John Williams was born on June 29, 1796, in Tottenham, near London, to Welsh parents. At fourteen he went to work as an apprentice in an ironmonger’s shop. On January 30, 1814, a sermon by the preacher Timothy East at Tabernacle Church in Moorfields moved him deeply, and he was converted. Soon after he began attending that same church, under the pastorate of Matthew Wilks.
By the age of twenty, Williams already felt the call to missions. He was ordained at Surrey Chapel on September 3, 1816, and nearly two months later, on October 29, married Mary Chawner. On November 17 of that same year, the couple sailed for the South Pacific in the service of the London Missionary Society, the LMS.
He arrived at the Society Islands in 1817 and established his first base in Raiatea. There he developed the method that would mark his ministry: training converted Tahitians and Raiateans and sending them out as teachers to open islands not yet reached, even before the missionary himself arrived. It was in this way that, in 1821, he sent Raiatean teachers to Aitutaki.
In 1827, eager to visit islands beyond the reach of the ships available to him, he built the Messenger of Peace with his own hands in just fifteen weeks, using local timber. His energy and taste for exploration at times worried the directors of the LMS, who at one point refused to fund his shipbuilding projects, believing a missionary should not engage in ventures of that kind.
He sighted Rarotonga in 1823, leaving behind the native teacher Papeiha, and returned in 1827 to establish the mission on a permanent footing. In 1830, he was the first to bring the gospel to Samoa, where the chief Malietoa Vaiinuupo accepted the Christian faith. Between 1834 and 1837 he was in England, where he oversaw the printing of the New Testament in Rarotongan and published the book A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands.
In 1839, now forty-three years old, Williams insisted on opening a new field in the New Hebrides, present-day Vanuatu. He landed at Erromango without knowing that European sandalwood traders had mistreated and killed islanders shortly before, leaving the population deeply distrustful and aggrieved.
On November 20, 1839, Williams and the missionary James Harris walked inland from the beach and, without realizing it, crossed a ritual marker signaling the limit foreigners were not to cross. Island warriors chased them back to the beach, where they clubbed them to death; their bodies were afterward ritually eaten, according to historical accounts. News of his martyrdom moved churches in England and Australia and stirred a new generation of volunteers for missions in the Pacific.
The method of training native teachers that Williams developed still inspires churches that send their own members as missionaries to neighboring peoples. In 2009, descendants of Williams and of the people of Erromango met again in a gesture of reconciliation, a sign that the gospel for which he died continues to reconcile peoples to this day.