Adoniram Judson
Adoniram Judson was born August
9th, 1788 in Malden, Massachusetts. His father was a
Congregationalist minister. From a very early age Judson showed to have a
brilliant mind. He learned to read at the age of three, and had mastered the
Greek language by the age of twelve. Judson enrolled in Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island in 1804 at just sixteen years old.
While at Brown University, Judson fell in with the wrong crowd. He
befriended a man by the name of Jacob Eames who was an atheist. By the time that
Judson graduated in 1807 as valedictorian he had total denounced Christ and his
Christian upbringing. He returned home and opened up the Plymouth Independent
Academy, but soon grew tired of living a hypocritical life and told his parents
he was moving off to New York to write for the stage. His parents were crushed,
but Judson went on anyway. When he arrived in New York the fame and fortune that
he had envisioned did not come. So defeated he obtained a horse and headed west.
One night he decided to lodge at a village inn. The only room available was a
room with a deathly ill man. Throughout the night he heard the man cry out in
pain and could tell that he did not know God. In the mourning he questioned the
innkeeper about the condition of the man. He was told that he had died during
the night. Judson then asked who the man was. The innkeeper replied that it was
“a Jacob Eames from the college of Providence.”
The death of his atheistic friend greatly touched Adoniram Judson. He
returned home and enrolled in Andover Theological Seminary in 1808. This was
where he was led to a full faith in Christ while reading the writings of a
Puritan author by the name Thomas Boston. The young man that was once an atheist
now felt that God was calling him into missions.
Judson faced a big problem with
his calling. In the early 1800’s there were no foreign missionaries from
America. Judson wrote this in a magazine article in 1811: “How
do Christians discharge this trust committed to them? They let three fourths of
the world sleep the sleep of death, ignorant of the simple truth that a Savior
died for them. Content if they can be useful in the little circle of their
acquaintances, they quietly sit and see whole nations perish for lack of
knowledge.”
Judson’s parents who were at one time so devastated by his lack of
concern for things of God were now encouraging him to accept a prominent
ministers job in Boston rather than go off to the mission field. You know that
his parents must have prayed for their son to be in the ministry when he was
running for God, but this just was not what they had envisioned. In June of 1810
Judson along with several men, which were involved in the famous haystack prayer
meetings at Williams College, wrote a statement to the General Association of
Congregational Ministers at Bradford, Mass. that resulted in the organization of
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
Since finances were still a
problem, Judson decided to sail to England to appeal to the London Missionary
Society for support. On his journey to England a French privateer captured his
ship and Judson was imprisoned. He was released but had no luck with the board
in England.
Judson returned to the States were he was married to Ann Hasseltine on
February 5th, 1812. He and his colleagues were ordained the next day,
and then sailed to Calcutta, India on February 19th. While on the
four-month voyage to India Judson and his new wife decided to study the topic of
believer’s baptism. They did this for a couple of reasons. First of all
because they knew that they were going to be in contact with William Carey a
Baptist missionary, and secondly because he was having some problems with how he
was going to handle the Congregationalist idea of covenant theology. During
their study they became convinced that believer’s baptism by immersion was the
Biblical method, and presented themselves for proper baptism in a Baptist Church
in Calcutta. Interestingly enough, Luther Rice a colleague of theirs came to the
same conclusion during his trip to India and was also baptized.
Their being baptized meant that their support from the Congregationalist
would be terminated. So they decided that Rice would go home and raise support
for missions and Judson would stay on the field. By 1814 Rice had rallied
Baptist churches and they had established the American Baptist Missionary Union.
Judson could not obtain permission from the British East India Company
for permanent residency because they did not trust missionaries and they did not
like the change in their converts. So they decided to go to Burma. During the
voyage the vessel was caught in a monsoon in the Bay of Bengal. Ann became
severely ill and gave birth to their first child, which soon died and had to be
buried at sea.
For the first six years in Burma Judson devoted his time mainly to
learning the language and translating the Bible. Then in 1819, he had his first
convert, a Burmese man by the name, Moung Nau. One practice of Judson’s that I
found interesting is that he insisted that new converts undergo an extensive
training before being baptized. Another missionary named Dr. Pierce joined the
Judson’s, and things were looking good. Their success was to be short lived
though because war broke out between the Burmese and the British, and although
Judson and Dr. Pierce were not British they were foreign and white so they were
arrested. The conditions of their imprisonment were absolutely horrible. They
had to share a room with 100 men. They were put in fetters, and they were
extremely malnourished. If it were not for the faithfulness of his wife Ann to
smuggle in food to him and Dr. Pierce, Judson would probably have died. During
his imprisonment Ann gave birth to their third child Maria (their second child
had also died soon after birth). Ann
found that she could not nurse her child so she had to go up and down the
streets begging for some one to nurse her child. The war with the British was to
soon come to a close and so Judson and his friend were released from prison to
help negotiate with the British.
Soon after his release his precious wife Ann died from a tropical fever.
Not long after that, Maria, his baby girl died. This drove Judson into a deep
depression. He moved out into a tiger infested jungle where he lived alone for
forty days in a hut. The natives said that his surviving was like Daniel
surviving in the lion’s den. During that lonely time in the jungle Judson’s
spirit was renewed. He moved to Moulmein where he would live for the rest of his
ministry.
In 1828, Judson had the privilege of converting a Karen slave. The Karens
were a wild race of people that lived in the remote areas of the jungles. The
man’s name was, Ko Tha Byu, and he was a robber bandit that had been involved
in some 30 murders. Under Judson’s and the Boardman’s, which were a new
missionary couple that had joined Judson, discipleship this man come to be a
mighty preacher that came to known as the Karen Apostle. He helped the Karen
people to realize that Christianity was the fulfillment of his own people’s
legends. Within 25 years there were 11,878 baptized Karen believers.
Mr. Boardman passed away and Judson married his widow. They were married
for eleven years and had eight children together, three of which died at an
early age. The work in Burma continued to grow, but Mrs. Judson grew very ill
and Judson decided that they would take a furlough to try to nurse his ailing
wife back to good health. The trip proved to be too much for her and she died in
the port of St. Helena. When he arrived back in the United States, Judson was
not ready for the reception that he would receive. It was his first furlough in
33 years and everyone wanted him to come to their church and speak about his
adventures. While in the States someone complained that he did not tell enough
stories of adventures in Burma, and he replied, “I am glad they have it to say
that I had nothing better to tell than the wondrous story of Jesus dying
love.”
Judson married Miss Emily Chubbock, and on July 11th, 1846 he
sailed back to Burma. In 1850 Adoniram Judson was advised to take a sea voyage
because of his health and on April 12th he died and was buried at
sea. At the time of his death there were 7,000 baptized believers in Burma, 63
churches, and 123 missionaries and pastors. On the 100th year
anniversary of his death there were some 200,000 Christians in Burma. Jason CofieldBaptist
History October
30, 2000
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