Many people still have the misconception that most Christian missionaries were like Nathan Price, the mean-spirited patriarch in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible. Price tries to baptize new Congolese Christians in a river filled with crocodiles. He proclaims Tata Jesus is bangala!, thinking he is saying, "Jesus is beloved." In fact, the phrase means, "Jesus is poisonwood." Despite being corrected many times, Price repeats the phrase until his death. Price is Kingsolver's image of the culturally insensitive missionary.

But few people have written about the real-life 19th-century missionary John Mackenzie. When white settlers in South Africa threatened to take over the natives' land, Mackenzie helped his friend and political ally Khama III travel to Britain. There, Mackenzie and his colleagues held petition drives, and even arranged a meeting with Queen Victoria. Ultimately their efforts convinced Britain to enact a land protection agreement. Without it, the nation of Botswana would likely not exist today.

And no one has told the story of Alice Seeley Harris and her husband John. They were Baptists who were among the first people to use photography to promote human rights. In the early 1900s, colonialists used forced labor to extract rubber from the Congo's jungles—and villagers who resisted were castrated, burned, or had limbs cut off. The Harrises traveled throughout the United States and Britain disseminating photos and giving lectures detailing the abuses.

You probably haven't heard the story of Ida Sophia Scudder who addressed the plight of Indian women and the fight against bubonic plague, cholera, and leprosy. Or the story of Timothy Richard, a Welsh Baptist in China, who helped lead one of the first major humanitarian relief efforts in modern history, campaigning against the cruel practice of foot binding. The annals of Western Protestant missions include Nathan Prices, of course. But they also include many more John Mackenzies, Alice Seeley Harrises, and Ida Sophia Scudders.