One of the most moving books that I've read on missions is the St Andrews 7 by Stuart Pigeon and John Roxborough, Banner of Truth Trust, 1985.

The reason I mention it here is a couple of reasons.

One is because this is a seminary.

It's a story about how Thomas Chalmers in the 1820s,

Professor in Scotland, St Andrews,

inspired six of his best students

to devote themselves to a radical missionary commitment that

totaled up to about 141 years of missionary involvement among those guys.

One of them was named Urquhart,

Urquhart, John Urquhart, who died at the age of 18 and had already written a two volume memoirs and in it he had a quote that

goes like this.

We know of no office in the Church of God

where the very highest mental attainments

can be more beneficially employed than in the office,

all despise as it is, of the Christian missionary.

Now I mentioned this book and that quote because of the bearing on my life and on this school I think namely that missions has historically from the first era to the second era to the third era in large measure grown out of a great vision of God and largely out of people who were very doctrinally oriented and very

thoughtful and intellectual kinds of people.

As Chalmers said, it was a vision of the greatness of God in his grand design

for the world that motivated people in the second generation of which he was apart and the first generation of modern missions of which

William Carey is an example who went to India you know and spent 40 years there without a furlow and Carrie was very intelligent he had a great

Calvinistic theology as a Baptist and he devoted himself to translating the Bible into goodness who knows how many language

29 or more.

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