The Baptist mission to Burma initially did not target the hill tribes, but rather the Burmans.
In 1807, the Serampore Mission extended its work to Burma, and Felix Carey was appointed one of its first missionaries.
British Missionary Dr. Felix Carey (eldest son of William Carey, founder of the English Baptist Missionary Society (1792) and lifelong missionary to India) served as a missionary doctor in Burma in 1807 before Adoniram Judson arrived. For Felix, life in Rangoon was difficult. Felix won favor by vaccinating Burmese people, including the Maywoon family, but food items were scarce, and it was difficult to learn Burmese. Felix Carey lost both his wife and mother in 1808.
In July 1813, when Felix Carey was in Ava, two young Americans, Adoniram Judson and his wife, Ann, tempest-tossed and fleeing persecution by the East India Company, found shelter in the Mission House at Rangoon.
Judson was one of a band of divinity students of the Congregational Church of New England, whose zeal had almost compelled the institution of the American Board of Foreign Missions. He, his wife, and colleague Rice had become Baptists by conviction on their way to Serampore, to the brotherhood of which they had been commended. Carey and his colleagues made it “a point to guard against obtruding on missionary brethren of different sentiments any conversation relative to baptism.” Still, Judson himself sent a note to Carey requesting baptism by immersion.
Felix Carey’s medical and linguistic skills so commended him to the king that he was loaded with honors and sent as Burmese ambassador to the Governor-General in 1814, when he withdrew from the Christian mission.
Pioneer of Baptist Missionaries to Burma
Adoniram Judson was born in Massachusetts in 1788.
In 1810, Adoniram Judson, with three others, offered himself for missionary work to the General Association of the Congregational Church. As a result, the American Board for Foreign Missions was founded. After being ordained for the Congregational Church on February 19, 1812, young Adoniram Judson and his bride of seven days, Ann Haseltine Judson, set sail for India, supported by the first American Board for Foreign Missions. But on that voyage, Judson saw the teaching of immersion as the mode of baptism in the Bible. Conscientiously and courageously, he withdrew his support from the Congregational board until a Baptist board could be established to support him. He and his companions eventually reached Calcutta in 1812, where, soon afterwards, he became a Baptist. On September 6, 1812, Judson and his wife were baptized by Rev. Ward in Calcutta. The East India Company having refused him permission to work in India, he arrived at Rangoon, Burma, on July 13, 1813, where one of the English missionaries, Mr. Carey, had already begun missionary work in 1807. When the American Baptists heard of Judson’s change of views, they determined to support him and founded the society, which was known as the American Baptist Missionary Union. The English missionaries in Rangoon then handed over their work to ABMU.
By 1816, Judson had prepared the Gospel of Matthew in Burmese, following up short tracts “accommodated to the optics of a Burman.” He finished the translation of Matthew on May 20, 1817, and the whole Bible on January 13, 1834.
After nearly six years in Burma, on June 27, 1819, Judson baptized Moung Naw, his first Burman convert. At the end of seven years, Judson had baptized 10 Burmese converts. He died on April 12, 1850, at sea. That evening in the greatest silence, broken only by the voice of the captain, his body was lowered on the larboard side into the Indian Ocean, even without a prayer.
In 1852, there were 62 missionaries, male and female, in Burma. The number of baptized members belonging to the Baptist mission in 1911 was: Burmese 3,182; Karen 54,799; Kachin 371; Chin 1,011; Shan 338; Talaing 308; Muhso 9,343; Tamil 465; others 579, making a total of 70,396.
Adoniram Judson was not involved with the Shan. But he did mention the Shan first in a list of the peoples of Burma, he represented as he was calling for help in his letter written from Rangoon in 1831.
Shans were Overlooked
When Eugenio Kincaid and his wife were in Ava (Mandalay) in 1833-1836, he wrote that a missionary would find a wide field of labor among the Shan. About the time that the letter arrived in Moulmain, Burma, the missionary force there had been strengthened beyond the needs of the local work, even though Judson was eager to extend to wider fields. No missionary came to the Shan until 1861.
Rev. Moses Homan Bixby said in his letter on April 12, 1861, from Rangoon, “For the forty-nine years during which missions have been in the Burman empire, but the Shan were wholly overlooked. Nothing was done for their moral or intellectual improvement. Just at the time, however, when the hands of the persecuting Burmese are raised against them for their oppression, the Christian people of the mother hemisphere have been adopting measures to send them the light of the gospel by the hands of a missionary of the cross. Every philanthropist will heartily wish success to this new Christian enterprise.”