Testimony
3 minute read
Our mission is a testimony to the faithfulness of God in the lives of pioneering men and women. Our ministry has grown out of four roots originally planted in Algeria and Morocco. The founders were all alert to God’s direction, obedient to His call, and persistent in their service for Him.
George and Jane Pearse had served for many years among French soldiers when they visited Algeria’s capital city, Algiers, in 1876 to minister to the French garrison. But their meeting with destitute Kabyles was unforgettable – they saw the need and moved into a new direction of ministry. Dr H Grattan Guinness was also moved by compassion by the spiritual need in this area and gave the first donation for the mission. Their subsequent meeting resulted in the first team arriving in Algeria in 1881. The initial cohort were:
The first American would follow a few years later. The Mission to Kabyles and Other Berber Races had begun work. By 1884, North Africa Mission (NAM) was found to be a better title.
John Anderson came back to Scotland in the latter 1880s from a visit to Morocco with a profound sense of the spiritual need in North Africa. As a result, he founded the Southern Morocco Mission. In 1888 Cuthbert Nairn and his sister were the first sent by the agency — he kept going until his death in Marrakech 56 years later.
Meanwhile Mr Glenny was speaking in London in 1887 when Lilias Trotter heard God’s call to her. Within a year she was in Algeria. Approaching Algiers she wrote, ‘If God wants weakness, he’s got it.’ Though already 37, she served for over 40 years as part of the Algiers Mission Band.
In the early 1960s, Kay Richmond saw the pressing need for ministry in the Dades Valley in Morocco. Though others joined her later, she settled into rooms in the kasbah of her desert town. Running water was a mile’s walk away. And so the Dades Valley Fellowship began.
Other early pioneers in North Africa Mission responded to the Lord’s direction. Emma Herdman from Northern Ireland had a talent for languages and saw the need for ministry to Spanish and Jewish residents in Tangier, Morocco. She believed that Scripture distribution could reach areas where foreigners couldn’t travel.
By 1890, Emma had a dozen Moroccan Christian men selling Arabic gospels over a wide area around Fez, another city in Morocco. She wrote, ‘I believe, if I seek to be out of it, and to let the natives evangelise as a national work, Christianity in this land will be disconnected with foreigners.’ After 11 years in Fez she died while being transported 200 miles to the nearest doctor in Tangier.
Meanwhile Karl Kumm, from Germany, was ministering in Egypt with the NAM. In 1898 he wrote, ‘Even while I was staying in England a voice seemed to say to me, “I have prepared the people of the desert for my gospel – go and preach it to them.” Now at least I have had a look upon those dear people and upon the vast desert Sahara …’. He met a camel caravan leader who had obtained an Arabic New Testament and read it several times. This man challenged Karl to move out into the desert and not stay among the labourers in the Nile delta. Karl went on to found Christian ministry in northern Nigeria, and walked from there to Khartoum in Sudan. Dr Karl Kumm and his wife Lucy Guinness (daughter of Grattan Guinness) went on to found Sudan United Mission which has since become Pioneers UK.
The lives of our founders set an inspiring example to be open to God’s call to glorify Christ among the nations. Their example points us to the challenge summarised in Scripture for all believers, in every age ‘…let us run with endurance the race that is set before us …’ Hebrews 12:1.
Interested in mission history?