North America is an incredibly diverse region, despite some superficial characteristics that could lead to an assumption of homogeneity. One obvious characteristic is its apparent monolingualism, or the phenomenon that English can be used nearly everywhere across Canada and the USA, an area of nearly 12.4 million square kilometres. This belies the great ethnic and cultural diversity that manifests itself across this vast terrain, and while English might mostly be the primary language spoken on the continent, hundreds of secondary or tertiary languages are also spoken.

Select History of North American Missions

While the evangelisation of North America began with the sixteenthcentury arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Florida on the East Coast and California on the West Coast and the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts, missions proper began with John Eliot (1604–90), the ‘apostle to the Indians’. His Algonquin Bible (1663) was the first complete Bible printed in the Western hemisphere. He was followed by other luminaries among the Native Americans such as David Brainerd (1718–47) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), both of whom ministered among the Stockbridge Indians in western Massachusetts. Evangelism did not stop with Native Americans, however: Edwards, along with George Whitefield, launched the First Great Awakening, which led to revival and religious fervour across the Eastern seaboard, from New England (Edwards’ region) to Georgia (Whitefield's domain), among the white British colonists. Western Massachusetts later became an important location for the inspiring of American missionaries abroad at the Haystack Prayer Meeting (1806) at Williams College, where Samuel Mills, James Richards, Francis LeBaron Robbins, Harvey Loomis and Byram Green (collectively called ‘The Brethren’) committed to overseas missionary work with the eventual establishment of the American Bible Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810). The 1806 meeting was considered the seminal moment when US American foreign missions were born. Their first missionaries to be commissioned and sent out were Ann and Adoniram Judson, from Salem, Massachusetts, to India and Burma, in 1812–13.

However, 30 years before the Judsons, the first overseas missionary from the USA was a freed Black slave, George Liele (1750–1820; alternatively spelled Lisle or Leile). He set sail from Savannah, Georgia, in 1782 and made his way to Jamaica. It must be noted that both the Judsons and Liele identified as Baptists, which was a frequent feature of US missionary Work.