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The history of the Christian Church is dominated by three things: persecution, martyrdom, and spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ, which we call the gospel, locally, nationally, and internationally. Those whose main job is telling others the gospel we call missionaries. The history of missions is fascinating – the bravery, the suffering, the freedom brought to people oppressed by their own sin and the sin of their traditional non-Christian religions, and the interesting encounters between culture and Biblical truth (a fascinating book about that specific topic is Eternity in Their Hearts, by Don Richardson).
Another inspiring part of mission history is the biographies of great men and women who have been used by the Lord God to make a real difference in a country or in a people group. One such man was Hudson Taylor, an Englishman in the 19th century, whose ideas about missionaries in a foreign country and whose life spent following those ideas changed China and the face of modern Protestant missions. He was the founder of the agency called the China Inland Mission, whose goal was to take the gospel beyond the Westernized coastal cities of China into the pagan heartland of China. To do this, he proposed that missionaries should at least dress, act, and talk like the people they were ministering to, even if they could not be real Chinese themselves. The idea was to take away the superficial differences to which culturally-sheltered people would easily react, so that the missionary could concentrate on presenting the gospel. The truth of the gospel was the real confrontational truth to which the listeners should react. This idea of Hudson Taylor’s was radical at the time but worked out well, as you will see when you read this middle school level biography of Hudson Taylor.