A Shoemaker Who Changed The World

A Shoemaker Who Changed the World

Willie was a stuttering plodder. The only job he could get was as a shoemaker’s apprentice. The only girl who would marry him was Dorothy, who suffered from mental illness. But everything changed for Willie when he read a runaway bestseller. Most who read Captain Cook’s journal were captivated by the exploits of a daring explorer. But Willie saw vast human needs in faraway places. He fashioned a world globe from leather scraps. After staring at it, he sobbed, “Here am I, Lord. Send me!”

Protestants were not sending foreign missionaries in the 1700s. When Willie stammered out his vision at a meeting of Calvinistic Baptists, an old pastor angrily shouted, “Young man, sit down! When God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without you or me!” Others tried to dissuade Willie by reminding him that he was a shoemaker saddled with a crazy wife. Someone said, “Face it, William: you’re unfit.” He stuttered, “B-b-but I c-c-can p-p-plod!”

For the next eleven years, Willie plodded until he could read the Bible in Latin, Greek, Dutch, and French. He was finally licensed to preach. When he wasn’t in the pulpit of his tiny church, he rode across England, stuttering a message: “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” Fortified by that credo, he gathered like-minded pastors to establish the Baptist Mission Society. He was so poor that he couldn’t contribute a single penny to his new venture.

Yet he managed to collect a handful of missionaries and some pitiful resources to go to India. In 1793 they might as well have been going to the moon. His wife sat on the dock, refusing to leave. Twice Willie had to get on his knees and beg her to board the ship. When the missionaries arrived in India, Hindu radicals tried to kill them. The British East India Company refused to let them travel inland. Willie’s five-year-old son died, and Dorothy lost her mind completely.

Willie labored seven years before he saw his first conversion. After twenty years, he had only a handful of converts. His first wife died, and then his second. But he continued to plod. When he died in 1834 at age seventy-three, he had translated the Bible into thirty-four languages, founded India’s first college, established forty-five teaching centers, alleviated famine by teaching new agricultural methods, and worked to free Indian women from the cruelest sorts of bondage.

If you visit India today, you can find Willie’s statue close to the parliament building. Even Hindus celebrate him as one of their nation’s greatest heroes. History recalls Willie by his full name, William Carey. He has been dubbed the Father of Modern Missions. But he would be more impressed to know that some 25 million people in India have called Jesus Christ their Savior, and today there are five times more Christians in India than in England. Maybe you’re just a plodder like Willie, in a place as small as a village cobbler’s shop. Yet as long as you can plod, you can do so much more, if only you do what he did:

Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.

I am the LORD, the God of all the peoples of the world. Is anything too hard for me?

Jeremiah 32:27