David Brainerd

David Brainerd, (April 20, 1718 – October 19, 1747) was an American missionary to the Native Americans.

Brainerd was born in Haddam, Connecticut. He was orphaned at fourteen and had an experience that intensified his dedication to Christianity at age 21 in 1739. Shortly after, he enrolled at Yale, but was expelled his junior year for saying of a college tutor, "He has no more grace than this chair." The episode grieved Brainerd, but some two months later, on his 24th birthday, he wrote in his journal, "...I hardly ever so longed to live to God and to be altogether devoted to Him; I wanted to wear out my life in his service and for his glory …"

The University later named a building after Brainerd (Brainerd Hall at Yale Divinity School), the only building on the Yale University campus to be named after a student who was expelled.

He then prepared for the ministry, being licensed to preach in 1742, and early in 1743 decided to devote himself to missionary work among the Native Americans. Supported by the Scottish "Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge," he worked first at Kaunaumeek, an Indian settlement about 20 miles from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and subsequently, until his death, among the Delaware Indians in Pennsylvania (near Easton) and New Jersey (near Cranbury). His heroic and self-denying labors, both for the spiritual and for the temporal welfare of the Indians, wore out a naturally feeble constitution, and on October 19, 1747 he died at the house of his friend, Jonathan Edwards, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Brainerd is believed to have died of tuberculosis.

He made only a handful of converts, but became widely known in the 1800s due to books about him. His Journal was published in two parts in 1746 by the Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; and in 1749, at Boston, Jonathan Edwards published An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd, chiefly taken from his own Diary and other Private Writings, which has become a missionary classic. A new edition, with the Journal and Brainerd's letters embodied, was published by Sereno E. Dwight at New Haven in 1822; and in 1884 was published what is substantially another edition, The Memoirs of David Brainerd, edited by James M Sherwood. Brainerd's writings contain substantial meditation on the nature of the illness that eventually led to his death and its relation to his ties with God.

Additional Reading

 * David Brainerd biographies

Audio

 * David Brainerd Audio Biography
 * David Brainerd Journal Part 1
 * David Brainerd Journal Part 2
 * David Brainerd Journal Part 3