It began in a chapel in Bloomsbury in 1861.
150 years later, Grace Baptist Mission is at work helping churches support their missionaries on four continents and in 13 countries. Jim Sayers tells the story of the growth of this work of God’s grace.
GBM began life in 1861 as the Strict Baptist Mission. A group of Strict Baptist churches in London were concerned to come together to support ‘the work of spreading the gospel among the heathen’. They decided to focus their efforts on supporting workers in India. Mr. Henry Doll, an Anglo-Indian already living in India, became the long-serving superintendent of the work on the field, supporting Indian Christians who worked as pastors and evangelists. Madras became the focus of the work, and a new area opened up in Tinnevelly in the south of Tamil Nadu, as well as a work in Ceylon.
After a memorable prayer meeting on November 19 1894, SBM sent out its first missionaries from Britain, Samuel Hutchinson and Ernest Booth. Booth served for 31 years and was known as a passionate evangelist and preacher.
In 1903, David and Ruth Morling went out to serve, pioneering a new work in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu. David wrote: ‘Not many days since, Brother Booth and I left the railway far behind us and made a missionary tour into this gospel-less country. How our hearts ached as we travelled from town to town, village to village and saw the dire need of the land’. They based themselves in Sendmangalam where they served for many years, establishing networks of village churches across Tamil Nadu.
The Mountains of Death
Jesse Brand was sent from Guildford in 1907 and Evelyn Harris followed in 1913. They married on the eve of the First World War, and went to pioneer a work on the Kolli hills, one of the most inaccessible and superstitious parts of South India. They combined medical care with evangelism, bringing the gospel to the so-called ‘Mountains of Death’, and planting churches among these animist people. When Jesse died from malaria in 1929, Evelyn continued to live and serve the hill peoples through to the 1960s.
From Ernest Booth in 1895 to SBM’s centenary in 1961, 50 missionaries were sent out to India. They devoted their lives to rooting the gospel in the Tamil language and culture. David Thrower worked over many years to compile a concordance to the Tamil Bible, and Wilfred Kuhrt became widely known as a Tamil preacher at Bible conventions across India.
By this stage the Mission owned many chapels and schools across Tamil Nadu, and it was the work of the missionaries to manage these schools and ensure that Indian preachers were trained and supplied to all the churches. The independence of the local church was not mission policy at the time. It was also in India that the seeds of GBM’s radio and literature ministries were sown, as Tamil radio programmes were produced in purpose-built studios in Kovilpatti.
God has other plans
In 1961, SBM celebrated its centenary by asking the churches to pray for ten new missionaries for India. But God had other plans. The Indian Government refused visas for new missionaries, and so the slow exit from India began. The last missionary to retire from India was Yvonne Langton in 2005.
Nellie Hawes had served for 20 years in India, when she shocked Mission Council by coming home on furlough to tell them she thought God was calling her to Spain! She went on to work in Valencia where she served faithfully for 20 more years. Colin and Carole Howells had expected to go to India, but, since that door had closed, were sent to plant a new church in Thonon, France. Roger and Helen Cook joined the mission in 1967, going to Mons in Belgium to plant a church. By the end of the 1960s, SBM’s focus was ‘Into all the world’.
Church-based mission
In 1971, SBM became a charitable trust with a council elected by the churches. No longer would the missionaries belong to the Mission. There was a move in the churches to reform at all levels and, in searching the Scriptures, they realised that it is the local church that sends, and the Mission belongs to and must serve the churches. The Mission is there to help the sending church in the tasks of preparing their members for mission service, raising their support, and caring for them on the field, as well as uniting other churches in praying for them and connecting with their work.
Another significant step was the opening of a purpose-built Mission Centre in Abingdon in 1976. This included a suite of three radio studios, as well as room for the growing literature ministry. It was a significant step forward in the providence of God, for it soon became clear that he had bigger plans, requiring such a centre for supporting a growing work.
A decade of growth
1980 was a year when there was not one enquiry from a church about sending out a new missionary. The 1981 Annual Meetings was a key moment. The message, from Ezekiel, entitled ‘Blood on our hands’, left no one in doubt about the need for church planters all over the world. Then the floodgates opened and, during the next ten years, through the newly renamed Grace Baptist Mission, churches sent missionaries to Colombia, Kenya, Peru, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland and the Arab world, as well as a new step: planting churches here in the UK. Partnerships were forged with likeminded mission agencies. Then, as the decade closed, something even more remarkable happened.
When the wall came down
The autumn of 1989 will forever be remembered for the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. This opened a door for the gospel in countries that had known severe persecution. In 1994, Liz Fennell went out to work in Latvia, and was joined by Malcolm Sunasky. They married in 1997, and were joined by Malcolm and Ruth Firth. David and Pauline Wilcox had been working in Macedonia for a number of years when they came within the Mission’s support, and the Vincent-Newsons were sent to do radio work in the Ukraine. At this time, teams of missionaries were beginning to grow in Arequipa, Peru and Kenya.
The future
Our work today faces needs as great as ever. ‘Creative access’ missionaries have entered countries officially closed to missionaries, following their careers while reaching nationals with the gospel. The rapid growth of the church In the developing world means there is a huge need to train leaders who will shepherd God’s flock according to the biblical example of Jesus. Populations are on the move, and we are able to reach people from the most closed Islamic nations as migrants here in the UK. In our 150th anniversary year we watch the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in the Arab world with great interest, and wonder whether we will see the doors open to the Arab world as they did in Eastern Europe. Europe remains the most unsaved continent in the world, so we rejoice in the sending of new missionaries to Poland and Serbia this year. We look to God as the Lord of the harvest to send out more labourers into his harvest field.
GBM is celebrating its 150th Anniversary with ‘Grace to the Nations’, a special thanksgiving event at the Renewal Centre in Solihull on Saturday October 29. The main preacher is Don Carson, and almost all the missionaries will be taking part. The final service will be recorded by the BBC for broadcast the next day as Radio 4’s Sunday Worship.
