Tarleton Perry Crawford

Tarleton Perry Crawford (May 8, 1821-1902) was a Baptist missionary to Shandong, China, who spent 50 years there with his wife.

Crawford was born in Warren County, Kentucky. He was the fourth son of John and Lucretia Crawford.

After his conversion to Christianity at the age of sixteen, he said:quote|I will spend my life in telling of Jesus' great mercy. He had dedicated his life to mission work in China.

At the beginning of 1848 he entered Union University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, being sustained in part by the West Tennessee Baptist Convention. He graduated in 1851 at the head of his class. At the close of 1850 he was appointed as missionary to Shanghai, China, by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. His wife Martha had studied during 1844 and 1845 at the Institute of Lafayette, Chambers County, Alabama. It was here in the autumn of 1845, that after a long struggle she had been converted to Christianity as well and baptized. On March 12, 1851, one week from their engagement, they were married at her home in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.

Posted initially to Shanghai in 1852, Crawford and his wife, Martha, moved to Dengzhou in Shandong, perhaps to gain more independence from mission oversight. His complex and domineering character caused much dissent and sometimes embarrassment, earning the rebuke of the American consul in Shanghai.

He insisted on preaching as the sole duty of the missionary, and had been dismayed by the fiasco involving Charles Gutzlaff’s Chinese evangelists. He thereafter insisted Chinese should never be paid out of mission funds. His friend Dr. George Burton’s burnout due to excessive medical work in Shanghai reinforced his central conviction. Crawford itinerated widely around local villages (131 in 1875 alone). His singlemindedness even meant that he closed down his wife’s school in 1879, perhaps out of jealousy at her success with Lottie Moon at Shating.

His criticism of the mission board of the American Southern Baptist Mission, whom he thought should have no say on mission matters, meant he was finally removed in 1892. Crawford formed the Gospel Mission, and eight (of fourteen) Southern Baptist missionaries joined him. By the turn of the century the mission had grown to nineteen missionaries, all wearing Chinese clothing, living in Chinese houses, and ‘solely preaching the gospel’ in a similar mode as the missionaries of the China Inland Mission.

Southern Baptist Convention missionaries struggled with his "unattractive social philosophy and his refusal to give sensible leadership to the Christian Chinese." (Hyatt, 1976:59)

Martha Crawford remained loyal to her husband, although she disagreed with several of his views. She formed a boys’ school in 1867 in her home. Several of the students became the backbone among the pastors at the successful Huangxian and Pingdu stations. She also wrote "The Three Maidens", a book for children, which was subsequently widely used throughout China. At the Second Missionary Conference (1877) she spoke on ‘Women’s Work for Women’, stressing house-to-house visitation, instructing local women and the preparation of suitable literature for them.

Crawford's book "The Patriarchal Dynasties", announced his conviction that the world was 14,376 years old and that the Garden of Eden was a theocratic confederacy, with a population of 1,174,405,120.

ee also

*C.W. Pruitt
*Anna Seward Pruitt

Sources

Irwin T. Hyatt, "Our Ordered Lives Confess. Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in Shandong", (Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1976)