William Taylor

William Taylor (1821–1902) was an American Methodist missionary minister, who in 1884 was elected by the Methodist General Conference as bishop over the Methodist missions in Africa for the Methodist Episcopal Church. Taylor spent most of his adult life performing missionary work around the world. He began his missionary service when he was assigned by the Conference to establish missions in California and provide services in San Francisco during the California gold rush of 1849. His other missionary work involved the establishment of self-supporting missions in various countries about the world, bringing him to England, Ireland, India, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa, all of which he wrote about in a number of publications. After many years serving as a Methodist missionary Taylor was elected Bishop of Africa. He has received acclaim and is noted for introducing Methodism through his missionary efforts to several countries around the world. Taylor is also credited for introducing the eucalyptus tree to California with seeds he gathered while serving as a missionary in Australia.

Family background Taylor was born May 2, 1821, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in Rockbridge County. in the Commonwealth of Virginia. William was the oldest of five sons and six daughters, born to Stuart Taylor and Martha Hickman. In his autobiography, Story of My Life (1896), Taylor describes his grandfather, James, as one of five brothers who were "Scotch-Irish of the Old Covenantor type" who emigrated from County Armagh, Ireland, to the colony of Virginia, about one hundred and thirty years ago" (i.e. 1766). The Hickman family was of English ancestry and settled in Delaware in the late 1750s. Both families "fought for American freedom in the Revolution of 1776", and afterward emancipated their slaves. Taylor married Isabelle Anne Kimberlin on October 21, 1846 after waiting an mutually agreed upon arrangement that he would serve the church for four years. Taylor had two sons and two daughters, Morgan Stuart, Oceana, William Jr., and Charles Reid. Only Morgan lived to see adulthood.

Conversion to Christ Before William was ten years old, his grandmother had taught him the Lord's Prayer and explained that he could become a son of God. At age ten he longed for this relationship, but was unsure how to obtain it, during which time he underwent a "profound religious experience", which was affirmed for him in 1841 at the age of twenty. After overhearing the story of a poor Black man who had received salvation, he wondered why he could not, also.

Missionary work

Between 1849 and 1883, Taylor traveled and became involved in many parts of the world as an evangelist missionary. His extensive missionary travels included Australia and South Africa (1863-1866); England, the West Indies, British Guiana, and Ceylon (1866-1870); India (1870-1875); South America (1875-1884); and Liberia, Angola, the Congo, Australia and Mozambique, a global involvement unmatched by no other during his time (1885-1896). Taylor was committed to bringing salvation to those he deemed were in need of it, and to this end he wrote a work, entitled, Reconciliation, or, How to be saved, which he had first published in 1867. To assist other preachers in this effort he also wrote the work, The Best Mode of Preaching the Gospel, published in 1859.

California

Taylor's missionary career began in San Francisco, California in September 1849, the year after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, resulting in the California gold rush. Due to the thousands of people flooding into California the Methodist General Conference deemed it necessary to send missionaries there to provide social work and religious services. The first sent for this undertaking were Reverends William Taylor and Isaac Owen. When Taylor arrived, and with no chapel for people to gather in and listen to sermons, Taylor preached the gospel in the streets to settlers, prospectors, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and to the sick and the poor, without receiving any salary. He subsequently came to be known as "California Taylor" throughout his missionary career. In October 1849 Taylor acquired a lot next to the home of Reverend Hatler on Jackson Street who invited him and advanced him the money at no interest to build his own house. Thriving congregations also emerged at Sacramento, San Jose, Stockton, and Santa Cruz while the Gospel was also preached in many of the mining camps. As the immigration increased so did the numbers in the congregations. Their ship, Captain Wilson at the helm, had arrived in the midst of a thick fog and so he cautiously landed just north of the Golden Gate. During the voyage they had experienced incidents of damage to the rigging and sails due to high winds, which the captain was able to remedy en route, without have to stop at any port. Having been informed about the very high cost of food in San Francisco due to the gold rush, the Taylors brought a year's supply of food along with them. As the rents for housing accommodations were also abnormally high, Taylor and his wife found lodging with another Methodist minister who gave them the first month's rent free. Having logging experience, he crossed the bay north to the redwood forests and acquired his own timber in which he used to erect his own house, in less than a month. The main square had many gambling hotels, where Taylor would spend time outside preaching in the streets about the vices of gambling and drinking, which was, to the amazement of some, often well received by the patrons of those establishments.

Taylor had preached hundreds of sermons in the streets of San Francisco, and would sometimes take up a collection which he saved and used to build a Bethel Chapel in 1851. Sometimes various miners, who appreciated Taylor's service, donated generously. Before securing a permanent location for the Bethel, Taylor had converted an abandoned ship, the Panama, one of the numerous other ships abandoned in the San Francisco Bay, as a “Seamen’s Bethel Church", which was soon well attended. Taylor began his service by preaching to the English speaking people in the evenings, and to the Hindustani people of lower India, through an interpreter during the mornings. Taylor's influence was immediate and well received.and greatly provided the impetus within the revival that was then occurring. was inspired by his interest in establishing churches and schools in that country. To serve in Chlie Taylor previously had recruited three groups of missionaries who arrived at different times. The first party included A. P. Stonewall, William A Wright and Ira Haynes La Fetra, a Methodist missionary and graduate of Boston University School of Theology who founded the Santiago College in Chili in 1880. His brother Ira gave to the college a printing press with which they printed great volumes of religious literature in Spanish.

The Taylor party assembled in New York ready to make the trip, but Taylor as of yet was not provided the appropriate funds needed to make the journey comfortably. Determined, they had no other recourse but to settle for steerage passage, and each were given a blanket, and a small mattress and together they pooled their money to secure basic canned goods. Taylor's initial objective was simply to assess the country and determine if it was practical to establish a self-supporting missionary as he had done in southern India. His main objective at this time, however, was not to undertake missionary work, but to secure the cooperation and support of the Protestant residents to establish a number of churches. Among the more prominent residents there at this time was Dr. David Trumbull, a Protestant missionary and founder of the Presbyterian church in Chile who gave his complete support to Taylor's efforts. Among those Taylor had recruited was Dr. Hoover, a young physician from northern Illinois with a thriving practice, which he gave up in order to come to Chile to serve as a medical missionary under Taylor.

On October 16, 1877, Taylor purchased two tickets for himself and his brother Reverend Archibald Taylor and departed from New York aboard the Acapulco, a mail steamship, for the west coast of South America at Callao, Peru, by way of the Panama Railroad in Colón, in Panama.

From Callao Taylor proceeded to Mollendo, a port city with a railroad that extended into Bolivia, passing through the important city of Arequipa. In Mollendo received by the British consul. Taylor's next port of call was at Arica, just across the border in Chili, which was still recovering from a tremendous earthquake and tidal wave. They were subsequently not very interested in the religious services Taylor had offered but were in need of teachers. From there he proceeded to Tacna, a flourishing city of fourteen thousand, where he managed to secure passage money for a teacher needed in Arica. After making more stops along the coast he arrived at Chañaral. where the Reverend Langbridge and his wife had already arrived from England, a month previous, to teach and preach. Not being very needed there he continued on to the next port, in Caldera. and was also duly ordained along with other bishops. Dr. W. R. Summers, Levin Johnson, Reverend. Taylor and C. L. Davenport were received into the Conference, being designed for a field southward which. Bishop Taylor afterward had opened. On January 29, 1885 Bishop Taylor presided over the Liberia Conference.

While in Africa Taylor encountered cannibal tribes throughout the interior. He was appalled at such practices, which included the display of human skulls on and about the various homes and other structures. At the World’s Congress of Religions, Taylor exclaimed that he had witnessed first hand in the Congo where women, who were too weak or ill to catch fish, or do other work, were subsequently strangled and burnt to ashes. He was convinced that the only way to change their ways was to appeal to their hearts by way of the gospel, an effort to which he committed much of his time, often to no avail.

Though Bishop Taylor received much acclaim during his missionary career he was, however, criticized by Robert Cust, Acting Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, writing in the introduction to Heli Chatelain's Grammatica Elementar du Kimbundu ou Lingua de Angola for conducting "Self-Supporting Missions" in Angola, implying that the poverty his leadership caused for his deacons resulted in the death of Dr. Summers at the Luluaburg mission on the Upper Kassai River, Angola. Nonetheless, the mission did produce the first modern grammar of Kimbundu, the national language of Angola. (The "self-supporting mission" concept is not explained in Robert Cust's note, but he squarely identified himself as critical of Taylor's "missionary methods".) In 1890, Reverend David Ela said of Taylor, "Nothing more romantic than the 'Taylor movement' has occurred in the history of the church since the crusades, and nothing better calculated to excite the imagination."

David Bundy, Professor of Church History at the Christian Theological Seminary maintains that, "Taylor, more than any other, was responsible for the expansion of the Methodist Episcopal Church beyond Europe and North America."

Taylor University, a Christian college in Indiana, was named after Taylor.

Works