August in World Missions History: It Happened Today!
TL;DR: Discover an event in world missions history for each day of August. These milestones include missionary departures, Bible translations, Christian broadcasting, medical ministry, persecution, and the growth of global missionary movements.
August Missionary Anniversaries and Historical Events
"Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on?"
Hebrews 12:1, The Message
Fulfilling Acts 1:8 -- Events, locations, people, and movements in world evangelism
- August 1, 1895 — Eleven people, including Western missionaries and their children, were
killed in an attack at Huashan, near Kucheng (present-day Gutian), Fujian, China.
- August 2, 1863 - Robert Wilder was born to missionary parents in Kolhapur, India. As a
student at Princeton in 1883, Wilder helped form that school's Foreign Missionary Society.
While Wilder did spend two 4-year terms as a missionary in India, his most memorable
contributions to world missions were as a leader of the Student Volunteer Movement for
Foreign Missions. That group dramatically jolted the Protestant churches of America to new
levels of missionary enthusiasm and action by enlisting thousands of young people.
- August 3, 1492 - Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain for the "Indies." Though the
Italian explorer was motivated by gold and glory, he also saw himself as a missionary. He
thought that if there were a shortcut to the East by sea, missionaries could get there faster.
- August 4, 1892 - English medical missionary Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell arrived in
Labrador, Newfoundland. He labored as a physician and missionary for 42 years and was
instrumental in setting up orphanages, hospitals, cooperative stores, and other community
organizations.
- August 5, 1988 - The 12,000 Cora Indians living in the Sierra Madre del Norte mountains of
Mexico received their first completed New Testament from Wycliffe Bible Translators. At one point in
the translation process, the
American translators were refused visas by the Mexican government, forcing them to do
their work in Tucson, Arizona.
- August 6, 1942 - English missionary Vivian Redlich was beheaded by the Japanese in Papua
New Guinea. The Japanese had invaded earlier that year, and Redlich had decided to remain at
his post.
- August 7, 1771 - Francis Asbury answered John Wesley's call for volunteers to go to
America as missionaries. Asbury would become the father of American Methodism.
- August 8, 1745 -- Missionary David Brainerd began experiencing the most glorious week in
his life as the power of God came down on a group of Indians to whom he was preaching near
Trenton, New Jersey. When news got out of conversions taking place, other Indians came to hear
the young white preacher. Some members of the white community also showed up and were
converted. By the end of August, Brainerd had baptized 25 Indians. Years of prayer and suffering
began bearing fruit.
- August 9, 1900 -- The Lambuth Monument in front of the Pearl River Church near the Natchez Trace in Madison County, Mississippi, was dedicated. The monument honors
Rev. and Mrs. James William Lambuth, founders of Methodist work in Japan, who first went to Asia in 1854 as missionaries to China. Many of Lambuth's descendants also became missionaries
in China and Japan.
- August 10, 1815 - Samuel Leigh, the first Methodist minister or missionary to Australia,
arrived in Sydney.
- August 11, 1847 - Presbyterian missionary Charles Williams Forman sailed for India. With
John Newton, Forman began Protestant missionary work at Lahore. He spent more than forty
years in the Punjab, founding a college in Lahore which still bears his name.
- August 12, 1859 - Presbyterian missionary A.B. Simonton arrived in Rio de Janeiro on
the merchant ship Banshee. In November of 1864, Simonton took the lead in
establishing Imprensa Evangélica, a semimonthly newspaper that garnered great
respect among educated Brazilians.
- August 13, 1964 - Trans World Radio's station on the Caribbean island of Bonaire went on
the air from a 500,000-watt AM transmitter.
- August 14, 1616 - Shen Huai, a high-ranking Chinese official, arrested dozens of
missionaries in Nanjing. He thought Western missionaries were spies, that they were teaching Chinese
people not to respect their parents or worship their ancestors, that they were stealing proprietary Chinese
knowledge, and that they were practicing customs he considered objectionable, such as baptism and allowing male and
female followers to study in the same room (something not allowed at that time by conservative Chinese
society).
- August 15, 1571 — Italian missionary Matteo Ricci entered the Jesuit novitiate. He later
became one of the most influential early Jesuit missionaries in China, known for learning Chinese
and adapting aspects of his presentation and lifestyle to Chinese culture. Ricci sailed for Asia
in 1578. Some missionaries sharply criticized his adoption of Chinese customs and his positive
view of Confucianism, which he did not regard as a religion like Buddhism and Taoism.
- August 16, 1952 - Rudolfo Haase of Brazil started a Lutheran mission in Portugal.
- August 17, 1850 - Baptist missionary William Ashmore sailed out of New York, headed to
Hong Kong on board the Channing. Arriving on January 4, 1851, Ashmore
spent the next half-century in China and Thailand as a missionary.
- August 18, 1732 - In an emotional farewell service, Moravian Christians at Herrnhut sang
100 hymns and commissioned Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann as missionaries to enslaved Africans
in the West Indies. Between 1732 and 1742, Herrnhut, a community of only 600 members,
sent out more than 70 foreign missionaries.
- August 19, 1846 — The Evangelical Alliance was founded in London by a gathering of about
800 evangelical leaders. The organization eventually developed into today’s World Evangelical Alliance.
- August 20, 1961 --
Missionary translator William Sedat presented the completed New Testament to the Kekchi tribal people of
Guatemala.
- August 21, 1883 - Presbyterian missionary Kate Mills illustrated the frustrations and
challenges of language learning in China when she wrote to her medical doctor father Samuel A.
Wilson saying, "It is one thing to be able to make them understand in conversation and quite
another to be sufficiently correct to preach." In a May 23 letter, Kate had related how a friend of
hers received a can full of dead cockroaches because a request she made to household help had
been misunderstood.
- August 22, 1670 - English missionary John Eliot founded a church for Native Americans at
Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
- August 23, 1828 -- Karl F. A. Guetzlaff of the Netherlands Mission Society landed in
Bangkok, Thailand. He and his wife translated the Bible into Siamese and parts of it into Lao and
Cambodian. Guetzlaff has become known as "the apostle to the Chinese."
- August 24, 1924 -- A week of self-denial for U.S. members of the Church of the Nazarene began with
participants being urged to give
sacrificially for the building of Bresee Memorial Hospital in China. Because needed funds did
come in, the dispensary/clinic of the hospital began operation on October 17, 1925. By January
1, 1926, both men's and women's wards were occupied and a training school for nurses
was launched on October 22, 1926.
- August 25, 1792 - John Thomas wrote a letter to Rev. John Rippon in which he raised the
possibility of English Baptists missionizing in India. Thomas wrote the letter when he returned to
London from years of secular work in India. Later, on January 9, 1793, the
"Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen" (i.e. Baptist
Missionary Society) agreed to send John Thomas and William Carey
to India as its first two missionaries.
- August 26, around 360 — Ninian, traditionally regarded as the first Christian missionary to the people
of what is now Scotland, was born. Details of his early life are uncertain, but tradition associates
him with the establishment of a church at Whithorn and with Martin of Tours.
- August 27, 1727 — Moravian Christians at Herrnhut began an organized round-the-clock prayer
vigil. According to Moravian tradition, the continuing prayer ministry lasted approximately 100
years and accompanied an extraordinary expansion of missionary activity.
- August 28, 1975 - Nazarene missionary Armand
Doll was imprisoned by Mozambique's Marxist government. Over the next
several months he smuggled letters out to his wife inside empty toothpaste tubes. Those
letters were published in a book: Toothpaste Express -- Letters from Prison. [ more
on Armand Doll ]
- August 29, 1936 - Missionaries John and Georgia Cochran sailed for Argentina where they
served for 37 years.
- August 30, 1858 - Presbyterian missionary John Gibson Paton landed at Aneityum, the
southernmost inhabited island of the New Hebrides archipelago (now called Vanuatu). Ordained
a missionary to the New Hebrides on March 23, Paton had left Glasgow with his wife Mary Ann
Robson on April 16. He would begin his missionary work on the island of Tanna on November
5, 1858.
- August 31, 1998 - Ten-year-old Mbwizu "Tantine" Ndjungu, daughter of United
Methodist missionaries Nkemba and Mbwizu Ndjungu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
died in a swimming accident in Dakar, Senegal.
— Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
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