Anthony Norris Groves was a pioneer in many wonderful ways. He was one of the first missionaries to attempt to reach Arabic-speaking Muslims with the Gospel. He opened new doors of missions among the vast population of India. Groves also raised up indigenous churches without requiring that native leaders gain theological training in Western universities. He was one of the leaders of the early Plymouth Brethren movement. Above all, Anthony Norris Groves was a man who had great confidence in a great God. 

Groves was born on February 1, 1795, the only boy among five sisters! His family was Anglican, and it was only natural that his early impressions of God and His Word were in the framework of the Church of England.

The Groves family lived in Hampshire on the southern coast of England. Young Groves was pious from youth, and he hoped one day to join the Anglican clergy as an ordained rector of a parish. When sin overwhelmed his soul as a teenager, he sought to ease his conscience by vowing to serve as an Anglican missionary in India.

But vows alone could not please God, nor could good intentions. Young Anthony Groves switched his focus from missionary service and instead studied dentistry with the intention to become a dentist. Dentistry in Groves’s generation was not what dentistry is now. In his time, there was no anesthesia, and most procedures, such as extracting teeth and draining abscesses, were performed with the patient’s senses fully engaged! 

At the age of nineteen, Groves set up a successful dentistry practice at Exeter. But the spiritual needs of the world, which were much greater than dental needs, pressed upon his heart. Anthony Groves still considered himself an Anglican, although studies of Scripture had led him to question some of the practices of the Anglican clergy. 

Two years later, Groves married Mary Bethia Thompson. She shared entirely his love for the Scripture and his desire to compare the Word of God with the practices of the Anglican church. But the very idea of becoming a missionary gave her great anxiety. In fact, she would weep whenever he mentioned the topic. She did her best to discourage him from life on a foreign field, while he did his best to encourage her!

To further study theology, Groves intended to go to Dublin, Ireland, with the purpose of studying at Trinity College Dublin. His goal was ordination in the Church of England and then to become a missionary under the auspices and authority of the Church Missionary Society.

On the night before he was to leave for Dublin, Groves was awakened by an unusual noise. When he went to investigate, he realized that a burglar had entered his home. His drawers contained two packages of money. The first held forty British pounds for his trip to Ireland. The second contained sixteen British pounds for taxes that were due.

To his astonishment, the tax money was still there. However, the money for his trip was gone! Groves took this loss as direct intervention from the Lord. He discarded the idea of going to Ireland and entering the Anglican clergy.

Anthony and Mary Groves had begun meeting with other believers in Exeter to read the Bible together and sing hymns. Under the Anglican system, a meeting cannot observe the Lord’s Supper without the presence of an Anglican minister. Groves realized from his study of Scripture that this requirement might not work well on the mission field. As a result, he began to study the Scriptures on the matter, and he soon realized that nowhere in the Bible was this requirement given. Of this realization, Groves said, “To me it was the removal of a mountain.” He could break bread with any fellow brother or sister in Christ who loved the same Master.

Among the likeminded believers with whom Anthony Groves fellowshipped was John Nelson Darby and George Müller. George Müller had married Mary Groves, a sister of Anthony Groves, thus making the two men brothers-in-law. These men, who began gathering to worship and celebrate the Lord’s Supper without ordained clergy present, eventually became known as the Plymouth Brethren, named for Plymouth, England, where they were centered.

In 1829, Anthony Groves and his wife Mary embarked for missionary work in Baghdad. Instead of going with a comfortable salary, the backing of a mission agency, and the authority of an ordained ministry, they went out simply as obedient followers of Christ. They had two sons at the time, named Henry and Frank.

They traveled first to St. Petersburg, Russia. From there, they pressed southward overland. Along the way, they met various perils. The mosquitoes were vicious. The rain was torrential. Gangs of highway robbers lurked along the dangerous roads. When the Groves family finally reached Baghdad, they were exhausted! But they were also eager and ready to embark upon the work that God had given them.

Groves began work by studying Arabic. At this time, mission work among Arabic-speaking Muslims was uncommon. Mary Groves gave birth to a little girl. However, while both mother and newborn daughter were still weak, a terrible plague swept through the area. Groves’s wife and infant daughter both died of the plague in the summer of 1831. 

The bereaved husband and father wrote, “The Lord has this day manifested that the disease of my dear wife is the plague, and of a very dangerous type, so that our hearts are prostrate in the Lord’s presence. . . . It is indeed an awful moment, yet my dear wife’s faith triumphs. The difference between a child of God and a worldling is not in death, but in the hope the one has in Jesus, while the other is without hope and without God in the world.” 

Concerning the source of his confidence, he wrote, “It requires great confidence in God’s love, and much experience of it, for the soul to remain in peace, stayed on Him, in a land of such changes, without even one of our own nation near us, without means of escape in any direction; surrounded with the most desolating plague and destructive flood, with scenes of misery forced upon the attention which harrow up feelings, and to which you can administer no relief. Even in this scene, however, the Lord has kept us of His infinite mercy in personal quiet and peace, trusting under the shadow of His almighty wing.”

The mission work went on, in spite of a raging civil war, little to no financial support, floods, and sickness. Yet, regardless of these troubles, the Lord gave eternal fruit for Groves’s labors. In 1833, new opportunities opened in India which allowed Anthony Groves to move there and concentrate his work among the people to whom he had been drawn to since he was a boy.

On a visit back to England in 1835, he met and married Harriet Baynes. She accompanied her new husband when he returned to the mission field in India in 1836. In India, Groves realized that there was a great need for dental work. He was able to support himself financially by working as a dentist, meeting physical as well as spiritual needs. In this field of medical missions, Groves was a pioneer.

As time passed, Anthony Groves was increasingly grieved by the split among the Plymouth Brethren. There had developed two factions, those called the Open Brethren, led by men such as George Müller, and the Exclusive Brethren, led by John Nelson Darby. Groves agreed with his brother-in-law George Müller that the Open Brethren view of independent, autonomous assemblies agreed more closely with the New Testament pattern than the sectarian, divisive view of the Exclusive Brethren.

Anthony Norris Groves died in the home of George Müller on May 20, 1853. By this time, many of the mission works that Anthony started were functioning under the leadership of native teachers. Groves had set a pattern for missions that many would follow in the decades to come.

Sources and Further Reference:

Dann, Robert Bernard. Father of Faith Missions: The Life and Times of Anthony Norris Groves. Chester, England: Tamarisk Publications, 2021.