Rev. Aeneas Francon Williams, Church of Scotland Minister, Missionary in India and China, writer and poet (born 1886)
Aeneas Francon Williams
Aeneas Francon Williams, FRSGS was a Minister of the Church of Scotland, a missionary, chaplain, writer and a poet. Williams was a missionary in the Eastern Himalayas and China and writer of many published works.
Church of Scotland
The Church of Scotland is a Presbyterian denomination of Christianity that holds the status of the national church in Scotland. It is one of the country's largest, having 245,000 members in 2024 and 259,200 members in 2023. While membership in the church has declined significantly in recent decades, the government Scottish Household Survey concluded that 20% of the Scottish population, or over one million people, identified the Church of Scotland as their religious identity in 2019.
Minister (Christianity)
In Christianity, a minister is a person authorised by a church or other religious organization to perform functions such as teaching of beliefs; leading services such as weddings, baptisms or funerals; or otherwise providing spiritual guidance to the community. The term is taken from Latin minister. In some church traditions the term is usually used for people who have been ordained, but in other traditions it can also be used for non-ordained.
Missionary
A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country since 2023; and, since its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia.