David Brainerd dies at 29
The missionary who inspired a thousand missionaries
David Brainerd dies at twenty-nine in the home of Jonathan Edwards, coughing his lungs out from tuberculosis, and his life does not look like a success.
He was expelled from Yale for an intemperate remark about a tutor. He was refused ordination because of the expulsion. He spent four years as a missionary to Native Americans in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, learning the Delaware language, riding through forests in all weather, preaching to communities that mostly ignored him — until, in 1745, revival broke out among the Delaware people at Crossweeksung in New Jersey and hundreds came to faith.
Then his health collapsed completely and he came to die in Edwards's house.
Edwards publishes his diary after his death. The diary is the record of a soul in sustained anguish — Brainerd suffers from depression of a severity that would be diagnosed and treated in any modern context, and he records it with an honesty that is almost unbearable to read. He doubts. He despairs. He keeps going anyway.
The diary becomes one of the most influential documents in the history of Protestant mission. William Carey reads it before sailing to India. Jim Elliot reads it before going to Ecuador. Henry Martyn reads it before going to Persia. John Wesley reads it and calls it the most extraordinary account of God's dealings with a soul he has ever read.
Brainerd's four years of obscure, sickness-plagued, mostly-unsuccessful mission to the Delaware people inspire more missionaries than any other single life in the Protestant tradition.
“I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but gain souls for Christ.”
— David Brainerd, Diary, c. 1745 AD
“He has said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me.”
Brainerd died at twenty-nine with almost nothing to show for it by ordinary measures. Four years of sickness and struggle and a revival that lasted only a few years before the communities that produced it were displaced.
And yet his diary has inspired more missionaries than any comparable document — because the missionaries who read it saw in it not a heroic success story but an honest account of what faithfulness actually looks like from the inside: doubt, depression, persistent obedience, and the occasional breakthrough that makes the persistent obedience worth it.
The power is made perfect in weakness. Brainerd's weakness is the most documented and most productive in Protestant history.
What is the weakness you have been ashamed of that may be exactly the place where God's power is waiting to rest?