200

I noticed that this is my 200th post so I thought I’d do something a little different and highlight an organisation that started 200 years ago in a pub in London.

In 1794 a ten-year-old Welsh girl named Mary Jones became the first in her family to learn to read. Her accomplishment was rewarded when her teacher invited her to read aloud from the Welsh Bible at school. Mary was so moved by the words she was reading she resolved then and there to do everything in her power to own a Bible.

For six years she knitted socks, grew vegetables, kept bees, raised chickens and helped local farmers harvest their crops, little by little earning the money she needed. She lived for Saturdays when she would visit Mrs. Evans, a local farmer’s wife who invited her to come and read the Scriptures at her home.

By the age of 16 Mary had finally saved enough money. She had heard that Mr. Charles, the minister in Bala, had Bibles for sale. Although it was an arduous journey of around 40 kilometres through a forbidding landscape, Mary set off, praying for safety as she walked.

She arrived the next day to discover that only one Welsh Bible was left – and that had been promised to someone else. She began to weep. Mr. Charles was deeply moved and took pity on her, saying that he had another Bible in English, and his friend could read English as well as Welsh. He sold the Welsh Bible to Mary.

The incident touched Mr. Charles’ heart and moved him to action. Four years later in London he presented the need of the Welsh people for the Scriptures with such eloquence that the Reverend Thomas Hughes, minister of the Baptist church in Battersea, cried out, “Surely a Society might be formed for the purpose! But if for Wales, why not for Great Britain? Why not for the world?”

The inaugural meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society drew three hundred people to the London Tavern on the seventh of March 1804.

From this simple meeting began the British and Foreign Bible Society and, subsequently, the Bible Society movement worldwide.

Posted by Rodney Olsen



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About the author

Rodney Olsen

Rodney is a husband, father, cyclist, blogger and podcaster from Perth Western Australia.

He has worked in radio at Perth's media ministry Sonshine for over 25 years and has previously worked at ministries such as Compassion Australia and Bible Society.

The views he expresses here are his own.

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