An Enquiry

No book since the apostolic authors has more positively impacted the means and methods of the Church's mission to reach the entire world with the gospel of Jesus Christ than William Carey's Enquiry. First published in 1792, Carey challenged the status quo interpretation by many influential mainstream Protestants that Jesus' Great Commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature had been fulfilled by the Apostles by the end of the first century. Carey struck a match that set fire to English Particular Baptists to not only organize their first global missions society, with Carey and company as its first commissioned missionaries, but also sparked a continual flame of other missions organizations formed that expanded global missions for the next 100 years so far and wide, it led the eminent Yale church historian, Kenneth Scott Latourette, to proclaim the era "The Great Century of Missions." He writes in his summation of the era after Carey, "William Carey and the society which arose in response to his faith were in fact the beginning of an astounding series of Protestant efforts to reach the entire world with the Christian message." Indeed Latourette devoted an entire volume of his seven volume set, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, to the missionary fire Carey started in 1792. "In spite of serious obstacles presented in the nineteenth century? So widely did [Christianity] spread and such diverse and remarkable results did it have, that we are compelled to devote as much space to that era as to all the preceding eighteen centuries." TMU Press is honored to offer the public a modern version of William Carey's missions classic, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens. While some of Carey's language is updated, know his original fire still burns brightly.