Long before the first missionary reached them, the Karen kept a memory: a book of gold that their fathers had been given, and had lost.
The book that was lost
The Karen told of one Creator God named Y'wa, who made the world and the first man and woman. They told of a book — a golden book — that Y'wa had once given their fathers, and that their fathers had lost. And they held to a strange hope: that one day a younger white brother would come from across the sea and bring the lost book home.
This is their own tradition, not ours. Historians who have studied the Karen record it plainly, and we pass it on the way they told it.
Their old stories carry more than that. The Karen told of a creation and a garden, of a first pair who fell, of a tempter, in ways that ran close to the opening pages of Genesis.
What to make of that, and what not to
We do not rest the weight of the gospel on an old legend, and neither did they. The Book still had to be read, believed and obeyed, the same as anywhere else. Nobody was saved by a folk memory.
But the hope is worth sitting with. God is not absent from a people until a missionary shows up. He goes ahead of every worker. He leaves a hunger in a place, and sometimes the hunger has a shape.
Among the Karen the shape was a lost book, and it was waiting when the Book finally came up the river.
A man who had been sold
The man who opened the Karen to the gospel was not a missionary from Boston. He was a Karen.
Ko Tha Byu had been a slave — sold, and then bought by a Burmese Christian who brought him into Judson's circle. There he heard the gospel, believed, and was baptized in 1828.
Then he went to his own people in the hills with the news, alongside the missionary George Boardman. The Karen had been waiting, remember. Here was one of their own, telling them the lost book had come home. They did not have to cross a gulf to trust the messenger. He was already theirs.
They listened.
What followed
Ko Tha Byu spent the rest of his life carrying the gospel from village to village until he died in 1840, and the church he helped start kept multiplying after him.
By common estimates, within roughly twenty-five years of his baptism there were nearly twelve thousand baptized Karen believers — one count puts the figure at 11,878. We give it as an estimate because that is what it is; the nineteenth-century records are good but they are not a census.
They called him the apostle to the Karen, and the name fit. A freed slave became the door through which a whole people walked toward Christ.
That is how God tends to work. He picks the person no empire would have picked.
Two men, one field
Hold two names together and you have the whole argument.
Judson: the scholar who spent his life giving the Karen and the Burmese a Bible in their own tongue, who waited six or seven years for one convert, who finished the Burmese Bible in 1834 and died at sea in 1850 without ever going home.
Ko Tha Byu: the freed slave who carried that book up into the hills, to people who would trust his face because it looked like theirs.
The Westerner and the national, working the same field, each doing what the other could not. Judson could not be Karen. Ko Tha Byu could not have produced the translation. Neither was enough alone, and neither was in competition with the other.
Why this is not just history
That partnership is the oldest pattern in this story, and it is the pattern we still work by two hundred years later.
It is the reason we do not describe what we do as sending Americans. There are believers living inside the hardest places on earth who will never need a visa, a support letter or an exit plan. They are already fluent, already trusted, already at home. What they often lack is training, and someone standing behind them.
The Karen did not need a foreigner to reach the Karen. They needed a Bible in their language, and one of their own men who had read it. One of those things came from outside. The other never could have.
That is still the division of labor, and knowing which half is ours has saved us from a great deal of foolishness.
James Bell is Founder and Director of ENDS, Lead Pastor of First Baptist Church of Fenton, Michigan, founder of the Pastors Connection Network, and author and creator of LiveWell by James Bell. He writes on world missions, national-pastor training, and the unfinished work of the Great Commission. More about the team.