William Carey
Pioneer to India and Father of Modern Missions.
Known as the Father of Modern Missions, William Carey was the first missionary to India who served for forty-one years translating the entire Bible into Bengali. He is also known for being a shoemaker, pastor, founder of the English Baptist Missionary Society, botanist, cultural anthropologist, educator, author, social reformer, and the first to bring the printing press to India.
In 1761, William Carey was born to Edmund and Elizabeth Carey who were weavers by trade in England. When William was six, his father was appointed the parish clerk and village schoolmaster. William was also the oldest of five children.
At a young age, William hungered for historical and scientific knowledge, although he never had any formal education after the age of twelve. He turned himself into a productive self-educator and an enthusiastic reader. He delighted in books of travel and adventure and had a special interest with plants so that he crowded his room with various specimens of them. He made frequent excursions into the woods and across the fields, always on the alert to discover and identify a new bird or animal or plant. Even as a young child, he showed determination in completing anything he ever began, such as when he broke his leg after falling out of a tree to study a bird’s nest and went to retrieve it a third time with the cast on his leg.
hortly after his conversion and upon becoming a pastor, William read a book called “An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd” about David Brainerd’s missionary work among the Native American tribes in the United States, written by Jonathan Edwards. He also read The Journals of James Cook, the explorer, which most people in England would consider were merely thrilling stories of adventure. For the next five years, William would begin to devote his spare time to making maps of faraway lands and gathering data on their location, size, population, and religions. Both of these written accounts began to spark something in William and he became deeply concerned with sharing the gospel with people who did not have any access to a Bible or a church.