James Mills Thoburn was born in St. Clairsville, Ohio, in the United States. He was the seventh child of Matthew Thoburn and Jane Lyle Crawford who were both Irish immigrants. After graduating from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1857, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. Thoburn was just 23 when the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church sent him to India as their missionary. 

In 1861, two years after arriving in India, he married Sarah Minerva Downey, the widow of a fellow missionary. The following year, Downey died from complications after giving birth to a son, leaving Thoburn a widower at the age of 26. A faithful Indian servant then cared for the child. 

Thoburn’s first assignment in India was to a place called Naini Tal at the foothills of the Himalayas. His co-worker was William Butler, the first American Methodist missionary to India, who had arrived in 1856. Thoburn’s parish consisted of low-caste Indians and British soldiers stationed at the hill station. Together, he and Butler did village evangelism and planted many churches.

Thoburn was not just an evangelist, he also founded several schools — the Lucknow Christian College in 1869 and the Central School in Lucknow in 1877. The Isabella Thoburn College for women, also in Lucknow, was set up together with his younger sister Isabella, whom Thoburn had asked to come to India in 1869 to serve alongside him.  

In 1870, Thoburn invited the American Methodist evangelist, William Taylor, to India. For the next five years, they were able to establish churches in seven leading cities across India, including Moradabad, Lucknow and Calcutta. In 1872, Thoburn started and edited the Christian mission paper called Lucknow Witness (later renamed The Indian Weekly).

In 1874, Thoburn was appointed presiding elder of Calcutta, where he served for 13 years.^[1] Under his leadership, the Methodist mission work in India expanded greatly. Two years later, the mission conference graduated to the India Conference. Thoburn was then promoted to take care of the Southern India Conference as the presiding elder. Over time, the India Conference expanded in size and, for pragmatic reasons, grew less dependent on the “home” General Conference in America. As a result, Thoburn was able to launch Methodist mission work in Burma (present-day Myanmar), Malaya and the Philippines through personal trips — to Rangoon (now Yangon) in 1879, Singapore in 1885, and Manila in 1899. 

In 1880, at a speaking engagement in the city of Philadelphia while he was back in the United States, Thoburn met Anna Jones, a medical student and missionary candidate. He married her and left for India two days after the wedding. Anna did not go to India until two years later after completing her medical studies. She was to serve as his co-worker for the next two decades. 

In 1883, Thoburn received a letter from Charles Philips, the head of the Seamen’s Institute based in Singapore, regarding mission opportunities in Singapore. Philips was an English Wesleyan who had been in Singapore since 1866 and had actively supported the work of the Anglican and Presbyterian churches in Singapore in the absence of Methodist work there.^[2] 

Thoburn relayed the call for volunteers to the U.S. Twenty young men answered the call but Thoburn found none to be suitable. A year later, William F. Oldham, a young Englishman, was finally chosen.

Thoburn, his wife Anna, Oldham and an organist from the Calcutta Church named Miss Julia Battie then set sail for Singapore and arrived there on February 7, 1885. To the party’s pleasant surprise, they saw Charles Philips waiting to welcome them at the wharf. 

The first evangelistic service was held at the Town Hall on the evening of Sunday, February 8, the day after their arrival. Two thousand handbills had been distributed throughout Singapore to announce the event and when the big day arrived, 150 people turned up. Thoburn read the scripture text: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord” (Zechariah 4:6). The message was described by William Oldham as having been delivered “with simplicity and directness”. ^[3]

During the following week, nightly evangelistic meetings were held. The crowd grew in number until it overflowed. When Thoburn called for a confession of faith, many responded. A total of 17 persons publicly dedicated their lives to Jesus Christ. Later on, when reflecting on these revival meetings, Thoburn remarked that he experienced the distinct sense of the immediate presence of God in the birth of this church in Singapore.^[4] 

On Monday, February 23, 1885, the first Methodist Church in Malaya was formed. Oldham was appointed the first pastor to three members (John Polglase, F. J. Benjafield and Maurice Drummond) and 15 probationers consisting of Eurasians, Indians and Chinese. But on the day of the election of officers, only Polglase turned up for the meeting and Oldham was summarily elected to all offices — from Sunday School superintendent to trustee, steward and treasurer! It was to be a self-supporting missionary church without any outside financial aid. 

Two days later, Thoburn, his wife and Miss Battie sailed back to India, leaving behind Oldham and Polglase to shoulder the responsibility of building a strong foundation for the growth of Methodism in Malaya. Charles Philips continued to be a strong pillar of the Methodist Church although he remained with the Presbyterian Church.

Thoburn was also responsible for the tremendous growth of the Methodist Church throughout the Indian sub-continent. At the General Conference in New York in 1888, he was elected as the first missionary bishop for India and Malaya. That same year, together with his wife and sister Isabella, he was instrumental in establishing the office of “deaconess” in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1894, Thoburn elevated the work in Singapore to that of the “Malaya Mission”. Thus, the work in Malaya became independent from India and came under the direct support of the Missionary Society in New York.

In 1902, his wife and co-worker, Anna, passed away. Thoburn, a widower for the second time in his life, continued to serve for six more years. After a missionary career of 49 years, he retired from active service in 1908 at the age of 72 because of ill-health and returned to the U.S. where he lived in Meadville, Pennsylvania until his death.

His years of missionary service were recognised by honorary doctorates from Allegheny College where he had been a student and Ohio Wesleyan University. Thoburn wrote several books before and after his retirement, including The Christian Conquest of India (1906), India and Southern Asia (1907), and God’s Heroes Our Examples (1914).

On November 28, 1922, Bishop James Thoburn was called home to the Lord at the age of 86.

* Photo of Bishop James M. Thoburn from William F. Oldham, Thoburn — Called of God (New York: The Methodist Book Concern, 1918) in Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/thoburncalledofg00oldh/page/n7/mode/2up