Heroes on Mission: Adoniram Judson

Missions Conference 2025 | Week 2

Adoniram Judson, America’s first foreign missionary, did not always have a passion for missions. In fact, during his college years at Brown, he abandoned the faith of his parents after becoming close friends with a skeptic who introduced him to the ideas of the French Enlightenment. However, when that same friend died unexpectedly in just his early twenties, Judson’s soul was sent into a panic, causing him to turn back to Christ. Just two years later, Judson set sail with his wife Ann to Calcutta, India.

Initially, he was sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the largest Reformed missionary organization at the time. Yet during his time at sea, Judson searched the Scriptures and became convinced that the Bible taught only believer’s baptism. Likewise, his wife Ann came to reject infant baptism in favor of believer's baptism by immersion. When they arrived, they were baptized as Baptists by a friend of William Carey’s in 1812.

Not long after his arrival, Judson encountered the first of many challenges, and he was quickly forced out by the British East India Company, who feared that missionary endeavors would disrupt their commercial enterprises. He eventually landed in Burma, where he became the first American missionary in 1813. The following year, he began working under the auspices of the newly established General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the USA for Foreign Missions.

From that point on, it was still another five years before he saw the fruits of his labor: his first convert was won in 1819. Indeed, Judson faced many challenges in his ministry. In 1824, he was arrested during the First Anglo-Burmese War after the Burmese mistook him and other English-speaking Americans for British spies. It was the persistent efforts of his pregnant wife Ann that ultimately led to his release 17 months later. However, this moment of triumph did not last long, for his wife died the next year in 1826, followed by their baby daughter just 6 months after that. Crippled by grief and the guilt of not having been there for his wife in the midst of her declining health, he is recorded as having written to his in-laws: “God to me is the great unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.” Sadly, this was not even the only wife he lost; his second wife, Sarah, passed in 1845.

Yet Judson's legacy is a towering one. Emerging from such deep depression through the prayer and support of fellow missionaries, he completed a 20-year-long project of translating the Bible into Burmese in 1834. He then spent the remainder of his life working on compiling a Burmese-English dictionary, which proved invaluable to later missionaries who would follow in his footsteps. By his death in 1850, there were over 8,000 baptized converts in Burma and 100 churches planted. Today, the Burmese church (Myanmar) is over 4 million strong.

Enjoy this blog? Share with a friend!
For more like this, click here.