Our mission, Frontline Fellowship, has been working for 37 years, seeking to help persecute churches, putting feet to our faith, working throughout Africa, and our vision is to let the earth hear his voice. Many parts of Africa, the church has been heavily persecuted, especially in North Africa. In Angola, where our mission really began, we came across churches like this, where no building. The building's been burnt down by the Cubans. And so the people were gathered And they didn't let the fact that they didn't have a church building keep them from worshipping the Lord. And as we approached this village, we could hear them singing, Ein feste berg ist unser Gott, a mighty fortune of God, in Ovumbundu. We knew the tune, even though we didn't know the words. And this church was commemorating 31 October 1517. They were celebrating Reformation Day. This was 24 years ago. And up till then, we didn't celebrate Reformation Day in Cape Town. Our mission didn't observe it. And we felt rebuke to the tears of church at the utmost parts of the earth. That's what they're called in the province, Portuguese called the ends of the earth. And they were commemorating Reformation Day. So ever since then, we've been celebrating Reformation Day and promoting it. I heard people say, I haven't done a Bible for five years. I've been praying for five years. years from my very own copy of the Word of God. This is the greatest gift anyone could have asked for, the Word of God in my own language. And what a privilege to give people Bibles in their language. Here in Malawi, a Muslim girl wanted Christ, Mozambique, churches and schools that had no buildings, just a few grasshuts, and no textbooks. We gave them Bibles and said that will be our textbook. Our mission is a literature mission first and foremost. We publish, we import, We get donations. We get literally shipments of Bibles and books to districts throughout Africa freely. We run leadership training courses at Bible colleges all over Africa, teacher training colleges, and often open-air preaching, open-air outreaches, call people back to the Bible, visit the gates of Parliament in Cape Town. One of the most successful missions in Africa, Kwasi Sibanti Mission, established by a German Lutheran missionary, Reverend Earl O'Stegan, back in 1960s. It's a site of tremendous revival and phenomenal impact of the gospel. The largest Great Commission course I've ever run was in Nairobi. At the university there, we had over 2,000 people attending a Great Commission course learning how to be missionaries to the ends of the earth. Even Muslims came to Christ at that event. This is, I don't know if you can see the one pale face in the dead center there. Yep, there we go. He's the only pale face there at this conference. And school assemblies out in Sudan. This is a typical assembly in Sudan. People form a kind of square quadrangle outside, they don't have a building big enough, and we preach the gospel there. We use film evangelism, especially the Jesus film, to give a basic core kerygma of the gospel, draw people together. This is where a lot of contacts come, many church services flow from it. Many of these people say they've never seen a film before, especially in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. And this has been a way of ministering behind the lines in Muslim-controlled Sudan. Training chaplains has been a very key part of our work. From the earliest days of our mission, we started in a South African infantry, South African military. And so we go to war zones throughout Africa, seek to train chaplains, evangelize them, equip them. And particularly here, you can see the Reformation Study Bible. Dr. Ossie Sproul is a great friend, wonderful supporter of our mission. He, in fact, the best supporter of our mission in many ways, and he donated over 1,800 Reformation study Bibles for us to distribute to key pastors, chaplains, evangelists, and Bible colleges across Africa. need libraries, and so we donate libraries to pastors. Generally what happens, they don't normally get this much in one go, they get a book for every conference they attend. But on this occasion, this is a bishop of a church that we've invested in a lot, so this was basically a donation to their church library. And all of these books are donations from different authors. Authors will donate their books, and you can see everything here from Robert Morey, Fearing God, A Practical Christian for Women, R.C. Sproul books, and Battle for Truth, that's from Dr. David Noble. And so this is just a set of books that we were able to put in the hands of one pastor for his church library. We see that throughout Africa, there's very little biblical preaching. A lot of it's repetitive, imaginative, maybe even inspired by Trinity Broadcasting Network, sadly. So to teach people expository preaching, we've been doing biblical preaching workshops, producing biblical preaching handbooks and trying to guide the people how to just preach what's in the text, expository preaching. And there's a lot of excitement for it, but most didn't know how to do it. And so five years ago, I began a project of preaching my way through the whole Bible, every book of the Bible, trying to summarize the core message, not in a Martin Lloyd Jones style, or we could be busy for a long time. So trying something very bold, just one to two, maybe three or four sermons per book of the Bible, and putting it in the Old Testament Survey and our work in the New Testament Survey to help pastors in Africa who mostly do not have any theological or Bible college training. So that's our vision, Africa for Christ. But tonight, my presentation's on making disciples of all nations. The inspiring lives of the 19th century missionary movements refute the anti-Christian propaganda predominant today. Educational institutions and many governments around the world on Namib with Islam and other Eastern religions. Like here, this is in England, for goodness sakes. They're teaching the kids how to pray towards Mecca. From so many sides, we are bombarded with guilt manipulation and disinformation. You know the difference between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is a mistake, typographical error, accidental. Disinformation is deliberate disinformation, like communist governments would have departments of disinformation to fabricate events, news, distort, produce fake documents, things like this, in order to disinform people. And in fact, I would venture to say that the vast majority of what most people in the Western world know today is disinformation. Hollywood, Slime Magazine, the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation, the Clinton News Network, Newspeak, Useless News and World Report, all of those sort of things, they're just disinformation agencies. Christianity plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, they say. Well, how has it been that during the Dark Ages they built the greatest architectural masterpieces, the cathedrals, and a thousand years ago in the Dark Ages they were producing stained glass windows like these? Libraries, universities. The Dark Ages is a myth. There never was a Dark Age. The Dark Ages is Enlightenment propaganda by Voltaire in the 1700s. Voltaire was the Karl Marx, so to speak, of the French Revolution. And so to discredit Christianity, he spoke about the Christian years being the Dark Ages. The Roman Empire wasn't the light ages. A third of the Roman Empire was slaves. Rome looted, pillaged and slaved the world. Rome was evil. Rome persecuted Christians, crucified Christ. In what way was the Roman era good and the Christian era, when the barbarians and the Vikings were converted, how is that the dark ages? I mean, this is just propaganda. Christianity introduced slavery to Africa. What absolute nonsense. Christianity ended slavery in Africa. Islam was the biggest slave trade in Africa. The people of Africa knew nothing about suffering until the missionaries arrived. That's a quote from Kenneth Kuhundu, dictator of Zambia, whose guest I once was in his presidential detainees detention center in Lusaka Central. He wrote in A Humanist in Africa that the people of Africa knew nothing about suffering until the missionaries arrived. The gospel ruined it all. God is the ultimate racist. I heard that two years ago at a government conference in Cape Town. Department of Justice. God is the ultimate racist. And all kinds of other ridiculous and blasphemous assertions. This is the kind of thing we hear endlessly. But what is so incredible about this train of disinformation, this campaign by so many in Hollywood and news media, is the gullibility of so many who are jumping on the bandwagon. That millions of gullible people have swallowed this vile diatribe is bad enough. However, many Christians have come to accept these slanderous accusations. The Greatest Century of Missions is an antidote to all this poison. Facts are stubborn things, and the inspiring lives and the incredible achievements against all odds by bold and brave missionaries of the 19th century exposes the fallacies and the fraud of these malicious and ignorant assertions. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter, who are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight. The greatest century of missions exposes the reality of heathenism which confronted the pioneers of the gospel. It kicks the legs out from under these Marxist myths that slander the saints and seek to rewrite history. The spectacular achievements of God-fearing Christians in confronting cannibalism and child sacrifice and widow burning and slavery needs to be understood. The missionaries of the 19th century steadfastly resisted Islamic slave trade and they set many tens of thousands of captives free. We need to expose and make these eye-opening exposés of Africa, the Middle East and Asia make it widely known. And how much we are all indebted, we are all indebted to the sacrificial services of these dedicated disciples who laid down their lives, laying solid foundations for the future. When pioneering missionary to Persia, Henry Malkin sought to present the Persian New Testament to the Shah, which he had just dedicated his life to translating. He was challenged with an ultimatum to declare that Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Henry Martin boldly refused and he asserted instead Jesus Christ is the Son of God and his opponents were enraged and they threatened to have his tongue torn out for blasphemy. When Robert Moffat first applied to the London Missionary Society he was rejected and his proposal to marry Mary Smith was also refused by her parents. But Robert persevered and on his first missionary journey, his expedition to South Africa, he succeeded in bringing to Christ the most notorious bandit and murderer in the country. Finally, Mary Smith's parents did relent and they gave permission, and she sailed to South Africa where they married, and for the next 50 years, the Moffat's became one of the greatest husband-wife mission teams in history. Robert Moffat succeeded in being the first to translate the complete Bible into the African language. This is the church he built. It can seat 800. The printing press, the first printing press north of the Orange River, which he brought in to print the first Bibles, Gospels, Pilgrims, Progress, in the Twana language. Here's the church of the centre part. And notice the illustrious names of those who worked at Kuruman. Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, and so many other great people whom God used to open up Africa for the Gospel. Robert Moffat didn't just work in Kuruman. He travelled south by Twana and even into Maddabili land, what later became Rhodesia and what today is Zimbabwe, where I grew up. And Robert Moffat did a spectacular amount of work for the gospel. When Britain was the greatest economic and military superpower in the world, Queen Victoria was asked by a visiting African prince, what is the secret of England's success, of England's greatness? She presented him a Bible and said, here, this is the secret of England's greatness. And this is also the explanation of why England is no longer great, just have turned away from God and have turned away from the word of God, which made Great Britain the greatest economic, military and spiritual superpower in the world in the 19th century. Great Britain still has the stones prying out from a great previous generation who did spectacular work. Samuel Zwemer chose to oppose Islam and he resolved to engage the enemy on the soil of Arabia. the very birthplace of Muhammad. If we want the 21st century, our century, to be the greatest century of missions and revival, then we need to learn from the Christian pioneers whom God used to make the 19th century, the greatest century of Christian advance so far. I'm not one of those who believes we are in a post-Christian era. I believe we're in a pre-Christian era. We haven't become thoroughly Christian. The Great Commission will be fulfilled before the Lord returns. Protestant Christianity was concentrated in Europe and North America. Except for a few Christian enclaves, Asia was almost untouched by the Gospel. There were a few significant Christian communities in Africa and Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, and a small number of Dutch settlers at the tip of Africa, around the Cape where I live and our mission headquarters is based, but otherwise Africa was un-evangelised. However, by the end of the 1800s, Christianity was a world religion with churches established in almost every Christian, in every country on earth. This is a map designed by the Operation World organisers and you can see the lights are there yellow, the higher the percentage of evangelicals, up to 20% plus. And the darker the red, the less the number of evangelicals. So you can plainly see the advance of the gospel and also the great missionary countries as of 1900. How Christianity became the first truly international religion in just one century is an amazing story. What inspired these incredibly effective missionary pioneers and the successful strategies that they used need to be prayerfully investigated if we're to be more effective in world evangelism. I had people challenging me about the title of this book, The Greatest Century of Mission. I said, no, the 20th century is the greatest century of mission. I said, there is no way. While the 20th century can boast greater numbers of missionaries in the field and greater numbers of converts, yes, if you just look at quantity, but the 19th century saw far greater depth of impact for the gospel. Especially when you consider the very limited resources available to these missionary pioneers and the overwhelming difficulties and the dangers and obstacles they had to overcome, the missionary pioneers of the 19th century clearly present the most inspiring examples of Christian courage and perseverance against all odds. Just take transport. It took David Levinson three months by boat to reach Cape Town from Britain. It took William Currie six months by boat to reach Calcutta. It took Robert Morrison nine months by boat to reach China, Shanghai, to begin his ministry there. I mean, the fact that we can do these things in less than a day is just extraordinary with modern aircraft. But think about the things they had to face aside from that. The incredible adventures of these soul winners, these nation builders, these culture shapers makes for exhilarating reading. And the exploits and achievements of these extraordinary Christian heroes and heroines has mostly been forgotten in the countries where they were sent out from. For this reason, it's perhaps appropriate that this book celebrating some of the adventures and sacrifices and achievements of these missionary pioneers comes from Africa. Because it's we in Africa who have actually benefited the most from the 19th century Mishmi movement. In this time of secularism and scepticism, some people may be surprised to hear how much these Mishmi pioneers are honoured in Africa. Dr David Livingston, for example, has two towns in Africa named after him, Livingston in Zambia and Livingstonia in Malawi. Other towns in Africa which were named after Europeans like Stanleyville, Salisbury, Elizabethville, Fort Victoria, they've had their names changed. But Livingston and Livingstonia remain as a tribute to the man who brought faith to the hearts of Africans and who struck fear into the hearts of the Arab slave traders. Livingston is known as a true liberator in Africa. In fact, some years ago, some secular publication, the New African Magazine, had a who's the greatest African of all time, and the extraordinary thing is that Robert McGough has the number one, and they had everyone there that they listed was contemporaries of our generation, who we've known. There wasn't one person from the past, I mean not Cleopatra, nothing from, not Jacques Rousselieu, nobody from previous centuries, it was such a, the greatest Africans of all time, they all just happened to be communist terrorist revolutionaries of our era, you know, you've got to be joking. We didn't have the same readership, but we've got 7,000 on the mailing list in Africa. So I did a survey, who's the greatest African of all time? We must have had 20 African countries contributing. David Livingston won. Streaked it. He was far, far, far ahead of any other. There was Shaka there. Somebody can put Mandela. I mean, he is somewhere like number 9 or 10. Ian Smith was there. Shaka Zulu was there. There was a whole lot. Robert Moffat, Mary Schleser. Nigerians voted for Mary Schleser a lot. But David Livingstone was far and away the most popular choice of greatest African of all time, without Christian leadership at least. While many statues, the statues of colonial figures like Cecil John Rhodes have been toppled and removed, statues and monuments to missionary pioneer like David Livingston retain the prominence and reflect the deep respect which Africans have for these Christian pioneers. In the city of Livingston, when I was there for the Livingston 200 in 2013, there were eight statues of Livingston in the city and they're still building them. I mean some of them are very new. Most of them have been built since the colonials left. So plainly David Livingstone. The stamps being produced from countries as far afield as Djibouti honouring David Livingstone are postage stamps. Now there have of course been many attempts to discredit the memory of early missionaries. Karl Marx declared that the first battlefield is a rewriting of history. And from the time I was first converted to Christ in 1977, I've heard the most vicious slanders against the 19th century missionary movement. At one of the first missions conferences I ever attended, a missiology professor from Stellenbosch University, that's where the Dutch foreign ministers are trained, Dr. Nico Smit, declared, the missionaries did not believe that black people had souls. They taught that Africans were the firewood of hell. Now, at the time, I was a new convert and I didn't know very much about anything. But what he said sounds so outrageous, so self-contradictory, that I actually stood up in a plenary session of a, I mean, I didn't realize at the time just how totally unacceptable it is, in a major conference, and I stood up there in a floor, probably one of the youngest people there, and took on this professor and said, which missionaries taught this? Did David Livingstone or Robert Moffat teach this? He looked surprised and said, no, not them. Did C.T. Studd teach these things? Did Mary Slessor believe these things, I asked. And he began to look uncomfortable and said, no, not them. So well, which missionaries taught this, I asked, because I don't understand why anyone would have come to Africa as a missionary, many of them dying of diseases here in the field, if they did not believe that the people for whom Christ died, that the people in Africa were souls for whom Christ died. Didn't many of the missionaries die bringing the gospel to Africa? Why would they have done that? Do you know the average life expectancy of a missionary to West Africa in the 1800s was two years. Some died within three months of arriving. This is a grave of Mary Moffat, Mary Livingston, David Livingston's wife, buried in Zambezi province. Died in the early 30s. Why would they have done that if they believed that black people didn't have souls? Well, Dr. Nico Schmidt never answered my question. He drifted off into some anecdote about some heartless church members he knew that had bad relationships with people of other races. I wondered, what on earth does that have to do with the missionaries of the 19th century who opened up Africa, often at the cost of their own lives? How many churches have I come to in Africa where there's the graves of the missionaries who died in their 20s and their babies and children buried, sometimes just a few months, other times a few years old. There's a whole family buried in a churchyard, and they're telling me that the missionaries were racist and didn't believe that the people in Africa had souls. Although I didn't know much about God's law at this time, I had this uncomfortable feeling that I just heard someone bearing false witness against someone else, Christians of another era, who were not present to be able to answer their slander. You know, it's easy to score goals when the other team isn't on the field. It seems cowardly to make a spiritual football out of our spiritual fathers and mothers. Now, I've always been interested in history, and so when I was converted to Christ in 1977, I was overwhelmed with a conviction I was called to missions. And throughout the last 40 years, I've never doubted that call. I've always been something of a bookworm, so I naturally gravitated towards history books. And as my knowledge of missionary history increased, I was astounded at the general ignorance in the church concerning our heritage. I was also most disappointed at the tendency of so many speakers at mission conferences to disparage the missionary pioneers who had laid the foundations of the church in Africa. I've been a Christian for over 40 years, and most church conferences I've attended have involved massive slander against the missionary pioneers of the 19th century. at one of the biggest missions conference ever, Gakau in 1997 in Pretoria, Global Consultation World of Angels. The first item on the agenda was a stupid, mindless skit that would have been embarrassing if it was done for a youth conference. But this is for a missions conference, people from all over the world, denigrating David Levickson as an idiot. And I thought, well, why don't we all just pack up and go home? If David Levickson was a failure, then what good could any of us do? You know, we're not fit to untie shoelaces. at a global church conference, I thought the mindless hatred, bigotry, stupidity and ignorance of Christians, especially professors of missiology, who think that they've got to attack our Christian heritage and try to slander the people who laid the foundations. I could not help wondering if these speakers really thought we could have done a better job. had we been their positions? With the few resources they had, facing overwhelming obstacles and dangers which these missionaries confront, would we have even ventured into the fields? Hindsight is all very well, but pioneers do not have the benefit of the hindsight of anyone who's gone before because they're the pathfinders. They're the first ones in the field. There's no grammars, there's no textbooks, there's no guidance on how to do it. They had to produce the first alphabets of these illiterate languages. They had to produce the first grammars and translations. They were the ones who pioneered the whole thing. They didn't have anyone able to tell them what the cultures were and the religions. They had to pioneer the whole lot. As I ventured into mission fields of Mozambique, Angola, Sudan, my respect for these missionary pioneers has only increased. and my respect for these professors has only plummeted. I was reading Livingston's travels while I was retracing much of the steps in the Shiri Valley of Malawi and the Zambezi Valley of Mozambique in the mid-1980s while I was doing primary research for the Killing Fields of Mozambique book. It was 1989 when I was captured by communist troops in Mozambique and flown by Russian pilots in Soviet M.I. eight HIP helicopters to TET, and I was intrigued to see how Livingston's description of TET back in 1850s could so accurately be applied to TET in 1989 as well. The devastation from the Arab slave trade, which he recorded in his Zambezi expedition, could have also described the scorched earth campaign of the Communist Gulema government and their Soviet allies in the 1980s. On other occasions, as I was going down some of the worst roads I've ever experienced in I remembered some of the trials and tribulations of David Livingston in that very area. As I regularly have to remind our missionary volunteers who complain about the bad roads, David Livingston had to walk where we drive. Forget bad roads. Livingston had to walk across an Africa that had no roads, no bridges, no shops, no hospitals, neither was clean drinking water available. As Livingston recorded after his first missionary journey, I have drunk water swarming with insects, thick with mud, putrid with rhinoceros urine and buffalo dung. Hacking his way through dense rain frost, walking for days in pouring rain, totally drenched with his equipment either rusting or rotting. It was canvas plus rotting, it was metal plus rusting. David Livingston persevered across the continent. Hostile tribes demanded exorbitant payment for crossing their territory. I sometimes thought that the reason we got taxed and so on every country again was because of the blasted colonials who got them into paperwork and bureaucracy and taxes. And then I discovered, no, this long predates the colonials. David Livingston's long expedition of people carrying things in their heads. It wasn't for his comfort. It was for the taxes he had to pay to cross every chief's territory. There was even more. I mean, the amount of beads and cloth and other things they had to pay to be able to cross people's territory. Oh, bureaucracy long predates colonialism. Exorbitant taxation and stealing from every traveler was endemic throughout Africa. It's just gotten worse since. His life was often endangered from Muslim slave raiders. He was mauled by a lion. He was charged by a rider. He was laid low with fever on over 60 occasions. The afflictions which David Levickson was called upon to endure while opening up Africa for the gospel and opposing the slave trade tested the limits of human endurance. Leeches, maggots, pussy flies, cholera, pneumonia, sunburn, huge sores, tropical ulcers and malaria plagued him. Yet his indomitable spirit rose as he set his heart to accomplish goals which seemed humanly impossible. He persevered and as a result of his sacrificial labours, the slave trade in Central Africa and East Africa was exposed and eradicated. And David Livingstone's example inspired many hundreds of men and women to devote their lives to African missions. Mary Slesa, for example, is a brave, bold redhead from Scotland. She went to Calabar, present-day Nigeria. Dr Kenneth Fraser was inspired to go to Muruland in southern Sudan, where our mission has had its main mission base in Barbacoa, which is established, where we've been bombed repeatedly, scorched earth. The Arabs have come in and rocked it. I've preached in about 1,200 services in South Sudan and I've never preached in a church or school that wasn't bombed at least once, sometimes bombed 12 times. One church, this church, Fraser Cathedral, established by Kenneth Fraser back a century ago, bombed 10 times, destroyed 3 times, rebuilt each time. is Fraser Cathedral. This church in Cotterby was destroyed by helicopter gunships just before I was going to run a Muslim evangelism workshop there. It was 1996 and the venue was destroyed. When we got there, some pastors had walked 50 miles to come to this service and we arrived there and the venue's destroyed and yet they stood with a Christian flag in the centre of the ashes of this destroyed church and they still wanted me to teach them how to win their enemies to Christ. and they rebuilt the church. This is the oldest man in the district. He is part of the Equatorial Corps trained by the British who fight the first shots of war back in 1955 as the Arabs tried to disarm the Equatorial Corps and order them disarmed to get onto a train to go to the north. And they said, we know you Arabs. You always treat us black people as slaves. We're the guardians of the south. We're not going to give up our rifles and you're not going to send us disarmed to the north. We know what you want to do with us. Just enslave us or kill us. And so the Danyanya won the first war the British had left and the Union Jack had finally come down on the 1st of January 1956, the war was already on the go in the south because the British had totally handed it south to Arabs and Arabs had put off 800 officials 796 were Arabs. Colonialism of a new sort. Arabs totally colonized the Black South and they rebelled. And this man was Brother Ecuador, of course, led his beret and his rifle from days when he was a soldier. He is now doing EE evangelism door-to-door with us. Taking Bibles, conferences, this conference that ran amongst the moral in amongst the Episcopal Church in South Sudan, it was being held in the forest because the church building had been destroyed and so we gathered outside in the forest and everyone had to bring their own chairs in the forest because the church venue downtown had been bombed by the Arabs. How many people do you know would go to a conference in the bush where they've got to carry their own chair, walking in 38 to 42 degree heat when there's a chance helicopter gunships might get at you? teacher training college ministry, training teachers. We've trained over 780 teachers, helped them establish over 120 schools, junior schools and a high school in South Sudan. This is Easter in Resurrection Sunday at Loi Cathedral, Fraser Cathedral. The roof you can see in the background, that's the church that's been bombed 10 times, destroyed three times. This tree, La Roe, is the old slave traders tree. Under this tree, the Arabs used to tether up and buying the Moro people as they led them off to the Nile River up to Cotoum to be sold in the slave markets. When the first missionary came there, Reverend Fraser, who was General Dr. Reverend Fraser, patron of the First World War and the Anglo-Boer War, When he got here, he said, this will be the redemption tree. Christ sets his captives free. And this is where the church began. He planted the first school, the first church, the first hospitals, trained the first teachers, nurses. The Moro people are really a wonderful example. And they still run their Sunday school under this tree. These people know what they're fighting for. Surrounded by about 140 farm craters. Translate the Bible into Moro. Kenneth Fraser got it started, one of his followers, his disciples, Canon Ezra Lewery, translated the rest of the Bible and we got it finally printed and taken in by the year 2001. The first 3,000 Bibles in a moral language in front of the church at Wilmot Dye, Fraser Cathedral, church at Cotterby which had been destroyed multiple times before. Here we are close to where the Bible translator Canon Ezra Lewery was buried. He's ambushed. He's on his way to get the translated Bible printed in 1991, and he's ambushed by the Arabs and killed close to this junction here. So we were there in 2001 with the first full Bibles printed in the Mora language, the fruits of Kenneth Frey's and Ken Israel Ueri's life's work, and While we were ministering there and teaching people Evangelism Explosion EE, Dr. James Kennedy had sent a team down and we were using them to train chaplains, pastors, teachers in Evangelism Explosion. We were doing, not exactly door-to-door, but hut-to-hut because they didn't exactly have doors. And while we were having a Sunday service, and we were going through the EE formula, if you were to die tonight, do you know for sure that you're going to heaven? Crown went up, Antonovs, and the people screamed and scanned out the church. I was the last one out of the church, because a plane flying overhead does not mean you're going to get bombed. I mean, how many times have I had false alarms like that? So I was in no rush. Everyone got out first. As I stepped outside the church, the bombs were falling. They were bombing us. five 1,000 kilogram bombs in the first run, three 1,000 kilogram bombs in the second run. Everyone fell within 100 metres, some as close as 17 metres to me and the church. And so you're talking about eight 1,000 kilogram bombs in the area the size of a football field. And you can actually see one of the Americans lying there trying to get into the trench, but there's so many people in here sort of lying on top of it, which is no good at all. Here afterwards we were with some of the shrapnel. I walked around looking for people to care for afterwards and you know, your ears are shot, you can hardly hear anything, disorientated, dust covered. But incredibly no one was killed and no one was seriously injured. I had a couple of cracked ribs but that was about it. And we were so astounded that how can you get eight 1,000 kilogram bombs land amongst a congregation of about 300 people in the area of the South's football field and no one's killed. The trees were full of shrapnel, but we were not. And not only did we not lose anyone, we gained people. More people were in the service after the bombing than before it. And the service continued. In fact, the whole service lost five hours, starting from before the bombing until the end. And the highlight was presenting the Bible, the moral Bible, which Kenneth Fraser and Ezra O'Reary had spent their life translating. And as I was presenting it to them, it came clear to me, do you realize how many people have died that we can have the Word of God in our own language? And I told them about Testimony of William Tyndale, who was forced to translate the Bible into English in Germany. And it had to be printed in Worms and Cologne because it was illegal to print Bible in English in England. It had to be smuggled from Antwerp in bales of cotton into England. And most of those first Bibles in English were destroyed. The Bishop of London had all 6,000 copies of original English New Testament prints in English burned. Only two survive, two copies. One of them was sold recently for 5.4 million pounds. one printed New Testament. You know, when people come out with things like the bestseller list, well it's total fraud because they never include the Bible and they never include great Christian classics of James Kennedy or John MacArthur or James Dobson, I mean those don't make the bestsellers, doesn't matter how many millions they sell. And the Bible always outsells. So I've asked, how is it that the Bible never makes the bestsellers? When I know that it exceeds everyone. When you say Harry Potter's exceed the Bible, not on its best year, you know that that's fraud. And I said, well, we can't always put the Bible first time, so we exclude the Bible. I said, well, how do you choose? Because I see you don't have Christian books there either. He said, well, the bestseller books are chosen by, we take a selection of 10 exclusive bookshops around the country. And that's how we extrapolate for the bestseller list. And not one Christian bookshop's on that list. I doubt if Australia's any better. I'll just describe what goes on in America, Britain, and South Africa. But it's a total fraud. In fact, it's like the Academy Awards. It's basically a marketing scam by the publishers, where they kind of, you know, I'll give you a gold statue this year, you give me one next year. It's a mutual back-slapping group. But the greatest bestseller of all time is the Bible. The fact that it's banned in 57 countries is another testament to its truth because I don't know that anyone bans fairy tales. So we handed this Bible over, and here's two pastors, Moses and David, outside the church that still stood. Here's some of the shrapnel. This is one of the bomb craters created by one of those bombs. And some soldiers came from nearby garrison to find out about the church that was bombed but still stood. Here are the chaplains and teachers and pastors who completed our evangelism explosion training course. Dr. James Kennedy said, never was an evangelism explosion training course better and more appropriately named. And here's a tree that was blown over in a bombing, and the trees were full of shrapnel, but we were not. This commander said, this happened to show the power of God. And he added, the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims. Indeed, here's another bomb, another place, another time. This is close to yay, actually. If this bomb had exploded, it would have taken the church and the compound where we were ministering off the map, but it did not explode. For some reason, the SBA dug it out because they wanted to reuse the explosives. I wouldn't want to play with unexploded ordnance, but at any rate. In fact, I don't even know what I was doing posing next to it. I think you get a bit bush happy out there and lose track of what's wise. Highly unstable ordnance. But the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims. That's a fact. And so it's been a great joy and privilege to train a new generation of pastors and evangelists and chaplains in Sudan in order to win their freedom from the Muslim Arab North and to rebuild the country on biblical Christian foundations. Jesus Christ said, on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. But modern detractors of the 19th century missionary movement like to brush aside the historic realities, which the missionaries had to confront. And they preferred to paint Africa before the influence of the gospel as idyllic and utopian. Like I'm sure Australia and New Zealand were just, you know, utopian paradises of democracy and egalitarianism before the colonials arrived and ruined everything and the missionaries came with the gospel. Kenneth Kuhanda, the one-time dictator of Zambia, wrote in his book, A Humanist in Africa, that the people of Africa knew nothing about suffering until the missionaries arrived. By the way, this man is an apostate. His father was an evangelist for the Reformed Church of Central Africa. His mother and father were trained as missionaries and evangelists at Livingstonia, at the evangelist training school in Livingstonia from Malawi. He said, I could never accept the Calvinist teachings of my parents. They believed in the depravity of man. I believe in the goodness of man. Now, this is the dictator, Kenneth Govinda of Zambia, who believed in the goodness of man. Funny how the people who believe in the goodness of man can commit the worst human rights atrocities, while the people who believe in the superiority of man can be some of the most gracious, generous, charitable ministries on the planet. Zambia is right there in the heart of Africa, just north of where my old homeland of Rhodesia was. And first time I went to Zambia, I ended up as a guest. presidential detainee. This is Lusaka Central Prison. I was in cell 11 right there. And there was only one entrance under this tower where the machine gun nest was. This is the interrogation cells. Here was the death row. And this is an open, just a roof where they cooked the big starch and a big cooking pot big enough to put a family of missionaries into actually. The only thing that they were stirring in there was starch, but the protein came from the flies that flew in. They didn't have any bowls or any eating utensils. They would serve the food literally onto our hands. There was no eating utensils and there was no bowls, you mentioned. That would be food from your hands. This was South Central Prison. I took this picture much later. This picture was taken during the war, one of our aerial photography things from Buccaneer. But this was years later, and it didn't look this nice when I went into it. And talk about entering the narrow gate. The cells we were in, of course I didn't have cameras at the time that we were in prison, but this is to give you an idea, because later I went back as a missionary, a guest speaker, and this is the conditions we were imprisoned in. 60 to 65 prisoners per cell. Now, they must have all given them a wash before this occasion when I got the picture because we went back clean. There was no way to get clean. There was no plumbing, no electricity, no running water in the entire prison for 1,000 to 1,000 people. The British built this prison for 1,000, sorry, the British built this prison for 80 people and they had electricity and plumbing and so on. The communists who believed in the goodness of man put 1,200 people here, but there's no plumbing, no electricity. When Kenneth Kohunda was imprisoned in here, Kenneth Kohunda, the British locked him up there, he had a cell to himself. Bed, sheets, pillows, electricity, desk, gramophone. books, access to the library, three cooked meals a day. That's the evil British colonials. But this man, who believed in the goodness of man, he had people getting one meal a day of starch only, no electricity, no plumbing. Most of the prisoners in Lusaka Central Prison when I was in there were remand prisoners. You understand the difference? A prisoner wears a uniform. He's had his day in court. A remand prisoner is waiting for his day in court. Most of the people in Lusaka Central when I was there in 1987 were still in the civilian tatters. They hadn't had their day in court. They were not prisoners, they were remanded. One man had been waiting eight years and he hadn't had one day in court yet. That's what can happen when you've got people who don't believe in depraved man, that believe in the goodness of man. You understand? Well, October 1987, I and three other frontline missionaries were imprisoned in Zambia for refusing to take a bribe. We'd been arrested at Kazangulu Ferry, the one place in the world where four countries meet. Zambia, Botswana, South West Africa, Zimbabwe, all meets at that point in the Zambezi River where we crossed over. And after refusing to bribe Zambian officials, we were beaten and abused and spent excruciating weeks of abuse at the hands of Zambian security forces. in filthy cells, blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, incarcerated, and overcrowded Lusaka Central Prison. Waterboarding and all of that. When I say waterboarding, that sounds nice. I must say, it would have been a joy to have had American or British waterboarding because they used water. These people used urine and filth. So we would have definitely preferred waterboarding to what they gave us. Friends of ours ensured that the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was informed of our plight just before her departure to the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver. And we used to call it the Commonwealth. And so as the gathering of the largest gathering of dictators, mass murderers, human and drug traffickers on the planet came together, well second largest, United Nations the largest gathering of dictators and mass murderers, this would be the second largest gathering. There, Margaret Thatcher was subjected to haranguing by the Zambian dictator Kenneth Kondo, Chairman of the Frontline States, whose guest we were at that very moment. He was outraged that Britain was refusing to place economic sanctions on South Africa. So Margaret Thatcher responded by asking, why does Zambia herself not place sanctions on South Africa? Kondo responded that that would place many Zambians out of work. Exactly, responded Margaret Thatcher. And as South Africa is one of our most important trading partners, many British citizens would be placed out of work if imposed sanctions on South Africa. Quite aside for many, South Africans themselves would be placed out of work. We'd be adding to the economic hardships. She then went on to relate how Zambians were dependent on South African maize, millimille, grown in the Orange Free State, how Zambian airways was maintained by South African airways, how Zambian railways was maintained by South African railways and pulled by South African locomotives, how many South African veterinarians were caring for Zambia's cattle and how many Zambians were migrant workers in South Africa, and how many hundreds of millions of pounds are put into the public coffers of Zambia every year. By the way, even if they got bitten by snakes, the snake bite serum came from Pretoria. Kenneth Gwenda then declared that because of South Africa's human rights abuses, Britain should impose sanctions. It was at this point that Margaret Thatcher produced our information. Who are you to speak about human rights abuses? You are an unelected dictator of a one-party state. Four British missionaries are being held without trial as presidential detainees in Lusaka Central Prison, tortured and abused by your own security forces. Well, Kenneth Koerner was dumbstruck and humiliated. He was knocked out. The Iron Lady had won the debate. He had nothing more he could say. The first thing he did when he came off his plane in Lusaka was, get those missionaries out of here. And so our immediate release was ordered. When I was called, I went to the front and I put out my hands, expecting him to handcuff me before taking me through the narrow gate and so on. And he shook my hand and said, the President's ordered your release. And, interesting. On the way out, this was not taken that day, I didn't have a camera with me then, they'd take my cameras away. This was on another time, but took me past the Freedom Monument. I couldn't help but notice that the Freedom Monument's behind bars. We made many friends during our time in Lusaka Central Prison, including General Godfrey Mianda, who was also locked up as a prisoner of Kohinda, for criticising sanctions, saying sanctions would hurt Zambia more than South Africa. And for that, thought crime, he was locked up. There was a major there who had been a graduate of Sandhurst University in Britain, an engineer. He was locked up for saying something similar. I didn't meet him personally, but Frederick Tullib was also in the prison at the same time I was there, and he later became President. General Meander became Vice President in 1991, Reformation Day, 31 October 1991. And Zambia, a few years later, overthrew this 26-year dictatorship, this one-party state of socialist, humanist Kenneth Kono, that was their official policy, socialist humanism, and they declared Zambia a Christian country. And then I was invited in as a VIP, interesting going from presidential detainee to VIP, and invited to teacher teachers and teacher training colleges, to helped him with a whole range of projects, ministering to the army, getting into radio programs, helping with different translation projects, and we have made many friends in Zambia from our prison time. It's interesting how often after yesterday's prisoners can become tomorrow's presidents, you know, it's just an African thing. Well, when I offered General Godfrey Mianda a whole range of books of economics, he said, I love reading. But I don't have the time anymore as Minister of Education and Deputy President. Don't you have a small book that summarises all of these? So that was my challenge, to produce Biblical Principles for Africa, which is one of our most successful projects ever. The Zambian government bought hundreds for their Members of Parliament who translated Afrikaans, translated French, got into Congo, Malawi government bought hundreds as well. This is General Ronnie Shikapashwa, another friend that we made from our prison time. He was once the head of the Air Force in Zambia, crippled in a car accident, told he'd never walk again. His wife was converted to Christ. He was converted to Christ. He was healed. He became Minister of Foreign Affairs, became Minister of Home Affairs. He became Minister of Information. many terms of office, he arranged for us to meet the President of Zambia. And this is Levi Mawadawasa, the successor to Frederick Tuluba, and he came from a Jehovah's Witness background and was excommunicated for getting involved in politics, so he was unchurched when we met him. And I had a good hour with him, we prayed together and presented with a Christian flag, and he shortly after that was baptized in Lusaka Baptist Church, was a faithful member of Lusaka Central Baptist Church until his death under suspicious circumstances at age 57. I've been to Zambia many times, including with my youngest son, Calvin, and had him helping me train people in cultures and seminars because I find that in Africa most of the men think they shouldn't be involved with young children and they only take an interest in children when they start being naughty teenagers and they beat them sometimes half to death with logs because they thought it was a woman's job to deal with them when they're small and you mustn't discipline them when they're small because shame they're just babies but when they become older then they start to discipline when it's too late and when they now a major problem. So the average man has no investment in his young children. So I take along my youngest son, Kelvin, who already from age five could give the Evangelism Explosion presentation, the Ten Commandments, Way of the Master, Apostles' Creed, a whole range of things. and on his own, so they even had him on national TV in Zambia. Here we are showing him where we used to swim the river smuggling barbels and jangola across the Crocodile Fest rivers during the war. This is from South West African Namibia. So Calvin, he was not quite, he was still eight years old at this point and he would speak at ministers' conferences and they were astounded because they had no idea that A kid could learn so much memory verses, but it's just repetition. It's nothing special. You can do it. Anyone can do it. Just start early enough. And he was able to challenge many of them to get more involved with their children. But according to people like Kenneth Gohenda, all Africans lived in peace, harmony, tranquility, and prosperity before the missionaries arrived with the gospel. Now you might expect such ahistoric ramblings from committed Marxists like Hitler Hunsby, the frontman for Mugabe's invasion of white farms in Zimbabwe, committed Marxists to hate the gospel. Here's a dentist, by the way, who used to put people strapped down into his dentist chair and drill their teeth out without anesthetic just for torture. So, nice man. But incredibly all too many Christians, because of their ignorance of history, are repeating these allegations even in Christian publications. But here's the reality of heathenism. Mary Slessor was horrified when she arrived in Calabar. She discovered that a woman who gave birth to twins was regarded with horror. The basic belief was that a father of one of those infants must be an evil spirit, and therefore the mother is guilty of a great sin to bear twins. At least one of the children was believed to be a monster, so both twins were seized, their backs were broken, they were crushed into calabashes or water pots, taken out not by the doorway but by a hole made in the back wall which had to be built up again. They were thrown in the bush to be eaten alive by insects and wild beasts. That was the reality. Mary Slessor found Caliban a group of rampant witchcraft, drunkenness and immorality. Here are a couple of twins that she adopted to save their lives. later grown up. She intervened to prevent a witch doctor pouring boiling oil over a woman's spread eagle on the ground, and she succeeded in getting the witch doctor back off. Cannibalism and slavery between the tribes was widespread. Once, when Mary was instructed to heal a dying chief, she knew that if she failed, she would be blamed for his death. Witch doctors like to do this. They get everything out of the person until the person is totally bankrupt, they've got no more goats or chickens to sacrifice, and then they send them off to the missionary. so that they could die at the Mishmi Hospital and they get the blame for the death. The witch doctor said, oh well, you know, I did everything I could but then they went to the Mishmi and that's why they died. So first she got rid of all her witchcraft charms and the sacrificed chickens around the hut and she prayed and she gave the chief good medicine and nursed him back to health. And the wives of the chief were particularly grateful for Mary's success because they would have otherwise been killed had the chief died. Those wives, I understand, were keen to learn about the book. Samuel Marsden, a pioneer missionary to New Zealand, witnessed the depth of degradation and the hold of superstition of the Maori people. When the widow of the deceased chief hanged herself for the approval and applause of her parents and brothers, can you imagine family members encouraging one of theirs to commit suicide? Cannibalism was rife amongst the Maori. One chief declared he had eaten 139 people. He knew this because he had kept one bone for every person he had killed. They count up, he had eaten 139 people. One woman confessed she had killed and eaten 19 children. Missionaries to the New Hebrides found human sacrifices and cannibalism rife throughout the Pacific. When people speak about the Maori being the original inhabitants of New Zealand, that's false. The Maori invaded and ate the original inhabitants of New Zealand. And I believe the same is true of the Aborigines, that the Aborigines actually took over from previous inhabitants and wiped them out or killed and ate them. And so when people speak about the indigenous peoples, it's not even true of the American Indians. They also invaded and wiped out and killed and ate the original inhabitants. So this business of original inhabitants has been very much twisted in modern disinformation. In Fiji, two-thirds of the children are boiled and eaten. Every village had a human butcher. Aged parents were butchered and eaten by their own children. Men would cook their best wife or child as a special feast for their friends. John Payton, a missionary to the New Hebrides, reported on an occasion in Tana when three women were killed in a human sacrifice to secure the recovery to health of the chief. When missionary to the South Sea Islands John Williams was criticised for imposing foreign Christian standards upon unwilling communities living in primitive bliss, the noble savage of Rousseau. John Williams noted these were the same communities and societies where laziness, promiscuity, human sacrifice, and the burial alive of infants who were unwanted had shortly before been commonplace. Far from the missionaries interrupting the peace and tranquility of pagan nations, the missionaries came to nations that were passing through immense upheavals. When Hudson Taylor first landed in Shanghai, 1854, the country has been torn apart by civil war, the so-called Taiping Rebellion. Rebels hold the city, 50,000 imperial troops besieged it. That's Chinese Imperial troops, it wasn't British Empire, they weren't dead. The house that Hudson was staying in in Shanghai was struck by cannon fire. The house next to his was destroyed. That was where he did his language study, in that condition. He frequently witnessed people being beheaded. He himself came close to being lynched on occasion. 25 million Chinese were killed in two civil wars that raged just in the 1850s and 1860s in China. That's more than the total population of Australia got wiped out in two civil wars in two decades in China. Another 10 million died during the 1877 to 1879 famine in northern China. That's long before colonialism. They can't blame colonialism for this. This is just normal life before the Drosborg got there. As Dr. George Grant states in his introduction to The Greatest Century of Missions, as missionaries moved out from Christendom to the uttermost parts of the earth, they were shocked to discover the horrors of untamed heathenism. They found abortion all too prevalent, infanticide all too complex, abandonment all too familiar, euthanasia all too customary. They were confronted by the specters of endemic poverty, reoccurring famine, unfettered disease and widespread chattel slavery. cannibalism, ritual abuse, patricide, human sacrifice, sexual perversity, petty tyranny, paternalistic exploitation, live burials, exterminated clan warfare, genocidal travel vendettas all predominated. As Mishri circled the globe, penetrated the jungles, crossed the seas, they preached a singular message, life out of death, liberty out of tyranny, life out of death. To cultures endemic with terrible poverty, brutality, lawlessness and disease, those faithful Christian witnesses interjected the concepts of grace, charity, law, medicine, and the sanctity of life. They overturned despots. They liberated the captives. They rescued the perishing. They established hospitals. They founded orphanages. They started rescue missions. They built almshouses. They opened up soup kitchens. They incorporated charitable societies. They changed laws. They demonstrated love. They lived as if people really mattered. Wherever the missionaries went, they faced a dual challenge, confront sin in men's hearts, confront sin in men's cultures. The obstacles, the dangers, the difficulties they had to face and overcome were staggering. By an act of British Parliament, missionaries were illegal in India. In China, not only was all missionary activity completely illegal, so was attempting to learn the Chinese language. There was a ban on any Chinese teaching their language to foreigners. And the Chinese tutors to Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, carried poison on their bodies so that they could end their lives quickly and escape torture if discovered. Because at the time the Chinese saw bad foreign women coming at their shores, Robert Morrison had to live apart from his wife Mary for most of their lives, once they were separated for six years. I know people complaining when husbands wait for six days. Six years. America's first foreign missionary, Adonai Ojutsu, was captured in the high seas, incarcerated in a French prison, from which he escaped. He later was imprisoned and tortured in a death prison, Burma, for 18 months, strung up by their feet so that only the shells were on the ground every night. He couldn't even walk after that. Livingston wrote, we need to be uncommon Christians. That is, eminently holy and devoted servants of the Most High. Let us seek that selfishness be extirpated, pride banished, unbelief driven from the mind, every idol dethroned, everything hostile to holiness and opposed to the divine will crucified. That holiness to the Lord may be engraved in the heart and evermore characterize our whole conduct. C.T. Studd, the famous cricket captain turned pioneer missionary, the one who brought the Ashes back from Australia to England, said if Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him. Think of it, these days we think a great sportsman is a person who acknowledges God and prays on the field. He was the top British cricketer of his day, world famous, and he gave it up to be a missionary to China and then to Congo. As he faced malaria and other attacks, C.T. Stubb wrote, some like to live within sound of church or chapel bell. I want to run a rescue shop within the yard of hell. In his words, Christ's call is to capture men from the devil's clutches, to snatch them from the very jaws of hell, to enlist and train them for Jesus and make them a mighty army of God. But this can only be accomplished by red hot, unconventional, unfettered, holy spirit religion. by reckless sacrifice and heroism in the foremost trenches. The challenge of David Livingstone rings out to us today. Can that be called a sacrifice? Which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay. It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather, it is a privilege. Studying the sacrifices and the exploits of the pioneer missionaries of the 19th century is most challenging and inspiring. These were ordinary people, made extraordinary by a dynamic and vibrant Christian faith, which carried them through some of the worst circumstances imaginable. Siti started to testify, I once had another religion, hunting the Bible for hidden truths, but no obedience, no sacrifice. Then came the change. The real thing came before me. became deeds. The commands of Christ became not merely Sunday recitations, but battle calls to be obeyed. Ascent to creed was born again into decisive obedience. Hudson Taylor stated his life was based upon three facts. There is a living God, he has spoken the Bible, and he means what he says and he will do all that he has promised. He wrote of the intense longing that gripped him, of the conviction that never left him, that he's called to China. Hudson Taylor agonized in prayer for China, sometimes praying through the night, and he wrote of wrestling with his unbelief and how the Lord conquered his unbelief and surrendered himself to God for service. The Great Commission is not an option to be considered, it is a command to be obeyed, he said. At the end of his long life, Hudson Taylor could declare the sun had never risen upon him in China without finding him in prayer. The battle is the Lord's, he said, and he will conquer. We may fail, we do fail continually, but he never fails. The pioneer missionaries of the 19th century were inspired by our most positive and optimistic faith. They were absolutely convinced that the Lord, who gave the Great Commission, would ensure it would be fulfilled. The will of God will never lead you, but the grace of God cannot keep you. When after seven years of laboring in China, Robert Morrison saw the first Chinese convict, I mean, you would have thought he could be discouraged. Seven years without a convict? But he said, may he be the first fruits of a great harvest, one of millions who shall believe and be saved. Today, indeed, we know there's over 120 million Christians in China. His faith was not misplaced. Scotland's first foreign missionary, Alexander Duff, declared, oh, what promises are ours if we only had the faith to grasp them? What a promise is that in a great commission, go and make disciples of all nations, and lo, I'm with you even to the end of the world. we go forth among the hundreds of the millions of the nations. We find gigantic systems of idolatry consolidated for thousands of years. They tower as high mountains. But what does faith say? Believe, and it shall be. And if any church on earth will realize that faith, to that church will the honor belong of evangelizing the nations and bringing down the mountains. When after seven years labour in India, William Carey was able to witness the conversion of Krishna Pal from Hinduism, Carey declared the divine grace which changed one Indian's heart could obviously change a hundred thousand. Carey declared the work to which God has set his hands will infallibly prosper. We only want men and money to fill this country with the knowledge of Christ. We are neither working at uncertainty nor are we afraid of the result. Christ must reign until Satan has not one inch of territory. God's cause will triumph. In the words of William Carey's historic sermon which launched the modern missionary movement, expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. By God's grace, William Carey was able to successfully campaign against the Hindu practice of sati, where widows were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. Kerry also ended the practice of burning lepers alive. He established the first newspaper ever printed in an oriental language. He introduced the steam engine to India. He pioneered lending libraries. Why? Make books available, knowledge available to people. He introduced savings banks. Why would a mission be involved in savings banks? That common people could own their own homes. He established the first Christian college in Asia, which is still training leaders. He pioneered forestry conservation 50 years before the government started its first forestry. He was doing forestry conservation. He succeeded in producing and distributing over 200,000 Bibles and New Testaments or Gospels in 36 languages, in addition to many books and tracts. He was involved in the translation of 36 different languages. Has there ever been anyone with the gift of tongues to match that? By God's grace, through the ministry of Mary Slessor, the killing of twins ceased. Slave trading in Calabar was eradicated. Drunkenness, killing, and witchcraft diminished. Many schools and churches were established, and many people in Calabar came to embrace the gospel of Christ. By the way, one of her prayer letters back home, send Maxim machine guns. We have slave traders here. I don't know how people in churches would respond to a request like that today, but that's the kind of person Mary Schlesinger was. The first public worship service in New Zealand was conducted on Christmas Day 1814 by Samuel Marsden. By 1845, it was reported that 98% of Maoris had embraced Christianity. By the time John Williams was clogged to death and eaten by cannibals on the island of Eremonga, 1839, he had succeeded in transforming scores of islands by the scriptures he had translated, by the schools he had established, by the churches he had built, and many thousands of islanders had come to salvation in Christ. John Williams had been converted 25 years earlier by a sermon based on what is a profited if a man shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What can a man give in exchange for his soul? True to the verse from Matthew 16 that he heard that night of his conversion, 1814, John Williams found his life by losing it for Christ. Many of these missionaries had the great joy of seeing their children follow in the faith of their fathers. Frank Patton followed in his father's footsteps, John Patton. He became a missionary to the very island where his father had been forced to flee for his life 34 years before. During his ministry there, Frank was blessed to see the whole population of Tauna one for Christ. Throughout the Pacific, their islands were saved. Before the missionary came, there were no Christians. When he left, there were no heathen. Similarly, Robert Morrison had the joy of seeing his son, John Morrison, follow in his footsteps and pour his heart and soul into work of bringing the gospel to the people of China. Adoniram Judson had ten children. Five died in the field. But of the five surviving children, all grew up to distinguish themselves in Christian service. Robert Moffat, who produced the first complete translation of the Bible into an African language, a Twano language, had the joy of seeing five of his seven children actively involved in missionary service. One of his sons, John Moffat, established the first mission station amongst the Maddabili, where I grew up. C.T. Studds had three daughters. Two of his daughters joined him, were born in China and came out and joined him with their husbands in the heart of African mission in the Congo. reluctant mishmies, one of the most delightful, humorous, or brutally honest mishmie biographies I've ever read. One of the fruits of William Wilberforce's lifelong crusade against the slave trade was that Samuel Ajay Crowther, who was born in Yorubala in 1807, the very year Great Britain abolished the slave trade, became the first African bishop of the Church of England. Samuel Crowther was born in Yorubaland and at age 13 he was captured by African slavers and sold to a Portuguese trader for transport across the Atlantic. Samuel was rescued by a British naval squadron in 1822 and put ashore at Freetown. From 1809 the British government mobilised their navy to search suspected slave ships and even foreign vessels on the high seas. For a century the Royal Navy was dedicated to setting captives free, going far beyond clearing the oceans of slave ships. They boldly sailed up uncharted rivers and creeks. They stormed slave stockades. They freed captives at every turn, including these slaves freed on Zanzibar by the HMS Cumberneal. Great Britain dedicated its resource to fighting and opposing the slave trade. They spent millions of pounds in suppressing the slave trade, and they sacrificed a lot of blood in setting free the captives. No nation has ever done mortified slavery. like Sierra Leone, established by British evangelicals as a haven for escaped slaves. They invested vast amounts in Sierra Leone to produce a free, independent state where liberated slaves could settle. And into this Sierra Leone came Samuel Crowther, who was converted to Christ, received his education first in Sierra Leone, later in England. About the third year of my liberation from the slavery of men, I was convinced of another, worse state of slavery, that of sin and Satan. I was admitted to the Visible Church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under his banner against spiritual enemies. In 1864, Samuel Crowther was ordained the first African bishop of the Church of England in an overflowing Canterbury Cathedral. He effectively indigenized an evangelical Anglicanism, which is truly African. Today there are over 18 million Anglicans in Nigeria. In fact, let me put it in perspective. There are 18 times more Anglicans in church every Sunday in Nigeria than the whole of the British Isles of North America combined. Missions is the lifeblood of the church, and it's absolutely essential that our congregations and our families be presented with these and many other inspiring examples of those whom God used in such extraordinary ways. We need to read these examples and feed our minds and our souls with examples of excellence. I pray that these few selected adventures and sacrifices, exploits, pictures and achievements will whet your appetite to read The Greatest Century of Missions and obtain more missionary biographies, to start the lifelong habit of making time to feed our minds and our souls with the noblest object that can engage the enthusiasm of man, the salvation of millions. May God be pleased to use The Greatest Century of Missions to inspire a new generation of missionaries to expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God. One who answered the call was David Brainiard, whose journal included this prayer, Here I am, send me, send me to the rough, the savage pagans of the world, to send me from all that is called comfort on earth, send me even to death itself, if it be but in thy service and to promote thy kingdom. As C.T. Studds said, you only have one life, it'll soon be past, only what's done for Jesus Christ will last.