America, Land of Faith and Miracles: John Marrant
JOHN MARRANT
John Marrant was a free black who heard Great Awakening preacher George Whitefield and converted. He became a missionary to the Cherokee of the western Carolinas and Georgia. When the Revolution started, the Cherokee caught him and was about to kill him when he preached to the chief, who then converted.
John Marrant was then allowed to preach to the Creek, Catawba, and Housaw Tribes.
When he went back to South Carolina, the British caught him and impressed him into the British Navy. He was taken to England where he preached for several years, then preached in Nova Scotia.
GEORGE LIELE
George Liele was a black slave whose master took him to a church where he heard the Gospel and was converted. He was freed and founded Silver Bluff Baptist Church in Beach Island, South Carolina, 1773, one of the first black congregations in America. He then founded the First Bryan Baptist Church, which grew to 700 and sent black missionary David George to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, Africa. When the Revolution heated up, George and his wife and family when to Jamaica where by 1814 they had 8,000 converts and started numerous Baptist Churches
HAYSTACK PRAYER MEETING AND WORLD MISSIONS
In 1806, Williams College students were walking back to class across a field. When a sudden thunderstorm happened, they hid under a haystack and prayed – committing their lives to world missions. The Haystack Prayer Meeting led to the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which in the next 50 years sent out 1,250 missionaries to India,
China, Hawaii, southeast Asian countries. In 150 years, it sent out 5,000 to mission fields around the world. Missionaries established schools, hospitals and translated the Bible into indigenous languages, even creating written languages.
Adoniram Judson, the first missionary sent out by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, went to Burma.
On the second boatload of missionaries to Hawaii was the black woman Betsey Stockton, who was the first single female missionary sent out from America.
Hiram Bingham and Yale graduate Asa Thurston, with his wife Lucy, were sent to Hawaii by the American Board of Missions on the ship, Thaddeus, arriving at Kailua on March 31, 1820. They were the first missionaries to Hawaii. The missionaries not only spread Christianity, but confronted drunkenness and vice which had been introduced into the islands by sailors, whalers, and convicts from Botany Bay.
