The Baptist Missionary Society began in a small room in Kettering in 1792, with a cobbler-preacher's conviction that the church should both dare much and rely on God for much. A year later it sent William Carey to Bengal. Settling under Danish protection at Serampore, Carey and his colleagues Marshman and Ward turned the mission into a workshop of translation and printing, putting Scripture into Bengali and other tongues, founding a college, and lending weight to early campaigns for social reform.
It started the way a village cooperative does — a handful of ordinary people pooling their first small coins for a venture far larger than any of them could fund alone.
- Founded at Kettering in October 1792, after Carey's appeal that Christians should expect great things and attempt great things
- Sent Carey to Bengal in 1793; its base settled at Danish-held Serampore from 1800
- Ran the Serampore Press, printed the first Bengali New Testament, and founded Serampore College in 1818
- Its missionaries' long campaign against widow-burning fed into the 1829 ban on the practice
Sources: carey-myers-life p.31 · carey-faithful-witness p.18 · neill-history-1707-1858 p.220