Not all missionaries look the same. Timothy came from an interfaith home. Paul didn’t. God pulled Jonah into missions by using a whale. God pulled Paul into missions by using blindness. Isaiah ministered for decades. John the Baptist preached for only a few years.
The Father of Modern Missions certainly didn’t look like your typical missionary prospect. Before William Carey started the Baptist mission society and before he wrote his classic work An Enquiry, he had a number of unconventional characteristics. Here are nine.
- Unusual looks: Carey went bald at age 22 due to a severe fever. He was 5’4″ at adulthood.
- Unusual wife: Carey’s wife could not sign her own name on the day of their wedding. She only learned how to do this later.
- Unusual brilliance: At age 12, Carey memorized a 60-page Latin book, a harbinger to his later linguistic brilliance. He taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French and Dutch.
- Unusual baptism: Carey came to Baptist convictions after hearing a paedobaptist sermon. Carey’s Baptist church allowed people to be members before they were baptized.
- Unusual obscurity: Carey did not come from an upperclass home or from clerical stock. When he was baptized at age 23, only a few attended.
- Unusual denomination: Many Baptists in Carey’s day were hyper-Calvinists, stressing God’s sovereignty such that it eliminated man’s responsibility.
- Unusual convictions: Carey stopped using sugar to protest the slave trade. He also chose to be a Baptist even though only Anglicans could be masters in government schools, officers in the army and graduates from the university.
- Unusual hobby: Carey loved globes, maps and world population statistics. He hung globes in his home and made his own maps. He referred to them as his second Bible.
- Unusual pastorate: The country church he applied to rejected him as a pastor after his first time preaching there. When he did eventually become the pastor, the church attendance went down.
Conclusion: God calls faithful servants that are dedicated to him. He doesn’t summon cookie-cutter Christians. The goal is not to look like everyone else. The goal is to look like Christ. If God has called you into missions, then accept and thank Him for the unique way He has made you. Then use your gifts for His glory.
You’ll notice that 8 of the 12 best books on missions are biographies. Books only on missions theory are like a one-wheel bike. They only inform. Good missionary biographies are like a two-wheel bike. They inform and inspire.
You won’t like my answer. Here it is anyway. Endure hardness.
Every Christian interested in missions should read William Carey’s An Enquiry. The word “enquiry” means investigation. In this book, Carey examines missions in a way never done before. The full name of the book is An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. 
Summary: poetic journal entries of known and unknown missionaries and their stories
This is the story of an island of cannibals, their journey out of darkness, and the man who led them to the light.
From time to time, most missionaries have asked themselves why their ministry is not as successful as the Apostle Paul’s. “I must be using the wrong strategy,” we groan. And it is certainly understandable to search for patterns in his ministry in hopes of garnering the same triumphs. But Paul was fruitful, Schnabel argues, not because of methods but because of the Holy Spirit’s work.
Between Two Cultures 