The English Baptist preacher William Carey (1761-1834), known as the father of modern Protestant missions, was a pioneer of new-style evangelism in India.

William Carey was born on Aug. 17, 1761, in a village in Northamptonshire, where he spent his childhood in poverty. He first was a shoe-maker's apprentice. Although without formal education, Carey was an avid reader and a precocious linguist. He became a Baptist preacher and worked as a schoolmaster and was already on his way to becoming the leader who, in spite of the general reluctance of the Protestant churches of his day, devised new ways to obey the great commission "to go and evangelize the nations."

In one of the most surprising publications of missionary history, Carey expounded some practical guidelines "to use means for the conversions of the Heathens" (Enquiry, 1788). In a sermon to his colleagues (1791) he first used the words which would become the...