- Published on
Burning of 18 Persons in Salzburg, 1528 in The Martyrs Mirror by Jan Luiken
Why the forgotten saints of the past can sharpen our mission vision for today
by Aaron Myers
In 1527, a group of Anabaptist leaders gathered for what would become known as the Martyrs Synod, a meeting of men and women so committed to the Great Commission that many of them would not live to see the next few years. I read about it last week, and I was stunned that I had never heard the story. That discovery is the seed of this new feature, “Cloud of Witnesses,” in which I hope to highlight the lesser-known stories of faith and mission in the history of the church.
There are two ditches we moderns can fall into. The first is discouragement. We look at our own culture, the one we long to see transformed by the gospel, and feel that it has never been this bad, this hopeless. The second is what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery: the quiet assumption that our generation has finally figured out theology and mission, and that those before us had little to teach.
Looking back corrects both. We find that our ideas are rarely new and our challenges are rarely unique. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, brothers and sisters who, in their own time and place, threw themselves into the harvest among those far from God. They may be unknown to us, but they were never unknown to the One who sent them. Historian John Lewis Gaddis says that studying the past doesn’t predict the future, but it prepares us for it “by expanding experience, so that you can increase your skills, your stamina—and, if all goes well—your wisdom.”
That is my aim here: to help us grow in skill, stamina, and wisdom for the work ahead. In the coming months, I’ll write about the Martyrs Synod and the men and women who went out from it to carry the gospel forth. I’ll also tell the stories of Rose Lambert, Lillias Trotter, George Lele, Samson Occom and many more. I plan to write four to six of these articles each year, each highlighting one lesser-known missionary and the lessons we can learn from their life.
Do you have a missionary whose story deserves to be told? I’d love to hear who you would add to the list.
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