Mission Work
Open Brethren are noted for their commitment to missionary work. In the earliest days of the Plymouth Brethren movement, Anthony Norris Groves became one of the earliest "faith missionaries", travelling to Baghdad in 1829 to preach the gospel and the Bible without the aid of an established missionary society. Many later Plymouth Brethren missionaries took the same stance, and included notable missionary pioneers such as:
- George Müller—founder of orphanages in Bristol, England
- Dan Crawford—Scottish missionary to central Africa
- Charles Marsh—missionary to Lafayette, Algeria (1925–69)
- Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming—missionaries to Ecuador killed by members of the Huaorani tribe
While the majority of Open Brethren missionaries do not belong to a missionary society, there are a number of supporting organisations that give help and advice for missionaries: in the UK, Echoes of Service magazine, Medical Missionary News and the Lord's Work Trust are notable organisations. Today, missionaries are found all over the world, with high concentrations in Zambia and Southern Africa, Brazil, India, Western Europe and South East Asia.
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Famous quotes containing the words mission and/or work:
“Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)