Today's is about George Liele, a missionary I hadn't heard of before reading about him today.
"George Liele, (17?-1828), a black slave from Virginia, went to Jamaica as a missionary. He is remembered as America's first missionary to a foreign land. When the people in the Baptist church, where Liele's master served as a deacon, realized how much Liele loved the Lord and witnessed the slave's wonderful ability to explain the Scriptures, they ordained him to preach, making him probably the first ordained black preacher in America. Liele's master freed him from slavery so he could spend all his time preaching the gospel. The former slave preached in Georgia throughout the War for Independence, and in 1779 he and his follower Andrew Bryan founded what may have been America's first black Baptist church, in Savannah. That same year, Liele went to Jamaica, hiring himself out as an indentured servant to pay his way. He preached in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, and eventually started Jamaica's first Baptist church, which grew from four members to 500 members in eight years. Liele organized a missionary society in Jamaica that sent fifty Jamaican missionaries to Africa and about twenty Jamaicans to the United States to minister to African-Americans. George Liele went to Jamaica fifteen years before William Carey, the Father of Modern Missions, sailed from England to India, and thirty-three years before Adoniram Judson, the Father of American Missions, sailed from the United States to Burma."