The Church Needs Missional Professionals
The case of Merten De Keyser - considered with a bit of imagination.
Merten De Keyser, as he was known to the Dutch, was a Frenchman born Martin Lempereur. He was a printer, due to having married into the Le Rouge family printing business in Paris with it's well equipped print shop and state of the art equipment. Upon his father-in-law Guillame’s death, he inherited the business. Merten was a Christian, and a devoted one. We know this. We know this because he didn’t just publish the safe books of his day. At great cost, he published the Bible in, then unauthorized, foreign languages and books that exposed the abuses of corrupt Church leaders and systems.
Many students of religion have heard of men such as Myles Coverdale, William Tyndale, even Erasmus of Rotterdam or Ulrich Zwingle. We’ve heard of them because they were ministers or scholars. But who printed their work? De Keyser printed works by them all, most notably the Coverdale Bible, some of Tyndale’s early books, and the second edition of Tyndale’s English New Testament. De Keyser printed the Bibles that opened the door for most of our predecessors in faith to read it themselves. Many of our modern translations still bear impressions of these old printed texts.
If you know the stories of Coverdale and Tyndale, you know their fate. You know they wrote and taught at risk of their lives. Coverdale died in poverty. Tyndale strangled and burned as a heretic. To print their books was to risk your life and career. It was not the path of success, it was a path walked bearing a cross. To walk it, one had to possess vibrant and resolute faith. Faith that overcame suffering, hardship, and stood firm in the face of potential persecution, from within the Church itself.
Merton De Keyser, discovered in Tyndale's story, has become a motivation for Infuse. My question became; how would Tyndale have even produced his work without this man with inherited capital assets, and a skill that placed him on the cutting edge of the technology of his day, and a faith robust enough to empower him to suffer for the sake of the gospel and the souls of people he would never meet? I later discovered that after De Keyser’s death, nineteen years after he inherited the business, his widow Francoise took the helm and continued the work. It had evidently been a joint venture all along and she became an oft overlooked woman running a successful and critical business that she likely learned from her father.
The De Keyser family therefore becomes a model to imagine. They are blessed with capital, they are skilled, they are educated in a cutting edge technology, and they are business minded enough to begin and pass down a successful enterprise. It isn’t surprising that such people would publish works they believed in, but, when trials came, we see the depths of their faith. When Bible printing was outlawed in Paris, they moved their shop to Antwerp. This could not have been a painless move. To simply pivot their business in the direction of the accepted academy would have saved their moving costs and kept them close to home, but instead they prioritized their gospel witness. When their authors were accused of heresy, they continued to print their works. They must have been serpently wise, for they were willing to print in secret and with untraceable monikers, yet they still participated, meeting with their authors under the veil of darkness when necessary.
Infuse hopes to form such Christians. Imagine if we raised up deeply faithful Christians who were also excellent in their field of work. We already know such people! What if we could see, affirm, and invest in their missional work? What if, as God allows, we had the opportunity to help move their work in an increasingly missional direction? Perhaps we know the next De Keyser family now. The world may never know their names or realize the impact they had, but we in the church most definitely should. We should, not just because we discvered them buried in the story of a minister, but because we invested in their faith and work.
