“Is not the commission of our Lord still binding upon us? Can we not do MORE than now we are doing?” - William Carey
William Carey was a Missionary, linguist and Bible translator who is often referred to as “The Father of the Modern Protestant Missions”.
He spent 41 years of his life as a missionary without a single break. His passion for sharing the gospel with those who have never heard the name of Jesus before is what inspired David Livingstone, Hudson Taylor and Adoniram Judson in their own ministries.
Carey was born in 1761 in Northamptonshire village in Paulerspury, England, to Edmund and Elizabeth Carey. He was the oldest of five children.
His father was a school master, which gave William access to hundreds of books to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He eventually taught himself how to read Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French, Dutch and various Indian dialects.
At the age of fourteen he began his career as a shoemaker's apprentice until he started his own cobbler’s shop at the age of twenty. By then he had already converted from the Anglican church to the Protestant faith.
After getting married to his wife Dorothy, Carey began a second job as a teacher at a Baptist church to help make ends meet. A few years later he was formally ordained by the Particular Baptists and later helped to found the Baptist Missionary society.
After reading the stories of the early Moravian missionaries, William began to feel a calling to the mission field. His passion eventually led to him publishing a brochure titled; “An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens”. This piece of writing was intended to get Christians to see the responsibility they had in fulfilling the Great Commission. Click HERE to read it for yourself!
As time went on, he began to feel called to spread the Gospel beyond where he lived in Europe. In 1793, William travelled with a missionary surgeon named John Thomas to Bengal India. He took his wife and their three sons with them as well. Already knowing many Indian dialects, he began translating the Bible into their language and preaching in the small villages.
The first seven years that his family was in India the Carey’s did not see any fruits from their labor. Their housing conditions were deplorable, John Thomas ended up leaving William alone in India, William struggled to keep his family fed and housed and his five-year-old son ended up passing away due to dysentery. Which caused his wife to suffer from a debilitating mental breakdown.
Despite all this, Carey was able to translate the entire New Testament into Bengali in the first five years of his ministry. His support increased drastically by 1799 and he was later asked to minister at a small Danish settlement and the professor of Fort William College in Calcutta.
Finally, after seven years of being in India, William baptized his first convert in December of 1800. Two months later his translation of the New Testament was published and in 1809, his translation of the entire Bible was published.
Over the next few decades, William and his team would translate the entire Bible into many Indian dialects, plant over 25 churches, found 125 schools, begin organizing medical missions, start India’s first printing operation, paper mill, and steam engine.
In 1818 he founded Serampore College, which is still there to this day. The school trains around 2,500 students in ministry and theology.
After nearly forty years in ministry, William saw nearly 700 people convert to Christianity. It may seem like a small number to some, but he brought so much change to India that is still evident to this day.
William was able to bring and end to many of the cultural normalities in India such as assisted suicide and the practice of putting widow’s to death. His life and legacy ignited people to wake up to the call of the great commission all over the world.
William remained in Serampore, India until his death on June 9, 1834. By then he had been in India for fourty-one years!
Despite all that he had accomplished during his lifetime, William still remained a humble servant of the Lord. The Words on his headstone read: “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, on Thy kind arms I fall.”
“And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” Galatians 6:9
