Missionary Heroes for Kids: 12 Lives Every Child Should Know

The shoebox of photographs came down from the closet shelf on a rainy Saturday, and my daughter asked the question every parent eventually hears: who are these people? They were her great-grandparents, mostly, standing stiff and serious in front of farmhouses. We spent an hour in that box. Children are hungry for the people who came before them.

The church has a shoebox too. It is full of missionaries: a cobbler who taught himself five languages by candlelight, a parlormaid the experts rejected, a watchmaker’s daughter who hid strangers behind her bookcase, an Olympic champion who would not run on Sunday. These twelve lives are the family photographs of the faith. Children deserve to know them by name.

Each story below is short enough to read aloud at the table. Five of them have grown into full family devotional biographies, with a longer story, talk-about-it questions, and a prayer. Start anywhere. Start tonight.

The Five Full Stories

Amy Carmichael prayed as a little girl in Ireland for brown eyes instead of blue, so sure was she that God had work for her far away. He did: 55 years in southern India, rescuing children no one else would rescue, becoming “Amma,” mother, to hundreds. She never once went home.

Hudson Taylor wore Chinese robes when every other Englishman in China wore a suit, because he wanted nothing about himself to stand between his neighbors and the gospel. The mission he founded on a beach in Brighton, with no money and no committee, carried the good news a thousand miles inland.

George Müller fed ten thousand orphans in Bristol without ever asking a single person for money. He asked God, out loud, every morning, and the bread kept coming. His orphans’ pennies helped send missionaries to China.

Gladys Aylward was told she was not qualified to be a missionary. She bought a train ticket to China anyway, with nearly nothing in her purse, and one day walked a hundred orphans over the mountains to safety.

William Carey mended shoes in an English village with a homemade leather globe hanging over his bench. He told the church to expect great things from God and attempt great things for God, then spent 41 years in India proving it could be done.

Seven More Lives Every Child Should Know

Adoniram Judson: the translator in the prison

Adoniram and Ann Judson sailed for Burma in 1812, among the first missionaries ever sent from America. Adoniram spent years learning Burmese, one of the hardest languages an English speaker can attempt, because he believed the Burmese people deserved the Bible in their own words. When war broke out, he was accused of being a spy and locked in a death prison for seventeen months, feet chained, while Ann smuggled him food. The pages of his Bible translation survived those months hidden inside a hard pillow so lumpy no guard wanted to steal it. He kept translating. The complete Burmese Bible he finished is still used today, and the church in Myanmar now numbers in the millions. He once wrote that the future is as bright as the promises of God. He had earned the right to say it.

Talk about it: What would you hide in a pillow if it were the most important thing you owned?

Corrie ten Boom: the watchmaker’s daughter

Corrie ten Boom was a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker, unmarried, living above the family shop in Haarlem, when the Second World War came to the Netherlands. Her family built a false wall in her bedroom and hid Jewish neighbors behind it, because, as her father said, in this household God’s people are always welcome. They were betrayed in 1944 and sent to the camps, where her sister Betsie died after telling Corrie that there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. Corrie survived. Years later, a man who had been one of the cruelest guards walked up after a church meeting and held out his hand. She prayed for the strength to take it, and did. Then she spent the rest of her life telling the world that forgiveness is not a feeling. It is a decision God supplies the strength for.

Talk about it: Why is forgiving someone sometimes the hardest thing God asks of us?

David Livingstone: the heart that stayed in Africa

David Livingstone went to work in a Scottish cotton mill at age ten, propping a book on the spinning frame so he could study while he worked. He made himself a doctor, then a missionary, and gave his life to Africa: walking, mapping, doctoring, and preaching across thousands of miles no European had seen, surviving a lion attack that ruined his left arm. What he saw of the slave trade horrified him, and he spent his last years fighting it with his pen and his fame. In 1873 his companions found him dead on his knees beside his bed, mid-prayer. Two of them, Chuma and Susi, buried his heart under a tree in the land he loved, then carried his body more than a thousand miles to the coast so it could go home to Westminster Abbey. His heart, they said, belonged to Africa.

Talk about it: Livingstone’s friends carried his body a thousand miles. What does that tell you about the man?

Eric Liddell: the champion who would not run

Eric Liddell was the fastest man in Britain in 1924, and he refused to run his best race. The heats for the Olympic 100 meters fell on a Sunday, and Liddell believed the Lord’s Day belonged to the Lord, so he withdrew while newspapers called him a traitor. Then he entered the 400 meters instead, a race that was not his specialty, and won the gold medal in world-record time. The next year he left fame behind entirely and went to China, where he had been born to missionary parents, to teach school. When war came he was interned in the Weihsien camp, where prisoners remembered him as the man who organized games for restless children, gave away his own shoes, and carried coal for the elderly. He died there in 1945, weeks before the camp was freed. He had already won the race that mattered.

Talk about it: Eric gave up one race and won another. What was the third race, the one bigger than both?

Jim Elliot: no fool

Jim Elliot was a college wrestling champion who filled his journals with prayers, and in 1949 he wrote a sentence the church has never forgotten: he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. Seven years later he proved he meant it. Jim and four friends had spent months flying gifts down to the Waorani people of Ecuador, a tribe so isolated and so feared that no outsider had ever lived to tell about them. In January 1956, the five men landed their little plane on a river sandbar to meet them face to face, and were killed there. The story did not end on the sand. Jim’s wife Elisabeth later went to live among the Waorani with her small daughter, and many of the very people involved that day became followers of Jesus. What Jim gave away, he did not lose.

Talk about it: What did Jim mean by things you cannot keep and things you cannot lose?

Lottie Moon: the cookie baker of P’ingtu

Lottie Moon stood about four and a half feet tall and was one of the best-educated women in the American South, and she spent forty years in China. In the villages of Shandong province, where children at first ran from the foreign woman, she baked plates of sugar cookies until they stopped running. The cookies opened doors, the doors opened conversations, and Lottie became so beloved that the people called her the cookie baker long after they called her teacher. She wrote letter after letter home, asking churches to send more workers and give more generously, and when famine came to her region she quietly gave away her own food and money until her health broke. She died in 1912. The Christmas offering her letters inspired now raises money for missionaries every year, in her name, more than a century later.

Talk about it: Lottie started with cookies. What small kindness could open a door for our family?

Nate Saint: the pilot who invented a way

Nate Saint loved two things, airplanes and the gospel, and he refused to choose between them. As a missionary pilot in Ecuador he flew supplies over jungle that would take weeks to cross on foot, and he solved a problem no one had solved: how do you give something to people on the ground when there is nowhere to land? His answer, the bucket drop, spiraled a bucket on a long rope down to a nearly fixed point below the circling plane. With it, his team lowered gifts, medicine, and kettles to the Waorani people for months, and even received gifts back. He was one of the five men killed on the sandbar in 1956 beside Jim Elliot. Years later his son Steve was baptized in Waorani water, by Waorani believers, some of whom had been on the beach that day. The plane is in a museum now. The church it helped plant is not.

Talk about it: Nate used the thing he was best at for God. What are you best at?

Reading these lives with your children

Do not present these twelve as superheroes. Present them as what they were: ordinary believers, most from unremarkable places, several rejected by the experts of their day, who said yes and kept saying it. A cobbler. A maid. A watchmaker. A mill boy. The pattern is hard to miss, and children find it before adults do. God does extraordinary things through ordinary yeses.

There are children growing up right now in the places these twelve loved, among peoples still waiting to hear the name of Jesus. That is what Wonder Letters is for: a hand-illustrated letter each month from a child among an unreached people group, so the next generation of senders and goers grows up knowing the world God loves. The shoebox of photographs is still being filled.

The story is not finished. Your children may be in it.