He Stayed at Home to Save the World

It is often this way in the ministry: the greatest gain and the greatest loss within two months. “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). He did marry again. In 1794, he married Ann Coles, who outlived him by ten years.

You won’t read it in the secular history books or hear it on the nightly news, but judged by almost any standard, the modern missionary movement — begun with William Carey’s departure to India in 1793 — is the most important historical development in the last two hundred years. Stephen Neill, in the conclusion to his History of Christian Missions, writes, “The cool and rational eighteenth century was hardly a promising seed-bed for Christian growth; but out of it came a greater outburst of Christian missionary enterprise than had been seen in all the centuries before” (571).

So how did it come about that the “cool and rational” eighteenth century gave birth to the greatest missionary movement in world history — a movement that continues to this day, which, if you’re willing, you can be a part of? God’s ways are higher than our ways, and his judgments are unfathomable and inscrutable (Romans 11:33).

More factors led to this great movement than any human can know. All I want to do is document one of them — just one of ten thousand things God did to unleash this great, Christ-exalting, gospel-advancing, church-expanding, evil-confronting, Satan-conquering, culture-transforming, soul-saving, hell-robbing missionary movement.

Great Gains and Losses

Andrew Fuller died on May 7, 1815, at the age of 61. He had been the pastor of the Baptist Church in Kettering (with a population of about three thousand) for 32 years. Before that, he was the pastor at Soham, and before that, he was a boy growing up on his parents’ farm and getting a simple education. He had no formal theological training but became the leading theological spokesman for the Particular (i.e., Calvinistic) Baptists in his day. He began to do occasional preaching in his home church of Soham at age 17, and when he was 21, they called him to be the pastor.

The year after he became the pastor at Soham, he married Sarah Gardiner. In the sixteen years before she died, the couple had eleven children, of whom eight died in infancy or early childhood. Sarah died two months before the Baptist Missionary Society was formed in Fuller’s home in October of 1792.

Hold the Rope

During his forty years of pastoral ministry, Fuller tried to do more than one man can do well. He tried to raise a family, pastor a church, engage the destructive doctrinal errors of his day with endless writing, and function as the leader of the Baptist Missionary Society.

A little band of Baptist pastors, including William Carey, had formed the Baptist Missionary Society on October 2, 1792. Fuller, more than anyone else, felt the burden of what it meant that William Carey and John Thomas (and later others) left everything for India in dependence, under God, on this band of brothers. One of them, John Ryland, recorded the story where the famous rope-holder image came from. He wrote,

Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men, who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine, which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said “Well, I will go down, if you will hold the rope.” But before he went down . . . he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us, at the mouth of the pit, to this effect — that “while we lived, we should never let go of the rope.” (Offering Christ to the World, 136)

Fuller served as the main promoter, thinker, fundraiser, and letter writer of the missionary society for over twenty-one years. He held that rope more firmly and with greater conscientiousness than anyone else. He traveled continuously, speaking to raise support for the mission. He wrote the regular Periodical Accounts. He supplied news to the Baptist Annual Register, the Evangelical Magazine, and the Baptist Magazine. He took the lead role in selecting new missionaries. He wrote regularly to the missionaries on the field and to people at home.