Of all the extraordinary giants of faith raised up by God at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, Revd David Bogue towers above most of them in his achievements. And yet few Christians have ever heard of him. David Bogue (1750-1825) grew up in the parish of Coldingham in Berwickshire, and attended the University of Edinburgh, aged 12. After receiving his Masters degree there, he left Edinburgh in 1771 as a licensed Presbyterian minister, but later became a Congregationalist. His ministry really took off between 1777 and 1825 when he lived in Gosport in Hampshire, England. It was here that he pioneered the world’s first Protestant missionary training college, called the Academy of Ministers and Missionaries in Gosport. It was his model that became the blueprint for missionary training colleges all over the world.
At Gosport Academy he taught and mentored over 200 men who would go on to be influential Christians, both at home and abroad. Inspired by William Carey’s courageous missionary exploits in India (1792), he wrote an article in the Evangelical Magazine in September 1794, calling complacent Christians to rise up and follow Christ into the mission field. He rebuked the church for ‘our criminal unconcern for the honour of God, and for the salvation of perishing souls of men.’ Passionately he wrote that there are ‘hundreds of millions of poor Pagans ignorant of the true God, and falling down before stocks and stones.’ His trumpet call woke up many sleeping Christians, and on 4 November 1794, a group of evangelical ministers met at the Baker’s Coffee House in Cornhill, London, to formerly discuss the pioneering of the London Missionary Society (LMS). The society was launched the next year, stirred by his preaching. Amidst tears of repentance and joy, the leaders called this gathering ‘a new Pentecost’.
The rallying call for missionary applicants resounded through the churches, and yet Bogue was insistent that they needed proper training before they faced the darkness, disease and hardness of resistant people. Emotionalism would not stand the testing fire; only proven Christlike character. At last, after the euphoria of the honeymoon period of the modern missionary movement, the church began to realise that Bogue’s words were wise, as many missionaries began returning home, broken, wounded and defeated. The LMS agreed in 1800 to send potential missionaries to be properly trained by Bogue at Gosport.
Out of this Academy came giants of faith: Robert Morrison, a Scotsman, who translated the Bible into Chinese for the first time (1819), and who, together with his fellow Gosport graduate and Scotsman, William Milne, set up the first training college for equipping Chinese nationals to lead the baby church there; Robert Haldane, who would impact Scotland with his brother James, and see revival break out in Switzerland (1816), France and in other European countries; and Joseph Frey, who would go on to pioneer the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (1809), now known as the Church’s Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ). Of the 115 missionaries that ushered forth from the Gosport Academy, some died soon of disease and other causes; others planted churches and training academies in Malaysia, Singapore, India, Russia, the South Sea Islands, South America and Africa. Later missionaries would swell their ranks with some of the stature of Dr David Livingstone of Malawi and Mary Slessor of Nigeria (both Scots), and many would establish thousands of churches, schools and healthcare centres worldwide.
This would have been more than enough for most people, but Bogue went on to be one of the key pioneers behind the founding of the Evangelical Magazine (1793), which was once the key media disseminator for world mission; the Religious Tract Society (1799), which pioneered the mass distribution of gospel tracts; the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), which spearheaded modern Bible translation and its global distribution network; and the Hibernian Society (1806), a missionary work to the Irish. In all of this he emphasized the importance of training up self-governing churches all over the world, rather than relying on Britain.
‘The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits’ (Daniel 11:32, NKJV).
Image: David Bogue (1750-1825), by Thomas Blood, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons