To Burma

Adoniram Judson lived by the conviction that missionary service required total dedication. Today, Stephen Nichols tells the story of how God sustained Judson through danger, imprisonment, and loss to bring the gospel to the people of Burma.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are going to Burma with Adoniram Judson. Adoniram Judson Jr. was born in Massachusetts in 1788. His father was a missionary in the Congregational Church. This was old New England Puritan stock. He was an ambitious young man. He learned to read at the age of three. He loved foreign languages, picked them up very quickly. He went to Brown University in Rhode Island and graduated valedictorian. While he excelled academically, spiritually he was departing from the faith of his youth, and he became a deist. He opened an academy and started writing books and all of this by the age of 20. In the fall of 1808, he decided to go to Andover Newton Seminary. He was, it appears, looking for answers. He made it clear that he was going to study and had no intention to go into ministry.

By the spring of 1809, however, he publicly professed his faith in his father's church. Now, remember our episode back a few on “The Haystack Prayer Meeting” and the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions? Well, Adoniram Judson and three other Andover Newton students were appointed as missionaries by the board to Asia in the hopes that "Providence shall open the most favorable door." Judson married Anne Hasseltine on February 5, 1812, and the next day, he was ordained. Two weeks later, they set sail from Salem. Four months later, they pulled into the port at Calcutta, India. On board, he was studying baptism. He had, of course, the congregationalist position, which is infant baptism, but by the time he landed in June and then by August, he had become convinced of the Baptist position known as believers’ baptism. He resigned from the American board, he was rebaptized by British Baptist missionaries, and he was then supported by the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the USA. Adoniram Judson was their first missionary.

Now, they landed in India, but they were forced out by the East India Trading Company, and they ended up in Burma. He arrived in 1815, and remember, he's ambitious, and he set to work. By 1825, he had published the Burmese New Testament. By 1837, the entire Bible was published. During the Anglo-Burma War, he was actually imprisoned as a spy, and then he was forced to serve as an interpreter for the Burmese government during the peace negotiations. This was a very sad chapter in his life. It was during this time that his wife was very ill, and she was about to give birth to a child, and she returned to Massachusetts, and the government forced Adoniram Judson to stay there in Burma. She died in Massachusetts, and their newborn also died. He would later remarry, and she too died, and he met a writer, and she had written biographies, and he had hired her to write a biography of his first wife and of his second wife, and she actually then became his third wife, but she also died, and there was a lot of loss over Judson's life.

In addition to all that loss, however, there was a lot of work done, not only in Burma, but also laying the groundwork for what would become a blueprint for future mission agencies. Judson was a little bit different from some of the mission agencies of his time. They were establishing very extensive institutions, sort of like camp, like structures that were very large and of course, a little bit cumbersome. He was more of a travel light kind of person and was for more outposts and a little bit fleet of foot. He also believed that a missionary calling was a very high calling. It required total dedication. It required the total dedication of all of one's energies. It required the total dedication of all of one's life, and so he was committed to being a missionary for life.

In 1850, he was on board a ship in the Bay of Bengal. He was 61 years old, and that is when Adoniram Judson Jr. died. Well, that's Adoniram Judson Jr., America's first Baptist missionary in Burma. And I'm Steve Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.