Joseph Booth

Joseph Booth (1851 em Derby, Inglaterra – 1932) foi um missionário inglês que trabalhou na África Central Britânica (atual Malawi) e na África do Sul. Aos 30 anos, Booth abandonou sua carreira como empresário e, pelo resto de sua vida, realizou trabalho missionário para várias denominações cristãs, incluindo igrejas batistas, batistas do sétimo dia e adventistas do sétimo dia, e foi nomeado missionário pela Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Ao longo de seus ministérios sucessivos, suas crenças definidoras eram um igualitarismo radical, incluindo um esquema de "Africa for the Africans" e, a partir de 1898, a observância do Sábado do Sétimo Dia (sabatarianismo). Early career Britain and Australia Little is known of Booth's childhood, but his mother died when he was twelve and his three elder sisters brought him up. His father was a Unitarian, but by the age of fourteen Booth questioned his father's religious beliefs and, as he could not live with those beliefs, he left home. Over the next few years, Booth educated himself through extensive reading, and before he was twenty, he turned to the Baptist Church. He married his first wife, Mary Jane née Sharpe, (who he first met on 1868) in 1872. He also adopted radical ideas about politics, economics and society. In 1880, Booth emigrated first to Auckland, New Zealand, and then to Melbourne, Australia, where he became a successful businessman. His business success helped to develop his later views on self-reliance and the economic basis of missionary work. From 1886, Booth became more active in his local Baptist Church and more fundamental in his beliefs. In 1891 he was challenged by an atheist to practice what he preached, to sell all his goods and go to preach the word. He sold his business and, in July 1891, he agreed to become a missionary in East Africa. Despite the death of his first wife, Mary Jane, in Melbourne in October 1891, he left Australia with his two young children and started his missionary career, choosing to work in Africa. He aimed to set up the type of self-supporting Baptist mission that William Carey had pioneered in India, combining teaching and commercial activities. In Nyasaland Booth first came to Africa in 1892 with his two children, Edward (who died of malaria aged 19 in 1896) and Emily, and worked to establish the Zambezi Industrial Mission at Mitsidi, close to Blantyre in the recently proclaimed British Central Africa Protectorate.