“Such a man as Carey is more to me than bishop or archbishop: he is an apostle.” This was the estimate that the evangelical Anglican John Newton once expressed about the Baptist missionary William Carey at the close of the eighteenth century. A blog post as recent as this year has a similar take on Carey: there he is described as “the man whom God used almost single-handedly to bring the Great Commission back to the forefront of the church’s thinking.”
The missionary’s opinion of himself was quite different, however. Carey was quite conscious that he did not merit being decked out with a halo like a medieval saint, something that evangelical tradition—following Newton’s lead?—has done. When he came to die in 1834, he gave explicit instructions that on his tombstone were to be placed the following words drawn from a hymn by Isaac Watts: “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, / On Thy kind arms I fall.” Human fallenness and thus the need for an ardent reliance on the Holy Spirit were constant themes in all that Carey wrote throughout his life. Read More
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