by Dr. James Ray, President & General Director

The old town of Kettering in England has experienced centuries of history. In the hundreds of years the city has existed, famouspeople have walked the streets and lived in the town. William Boothpreached there. John Gill lived there. Kings have passed throughthe city. Perhaps the most sacred spot in Kettering is the homeof a widow affectionately known as “Widow Wallis.”

Living only five miles away, I would see the old Wallis home almost every week. It never ceased to inspire me knowing what happened there. The Wallis family were active members of Fuller Baptist Church. There was so much church activity in their home that it was nicknamed “The Gospel Inn.” It was here in the home of Widow Wallis that the first mission board was organized.

On the 2nd of October 1792, in Widow Wallis’s parlor, twelve ministers, one deacon and one student established “The Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Heathen,” the springboard of the modern missionary movement. A collection taken in Andrew Fuller’s snuffbox raised £13 2s. 6p. ­— a considerable sum in view of the poverty of most of those present.

The student who signed himself “Anon” on the list of donors and who bor­rowed his 1016p., repaying it from preaching fees, was William Staughton. Immigrating to the United States, he founded the American Baptist Missionary Convention, serving as its secretary and president until his death. He is reported to have said that the “fire of mission­ary enterprise was lit within him in Widow Wallis’s back parlor.”

William Carey was born in North-hamptonshire the 17th of August 1761 in the tiny country village of Paulers Pury. This was a time when the British Empire was expanding its power across the world, a time which de­manded great men. These were excit­ing times. In the American colonies George Washington was ready to lead America in a war of independence. John Newton was fighting the slave trade. John Wesley was setting the whole country ablaze with the Gospel.

In England, there was a Mr. Grant who had come from India to try to persuade the Archbishop of Canterbury to start a mission in the colony. The archbishop presented the request to the King of England but the king refused. He wanted no new religions to be introduced into India that might disturb the new colony. The archbishop and the king closed the door on missions to India. At that point God moved around the throne of England and the established religious system. He began a new work in an obscure village in the heart of the English countryside with the birth of William Carey.

Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he was converted through the witness of a fellow apprentice, a dissenter called John Warr, and attended the Hackleton Meeting House. In the shoe shop where he worked, he began language study. On his own, without a teacher, he mastered Greek, Latin, Dutch and French.

In time, Carey was commissioned to preach by the company of Baptists at Olney and became part-time minister of the church at Moulton. After moving to Moulton in 1785, he ran a small school, tended his shoe trade and pastored the church next door. He would bring his finished shoes to Thomas Gotch, his employer and encourager at Chesham House, who sold them and supplied Carey with a fresh quantity of leather for further work.

In a small cobbler’s shop, Carey made shoes while looking out the shop window at a village of 300 people, but seeing beyond them the millions perishing in other lands. This vision ultimately led to the “Death­less Sermon of Nottingham” in May of 1792.

The meeting was held at Friar Lane Baptist Church. William Carey was scheduled to preach at 10:00. Little could anyone present know, including Carey himself, that he was about to change the world forever. His sermon would become famous as “William Carey’s Deathless Sermon” because it initiated a movement that lives forever. Opening his Bible, he preached from Isaiah 54:23: “Enlarge the place of thy tent ... stretch forth the curtains of thy habita­tion, lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes.” The sermon was entitled “EXPECT GREAT THINGS FROM GOD! ATTEMPT GREAT THINGS FOR GOD!”

It must be remembered that the ministers in the meeting were mostly, like Carey, pastors of small, poor village churches with congregations number­ing in some case no more than twenty-five members. Also, this meeting represented only one small group of the various associations that made up the Baptist movement of that day.

Another serious consideration of the times was the paralysis of extreme Calvinism. The often vocal and common opposition to evangelism of heathen lands was the persuasion that if God wanted the hea­then saved, He would do it without hu­man help. In a previous meeting Carey had been rebuked by an older man when he attempted to discuss the Great Commission.

At this meeting in Nottingham, however, Carey would not be silenced. He poured out his heart for those in spiri­tual darkness. He was preaching for a verdict. This sermon demanded action. In the business meeting that followed, routine matters were discussed but not a word about missions. Carey’s heart burned within him. When the chairman asked if there were any new business, Carey turned to Andrew Fuller, sitting next to him. Gripping Fuller’s arm he said, “Is nothing again going to be done?”

Andrew Fuller was a leading influence among lo­cal Baptist circles. When he became in­volved in Carey’s vision for missions, things began to happen. Before the meeting adjourned it had been resolved to present a plan for a Bap­tist Mission Society when the next minis­ters’ meeting was held in October at Fuller’s church in Kettering.

Carey’s touching appeal led to the historic meeting in Widow Wallis’ parlor on the 2nd of October 1792. After the day’s services were over, the twelve ministers gathered in a back room of Widow Wallis’ home. The plan for a mission board was presented. Let it be emphasized again that the majority of these preachers were from small area churches. They could not know how much their simple decisions would eventually mean to the world. God, how­ever, was beginning a work through them far beyond their own understanding. This author has seen and held the original minutes of the meeting of October 1792.

Looking down the list of names of twelve ministers, including Andrew Fuller, John Sutcliff and William Carey, my eyes locked on the bottom of the page. There was totaled the offering, the first offering given by Baptist churches as a group for world missions. The sum total was £13.20s amounting to probably $50 in today’s money. There in the small English village of Kettering were planted the tiny seeds of modern day missions with twelve Bap­tist ministers and £13.20s. From this small beginning has come millions and millions of dollars for missions along with thou­sands of missionaries who for two hun­dred years have covered this world winning souls for Jesus Christ. It could have so easily failed to materialize.

There were many obstacles. En­gland would not grant a work permit; thus, English ship captains refused to issue tick­ets. The mission society had raised only about three hundred pounds. The passage was six hundred pounds. There were vo­cal opposition and scorn from extreme Calvinists. Carey visited John Newton, the converted slave trader and author of “Amazing Grace,” for advice. John New­ton told him, “If God is in it no power on earth can hinder you.”

On March 20, 1793, the mission board met and set apart Carey and another missionary for service abroad. Andrew Fuller said on that occasion, “There is a gold mine in India, but it seems as deep as the center of the earth.” Carey replied, ‘I will venture down into that mine to dig, but remember YOU MUST HOLD THE ROPES.’”

What emerged on that mo­mentous occasion in Leicester was a con­sensus by the home pastors and churches that they would stand by the missionaries until DEATH.

June 13, 1793, leaving England on a foreign ship and still without a work per­mit, the Careys set their eyes toward an unknown horizon. They had very little money to sustain them upon their arrival in India. The journey was rugged, taking five months without one time putting into port.

After being in India for a short time, the Carey’s five-year-old son caught a fe­ver and died. After his death, Mrs. Carey became very depressed. The depression grew into mental illness. After being in India for eight years, she had completely lost her mind and soon died.

Carey’s sister wrote of him, “Whatever he began he always finished.” Carey once described himself as a plodder. It was a just self-evaluation. He plodded when there was no money or ship to take him to India. He plodded when he had to work full time in India to support his family. He plodded when extreme Calvinists rebuked him for wanting to convert the heathen.

When his loving little son died, he plodded. When his wife, de­pressed by all the tragedy and hardship, lost her mind, he plodded. When she died, he plodded. He later remarked when his second wife died, after thirteen years of happy marriage, “My loss is irreparable. I am very lonely.” Still Carey plodded on with the Word of God. For over forty years, without a single furlough, HE PLODDED. HE WAS GOD’S PLODDER!

At sunrise on June 9, 1834, in Serampore, India, William Carey died. Sometime ago I visited Regents College, Oxford, England, and stood beside the couch on which he died. The couch had been sent to England to be preserved for Baptist archives. Looking down, I tried to vi­sualize Carey in his final moments. Had it made any difference to anyone that he had lived? “He had expected great things from God. He had attempted great things for God.”

When he arrived in India, only two small provinces had a portion of Scripture. Only two small lights were burning. When he lay down on that couch to die, he had translated all or part of the Bible into thirty-four Indian lan­guages. Almost all of India at least had access to the printed Gospel.

Churches had been established and native preach­ers were preaching. Serampore College had been established and he had started the modern-day missionary movement. The door was open for others to fol­low. Adoniram Judson followed. Hudson Taylor followed. Robert Moffat followed. David Livingstone and thousands of others followed.

Carey’s cobbler shop still ex­ists in the village of Moulton, England, a village that has changed little in two hundred years. Positioned in a corner of the little room is the pulpit from which Carey poured out his soul to the church next door. There is the bench where he sat making shoes and studying languages, looking out the window at a dull village of perhaps three hundred people, but SEEING THE WORLD.

Just a village ... just a shoe cobbler ... but LITTLE IS MUCH WHEN GOD IS IN IT. Dear Friend, will you expect great things from God? Will you attempt great things for God?

The “Deathless Sermon of Nottingham” lives on, and will live on, as long as there are men and women who, like Carey, have a heart for perishing souls in other lands.