London Missionary Society

Encyclopedia : L : LO : LON : London Missionary Society

The London Missionary Society was an Anglican and Nonconformist missionary society formed in England in 1795 with missions in the islands of the South Pacific and Africa. It now forms part of the Council for World Mission (CWM).

The London Missionary Society began in 1794 after a Baptist minister, John Ryland, received word from William Carey, considered the "Father" of modern missions, who recently moved to Calcutta, about the need to spread Christianity. Carey suggested that Ryland join forces with the non-denominational lines of the Anti-Slavery Society to design a society that could prevail against the difficulties that evangelists often faced when spreading the Word. Puritans in the Americas had experienced difficulties in their missions due to lack of coordination among the evangelists and often their missions reached only a small group of people.

The society aimed to be more successful by creating more lines of support, better coordinated missions, and having more missions. After Ryland showed Carey’s letter to H.O. Wills, an active anti-slavery campaigner in Bristol, he quickly gained support. Scottish ministers in the London area, David Bogue and James Steven, as well as another Evangelical, John Hey, joined forces to organize a new society. Bogue wrote an announcement in the Evangelical Magazine stating:

"Ye were once Pagans, living in cruel and abominable idolatry. The servants of Jesus came from other lands, and preached His Gospel among you. Hence your knowledge of salvation. And ought ye not, as an equitable compensation for their kindness, to send messengers to the nations which are in like condition with yourselfs of old, to entreat them that they turn from their dumb idol the living God, and to wait for His Son from heaven? Verily their debtors ye are."

Soon a campaign began to raise money for the society and a meeting was called at Baker’s Coffee House in the city. Eighteen supporters showed up, and by the next Christmas over thirty men were committed to the society. By 1795 hundreds of Evangelicals began coming to meetings and the society began receiving letters from prospective missionaries.

The board began interviewing prospective candidates, and soon after a Captain Wilson offered to sail the missionaries to their destination unpaid.

The society then was able to afford a boat, the Duff, which could carry eighteen crew members and thirty missionaries. Seven months after the crew left port from the Woolwich docks they arrived in Tahiti, where seventeen missionaries departed. The missionaries were then instructed to become friendly with the natives, build a mission house for sleeping and worship, and learn the native language. The missionaries faced unforeseen problems. The natives had firearms and were anxious to gain possessions from the crew. The Tahitians also had faced difficulties with diseases spread from the crews of ships that had previously docked there. The natives saw this as retribution from the gods, and they were very suspicious of the crew. Of the seventeen missionaries that arrived in Tahiti, eight soon left on the first British ship to arrive in Tahiti. When the Duff returned to Britain it was immediately sent back to Tahiti with thirty more missionaries, but the journey was disastrous. Captured by French pirates, the Duff was sold by its captors. The expense of the journey cost the missionary society ten thousand pounds and was devastating to the society.

The society established their station in 1807 in China under Robert Morrison.

In 1839 John Williams' missionary work whilst visiting the New Hebrides came to an abrupt end killed and eaten by cannibals on the island of Erromango whilst attempting to convey to them the blessings he brought. A memorial stone was erected on the island of Roratonga in 1839 and is still there today. His widow is buried alone at the old Cedar Circle in London's Abney Park Cemetery; fittingly the name of her husband and the sad record of his death stands first on the modest stone.

Despite such difficulties, the society prevailed and would soon send Christians all over the world. The society eventually disbanded, but not until the late 1970s. The LMS missionaries had a huge influence on the spread of their largely non-denominational approach to Christianity, throughout the world.

Works

Rev. C.W Abel "Savage Life in New Guinea" by thge London Missionary Society

Source

Hiney, Thomas: On the Missionary Trail, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press (2000), p5-22.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.