From Scotland to the Ends of the Earth

In size and population, Scotland is tiny. Its area is smaller than South Carolina. It has fewer people than the DC Metropolitan Area. Indeed, there are almost five times as many millionaires in the US as there are people in all of Scotland. So, small it is.

And yet, in God’s economy, smallness does not disqualify one from godly service. Creation reveals that God loves the small and delights in transience and fragility. Consider minuscule flowers of stunning beauty, or delicate mayflies, which spend years as nymphs only to emerge briefly for a few hours. Grace, too, reveals a similar preference. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). If in Jesus’s hands a boy’s snack can feed thousands, what could he do with the boy himself?

The history of missions in Scotland provides many examples of God’s delight in magnifying his glory through smallness. Although geographically slight, over the centuries Scotland has profoundly influenced the work of the kingdom. The following account summarizes humble Scotland’s disproportionate contribution to world missions.

Born in Mission

The story starts with the fifth-century colonization of Caledonia’s western shores by Gaelic-speaking Irish Christians — the Scots, who gave their name to the nation. In AD 563, Columba, an Irish prince and priest, established the island missionary colony of Iona with his twelve companions. From Iona, they reached out to the mainland to share the gospel with the pagan Picts. Seventy years later, Aidan, also from Iona, set up another missions hub at Lindisfarne on the northern coast of Northumbria. Then Máel Ruba sailed from Iona in AD 673, established his base at Applecross on the western coast, and took the gospel west and north to the islands of Lewis and Skye and possibly eastward to Forres and Keith as well as the far north.

From its earliest days, the Scottish church has had missions in its spiritual DNA.

Confessing the Reformed Faith

The sixteenth-century Reformation established Scotland’s national church as a confessional church, adhering first to the 1560 Scots Confession and later to the Westminster Confession. In the view of John Knox, a confessional church was not merely a church that produced carefully worded theological statements of the truths that united its members and fellow congregations. Rather, it was also a church that actively confessed to the unbelieving world those same truths. A confessional church was, in other words, an outward-looking missionary church.

The preface to the Scots Confession states, “Long have we thirsted, dear Brethren, to have notified unto the world the sum of that doctrine which we profess.” Professor Clement Graham rightly observed, “The man who has studied the Word of God and compared the Confession of Faith with it makes a happy declaration when he acknowledges it as his own, but his happiness is increased by sharing” (Hold Fast Your Confession, 41).

The confessions and catechisms adopted by the Scottish church not only sustained theological orthodoxy within its communion, but also enabled its members to proclaim the gospel to the world with biblical precision.

Mission to the Jewish People

Through its reading of the Scriptures, the Scottish church grew to appreciate the part ancient Israel played in God’s plan of redemption and marveled that such a plan included Gentiles such as themselves. Gratitude led to a sense of affinity, expressed first by fervent prayer for Israel’s salvation and eventually through sharing the gospel with them. Early attempts to evangelize the so-called Ten Lost Tribes of Israel — erroneously identified by John Eliot as the indigenous North American people — led Scotland to stumble into international evangelism in 1646.

“From its earliest days, the Scottish church has had missions in its spiritual DNA.”

Building on Eliot’s work, in November 1742 the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge hired David Brainerd as a missionary to the indigenous people of North America. Just four months earlier, George Whitefield’s ministry in Cambuslang, Scotland, had led to a major revival, which in turn resulted in a transatlantic Concert for Prayer, a monthly day of fasting and prayer for continued mission to the world. This effort, in turn, inspired William Carey’s pioneering initiative in India in 1783, and Claudius Buchanan’s ministry among the Bene Israel Jews of India from 1797 to 1808. Three hundred years later, a persistent sense of indebtedness to the Jewish people led Jane Haining from Dumfriesshire to return to her work in the Skót Misszió school for Jewish girls in Budapest and thence to Auschwitz in 1944 to die as a martyr.

Throughout its history, the Scottish church’s heart for Israel has inspired missions around the globe.

Heart for the Lost

Once, as a theological student, William Chalmers Burns watched the crowds in Glasgow’s bustling Argyle Street and was so moved by that stream of lost humanity that he sought respite beneath the glass and cast-iron ceiling of the Argyle Arcade. Thus preoccupied, he failed to notice his mother, who had walked right up to him. He apologized and explained, “I was so overcome with the sight of the countless crowds of immortal beings . . . all posting onwards towards the eternal world, that I could bear it no longer, and turned in here to seek relief in quiet thought” (Memoir of the Rev. William C. Burns, 52). Burns offered himself as a missionary to the Jews of Aden, but after ministry in Dundee and Kilsyth, he became a missionary to China.

Such emotion among Scottish missionaries was not unique to Burns. Mary Slessor, who served for decades without furlough in Nigeria, was so driven by a similar concern for the salvation of Africans that she wrote in her Bible, “It were worth while to die, if thereby a soul could be born again. . . . Sin is loss for time and eternity” (Mary Slessor of Calabar, 298). Slessor and Burns demonstrate how solid Christian teaching kindled compassion for unevangelized peoples, impelling Scottish Christians toward distant lands to face unpredicted hardships.

Sacrifice for Christ

Words such as sacrifice, hardship, and adversity are disappearing from our risk-averse vocabulary. It was not always so. Scottish missionaries were not unique in disregarding their safety for the gospel, but they provided some remarkable examples of personal sacrifice for Christ.

For instance, many attempted to deter John G. Paton from a life of mission to the South Pacific islanders between 1858 and the early 1900s. One of the most persistent was a Mr. Dickson, who warned Paton he would end up being eaten by cannibals. Paton replied,

Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honouring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms. (John G. Paton, 91)

Within months of arrival at Tanna, an island in the South Pacific, Paton buried his wife and firstborn son; he slept on their grave to protect it from violation by hostile local people. And yet, in the face of such devastating loss, he remained faithful in his mission for Christ: “Feeling immovably assured that my God and Father was too wise and loving to err in anything that he does or permits, I looked up to the Lord for help, and struggled on in his work” (138).

Scottish missionary to Africa David Livingstone likewise considered hardships for Jesus the merest of sacrifices. In 1857, he appealed to ambitious Cambridge students to see everything from an eternal perspective:

Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in, and for, us. (Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, 23)

Livingstone viewed hardships as small renunciations compared with the supreme sacrifice of Christ: “Of [sacrifice] we ought not to talk, when we remember the great sacrifice which he made who left his Father’s throne on high to give himself for us” (23).

“Human weakness or small beginnings simply do not matter when you trust an infinite God.”

Cambridge graduate and English missionary C.T. Studd, who under Livingstone’s influence gave away his great wealth and abandoned a successful sporting career, reformulated Livingstone’s sentiment into a pithy personal motto: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, can any sacrifice be too great for me to make for him?” (C.T. Studd, 141). Like Livingstone, Studd died in the heart of the Congo. His last intelligible word was “Hallelujah!”

Small Servants, Great God

These qualities — a missional mindset, an affinity for the Jewish people, a heart for the lost, and a willingness to sacrifice for Christ — cultivated by grace and reinforced by confessional theology, enabled Scotland to play an outsized role in the history of missions. Human weakness or small beginnings simply do not matter when you trust an infinite God. So, boldly go and do likewise, confident that God delights to use those who feel they have little to offer to him (2 Corinthians 12:9).