Church of Scotland Mission (later Free Church of Scotland)

Scotland's mission in India was built around a strategy as much as a man. Its first foreign missionary, Alexander Duff, arrived in Calcutta and in 1830 opened a school teaching in English, convinced that education would loosen old certainties and open minds to the gospel. When the Scottish church split in 1843, Duff and his colleagues gave up their buildings and salaries to join the Free Church, and simply began again.

Duff did not build a pulpit but a staircase, trusting that the climb itself — lesson by lesson — would change whoever reached the top.

• Sent Alexander Duff, its first foreign missionary, who opened an English-medium school in Calcutta in 1830
• At the 1843 Disruption its Calcutta missionaries joined the new Free Church of Scotland and carried the work on
• Its educational approach fed into wider Indian education reform and the later University of Calcutta

Sources: duff-life-v2 p.1 · neill-history-1707-1858 p.331