Christian Unity (the book) - The Maranatha Community

south. It was also established as a Church of England enclave, and the Wesleybrothers and George Whitefield spent some time there as parish priests.The revival of the Evangelical faith in both Anglican and Dissenting Churchesled to the rise of the Protestant overseas missionary movement. It began withthe founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and the LondonMissionary Society in 1795. Protestantism in England and Wales was beginningto wake up to the vast numbers of people in the world and to their spiritualneeds.In 1792 William Carey (1761-1834), an English Baptist, had written a tract onthe subject An Enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for theconversion of the heathens, in which he tried to assess the number of peopleworldwide who had no knowledge of the Christian Gospel. The next year Careywas in India as a missionary with the Baptist Missionary Society, and there heremained until his death in 1834.Three years later, in 1795, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans andAnglicans contributed to the founding of the London Missionary Society, aProtestant missionary society which had as its goal a non-denominationalmission to the South Seas. It was to produce many notable missions andpioneer missionaries, not least Robert and Mary Moffat and DavidLivingstone, their son-in-law, in Central Africa.It can be said that the London Missionary Society, as a para-church body, wasone of the very first ecumenical ventures of the modern period; it allowedmissionaries to be free to pursue whatever form of church order they felt right.The basic truths of the Gospel based on the Creeds were accepted as bindingon all.It was from the overseas Protestant missionary movement’s desire and needfor cooperation in the overwhelming task of reaching the ‘heathen’worldwide with the Gospel that the modern ecumenical movement of the 20 thCentury came into being.Page 123