indian zenanas. Four years later the first individual female missionary was sent out – Miss Fryer of Bristol went to India.

 

In 1914 the Baptist Zenana Mission was amalgamated into an auxiliary of the Baptist Missionary Society and called the Women’s Missionary Association.

The worst famine in modern Chinese history killed 9.5 million people. BMS worker Timothy Richard and his colleagues were surrounded by thousands who died.  Richard appealed to the foreign community for help, and became a vital agent for the distribution of aid. 

 

Timothy Richard had arrived in China in 1870 and was one of BMS’ greatest missionaries to that country. He was a pioneer and a radical, believing that the best way to witness was to find the ‘worthy’ men of integrity and use their influence to reach the rest of society. He targeted religious teachers and educated government officials, saying, ‘I am after the leaders. If you get the leaders, you'll get all the rest.’ Richard finally returned to Britain in 1914 and is considered a nation-builder of modern China.

In December 1882, BMS’ first steamer, the Peace, was sent in pieces with George Grenfell from Liverpool to Congo.  The boat was split into 800 loads for carrying overland in Congo to the beginning of the upper reaches of the Congo River.  Those loads were carried for about 250 miles in just over four months over difficult terrain.

 

The skilled mechanics who were to reassemble the steamer died on their way up-country, so George Grenfell was left to re-assemble the boat with the aid of unskilled local labour. But by July 1884 the Peace was able to begin her work of transporting missionaries around Congo’s waterways.

The Boxer Rebellion was a religious, anti-foreign movement in China that began in early 1900 and led to the deaths of many Christians, both missionaries and Chinese converts. Members of this movement were called ‘Boxers’ by Westerners because of their martial arts rituals.

 

Massacres started in Shandong and spread throughout the north and then the whole of China. BMS had mission stations in Shandong, Shaanxi and Shanxi. The missionaries in the first two provinces were able to escape to the coast.

 

But BMS workers in Shanxi were at the mercy of the governor of the province. At Taiyuan on 9 July 1900 all the BMS workers there were massacred. A month later on 9 August, the staff of the Xinzhou station were also killed after having escaped briefly to the mountains, taking refuge in a cave. In one month 12 BMS missionaries and three children were slaughtered, along with many workers from other societies.

Medical workers had been sent as missionaries by BMS prior to 1901 but amid much debate as to which was more important: preaching the gospel or practising medicine. However, by 1901 professional medical work was seen in a more favourable light, and not as a competitor to traditional evangelistic work. The MMA’s purpose was to create and maintain the interest of Baptist churches in medical mission, raise funds to support hospitals and recruit fully-qualified medical missionaries.

 
In the early years of the auxiliary, doctors were sent to Congo, Angola, China and India and mission hospitals were opened. The MMA became part of BMS in 1925.

After over 20 years on the Congo River, the steamship the Peace was dismantled again. Divided into pieces once more, she was packed in bundles and transported back to England, where she was partially reassembled and put on exhibition. BMS supporters were offered the ‘opportunity of standing within the walls of the very cabin whose timbers sheltered George Grenfell during his adventurous days of pioneering and discovery’. Three years later, in 1911, her steel plates were further divided up and mounted on cards, sold to raise money for the continuing Congo mission.

Ellen Farrer applied to the Baptist Zenana Mission in 1891 and wrote in her papers that she hoped she would be allowed ‘to develop medical mission work – even having a Hospital if it seemed admirable’. She was accepted and sailed for India in October 1891.  Once there she went to Bhiwani, and took over a dispensary, seeing her hopes fulfilled as the first hospital buildings opened in March 1899. Her remarkable career at Bhiwani lasted until 1933 and twice earned her the award of honours from the Indian imperial government for distinguished public service.

The inauguration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was the death blow to BMS work in that country.  Mission workers were forced to withdraw as Chinese Protestant leaders were told to ‘sever all relations between Chinese Churches and imperialism and to help patriotic Chinese Christians to become independent, self-governing and self-propagating.’ The last remaining BMS mission worker, Rev Hubert Spillett, left China in 1952.

BMS first sent explorers to Brazil in 1908 and again in 1909 to see if Latin America could become a new major mission field like Congo. Robert Glennie and G S Blake reported back to the BMS Committee from their travels among the unreached tribes that they believed and hoped that ‘the sowing of the seed might be the initiation of an endless harvest’. 

 

Despite these two exploratory trips, it wasn’t until the early 1950s that BMS turned its thoughts back to Brazil. Arthur and Kathleen Elder were ex-China missionaries interested in working in Latin America and they sailed there in 1953. Some viewed this Brazil ‘experiment’ sceptically, but by 1956 BMS committed to pursuing the work there – and growth soon followed.

After an anti-colonial uprising in Angola, as many as 50,000 Africans were killed in the Portuguese suppression. Usually silent on political matters, BMS missionaries provided key information exposing the atrocities, speaking out against the social system which had fuelled the revolt and the colonialist violence.

 

The BMS workers were evacuated from Angola in mid-1961 and engaged themselves instead in medical and relief work among the refugees – an estimated 400,000 by the end of 1964 – who had fled to neighbouring Congo. The Angolan refugees were only able to return to their home country after independence was declared in 1975 and BMS workers continued to organise refugee aid projects and assist Angolan pastors and evangelists in their work. In 1982 the first two BMS missionaries were able to return to Angola.

The decades after BMS work in China ended were characterised by expansion into new countries. BMS began to look east again in addition to its work in India and Bangladesh and, in 1962, its first missionary was sent to Nepal – Margaret Robinson, a nurse. In 1988 Jacqui Wells moved to Thailand from Bangladesh to work with the Karen Baptist Convention.

 

Work in Europe also expanded. In 1990 the partnership between BMS and the Union of Baptists in Belgium was established and two years later Albania opened up to mission work after the final fall of communism. Although BMS had worked in Italy from the 1870s to 1921, it was in 1993 that work with the Italian Baptist Convention was re-established. Similarly, work in France had started in Brittany in 1843, but was re-established in 1998 as John and Sue Wilson moved across the channel.

The first pre-school education programme (PEPE) was started in August 1992 by BMS worker Georgie Christine and Abiah with 12 children. The new programme aimed to break the cycle of poverty that trapped many children in slum life. Favela (slum) children without access to pre-school education tended to drop out of school early and, deprived of education, would be far more likely to turn to drugs or prostitution, their own children eventually suffering the same fate.

 

In many locations, churches have been planted too, centred on the pre-school. Since its small beginnings, the programme has spread across the world – by September 2006 there were 206 PEPEs, from Brazil to Paraguay to Angola, with around 5,000 children attending.

By the year 2000 it was time for BMS to review its image for the 21st century. BMS set about a tough self-examination, listening to staff, ministers and churches to discover what people really thought about it. Feedback reported on both strengths and weaknesses and BMS started putting changes in place whilst remaining faithful to its calling more than 200 years previously. This led as well to a change in corporate identity: the words ‘World Mission’ were added to ‘BMS’ to explain more immediately and clearly its work across the world, and a new, easily recognisable logo was created.

BMS work in Latin America moved into Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay. Long-, mid- and short-term workers are involved, and the first Action Team to Ecuador was sent in 2006.