Source: God Reports, January 30, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
George Liele, a former black slave, sailed for Jamaica to reach the lost in 1782, 11 years ahead of heralded British missionary William Carey and long before American Adoniram Judson sailed to India (and later Burma) in 1812.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Liele was a slave in Georgia who received Jesus into his heart in 1773 under the coaxing of his master, Henry Sharp, at the local Baptist church. He was ordained on May 20, 1775, becoming the first officially recognized black preacher in the Colonies. Seeing the anointing on Liele\u2019s life, his master freed him from slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pastor Liele migrated to Jamaica with the help of British colonel Moses Kirkland. Landing at Kingston, Liele and his wife, Hannah, planted a church there by preaching among the slaves of Jamaica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He served for 10 fruitful years but also faced severe opposition from the slave owners, who cynically viewed his preaching as agitating the slaves, and even was thrown in jail for a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Liele didn\u2019t limit his outreach to people of color. As a result of his ministry, people from all sorts of ethnicities became believers in Jamaica. By 1838, Jamaica had 20,000 believing Baptists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read the full story<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days it isn\u2019t hard to find information about George Liele and other once-obscure pioneering missionaries. A somewhat longer biography with references<\/a> points out that like many other slaves, Liele had sided with the British during the American Revolution. That (and not just missionary zeal) led to his decision to become an indentured servant to pay for his family\u2019s passage to Jamaica (Boston University).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: God Reports, January 30, 2023 George Liele, a former black slave, sailed for Jamaica to reach the lost in 1782, 11 years ahead of heralded British missionary William Carey and long before American Adoniram Judson sailed to India (and later Burma) in 1812. Liele was a slave in Georgia who received Jesus into his … Continue reading Jamaica: The Surprising Story of America\u2019s First Missionary<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11746,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745\/revisions\/11746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}