Rev. George Wood Thompson
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A selfless pioneer in Central Brazil
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George Thompson was born in Bolivar, Tennessee, on February 13, 1863. He was the son of D. Lucy C. Thompson and the Rev. Philip Thompson, who was Aapastor in Louisville, Kentucky, and died in 1871. George professed the faith at the age of only thirteen. Studied at the university of Southwest Presbyterian in Clarksville, Tennessee, where he graduated in June 1882. He then attended the Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina, which he formed in May 1885, having been licensed by the Nashville Presbytery in 1884 and ordained in April 1885. He worked for a year in Waverly, Tennessee. Departed from Newport News (Virginia) on June 8, 1886, arriving in Rio de Janeiro on 4 accompanied by Rev. John Boyle, who had been on vacation in the United States with the family and had obtained permission to reside in Central Brazil. In the same year, the two missionaries visited the points of the Minas Gerais Triangle in which Boyle had preached in 1884 and decided that Baggage (current Southern Star) should be the new base of operations. Thompson left a detailed description of that trip. Said to have accompanied Boyle
to taste their future work and to see if they would agree on cities to be chosen as new mission centers. They left Mogi-Mirim on the 11th day of August 1886, by train to the White House. There, Antônio Rangel, colporteur and accompanying troop guide, provided saddle and cargo animals. They took a week to the Rio Grande, staying overnight at the troupe's landings, and another week Baggage. They stayed for a week in the house of Mr. Tertuliano Goulart, who had been baptized with Rev. Boyle's family in 1884.
They then went to Santa Luzia de Goiás, where stayed another week, staying with Mr. José Inácio, the father of a large family. Eleven people were received by profession of faith, children were baptized and the Supper of the Lord. On the way back they passed through Paracatu ("the whole city vibrated with messages of eternal life ") and again by Luggage. They took the train at Batatais, returning to Mogi-Mirim after ten weeks of travel. In the following months, Thompson collaborated with Boyle in Mogi-Mirim, Campinas, Itatiba, and other locations. He was a founding member of the Presbytery of Campinas and Oeste de Minas, organized on April 14, 1887, with his presbytery colleagues Revs. Edward Lane, John Boyle, John W. Dabney and Delfino dos Anjos Teixeira. Boyle and Thompson were appointed to consult the General Assembly of the Southern Church if the newly formed presbyterate should join an American synod or accept the Presbytery of Rio de Janeiro to form a synod in Brazil. In June 1887,
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Thompson and the Boyle family made the long shift trip to Baggage. They took the train to Franca and then traveled for three weeks in wagons and ox cars to his destiny. The two missionaries visited several points of the Triângulo Mineiro and Goiás.
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Thompson continued to study Portuguese and to preach as far as the knowledge of the language allowed. One of the sites visited by Thompson in the eastern Triângulo Mineiro was Lagoa Formosa of Patos, where he was hosted by Saint-Clair Justiniano Ribeiro, paternal great-grandfather of the Rev. Boanerges Ribeiro (1919-2003). The whole family came to be converted, initiating a Presbyterian Church. The same occurred in São Francisco das Chagas do Campo Grande, Rio Paranaíba, near the source of this important river, where Thompson preached in the farm of Cristiano da Rocha, one of the local patriarchs, maternal great-grandfather of Rev. Boanerges. Thompson reported that he was preceded in this region by the Bible and copies of the newspaper O Evangelista, received by members of this family and read by them accepted. The Ribeiro family, from which some outstanding pastors (besides Boanerges Ribeiro, his father Adiron Justiniano Ribeiro Sobrinho, and his brother, Americo Justiniano Ribeiro), has given important contributions to the Presbyterian Church of Brazil.
The following year, Thompson made a historic trip through the Black, Paracatu, and São Francisco to the sea, arriving in Pernambuco. This trip was described by his Rev. Hugh Clarence Tucker (1857-1956), a Methodist missionary and agent of the American Bible Society in Brazil since 1877, in The Bible in Brazil (The Bible in Brazil, 1902). Tucker had made a great script through the interior, Baggage, where he observed the work of the Presbyterian missionaries and preached at their request to large auditoriums. Thompson accompanied him to Paracatu, where he was festive and preached to hundreds of people on the streets. Then the trip along the river San Francisco. Thompson even contracted malaria but recovered fully. In Recife, went down to Rio de Janeiro, where he participated in the organization of the Synod of the Church Presbyterian of Brazil, in September 1888. Soon after, he returned to Bagagem enjoying good health.
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In March of the following year, he went back to exhaustion with the companions of the Mission in Campinas and especially assist the Rev. John W. Dabney, exhausted by the excess of job. There was an epidemic of yellow fever in the city and Thompson assistance to the sick in the usual work of the mission. By then I was already preaching Very well in Portuguese. When Charlotte Kemper should go to the United States and was very sick and very weak to travel alone, He took her to Rio de Janeiro, where at that time also yellow fever. Upon returning to Campinas on April 13, found all the sick missionaries except the newcomer Kate Eliza Bias, who was recovering. One of the children of the then-presbyterian Flamínio Augusto Rodrigues died at that time.
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After giving assistance to many people, including Dabney, Thompson himself was taken with the fever on the 20th. Despite the assistance of Dr. Horace Manley Lane, coming from São Paulo, and other physicians, as well as Rev. Tucker, who had come from Rio de Janeiro,
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Thompson died at dawn on May 1, 1889, at the age of 26. It seems that only Tucker and the presbyter Rodrigues accompanied the coffin. Pressing the end, Thompson said he felt like dying only because of his mother in the United States, but God would comfort her. He was thus the first of the Campinas missionaries to be taken by yellow fever. The missionaries have engraved in their tomb a verse that expressed his dedication in favor of his colleagues: "No one has more love than this: give one's own life to one's friends. "
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Dr. Horace Lane testified about the courage and self-denial of Thompson, who, even knowing of the risks he ran, did not escape his Christian duty. In July 1889, the Evangelical Pulpit published a sermon by the late missionary about the Prodigal Son ("The
love of God for sinners "). To replace him in the "Mission of the Interior", he was sent the same year to the Rev. Frank A. Cowan, who, having poor health, can do little. A little time after the death of Thompson was born in Araguari a boy who received his name and came to be a well-known Presbyterian pastor and professor of the Seminary of Campinas: Jorge Thompson Goulart (1889-1967).
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Bibliography:
• Lessa, Annaes, 269, 313, 315, 342.
• Ferreira, History of IPB , I: 248, 250-53, 285, 322s, 381.
• "Rev. GW Thompson, " The Missionary (July 1889), 251.
• The Missionary (1886), 101; (1889), 25, 37; (08-1895), photo.
• Brazilian Missions (09-1888), 70; (06-1889), 41; (07-1889), 52; (01-1890), 3.
• Hugh C. Tucker. The Bible in Brazil . New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1902.
• Bear, Mission to Brazil , 20s.
• McIntire, Portrait , 7 / 73-75.
• Boanerges Ribeiro. Be a Pastor in Brazil . São Paulo, 1999.
• Ferreira, Little History of the West Mission , 39s