He Was Free, and He Went Anyway

Almost nobody knows the name, and the reason for that is worth sitting with.

George Liele was born into slavery in Virginia, around 1750. The date is approximate; the records for enslaved people in that period are not complete and his birth year is given differently in different sources, and I am going to say that rather than pick one and state it flatly.

He was converted as a young man, began preaching, and was freed by his owner, a Baptist deacon named Henry Sharp, who recognized the gift.

After the Revolutionary War, with his freedom at risk in the new order, he left Savannah for Jamaica. The year is given as 1782 or 1783 depending on the source, and the record does not settle it precisely.

Here is how he paid for the voyage.

He indentured himself. He had been enslaved, had been freed, and then bound himself into an indenture to a colonel in order to buy passage for himself and his family, and he worked that indenture off in Jamaica before he was free again.

Then he started a church in Kingston.

He went before anybody was sending anybody

Here is the fact that reorders the whole story.

William Carey, who is usually called the father of the modern missionary movement, sailed for India in 1793. Adoniram Judson, the first American usually named in these lists, sailed in 1812.

George Liele was in Jamaica about ten years before Carey and about thirty before Judson.

He is generally recognized as the first American to go abroad as a missionary, and he did it with no society behind him, no board, no salary and no sending church. He paid his own passage by indenture.

You are not disqualified by where you came from. 1 Timothy 1:12 has Paul thanking Christ for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, and it is the Holy Spirit who reads that over a person who has been counting themselves out.

Here is the verse.

And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry1 Timothy 1:12, King James Version

He counted me faithful. And read the next verse if you want to know what Paul thought about his own record, because he lists it: a blasphemer, a persecutor, injurious. He does not hide it and he does not minimize it.

The counting was done by somebody else, and it was done over a man with a documented past.

You have been counted by somebody other than yourself, and Paul lists his own record in the very next line. 1 Timothy 1:12-13 keeps the appointment and the history in the same breath, and the same Spirit who kept them adjacent is the reason the record does not have to be cleared first.

Now what happened in Jamaica, because it is documented and it is remarkable.

Liele founded a Baptist church in Kingston and it grew. He wrote letters back, some of which survive and are a primary source for what he was doing. He was careful about how he operated in a slave colony, and he required written permission from owners before baptizing enslaved people, because the alternative would have got people killed.

He was imprisoned on a charge of sedition, and acquitted. He was jailed for debt over the chapel building.

And the movement he began grew, and Baptist work in Jamaica traces back to it.

You have a life with prison in it twice and a church at the end of it, and both are in the record. The written letters he sent survive as a source, and it is His Spirit who is the reason the imprisonments are part of the account rather than an embarrassment removed from it.

Now the honest part, and this category requires it.

Dates in Liele's life are uncertain in several places. His birth year is approximate. The year of his arrival is given variously. Some details come from his own letters, written years after the events, and letters are a good source and not a perfect one.

And the reason he is not better known is itself contested. Some historians point to the ordinary neglect of Black figures in the writing of that history. Others point to his distance from the mission societies that generated most of the records. Both are argued and I am not going to settle it.

You have been kept in a record that took a long time to be read properly, and being unread is not the same as not having happened. The written letters existed the whole time, and the same Spirit who preserved them is the reason a life is not measured by who noticed it.