Lives worth knowing: missionary heritage
Biography was the conference's native genre: Chalmers and the Six, Henry Martyn, Adoniram and Ann Judson, John G. Paton, Amy Carmichael, Eric Liddell, and Ferguson's seedbeds of Geneva, Princeton and St Andrews. Piper said he wrote his biographies to dismantle the lie that Calvinists don't do missions, and found that all his heroes were Bible people who suffered greatly.
Tim Challies urged parents to give children these heroes, and Kevin DeYoung observed that most people are called through a hero, then need older believers to make sure the feeling becomes training and staying. The organizers turned that into films, children's books and a steady stream of recommended reading.
Who were the other six? Let me tell you their names. There was John Urquhart, Alexander Duff, John Adam, David Ewart, William Sinclair Mackay, and Robert Nesbit. And these six young men, with other men, yes, but with these six in particular, Chalmers' life and teaching gripped them.
The St Andrews Six.
You could almost say the love of Christ has me in its inexorable grasp. That's why if you had asked, surmising, but I'm pretty sure I'm right, if you had asked William Carey, Adoniram Judson, John Gibson Paton. William Chalmers, Burns, Henry Martyn, Michael, why did you go?
Why did Carey, Judson, Paton, Burns and Martyn go?
There's several biographies of him for kids that I recommend. Two of them are my own. I've written a biography for younger children. It's coming out next year as part of the Good Book Company's Do Great Things for God series. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. I've also written a graphic novel, comic book, for sort of tween's ages that is already available. It's called Eric's Greatest Race, and there's other material about him as well. Crossway's got a biography of him. Christian Focus has one for the kind of 12 to 16 range. For adults, there's some great options as well. He's a man who's worth getting to know.
Challies on biographies of Eric Liddell for children.
Set Apart to Be Sent: The Church as Sending Agency
Jonathan Master, Sinclair FergusonAnd the third place is St. Andrews in the 19th century, and St. Andrews in any century, St. Andrews and the home of golf. And I want to suggest to you that this is a very interesting place. I want to suggest to you that from our sense of God's moving in history, we can say about each of these places, Geneva in the time of Calvin, seedbed for missionaries, Princeton in the time of Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge, seedbed for missionaries.
Ferguson: Geneva, Princeton and St Andrews as seedbeds for missionaries.
Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Risk: Epaphroditus
Paul SchlehleinI love that short, readable biography because it talks about the children of John G. Paton, and it gets into John G. Paton's missions methodology, what he saw as the finish line, how to get there. One of the things that missions conferences or conferences that are loosely about missions suffer from is that they don't have a lot of missionary speakers.
Brooks Buser on Schlehlein's biography of Paton.
Q&A Panel
Chad Vegas, Brooks Buser, Kevin DeYoung, John Piper, Jonathan MasterJohn, you've written a number of missionary biographies, biographical sketches, and we heard a little bit about how those began. But I'm wondering, as you as you survey that work, these are different men, different backgrounds, different places. Are there are there threads that you see in common among all of them?
Master asks Piper about common threads in his biographies.
He was born August 9, 1788, Malden, Massachusetts. There was an article last week in Christianity Today of Burmese Christians in Boston who found out that the home that he was born in, a few miles north of Boston came for sale. They bought it for seven hundred thousand dollars and turned it last year 2025 into a museum. I just said, "You gave that to me two days three days ago. How How cool is that?"
Piper begins the story of Judson's life.