The Life and Diary of David Brainerd

“Let every preacher read carefully over the Life of David Brainerd.” John Wesley\nDavid Brainerd has for centuries been referred to as the model missionary.\nThrough his short twenty-nine years on earth he focused solely upon doing one thing: to preach the gospel to those who had not yet heard its words.\nBorn in Haddam, Connecticut, in 1718, he lost his father at the age of nine and his mother at the age of fourteen.\nAt the age of twenty-one he had his road to Damascus moment and recorded that he had an experience of “unspeakable glory” that prompted him a “hearty desire to exalt [God], to set him on the throne and to ‘seek first his Kingdom.’"\nAlthough already suffering with the first signs of the tuberculosis, that would claim his life seven years later, he immersed himself in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and on 1st April 1743 began his life working as a missionary to Native Americans.\nThe Life and Diary of David Brainerd, that was compiled and edited by his good friend the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, provides fascinating insight into Brainerd’s life preaching in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.\nThrough the course of his short life he preached to Housatonic Indians, Delaware Indians and in less than a year of being in Crossweeksung in New Jersey he had built up a church community of one hundred and thirty Native Americans.\nHe suffered endless trials and tribulations, not least continually spluttering blood from his ever-worsening tuberculosis, yet through all this he remained motivated. In his diary he stated his driving force behind his missionary activities on July 24th 1744: “All my desire was the conversion of the heathen, and all my hope was in God. God does not suffer me to please or comfort myself with hopes of seeing friends, returning to my dear acquaintance, and enjoying worldly comforts.”\nThe Life and Diary of David Brainerd is essential reading for anyone interested in the missionary activities that occurred among Native Americans in the colonial period as well as those who wish to read about the life of a man who pushed through endless difficulties with the aid of the gospel.\nDavid Brainerd was an American missionary to the Native Americans who had a particularly fruitful ministry among the Delaware Indians of New Jersey.
The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, is a biography of David Brainerd by evangelical theologian Jonathan Edwards, first published in 1749 under the title "An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd". Brainerd passed away in 1747 and Jonathan Edwards passed away in 1758.