Search

[German Version] (Mar 19, 1813, Blantyre near Glasgow, Scotland – May 1, 1873, Chitambo, Zambia), geographer, missionary, explorer, and anti-slavery campaigner. He studied medicine and theology in London and Glasgow. In 1838 he was appointed missionary by the London Missionary Society and was sent to Africa in December, 1840, where he arrived in March, 1841. Thereafter Livingstone's life can be divided into four periods: From 1841 to 1851 he worked on Robert Moffat's mission station in Kuruman, so…

[German Version] (Aug 9, 1884, Oregon City, OR – Dec 26, 1968, Oregon City, OR) was an American historian of China and of the expansion of Christianity. After studying and graduating at Yale and after working as travel administrator for the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) for one year, Latourette went as a missionary to Hunan Province in China in 1910, to teach at the China branch of Yale. He returned to the United States in 1912 after a severe illness. In 1916 he began teaching at Dennison Unive…

[German Version] (1672, Dailly, Ayrshire? – 1752, Paisley), ordained as minister of the Church of Scotland in 1697, minister of Paisley Abbey from 1709 until his death. In 1723 he published A History of the Propagation of Christianity and Overthrow of Paganism, which went through two more editions in 1726 and 1731. It was also translated into Dutch. It was fundamentally a piece of Calvinist apologetics positing the progressive and providential expansion of Christianity. It ended with an appeal for Protestants to take up the task of pro…

[German Version] Protestant mission activity began on a large scale after 1780 and was rooted in the second great revival movement of the United States, in the evangelical revival movement of England, and in the Swiss, Dutch, and German Réveil (Revival/Revival movements: III). It was a movement of individual personalities who came together in voluntary associations. The self-conception of missionary Protestantism was centered on the individualism of the Enlightenment. This proved a strong advantage inasmuch as it provided the mission…

[German Version] (Apr 14, 1775, Kirkaldy, Scotland – Aug 27, 1851, South Africa), founding father of South African Liberalism and the classic example of the churchman interfering in politics. As a director of the London Missionary Society (LMS) he was sent to South Africa in 1819 along with John Campbell, another Scottish director of the LMS, to recommend reforms of the Society’s work there. The indigenous people of the Cape, the Khoi, had become a landless laboring class serving the white farmers and town merchants. Together with the many people of mixed ra…

[German Version] (Feb, 1539, Chieta, Italy – Jan 20, 1606, Macao, China), administrator of the Jesuit missions from Ethiopia to Japan from 1573 until 1595; from 1595 his authority was over Japan and China only. The appointment of the young Italian aristrocrat was part of the effort to regenerate and reform the work in the East, which had become too closely identified with Portugal. Valignano shaped a strategy of inculturation of Christianity in Japan, which was a radical development of the break, …

[German Version] (Dec 21, 1795, Ormiston, Scotland – Aug 8, 1883, Leigh, England), missionary and linguist of the London Missionary Society, who was sent to South Africa in 1817. Together with his wife Mary Smith, he built up the mission station in Kuruman (south-east of the Kalahari) to become the most important in southern Africa and worked there until his retirement in 1870. Moffat translated the New Testament (publ. 1840) and the Old Testament (publ. 1857) into the language of the Tswana, a gr…