A Promised Life: Robert Maxwell: Missionary to the Punjab 1900-1942

Robert Maxwell was promised for ministry seven years before he was born, and his life work would take him to British India in the half century leading up to its independence. Maxwell spent his life keeping his fathers promise to enter the ministry, and he would be a formative part of the missionary movement that shaped the Presbyterian Church in todays Pakistan.

In A Promised Life, author Elizabeth Paige Maxwell McRight tells the story of her grandfather Robert Maxwell and his role in the missionary movement, all through the lens of her familys part in it and with many wonderful letters and correspondence left behind. Tracing his life from a farm in Upstate New York to a world strange and new to him and his bridea world where he spent forty-two years in mission servicethis chronicle both tells of the joy and the sacrifice in his family life as well as documents Maxwells mission work in the first half of the twentieth century, which would lead to the growth of the Presbyterian Church in Pakistan today.

The Maxwells felt a sense of duty to raise sons and daughters who would make their own contributions to their communities, and their story is part of the larger tale of the spread of the gospel far beyond their own households. They are not particularly remarkable on the world stage, yet their story points beyond themselves to represent the countless others who devoted their lives to being Christs witnesses.

Elizabeth Paige Maxwell McRight is a retired Presbyterian minister, and she spent half of her ministry serving on the staffs of four presbyteries. Like her grandfather Robert, the subject of A Promised Life, she discovered along the way that the support work of church administration is important ministry. She currently lives in Orlando, Florida.