Bible Missionary Quotes & Sayings

To know the will of God, we need an open Bible and an open map. — William Carey

My views of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm," Livingstone explained. "I have labored in bricks and mortar, at the forge and at the carpenter's bench, as well as in preaching and medical practice. I feel that I am 'not my own.' I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or taking an astronomical observation. — Jay Milbrandt

These bible people remind me of another calamity similar to this missionary scheme, when our people, or any christian power would go to Africa for the pious purpose of kidnapping negroes, the mother would cry out to her children "run, run, the christians are coming," so when ever you hear "bibles," run for your life, if you do not want your pockets picked, or to be insulted and slandered as I was ... and if you hear "hopeful conversions" or the "gospel," don't stop to look behind you. — Anne Royall

Nature is God's first missionary. Where there is no Bible there are sparkling stars. Where there are not preachers there are spring times ...
If a person has nothing but nature, then nature is enough to reveal something about God. — Max Lucado

To see a thing one has to comprehend it. An armchair presupposes the human body, its joints and limbs; a pair of scissors, the act of cutting. What can be said of a lamp or a car? The savage cannot comprehend the missionary's Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the sailors. If we really saw the world, maybe we would understand it. — Jorge Luis Borges

If you take missions out of the Bible, you won't have anything left but the covers. — Nina Gunter

The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner. — William Cameron Townsend

In telling these stories of our Nation's past, however, let's not be so zealous in correcting liberal historians that we create our own historical revisionism. If the Founding Fathers were alive today, some of them would not want to go to the typical Evangelical church. Some were influenced by the pagan Enlightenment, as well as the Protestant Reformation. one historical figure (not a Founding Father) who's been misrepresented in our quest to find Christian heroes is Johnny Appleseed. He's routinely pictured as a nice man who went around scattering apple seeds everywhere and toting a Bible under his arm. The fact is, Johnny Appleseed was a missionary for Swedenbogrism, a spiritist cult. This cult taught many false doctrines and claimed that the writings of the Apostle Paul had no place in the Bible. When a child hears that Johnny Appleseed is a 'godly hero' and then discovers that he was in fact a cult member, what will he logically conclude about everything he's been taught? — Gregg Harris

Cyrus Scofield, a preacher from Dallas, Texas, was another link in the chain that connected missionary theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This violent priest produced an annotated, fundamentalist version of the Bible that was published by Oxford University Press in 1909. It was, in a way, the most explicit sketch of the three prongs that form the basis for U.S. policy today: the return of the Jews, the decline of Islam, and the rising fortunes of the United States as a world power. — Noam Chomsky

Apropos of Eskimo, I once heard a missionary describe the extraordinary difficulty he had found in translating the Bible into Eskimo. It was useless to talk of corn or wine to a people who did not know even what they meant, so he had to use equivalents within their powers of comprehension. Thus in the Eskimo version of the Scriptures the miracle of Cana of Galilee is described as turning the water into blubber; the 8th verse of the 5th chapter of the First Epistle of St. Peter ran: 'Your adversary the devil, as a roaring Polar bear walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.' In the same way 'A land flowing with milk and honey' became 'A land flowing with whale's blubber,' and throughout the New Testament the words 'Lamb of God' had to be translated 'little Seal of God,' as the nearest possible equivalent. The missionary added that his converts had the lowest opinion of Jonah for not having utilised his exceptional opportunities by killing and eating the whale. — Frederick Hamilton

The Bible is not the basis of missions; missions is the basis of the Bible. — Ralph Winter

That uncivilized heathen nations should first be civilized, and then Christianized, is a sentiment of the past. Now it is coming more and more to be acknowledged, that the Bible is the great civilizer of the nations. — Stephen Return Riggs

For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses
an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion. — Sarah Vowell

The hardest part of a missionary career is to maintain regular, prayerful Bible study. Satan will always find you something to do, when you ought to be occupied about that - if it is only arranging a window blind! — Hudson Taylor