Liz was involved in the EAB church in Patos from very
young. Liz is an amazingly strong devoted Christian. Many don’t realize what a
rock she is because she rarely says much about it. I talk the hind legs off a
donkey, but Liz gets on with the work, serves the Lord and never turns away a
poor person in need. She taught a Sunday School class with 120 children when
she was only 13 years old.
I was in Notting Hill, London at this time, at my
church called Peniel Chapel. I too was involved in the church from very young,
and I too was involved as a teenager with children’s work. My job was to go
round with driver Steve Grantham in the church mini-bus and collect the kids to
take them to church 4 times a week! My job was to knock on the doors of houses
and flats and get the kids into the mini-bus. Our record number was 252
children one Tuesday night and not one was white! I loved the Anglo/West Indian
community and still do.
My church was missions mad! Founded by pastor Ben
Griffiths who was fruit of the 1904 Welsh Revival, he was a tremendous man of
faith and missionary vision. We supported dozens of missionaries all over the
world and this included Brazil. Our missionary family in Minas Gerais, in south
east Brazil, were the Roults, and on their visits to the UK they stayed with
their family a couple of streets from where I lived. I started hearing a lot and
to feel God’s call on my life, and was already planning to head for Brazil one
day still in my teenage years of child evangelism. It was just a matter of
turning the West Indians into Brazilians!
I had never heard of north-east Brazil. Who had? My
church worked down south and I thought one day that I might head there.
However, 1966 (the year that England won the Football World Cup) was far more significant
for my life for another reason. In the October the Millbrook Church youth from
Southampton came to my church in London for a united youth service during which
a young lady, who had recently arrived from north-east Brazil, was asked to
sing Psalm 51 in Portuguese. My jaw dropped at her beauty!
I tried to chat to Liz after the service, but to no
avail. I prayed a lot over the following weeks! In the New Year I went to run
with my Cross-Country athletics club at Southampton and in the evening I went
to see a Christian film for youth at a Baptist church and prayed that Liz would
be there – and she was! But no amount of insistence for her to have an
ice-cream with me after the film worked, but I kept praying. Then I heard that
my church had invited EAB’s Frank Dyer to preach at our Good Friday morning
service and of course I wondered could this be my answer to prayer? I contacted
my friend David Irish in Southampton to invite Liz, Frank’s daughter, to my
house for lunch after the service if she was coming with him. David “Sherlock”
Irish discovered she was coming, together with her brother Sam, so he invited
them both and they accepted! The rest is history.
Our courtship (see photo) lasted from Easter 67 to
November 69 in which time I went to Liz’s house one weekend at Dibden Purlieu
near Southampton and she came to mine on the other. All I heard constantly was
about EAB and the needs of north-east Brazil! Frank, Liz’s Dad, showed me
slides and told me endless stories about the Mission and I soon realized they
had a point. The needs of north-east Brazil were incomparably greater than
where my church was working in the south. Thus we got married at that same
church in Southampton, who had visited mine 3 years earlier, and where God had
brought Liz and I together. Pastor Winston Shearing conducted our wedding (leader
of the Board of Trustees of EAB), Albert Mundy (EAB’s founder) also took part
in the service as did Reuben Gunter, then pastor at Peniel Chapel, and Jack
Dyer (pastor at Liz’s local church in the area at Hardley). Of course EAB
missionary Frank Dyer gave away the bride and our good friend Pastor Colin
Whittaker was also present. 6 ministers at one wedding did the trick!
Liz and I married committed to working with EAB in
north-east Brazil and I studied at the IBTI in preparation for this. Later on I
did a degree in theology at LBC (this was great) and a master’s degree at Leeds
University. So at the beginning of August 1972 we took off to Patos, Paraíba, north-east
Brazil, with our 4-month baby Deborah. And here we still are serving the Lord, but
now with a bigger family. But I’ll tell you more about how our first years went
here in Brazil in my next chapter…
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