JACOB GRIGG:
Cornwall’s first missionary
By Stephen Dray
Carn Brea Media. 158 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 0 244 930 752
Stephen Dray has certainly done his homework on Jacob Grigg, a name new to me, with seven pages of bibliography referenced by 460 citations.
We are taken through Grigg’s Cornish roots, his call as one of the earliest modern missionaries, an abortive first placement in Sierra Leone and then, the major part of the book, his work and service in the early United States of 200 years ago.
Ministry and burn-out
The style is clear. Dray documents the established facts, and deftly joins the dots between them where we are left to best-guess the gaps in the record, or speculate as to motivations. There are interesting insights into how the world of 200 years ago is not so dissimilar to our own: contention between evangelicals in the Sierra Leone placement (Chapter 3), a third of 1780’s New England brides being pregnant on their wedding day (p.56), contending for the doctrine of sub-stitutionary atonement against ‘New Light’ (quoted at length in Chapter 5), and Grigg’s own ministerial burn-out.
Yet, despite ‘Cornwall’ in the strap-line, there’s actually very little Cornwall here. I don’t doubt the accuracy of the history, but I never felt that I got to know Grigg himself. I had to check back to remember if he was even married. Most of the facts listed are impersonal records: locations, church associations, invitations to preach. Grigg was clearly an astute theologian, but I would also have loved to hear something more of his home and his heart. Why, for example, did he sink into depressive alcoholism in later life (p.135), and how did he recover and return to some degree of ‘gospel usefulness’ before his death?
This, I fear, will limit the audience. The Cornish, or the early US Baptist, church historian will value it. But the average reader would look for something with more personal interest. Though I do know one local pastor who already wants to borrow it!
