God'sTrioPartners
For Mission Myanmar
The Gospel in Myanmar
​Adoniram Judson, America's first overseas missionary, landed on the harbours of Myanmar (Burma) on July 13, 1813. This year 2013 marks the 200th Anniversary of Judson's Ministry. Judson began learning the language and was able to translate the whole Bible into Burmese. He also compiled two dictionaries; one from English to Burmese and the other from Burmese to English. They are both still the most comprehensive and useful sources available today.
Adoniram Judson
​​9 August 1788 -​
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12 April 1850
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Adoniram Judson was born in Malden, Middlesex County in Massachusetts, USA. He grew up as the son of a Minister but while at College made close friends with Jacob Eames who was a profound skeptic and Jacob's influence turned the young Judson away from his childhood faith.
However, Judson's deist views were shaken when his friend died a voilent death. And Judson returned to his faith during his years at Handover Seminary College.
In 1808, in his last year of College, Judson dedicated himself to God and also committed himself to God to become a missionary. He then started getting invovled with mission minded students.
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Later on, he travelled to London and then from there, along with his new wife Ann (Nancy) took a ship bound for India. The Judsons arrived in Calcutta on June 17, 1812. However the Hindus did not recieve the foreigners well and by that that America had declared war on Britan so they were forced out of India. But Judson and his wife boarded a Ship bound for Rangoon instead. They arrived on July 13, 1813.
Judson who already knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew well and began studying the Burmese language. It took him three years of intense learning, twelve hours a day together with a tutor to learn Burmese fluently. But the Judson's dedication to learning the language in order to share the Gospel was a burning desire.
Judson and Ann did all they could to fit into the Burmese culture including wearing the native clothes, eating the food, living in homes like the Burmese and sharing the Gospel. But it took Judson almost six years to convert the first man.
Fifteen men came to his first public meeting in April 1819. He was encouraged but suspected they had come more out of curiosity than anything else. Their attention wandered, and they soon seemed uninterested. Two months later, he baptized his first Burmese convert, Maung Naw, a 35-year-old timber worker from the hill tribes. It took two years to convert eighteen people by 1822.
Judson's calling to Missions
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Today there are three million Christians (but not all born again) who are from those minority tribes (mostly Karens, Kachins, and Chins). The major tribes, which include the Burmese (70% of the population), the Shans and the Rakhines, and many other minority tribes are still mostly un-reached. There are over 100 languages (nations) in Myanmar and 57 of them still have no portion of the Bible in their languages yet.
Christianity in Myanmar Today
Ancient Prophecies
The Karen tribes had a myth that a white man with a black book under his arm would bring back their lost religion and had waited for this day for many generations. When Judson and the American missionaries preached the Gospel from their black covered Bibles, mass conversions took place. Other tribes had similar stories and they too were converted.
Judson's Legacy
When Judson began his mission in Burma, he set a goal of translating the Bible and founding a church of 100 members before his death. When he died, he left the Bible, two comprehensive dictionaries, 100 churches, and over 8,000 believers. In large part due to his influence, Myanmar has the third largest number of Baptists worldwide, behind the United States and India. The majority of adherents are Karen and Kachin.
Conversions
​While the nation was Burmese, a lost province of Great Britain, and the missionaries were American, the apostle of that first numerically significant evangelistic breakthrough was neither Burman, British, nor American. He was a Karen, Ko Tha Byu.
The Karen people were a primitive, hunted minority group of ancient Tibeto-Burman ancestry scattered in the forests and jungles of the Salween River and in the hills along the southeast coast. Judson was the first missionary to make contact with them in 1827, when he ransomed and freed a debt-slave from one of his early converts. The freed slave, Ko Tha Byu, was an illiterate, surly man who spoke almost no Burmese and was reputed to be not only a thief, but also a murderer who admitted killing at least 30 men, but could not remember exactly how many more.
British Burma
It was not long after the first conversions, with Britan's hunger for more trade to extend to the east, and Burma wanting to extend it's territories westward towards India, the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 occured. During those wars, Judson was imprisoned for seventeen months in Ava and Pinle. Then the prisoners were marched barefoot to a primitive village near Mandalay for six months. In total Judson spent twenty months in the prisons and all but one of the prisoners of war died. The collapse of the Burmese brought Judson out of prison but he was still under the service of the Burmese, being used as a translator between the British and the Burmese in peace negotiations. In the British ruled territories, the Baptist congregations would grow but were mostly from Animist backgrounds and not from the Buddhist Burmese. The British were to rule Burma for the next one hundred years.
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