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A full 150 years before the modern missionary movement, John Eliot was successfully evangelizing native Americans. Yet forces beyond his control would destroy his life’s work.

Eliot’s wealthy English father sent him to Cambridge. Afterward Eliot taught grammar school and met Thomas Hooker, the man chiefly responsible for his conversion: “When I came to this blessed family I then saw, and never before, the power of godliness in its lively vigor and efficacy.”

In 1631, as church leaders applied heat to English Puritans, Eliot emigrated to America. He became pastor of the church in Roxbury, composed of many of his English friends. The following year, he married Ann (Hannah) Mumford.

The main legacy of Eliot’s early years is his work on the Bay Psalm Book (1640), which put the Psalms in metrical verse. This famous hymnbook was the first book published in America.

Eliot was frugal, eating just one plain dish for dinner. Of wine he said, “It is a noble, generous liquor … but as I remember, water was made before it.” He was deeply against the use of tobacco, and wigs or long hair on men.

However, Eliot cared deeply for the Indians. At Roxbury, he began learning Algonkian, and by 1647 was preaching in the native tongue. He began translating and in 1663 published the entire Algonkian Bible—the first Bible printed in America.

Eliot helped organize towns in which native Americans managed local affairs in their own way. By 1674, there were fourteen towns with a total of 1,100 “praying Indians.” He began giving some natives ministerial training.

Tragically, the bloody King Philip’s War (1675–76) between Wampanoags and the English, undid all his efforts. Though the “praying Indians” supported the English, the settlers panicked and confined them to an island in Boston Harbor. The war destroyed most copies of Eliot’s native American Bible and all but four of the Indian villages. More critically, it undermined the Indians’ trust in the English as well as English interest in native missions.

Eliot continued to minister to broken bands of Indians until his death.

In the late 1620s, English lawyer John Winthrop expressed the fears of many Puritans: “I am verylye persuaded God will bring some heavye affliction upon this lande [of England]. If the Lord seeth it will be good for us, he will provide a shelter and a hiding-place for us and others.”

When the Lord provided that hiding place in England’s American colonies, Winthrop played a significant role.

Young Winthrop entered Cambridge University in 1602. His marriage in 1605 cut short his academic pursuits. He lost two wives, one of whom bore him six children, in the next eleven years. But his marriage to Margaret Tyndal, daughter of a knight, in 1618, lasted until her death two years before his.

Winthrop considered becoming a priest but settled on law, becoming justice of the peace at Groton, and then lord of Groton Manor. He was an influential lawyer, frequently drafting petitions to Parliament.

Early on he was committed to Puritan ways. One diary entry reads: “O Lord, crucifie the world unto me, that though I cannot avoyd to live among the baites and snares of it, yet it may be so truely dead unto me and I unto it.”

Winthrop debated hard about moving to America. Before leaving, he helped alter the Massachusetts Bay Charter so it could be administered locally, not in England (as the Virginia colony’s was). Under the charter, Winthrop was elected governor, and in 1630, he set out with 600 to 700 people, not including his pregnant wife and three sons who were to join him later. While aboard the Arbella, Winthrop described a Christian commonwealth in the now-famous sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity.” New England was to be a “city upon a hill.”

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