Dr. Hermann Karl Wilhelm Kumm

Hermann Karl Wilhelm

The founders of faith missions were remarkable, visionary, and committed Christians.

True pioneers! The founder of SUM was no exception. Karl Wilhelm Kumm (1874-1930),

born in Hannover, Germany, attended the East London Training Institute. Eventually he

attended universities at Heidelberg, Jena and Freiburg and received his Doctor of

Philosophy degree from the last. In 1898 he went to Egypt to prepare for missionary work

among the Muslims under the auspices of the North Africa Mission. There he met and

married Lucy, daughter of Grattan Guinness, an evangelical leader in Britain who had for

some years experienced a burden for the evangelization of the Sudan. Guinness also

published a periodical entitled "The Sudan and the Regions Beyond," with the purpose of

stirring up interest in missions. Kumm's greatest hero was the famous missionary David

Livingstone, referring to him as "saint, physician, explorer, missionary, pathfinder, and

pioneer for God - ‘the John the Baptist’ of the 19th Century."

Kumm's biographer summarizes his feelings as follows: "More and more he had absorbed

the spirit of David Livingstone, and he longed and prayed that in the year, which

celebrated the Centenary of his hero's birth, there should be inaugurated such a forward

movement in missionary enterprise that Christianity should sweep the continent for which

Livingstone gave his life." Kumm himself has been described as "a bold missionary

explorer," one who was attracted by the unknown, by the difficulties and by obstacles. He

was poetic, intense, and forceful, able to captivate his audience, whether in public

speaking or in writing. Though Kumm became a missionary statesman, he seldom made

any reference to denominations. He simply did not think in denominational terms. He was

born a Lutheran; in Britain he became an Anglican. He also had a deep interest in the

Keswick (holiness) movement.

In 1904 the Kumms moved to Britain started the SUM, an independent,

nondenominational mission, not in opposition to existing mission societies, but to

evangelize the unreached in the Sudan. Already in 1904 The SUM was able to send its

original party of four men, with Kumm as leader, on an exploratory venture Northern

Nigeria. Kumm was driven by two realizations: first, the hold that Islam had on the

population south of the Sahara desert, and second, how the Muslims were winning the

animists of the Sudan to their faith. It was his ambition to win these people for Jesus

Christ before Islam took them over.

A British citizen from 1910, Kumm moved to the United States in 1919 to lead the SUM

branch there.