David Brainerd

David Brainerd (April 20, 1718 – January 9, 1747) was a Colonial American Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans (Seneca and Delaware peoples of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) during the First Great Awakening. Educated at Yale (expelled before graduation for criticizing a tutor's spiritual state during the Awakening's emotional fervor), he was licensed by the Presbyterian "New Side" and commissioned by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. He died of tuberculosis at age 29 in Jonathan Edwards's Northampton parsonage. Edwards published *An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd* (1749) drawn from Brainerd's private diary — one of the most-circulated and most-influential missionary biographies in Christian history. The diary inspired William Carey, Henry Martyn, Jim Elliot, and generations of evangelical missionaries; it remains in continuous print.

• Cost of Following — The diary documents costly discipleship in unflinching detail — sustained physical illness (tuberculosis), wilderness exposure, isolation, depression, persistent prayer-and-fasting, death at 29. Brainerd's life is the doctrine.
• Cessation — Functionally cessationist 18th-c. Reformed mainstream; the Crossweeksung revival's Spirit-given convicting power was experienced experientially without modern continuationist-charismatic categories.
• Theology and Pattern — The Crossweeksung revival (1745) followed the Edwardsean revival-pattern: sustained prayer, modest preaching, sovereign Spirit-given convicting power, broad community response, sustained Christian-community formation. Brainerd's example is foundational for evangelical revival theology.
• Disciplines Emphasis — Substantial. Sustained fasting, prayer, scripture-meditation, and self-examination are documented across the diary. Brainerd's framework is Puritan-Edwardsean disciplines-and-grace synthesis.
• Unreached Peoples Priority — Substantial; Brainerd's three-year Delaware-and-Seneca mission was sacrificial cross-cultural mission to specifically unreached peoples in mid-18th-c. New England wilderness contexts. The Crossweeksung revival (1745) demonstrated the framework's fruitfulness.