David Brainerd

David Brainerd (April 20, 1718 – October 9, 1747) was an American Presbyterian minister and missionary to the Native Americans among the Delaware Indians of New Jersey. Missionaries such as William Carey and Jim Elliot, and Brainerd's cousin, the Second Great Awakening evangelist James Brainerd Taylor (1801–1829) cite Brainerd as inspiration.

Early life

David Brainerd was born on April 20, 1718, in Haddam, Connecticut, the son of Hezekiah Brainerd, a Connecticut legislator, and Dorothy Hobart. He had nine siblings, one of whom was Dorothy's from a previous marriage. He was orphaned a month before his fourteenth birthday. His father died in 1727 at the age of 46 and his mother died five years later.

After his mother's death, Brainerd moved to East Haddam to live with one of his older sisters, Jerusha. At the age of nineteen, he inherited a farm near Durham, but returned to East Haddam a year later to prepare to enter Yale. On July 12, 1739, he recorded having an experience of "unspeakable glory" that prompted in him a "hearty desire to exalt [God], to set him on the throne and to 'seek first his Kingdom'" This has been interpreted by evangelical scholars as a conversion experience.

Preparing for ministry

Two months later, he enrolled at Yale. In his second year at Yale, he was sent home because he was suffering from a serious illness, tuberculosis, that caused him to spit blood. When he returned in November 1740, tensions were beginning to emerge at Yale between the faculty staff and the students as the staff considered the spiritual enthusiasm of the students, which had been prompted by visiting preachers such as George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Ebenezer Pemberton and James Davenport, to be excessive. Brainerd was expelled because of comments about the impious staff.