William Carey: Father of Missions, His Story for Kids & Families

Over the cobbler’s bench, where other workmen tacked up calendars, William Carey hung a globe he had made himself out of scraps of leather. He was a village shoemaker in Northamptonshire, England, mending boots for farmers, and between hammer strokes he looked up at his leather world and prayed his way around it. He had drawn the continents by hand. Next to the globe hung a homemade map sewn from sheets of paper, with facts inked beside each country: populations, languages, religions, copied from every travel book he could borrow.

Nobody in the 1780s thought a shoemaker should care about Tahiti or Bengal. Carey could not stop. He taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at that bench, a grammar book propped beside the shoes, because books were cheaper than teachers and he was poorer than both.

Expect great things. Attempt great things.

The churches of Carey’s day had largely concluded that taking the gospel to distant nations was not their job. At one minsters’ meeting, when young Carey raised the question, an older minister is said to have silenced him with words that have lived in infamy ever since: sit down, young man. When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine.

Carey did not sit down. In 1792 he published a little book with an enormous title, usually shortened to the Enquiry, arguing from Scripture, geography, and his hand-copied population tables that the Great Commission still applied. That same spring he preached the sermon that became his life’s motto: Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. Within months, a small group of pastors formed the Baptist Missionary Society around his conviction, with pledges collected in a snuffbox. The next year, Carey himself sailed for India.

Children should hear it plainly: the modern missionary movement, the entire era that sent the Judsons and the Taylors and the Aylwards, traces back through a village cobbler who would not sit down.

Forty-one years, no furlough

India did not welcome him gently. The East India Company opposed missionaries, money ran short, the family suffered fevers, and Carey buried a young son. His wife Dorothy, who had never wanted to leave England, broke under sorrows we should speak of gently and honestly: the cost of his calling fell heavily on her, and Carey carried that grief the rest of his days.

Yet from a riverside town called Serampore, where he settled in 1800 with his friends Joshua Marshman and William Ward, an astonishing workshop took shape. Carey the self-taught linguist now translated the complete Bible into Bengali, Sanskrit, and four more languages, with portions of Scripture in more than two dozen others. The Serampore press printed grammars, dictionaries, and Scriptures for languages that had never been printed before. He helped found a college that still stands, campaigned against the burning of widows until the practice was outlawed, and became such an expert in Indian plants that botanists put his name on species. He served forty-one years and never once went home.

In 1812 a fire tore through the print shop and destroyed years of irreplaceable manuscripts, whole translations turned to ash in a night. Carey’s response is the measure of the man. He grieved, gave thanks that God remained sovereign, and started the translations again, saying the second versions would be better than the first. The plodder, he called himself. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To that I owe everything.

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds that becomes a tree. Carey’s seed was a leather globe over a workbench. The tree is still growing.

Read it aloud: the five-minute version

Once there was a shoemaker named William who made himself a globe out of leather scraps, because he could not stop thinking about all the people in the world who had never heard about Jesus. While he mended boots, he taught himself languages from borrowed books. When he told the church leaders that someone should go and tell the nations, one of them said, sit down, young man. William did not sit down. He preached that we should expect great things from God and attempt great things for God, and then he got on a ship to India to attempt them himself. It was hard, harder than he ever imagined. He was poor, and sick, and sad, and one terrible night a fire burned up years of his work, whole Bibles he had translated by hand, gone in the smoke. Do you know what William did? He cried, and then he started again, and he said the new work would be better than the old. He called himself a plodder, which means someone who keeps going, step after step after step. By the end of his forty-one years in India, he had helped translate the Bible into six languages, with pieces of it in dozens more, so that millions of people could read God’s words in their own language. The next time something you worked hard on gets ruined, remember the plodder of Serampore. Cry if you need to. Then start again, better.

Talk about it

• Carey made a globe before he ever made a journey. Why does caring start with knowing?
• When the fire destroyed his translations, Carey started over. What would you have done?
• He called himself a plodder. Why might plodding matter more than talent?

Pray together

Father, thank you for the plodder who would not sit down. Give this family his stubbornness: to keep praying, keep working, and keep starting over when the fire takes what we made. Show our children the leather globe, the whole world you love, and let them hear which corner of it has their name on it. Amen.

Carey learned the nations from a homemade map and borrowed books. Your children can learn them from letters that arrive in the mail, one unreached people group at a time, through a Wonder Letter subscription.

Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. The sentence still works.