author
Rufus Anderson
1796–1880
A major architect of 19th-century American Protestant missions, he helped shape how mission work was organized around the world. His books and reports offered a practical, influential vision of how churches could be planted and sustained abroad.
3 Audiobooks
History of the missions of the American board of commissioners for foreign missions to the oriental churches, Volume II.
by Rufus Anderson
History of the missions of the American board of commissioners for foreign missions to the oriental churches, Volume I.
by Rufus Anderson
Memoir of Catharine Brown : A Christian Indian of the Cherokee nation
by Rufus Anderson
About the author
Born in North Yarmouth, Maine, in 1796, Rufus Anderson grew up in a minister's household and went on to study at Bowdoin College and Andover Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1826 and soon became closely tied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the organization with which his name is most strongly linked.
Anderson spent decades as a leading administrator and strategist for the Board, including many years as its senior foreign secretary. Rather than being known mainly as a field missionary, he became important for the way he organized, evaluated, and wrote about mission work. He traveled to inspect missions in places including the eastern Mediterranean and India, and those journeys informed the reports and books that made him an influential voice in Protestant missionary thinking.
He is especially remembered for arguing that missions should aim to build self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating local churches. That approach shaped later mission policy far beyond his own lifetime. Anderson died in 1880, but his historical writings and ideas about how missions should grow continued to be widely read.