Because of his success as an author, involvement in worldwide evangelical endeavors and his great respect among Christians, Norman Grubb was asked to write the Foreword to many books. While visiting Linda Bunting I went through Norman’s library and found numerous books graced with these Forewords. You will recognize many of the authors, but most of the books listed are no longer in print
| Book Title | Author | Published |
| Flood on Dry Ground | Eva Stuart Watt | 1939 |
| God at Work in Spanish Guinea | Alec Thorne | 1943 |
| The Calvary Road | Roy Hessian | 1950 |
| Amazing Love | Corrie Ten Boom | 1953 |
| Further Evidence | Elsie Rowbotham | 1954 |
| Upon This Rock | Eric W. Gosden | 1957 |
| A Closer Walk | Ernest & Marie Williams | 1958 |
| Would You Believe It! | Elsie Rowbotham | 1963 |
| Going Through With God` | Lily Searle | 1965 |
| I Believe in the Holy Ghost | Maynard James | 1965 |
| God Breaks In | Ruth L. Congdon | 1968 |
| In Christianity or in Christ | J.C. Khan | 1968 |
| Five Five Fifty-Five | Maurice Smith | 1969 |
| Ma Harri—and No Nonsense | Mary Harrison | 1969 |
| Man Alive | John Whittle | 1971 |
| As He Walked | Ernst I. Dahle | 1971 |
| Going for God | Betty Macindoe | 1972 |
| Wholly for God | Andrew Murray | 1976 |
| The Foolishness of God | Ken Adams | 1982 |
| Wink of Faith | Bill Volkman | 1983 |
| Follow My Leader | Katharine Makower | 1984 |
| Prove Me | Marion B. Perry | 1989 |
| Grow or Die | Ann Watt Wiechmann |
By: Eva Stuart Watt– 1938
FOREWORD
I heard this story first-hand from Jack and Lily Roberts on their return to England in 1937. I was both greatly impressed and blessed. So many of us seek for revival and ask how it may be found. Here was revival both sought and found; and the telling of the story revealed the secrets of the seeking and finding, as well as giving the results. I felt so sure that blessing and revelation in the ways of the Spirit would come to many if they could hear it, that I asked my friend, Miss Eva Stuart Watt, whose writings have already made the triumphs of the mission field live to thousands, whether she could find time to put it into book form. After waiting on God, her consent was given. The book has been written in the same dependence upon Him for wisdom, truth and words that are with power.
As to the setting of the story, for the most part it explains itself. It will be sufficient if I add that this populous area of the Ituri forest in the N.E. Belgian Congo was first visited in 1920 by one of our missionary evangelists, Mr. James Lowder. He sent back reports of an extraordinary response to the Gospel, such as he had never met with elsewhere. Mr. C.T. Studd, the founder and director of the Mission, soon became so impressed with these reports, that he came himself to open a centre amongst them. His experiences were the same. In 1922, he wrote, “The sound of abundance of rain! What music it is to tired hearts and heavy ears to hear the sound of hymn singing ever coming closer and closer and then to see a band of men and women, boys and girls, who have marched one or two or eight or ten hours to hear the words of God. I found some fifteen hundred natives, all packed tight as sardines, squatting on the ground in the sweltering mid-day African sun. No church nor shed was theirs. They are singing hymns to God with hearts and tongues and voices – a great untrained and unpaid choir, making better melody to God and to us than a choir of a thousand Carusos. You watch their eager faces as they squat there drinking in every word of the preacher. They are greedy for the Gospel. A two hours meeting doesn’t trouble them, unless it be that they consider it scant measure. They were then sent for a rest for an hour; then they turned up bright and breezy as ever for their second innings. Under our supervision they built themselves a House of God to seat 1,250 people. It measures as much as a cricket pitch each way . . .”
It was to these people 14 years later, when sin and coldness had crept in, that the Spirit came in revival blessing.
If any read this story who have lost their first love, I pray that it may be used to show them the way back to blessing and usefulness; and that to others who feel the pressure and power of Satan in their field of labour, and the barrenness of the soil, the Holy Spirit may use it to reveal the secret of “floods upon the dry ground”.
NORMAN P. GRUBB
Worldwide Evangelization Crusade,
17, Highland Road, Upper Norwood
London, S.E. 19
By Alec Thorne – 1943
A WORD OF EXPLANATION
The Colony of Spanish Guinea, sometimes called Rio Muni, in Equatorial Africa, is the first of a number of countries ON THE West Coast of Africa which God has called the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade to enter. It was first entered by the American Presbyterians over ninety years ago, then evacuated, then more recently re-occupied. We would acknowledge with thankfulness to God both the faithful work of that splendid mission in the northern half of the Colony, and their unvarying kindness to our own missionaries.
Just at the time that our first Crusaders were preparing to sail, new laws were passed in Madrid against the admission of foreign missionaries into their territories, although allowing those already in the Colony to remain “as colonists.” It was this fact that made the entry of Mr. and Mrs. Thorne in 1933, followed by Miss Elizabeth Smith (Mrs. Anthony) and Miss Emma Munn, and (with the exception of Miss Smith, who had to return through ill-health) their continuance in the land these nine years, a ‘daily miracle’ of God’s power.
The story of its commencement has already been told in general outline in a booklet called Penetrating Faith in Spanish Guinea, many thousands of which have been sold. Now that Mr. Thorne has himself returned on furlough after nine years in the land, he has given vivid insights into the lord’s marvelous workings, such as can only be described by those who experienced them on the spot. These are now published here under the title, God at Work.
The story is not a consecutive account of the happenings of these years, but rather a collection of the outstanding interventions of God’s grace grouped under various headings, and described in a way which can only bring all the glory to Him and give readers a new and wonderful conception of His faithfulness.
As the following facts are not mentioned in the narrative, it ought here to be pointed out, also to the glory of God’s grace, that where the little band started work in 1933 amongst the Okak Tribe, there are now, in spite of the constant interferences described in this book, five Okak churches, and two more in process of formation. Out of many hundreds who have professed conversion, more than one hundred have been baptized as the outward and visible sign of truly changed lives. The churches are under the leadership of their own elected elders, and ten Okak Christians have been set apart as evangelists.
All through the narrative Mr. Thorne speaks of himself as “Kiwe” (his native name), Mrs. Thorne as “Ma Kiwe,” and Miss Smith as “Ma Lui,” and Miss Munn as “Ma Mondo.”
N.P. Grubb,
19 Highland Road Hon. General Secretary London, S.E. 19. Worldwide Evangelization Crusade
By: Roy Hession – 1950
Used with permission of Kingsway Publications
INTRODUCTION
By NORMAN P. GRUBB,
Hon. Secretary of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, London.
I AM sure from my own experience, as well as from what we have seen in the ranks of our Mission these last three years, that what the authors tell us about in these pages is one of God’s vital words to His worldwide church today. For long I had regarded revival only from the angle of some longed-for, but very rare, sudden outpouring of the Spirit on a community of people. I felt that there was a missing link somewhere. Knowing of the continuing revival on a certain mission field, and because it was continuing, and not merely sudden and passing, I long felt that they had a further secret we needed to learn. Then the chance came for heart-to-heart fellowship with them, first through one of our own missionary leaders whose life and ministry had been transformed by a visit to that field, and then through conferences with some of their missionaries on furlough, and finally through the privilege of having two of the native brethren living for six months at our headquarters.
From them I learned and saw that revival is first personal and immediate. It is the constant experience of any simplest Christian who “walks in the light,” but I saw that walking in the light means an altogether new sensitiveness to sin, a calling things by their proper name of sin, such as pride, hardness, doubt, fear, self-pity, which are often passed over as merely human reaction. It means a readiness to “break” and confess at the feet of Him who was broken for us, for the Blood does not cleanse excuses, but always cleanses sin, confessed as sin; then revival is just the daily experience of a soul full of Jesus and running over.
Further we are beginning to learn, as a company of Christ’s witnesses, that the rivers of life to the world do not flow out in their fullness through one man, but through the body, the team. Our brokenness and openness must be two-way, horizontal as well as vertical, with one another as with God. We are just beginning to experience in our own ranks that team work in the Spirit is one of the keys to revival, and that we have to learn and practise the laws of a living fellowship.
I need not say more, as Roy Hession and his wife expound on the whole matter. But we have seen God at work in our midst. I could name half-a-dozen of our workers, several of them leaders, in whose lives there has been a new spiritual revolution. Then rivulets of blessing in some of our individual lives have been merging in a larger stream. God has been giving us times as a company when “as they prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.” Here and there on our battle fields, distant and near, the sound of abundance of rain is being heard; and we believe among many companies of God’s people He is preparing afresh for these last days a “sharp threshing instrument having teeth,” and that what God is saying to us through this Revival, and through the interpretation of that message in this pamphlet, is a word of the Lord for our day. May it be greatly used to produce revived lives, revived fellowships and revived churches.
By Corrie Ten Boom – 1953
FOREWORD
“YE shall be witnesses unto Me”, said Jesus to His disciples, “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Corrie ten Boom is one of that number. Having found for herself the victory that overcomes the world in the horrors of a concentration camp, she cannot keep her secret to herself. She has become a world-wide witness, a troubadour of Christ. She shares with us in these pages, with all the vividness of first-hand experience, contacts and conversations with all sorts in camps and jails, with actresses and students, with sophisticated and illiterate: and I lay down this manuscript saying, like those two disciples of old, “Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us by the way?” For I met, not Corrie, but Corrie’s Christ. I was blessed again and again by the instances of her own child-like dependence on Him as her wisdom, by his responses to her faith, and by the wise and winning ways in which she has been able to commend Him to so many. May many who read these living chapters see Him again, in the simplicity of faith, as our all-sufficiency, and be stirred, as I have been, to a bolder faith.
Norman P. Grubb
By: Elsie Rowbotham – 1954
FOREWORD
FRANCIS and Elsie Rowbotham owned a business in Birmingham, which they managed themselves with the help of assistants, and they lived in the rooms above the shops. Both had come to know the Lord as their Saviour in early years and were keenly interested in missionary work, having special links with the work and workers of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. Little did they then realize what God had planned for their lives as they followed Him step by step in the pathway of obedience. In order to get the background of what God has done through them in bringing into being the Missionary Training College in Glasgow, we asked Elsie Rowbotham to tell, in her own words, some of the ways the Lord used to train them in the school of faith. She goes on to tell the full story of the College. Another romance of prayer and faith. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
N. P. GRUBB
The Sacrifices of a Japanese Nurse for a Young Church
By Eric W. Gosden- 1957
FOREWORD
The beauty of Jesus shines out of this Japanese story in a purely Japanese setting, and irradiates the spirit of the reader. Though written by a “foreign missionary”, only Jesus and the Japanese are seen. We walk in the ever-old, ever-new tracks of the Shepard who finds His other sheep, as He found us, and our hearts sing the song of the angels. Here in the heart of dark Japan, where false gods and lying faiths hold almost universal sway, we thrill to read the old, old story of grace abounding—the agony of a destitute soul, the change that Jesus makes, the courage, the tenacity, the boldness, the grace, the patience of the Spirit in a weak human vessel, the ‘much fruit’ in an intensely conservative Buddhist village, the church built literally at night, the life of self-denial among many adversaries, the glory of the home-going. No redeemed child of God can read this narrative without a glow in its soul: deep calls unto deep.
Eric Gosden has a remarkable facility in making us live with the Japanese for the few hours of our reading. Nothing foreign intrudes—we see, feel, think Japanese. Here we meet the Christ of the Japanese Road. Eric Gosden himself has lived in Japan many years, first arriving there in 1933, and most evidently sits where they sit. He is a senior member of a greatly used band of missionaries who have ministered Christ to the Japanese—the Japanese Evangelistic Band. On a recent visit to Japan, several senior Japanese Christians told me that no work of God in Japan had gone deeper than that which the Spirit had wrought through the two founders of the J.E.B., the much loved Barclay F. Buxton and Paget Wilkes. What God did by them can be read in the biography of Barclay Buxton written by his son, Godfrey Buxton, now chairman of the J.E.B. called The Reward of Faith; and in the well known masterpiece of missionary soul-winning by Paget Wilkes, recently re-published, The Dynamic of Service. Older lovers of Japan can doubtless remember Paget Wilkes’ first book which opened the eyes of many of a past generation to the power of the Gospel in Japanese lives, Missionary Joys in Japan.
The keynote of the work of the J.E.B. has ever been Christ’s full salvation, with the emphasis on the ‘full’. The Band members have ever sought to dig deep in lives, to lay strong foundations in the new birth, to build an equally strong superstructure on the standards of I Thessalonians 5:23, “the very God of peace sanctify you wholly”; and God has mightily and outstandingly borne witness to their ministry. Indeed, it has been a testimony not only throughout Japan, but far beyond to the Christian church in general, of a Saviour who both justifies and sanctifies. Yet what is even more significant and the hallmark of true missionary service, the humble, radiant, undaunted little Japanese woman of this story is not a child, but a grandchild of the missionary. No missionary is mentioned in the book! It was a Japanese saint who first bore witness to her, a Japanese pastor who nurtured her in Christ, a Japanese evangelist who reaped where she had sown, a Japanese church that was born out of heathendom. A mission fulfilling its destiny.
Norman P. Grubb
By Ernest & Marie Williams – 1958
FOREWORD
BY NORMAN P. GRUBB
General Secretary, Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
“My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” Not for a doctrine, not for a theory, not for a philosophy, but for a Person. This is what comes to me, as I read these beautiful pages. Till we know Him, whom to know is life eternal, we wander in a wilderness, a dry and thirsty land, for the human heart is created only for one purpose, for fellowship—with God. Those who have never drawn near to HIM may see no beauty in these pages; but for those who have, they will be green pastures and still waters. I love that dominant note, struck in the very list of headings—“GOD my peace, GOD my guide, GOD my strength . . .”
Ernest and Marie Williams now live in retirement (another form of activity!) in a lovely home among the pines overlooking one of the beauty spots of Southern England, Poole Harbour. Their garden is a picture, the quiet lawn fringed by a multi-coloured variety of flowers and flowering shrubs, and beyond the lawn a break in the pine-woods through which they look down on that lovely inland harbour. These daily meditations were written in these surroundings, which surely had their influence upon them as they worked: “The whole earth is full of His glory.”
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot—
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not—
Not God in gardens! When the eve is cool:
Nay, but I have a sign:
‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.
These meditations are the flowers of a lifetime plucked by Ernest and Marie from that vast garden of literature of the Spirit, blooms which have first been a sweet savour to their own spirits, and are now shared with us.
Poems, verses of hymns, quotations, sayings from the Bible, comments of their own, flow in a connected stream on the subject of each meditation, bringing one right into the presence of Him to whom each points. We are left with Him, we feed on Him. It would be impossible for anyone whose heart is open to the unveiling of Christ not to be taught, encouraged, bound by stronger bonds of faith to Him who is our All in All. Nor are these presented to us by one whose profession it is to do so, but by two busy, practical people, whose lives have been spent in positions of responsibility in Government service, and who are sharing with us what has been meat and drink to them, living right in the world of affairs. They will equally enrich all others who use them.
Ernest Williams was for several years the chairman of International Christian Leadership in Britain.
By: Elsie Rowbotham – 1963
FOREWORD
I have not felt it necessary to put much of an editor’s pen into this story. It is better told in the words of one of the two who went all through it. You can polish a thing up and maybe it is more smooth-running from a literary point of view; but that is not our objective. Let this tremendous testimony to God’s miracle-working power do its own work in our hearts. This God is our God also. Let us see how God turns the ordinary into the extraordinary in the life of a normal young business couple in the city of Birmingham (I knew them myself in those days and have been along with them in the work every since): how God changed them from being merely recipients to becoming channels of His grace: the simple down-to-earth obediences of faith which were the training ground: the first hesitating steps in the life of believing God: the lessons learned of “Give and it shall be given unto you”, and “It is more blessed to give than to receive”: the call: learning the secret of the corn of wheat which must “fall into the ground and die”, if it is to bear much fruit: and so onward to the full fruitage in the miracle of the Glasgow Missionary Training College and the Kilcreggan Conference Centre, with the hundreds of young lives in whom the same self-giving, outgoing life of Christ is being reproduced in all parts of the world, as in these two.
Francis and Elsie Rowbotham are known to us in the family circle of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade either as Fran and Elsie, or as “Row” and “Ma Row” (an echo of the way the Africans often shorten the names of the missionaries, and add “Ma” for the better halves), and you will find them named in this way in the following pages. Elsie tells the story. But that must not leave anyone with the idea that here is the dominating lady in the leadership! Fran is in the lead in the general oversight of Bible College and Conference Centre, to his finger tips the willing servant of all for Christ’s sake, and chairman of the conference sessions: Elsie, woman of prayer and faith side by side with her husband, and managing all that is involved in the domestic and catering side of these two crowded households: and both having learned – through fires of their earlier experiences – the secrets of team work with their band of co-workers. We are sure any reader of this testimony who is up in the Glasgow direction will feel the warmth of their hospitality and welcome if you visit the Training College at 10, Prince Albert Road, or take a week of your summer holidays at Kilcreggan.
Norman P. Grubb
An Autobiography by Lily Searle- 1965
FOREWORD
Lily Searle’s life story is an ideal example of how God chooses his own instruments in His own way and moulds them for the purposes they would never dream of; and they become in the hands of the Potter the exact vessel for that exact use. How perfectly He prepared Lily for one of the most demanding and delicate tasks in a missionary crusade. How perfectly she has fulfilled it. Yet what was there about her early life which would make anyone think she was destined for this?
It had always been our aim in the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade to watch for really only one essential characteristic in a candidate: “These all with perfect heart” came to make Jesus King. Not the intellectual first, not the physical, but the heart firmly set on God, and the go-through spirit. ‘Mother’ Studd was an adept in ‘spotting’ God’s anointed among the unlikely, and Lily Searle was one of her ‘bull’s eyes’. It takes keenness of scent, free from following just the beaten tracks, not to miss God’s specials. Lily Searle only scraped through on the health level, and after eight wonderful years in the Congo, left the field with many more tears than when she left her homeland. But that leaving, that inability to return, those years of desperate testing, when Charlie and she seemed on the scrap heap – these were exactly God’s ways to their true life’s calling. And when it came, she could at first neither see nor accept it.
But what lies at the base of a God-led life? That ‘perfect heart’ which always finally says yes to God when it knows He has spoken. That has been Lily’s life through and through. That is of more value to God than all the ‘rubies’ of human equipment.
So I say, as I have read and helped to prepare this little book, and as I have known Charlie and Lily Searle since they first went to the Congo in 1928, thank God for being in a Crusade which is manned with crusaders of their type. Do you want to know what a real crusader of Jesus is made of? Read this and God give us many more like them.
Charlie Searle, Lily’s husband, has already told some of the miracles of God’s working for them at ‘The Elms’ in his booklet God Can, and to many enthralled audiences in Britain, U.S.A. and elsewhere. This is Lily’s life story, her side of a married partnership in which in such an amazing way, they have been father and mother not only to their own six children, but to so many others entrusted to them. A commission as delicate, self sacrificial and exacting as any could be.
Norman P. Grubb,
International Secretary.
The WORLDWIDE EVANGELIZATION CRUSADE.
by Maynard James – 1965
I have been treading on holy ground as I have read this manuscript.
It is in response to the request of my old friend and beloved brother in Christ, Maynard James, that I write this foreword. I have often heard Maynard preach, and I know him to be a God-inspired prophet of a full salvation. But not until reading this manuscript did I realize he is also a Biblical scholar.
The range and aptness of his Bible references, the breadth and scope of his quotations from theological authors through the centuries, and the pungency of his facts and illustrations collected from all kinds of sources, grip my attention.
I must confess that I read through enough Biblical publications to quickly lose interest when the presentation is not beyond the ordinary. But this manuscript has held my interest.
Way beyond that, however, there is an atmosphere here in what Maynard James writes. It reminds me of the title of Rudolph Otto’s classic The Idea of the Holy. This is entering into the holiest—the Holy Spirit speaking through a man on the Holy Spirit.
It is not a light book. It is not a bunch of diverting illustrations to capture the ephemeral interest of a quiet afternoon. It is not that modern atrocity that masquerades as a living book—a series of sermons! It is a serious presentation for the serious readers on that most serious of all subjects—God the Spirit. But it is written in no dead fashion of the theological treatise; it is with the same fire burning through its pages as burns in the authors preaching, and with the same depth of concern to see the Holy Spirit outpoured on the Church today as at Pentecost, and through the Churches to the world.
The Holy Spirit at Pentecost is the Holy Spirit of today. He is at work, and the promise is to every believer: “He that believeth on me…from within him shall flow rivers of living water. But He spake of the Spirit.”
Norman P. Grubb
International Secretary
The Worldwide Evangelization Crusade
Used by permission of Bethany House a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2007. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group. http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com.
by Ruth L. Congdon – 1968
By: J.C. Khan – 1968
FOREWORD
The Church of God in India has its own Spirit-anointed servants of God; fearless men who know the real from the unreal; men who can wield the Word of God as a sharp sword, and at the same time bind up the wounds with the Balm of Gilead.
Brother Jordan Khan is one of these. Before I first met him, some fifteen years ago, I heard of this brother, who, on meeting a Western missionary, did not hesitate to ask him if he was born again. I liked that! Here was a man to whom the Church of Christ was people of any race who possessed Christ in their hearts, and not who merely professed Him with their mouths.
This little book bears out completely what the title says. I have not read a plainer, more direct presentation of the dividing line between the nominal and the real, and the way to reality. Its message is, therefore, peculiarly to professing Christians of any branch of the outward church, particularly in his own country of India, but would be as pertinent for those who call themselves Christians, of all races. His messages are shot through with all kinds of apt illustrations taken from daily life,–practical and simple, of coins and caterpillars, telephones, trains and spies.
Of his earlier life Brother Jordan Khan writes: “My late father, Chanan Khan, was a Muslim convert, and later became a servant of God. He was a companion of Praying Hyde for many years in the Punjab. I was a nominal Christian by birth (born February 26th, 1918.) I was saved on September 11th, 1941, in Kotri, Sind, (now in West Pakistan).
In the month of December 1941, the Lord called me for full-time service while I was working on the railway in Larkana in Sind. I immediately resigned my railway job and started serving the Lord by faith. The messages in this book have already been used by the Lord in my humble ministry, for the salvation of thousands of souls throughout India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia and Europe. Kindly pray that the Lord may use the book for the salvation, restoration and blessing of many more souls.”
Norman P. Grubb.
The Worldwide Evangelization Crusade
Fort Washington.
Pa., U.S.A.
By Maurice Smith – 1969
FOREWORD
I HAVE not met Maurice Smith, but a friend of his and mine suggested that he send me a copy of his manuscript. I found it vivid and intriguing, just because he does not try to be sophisticated or theological but gets straight down to honest personal experience and does not leave that one path. The personal always grips me. Novels may have their place, but I never get away from the uncomfortable feeling, ‘This never really happened’, ‘Could it really have happened that way?’ But to me a life story is life; and it need not be egotistical. This one is not. It moves straight on over hill and valley, and I don’t feel Maurice has skipped anything that mattered, whether painful or humanly humiliating. It is a young story: not young in the sense of a teenage tale but of a man near enough to his young days to speak to this generation; and when it comes to taking us with him through his varied Christian experiences they are varied enough and spiritually dramatic enough, and plainly told enough to grip any hungry heart, and they seem just about to cover the span of God’s dealings with ‘the growth of a soul’. It does not mean that God takes everyone of us all those ways, nor that we must be stumbled by any compulsive drive to imitate. It is really an unfinished story, because Maurice’s is very much an unfinished life; but I have no doubt that God will speak to readers’ hearts, as He has to mine.
Norman P. Grubb
By: Mary Harrison – 1969
FOREWORD
At the start of our Worldwide Crusade, our founder, C.T. Studd, set our crusading standards for us, and himself lived them in the Heart of Africa. These standards remain and are to us the foundation principles by which the world can be evangelised. That is why this life story of Mary Harrison means so much to me. Her husband, Jack, followed C.T. Studd in the leadership of the work, until he himself went to be with the Lord in 1946. He was my ideal of a young man without any of life’s normal opportunities, moulded by the Spirit into a great missionary leader of the living Church of Christ in Congo. Mary’s story is equally so of a young woman, called to God’s service in the mission field when she never felt herself equipped for it.
Jack and Mary and I all started our missionary life within a year or two of each other, in the early twenties, so I am speaking of one whom I know.
There followed her early recruit years, marriage, life with Jack before and after he had become field leader, the shock of his sudden “glorification”; since then the years given to total immersion in living among her African brothers and sisters, making further advance to new tribes, and often in hardships with her beloved co-worker, Muriel Harman, who was martyred by the Simbas.
Then came the change over of the Congo to an independent republic, followed later by the suddenness of the horrors of the Simba take-over with its accompanying atrocities. Ma Harri was caught up in this and was only willing at my request to tell her experiences more or less in detail.
She did much translation work on the field and about a year ago sent to the Congo a manuscript in Swahili, on the Life and Ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ, taken from the four Gospels and woven into one story.
Her memoirs are tremendously moving, with a solid, down to earth, factual, though on the whole unemotional, presentation of a crusading life for Jesus. There is much in it I love, especially the tender and appreciative references to her “ebony brethren”, not downgrading them, but glorifying God in them and I think here is a pattern for the young women missionaries of today.
NORMAN P. GRUBB
Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
By John Whittle – 1971
FOREWORD
I suppose it is inevitable that I write approvingly of this little book by John Whittle. John and I have been closest companions for over 25 years in seeking to share with others the union relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ—for us, in us, and by us—which is to us the meaning of human living, both on its basis of scriptural revelation and as implanted in our own consciousness. We have traveled thousands of miles together, talking out to the last detail as we traveled how we were progressively seeing things, and have participated in hundreds of public meetings and house groups. In most of these I have done the speaking; but for so long I have known that John had great riches of understanding in “the mystery of God,” and a much better clarity of public speaking than I, that I urged him to put into writing what God had so plainly made living to him. At last he has done this, and how glad I am. I am sure this will confirm to many what the Apostle John says we who are the Lord’s already inwardly know by “the anointing of the Holy One,” but often have not consciously and boldly affirmed; or alternatively, this will come as the sunshine of new revelation to burdened, striving servants of Christ who by no means find what He said to be fact: “My yoke is easy and My burden light.”
By the privilege of God’s call, John and I for all our serving lives have been immersed in the world-wide spread of the gospel through the Crusade founded by C.T. Studd, The Worldwide Evangelization Crusade; and this is still our first-line calling.
Norman P. Grubb
By: Ernst I. Dahle – 1971
FOREWORD
In these days of revolutionary ferment, I thank God that my friend, Ernst Dahle, tells us plainly in these three talks in print that to be truly living is to be a revolutionary, and what that revolution is. If a normal human being who is naturally self-loving, self-centred, and self-seeking becomes equally naturally God-loving and other-loving—that is the revolution. And when that same person has as his main objective, to get others to join him—that is being a revolutionary.
This is exactly what Brother Ernst is not only advocating, but is explaining how it becomes an actuality: in a word, in Bible words, walking as He walked, and being as He is in this world. Is this possible, realizable in normal human living? Yes, it is, and Ernst tells us now. We won’t say more than that it is emphatically not by imitation, but by impartation, and the way is made plain in these pages. Some who read will find, that “the wayfaring men, though fools, shall never err therein.”
Norman P. GrubbUsed by permission of Bethany House a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2007. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group. http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com.
The Story of Bessie Brierley
By: Betty Macindoe – 1972
FOREWORD
I don’t know if it is the best moment to write a foreword when I have just finished reading the manuscript of this book. I have been thrilled to my depths, not only by the plain impact of this story of Bessie’s life, but by the upsurge of joy which I find at this modern-day illustration of what the Lord said was the one essential for missionary-apostleship—the Holy Spirit in the earthen vessel. As C.T. Studd, the founder of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, said in his own inimitable way, “All God wants is a heart, and any old turnip will do for a head! As long as we are empty all is well, for then He fills with the Holy Ghost.” And sometimes His servants are women, not men—Mary Slessor, Gladys Aylward, Bessie Brierley. Sacrifice and faith are still the true crusading standards, only now, thank God, the day has come when the ranks of missionary crusaders are being swelled by Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.
You will see what I mean as you read the story. It is an eye-opener to me to read of the raw conditions of Bessie’s home-life. I first met her at Arthur’s Mission in the East End of London. I noticed the rapt attention of this young woman in the small group which gathered nightly. But when she came straight up to me and asked if there was any chance that a girl like her could be a missionary, I thank God that I gave her the right answer. I told her that it is not a good education that makes a missionary, but the Holy Ghost. She was to face me up with that effectively enough some years later when, as you will read, the crisis moment came about her going alone into Portuguese Guinea. I cabled to her saying that she should come home and that the passage money would be provided. She thanked me for my concern, but added that it was not me who had sent her out but God. “The Holy Spirit tells me to go forward,” she wrote. “He can save by many or by few. I go forward even though everybody says I am crazy to do so.” It was then that the motto came into being among us, “The woman is the man to do the job!”
I have known and loved Bessie since those beginning days—just the human Bessie that Betty Macindoe now makes alive to us in these pages. If God can do as He has with Bessie, He can surely do something with all of us.
I feel I must add a word of thankfulness for what this story brings out so clearly too—that God also commissions the hidden ones, the people behind the scenes. We are grateful for those who participated with Bessie by continual sacrifices and persistent prayer and faith all through the years—her co-crusaders in Arthur’s Mission, Miss Cowley, the Keoghs and the others.
She that “goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing her sheaves with her.”
Norman Grubb
Former British Secretary of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
Selections From the Writings of William Law
Edited by Andrew Murray – 1893 – Reprinted 1976
FOREWORD
The writings of William Law have been to me the key which unlocked the door into the true treasure chamber of what Paul called “the mystery of godliness,” I had come some distance by grace through faith, both into the initial new birth experience and on into what is sometimes spoken of as “the second work of grace,” “sanctification,” “full salvation,” or “enduement with power,” by which Galatians 2:20 (“not I, but Christ liveth in me”) had become a transforming reality.
But, as Paul wrote to the ‘topline’ saints of Ephesus, who already knew Christ in a saved and Spirit-filled relationship, they still needed “the eyes of their understanding to be enlightened,” so William Law was the beginning of that enlightenment to me, carrying me into what I would daringly call the ultimate of understanding. Here at last was, in reality, what it is all about!
It was through extracts from his writings, authored by Andrew Murray, that I came to find William Law. I grew up under Andrew Murray. But here was a discovery. Murray must have felt the need of lifting the veil just a little into his own true sources of depth insights in “the way of God more perfectly.” For William Law’s unfoldings of the truth within the truth go way beyond any of Murray’s published writings; and I think in the wisdom of God, Murray’s commission was to interpret them in more readable and palatable form for the majority of God’s people, who maybe are not meant to pursue to the ultimate.
As soon as a friend handed me Wholly for God, I scented the source of the river. That was about 35 years ago. I found Law difficult. His presentation of ultimate truth was too ultimate for me at first. Its concepts went more deeply into “the nature of things” (one of Law’s favourite terms)—who God is, who Christ is, who man is—than any mere surface understandings I already had, which had not before seemed surface to me.
Then I found that William Law himself was an illumined man only because he had come across the writings of the German cobbler, Jacob Boehme. William Law was a high church legalist, knowing nothing of grace. In his student days at Oxford, together with John Wesley, he belonged to a group called The Holy Club. Law with his writing gift then wrote what is considered an English classic on a level with The Imitation of Christ, which he called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. This book offers the reader the hopeless ladder of good works to attain perfection. That was the only William Law that John Wesley knew, so after Wesley had his illumination in grace, he always regarded Law as someone to be avoided as ignorant of grace. He never knew the transformed Law.
Jacob Boehme’s writings opened this whole new world of depth revelation to Law. Law is really the expositor in simpler form of Boehme’s glowing, but sometimes almost unintelligible, outpourings. Jacob Boehme is, of course, acknowledged by all the great investigators of truth—scientists (Sir Isaac Newton owned some of his basic concepts on gravity to Boehme), philosophers, theologians—as one of the greatest “seers” of all time, yet always with the Scriptures as his ultimate source. I must admit I have received more pure light from a few sayings of Boehme that from whole books by other authors. However, he is difficult to understand and much goes beyond me, whereas anyone can read William Law, though there again it took time for me to soak into his glorious presentation of God “the eternal will to all goodness,” to the depth understanding of the Fall, wrath, atonement, and the total meaning of the new birth. You may not find it easy to follow through, even with this Wholly for God, but oh what riches if you do! In William Law, Jacob Boehme, and some others, for me “the winter is passed; the time of the singing of the birds had come.”
I am very thankful that Andrew Murray let us in on his secret springs, and that Bethany Fellowship has undertaken the reprinting of this choice volume.
Norman Grubb
International Secretary Emeritus of
The Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
By Ken Adams – 1982
Note From Ken and Bessie Adams in Norman’s Copy of the book.
Our dear Norman,
How can we ever thank you adequately for the Confidence you put in us in those early untried days of 1941. And for the vision you imparted of a Worldwide Literature Crusade. As this story reveals it was surely if God … and the end is not yet.
With our much love,
Ken and Bessie, January 1982
FOREWORD
What joy I have in writing the foreword to this record of the Christian Literature Crusade by its human founder, Ken Adams. I was with Bessie and Ken forty-one years in that room in Colchester when the Lord gave the vision of starting this Crusade—just these two young people in the midst of World War II in that small garrison town in eastern England. Now we compare it with its worldwide spread of today!
My chief joy is that this is a story not of a movement but of a man, and then men, to which the title can boldly be given of “The foolishness of God,” adding the remainder of that saying of Paul’s—“which is wiser than men!” For this has always been God’s way throughout history—the work of God through the men of God. “There was a man sent from God…”, “Come now, I will send thee”; “Here am I, send me.” Sometimes, as now, he works through a youth whom the Spirit has caught hold of in his early days, like Joseph or Daniel, and indeed the Savior Himself. I personally saw that young couple with their worldwide literature vision starting out in one small room with a borrowed £100 worth of books that pointed to Christ; Ken himself trundling all their earthly possessions in a handcart from this one room to their first shop; and the magnificent office of this “Crusade” being a table nailed to the wall to give it support! All this happened in days of war when government restrictions severely limited opening bookstores or publishing books.
I am so thankful that from those first days they were not only “obedient to the heavenly vision,” but also to the ways of God laid down in the Scriptures for the provision of all material supplies: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink?…but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness [His right ways], and all these things shall be added unto you.” As they started out by conforming to that principle of earthly provision, indeed with many privations and in cramped quarters, so they and the whole company of Crusaders, now increasing to nearly six hundred in forty-six countries with an annual turnover of millions of dollars, walk this same way of faith and sacrifice. You will read the story told in Ken’s own personal terms of what we can only call miracle after miracle in country after country. It is like reading another section of the Acts of the Apostles, a thousand miles from a dry account of mere book distribution.
Two other facts are a special joy to me. One is that faith is evidenced by good works, and God’s people should be the best at their practical jobs in the world. Ken himself rapidly acquired expertise in the ramifications of book salesmanship. Then he saw to it that the enlarging staff was also trained in the same efficiency while maintaining a personal witness to the Savior to whom the books points, sometimes leading customers to Christ.
My other special personal joy is that Ken and the CLC started its life linked with the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade (to which I have belonged for my lifetime). Thus they were soaked in the principles of faith, fellowship and sacrifice of its founder C.T. Studd, even while moving on—as we always aimed that it should—to become its own Christian Literature Crusade. Because of these close bonds with the WEC, there has been forged a link of special fellowship between the two.
So as the story unfolds, you will see the outflowing rivers of the Spirit through the numerous fellow-Crusaders, the vine of the Lord’s planting with its branches spread widely over the wall—international, interracial, neither male nor female, a glorious present-day witness to that “foolishness of God which is wiser than men.”
I had the privilege of writing the first story of the developing Crusade, called the Leap of Faith. Now with Ken’s fully expanded and vividly personal record of its whole history (always in cooperation with the whole Body of Christ in all its outreaches), we can watch as area after area sends its call “Come over and help us,” and as occupied countries greatly enlarge their literature distribution. Truly our CLC, by each new venture of faith and expansion, will continue to be CLC Unlimited!
Norman Grubb Grubb Grubb Grubb
Fort Washington, Pennsylvania 19034
CLC-USA (Website: http://www.clcusa.org ) has recently republished Norman Grubb’s book, entitled “The Leap of Faith” pictured below. It can be ordered on-line from their website or at amazon.com.
This is the thrilling story of the worldwide expansion of the Christian Literature Crusade…”-Moody Monthly. The book carries you from two people in an upstairs bookroom to a worldwide chain of Christian book centers and publishing, multiplied by only a “shoestring” of faith and committed, although unlikely, lives.
Author
By Bill Volkman – 1983
FORWARD
Over the past five years Bill Volkman has had a major impact on my life. I have watched this man – who has many “worldly” gifts and abilities – find his completed self by a total absorption in “other-worldly” activities of the Spirit.
In this book, Bill first traces for us the ways – and they are long for most of us – by which, like a totally dedicated mountain-climber, he scaled peak after peak of further spiritual enlightenment, finding that only Mount Everest would satisfy. But there is an Everest, and he found it: that self-fulfillment of which Jesus spoke when He said, “If the son of man shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.” Paul called it his ultimate ministry to the body of Christ – “to present every man perfect [complete] in Christ Jesus.” It is the privileged possession of every born-again believer, but in fact only a few experience it.
Because of this, when what Browning called “the imprisoned splendor” shone in to Bill, he had the inescapable compulsion, according to God’s purpose, to bring this same fullness of light and freedom to the whole redeemed church of Christ. In his freedom – of self-giving, not self-getting – he uses his gifts and abilities to publish Union Life magazine. In cooperation with many of us who are “driven” by the the same compulsion, he sees a worldwide, church-wide commission to bring this “completion” to God’s people. In the Reformation, Luther brought us the glorious truth of justification by faith; and now, in this “20th Century Reformation,” we build that to produce a greater glory: completion.
Bill not only gives us in his down-to-earth way the explicit details of his own pilgrimage from the wilderness to the promised land, but he makes use of his keen business and legal mind, enlightened by the Spirit and steeped in the Scriptures, to go much farther. He tells us, in specific terms, just what this “more perfect way” of God is, putting in his own words what he has personally learned from the writings of Peter, Paul, James and John. In the process he sheds great light on the message we call “union life.” He then exhorts us, as intercessors and soldiers in action, to get out to the whole church what we call “total truth,” and to take our privileged share in “filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ for His body’s sake,” “till we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
So, many of you will be thrilled, absorbed and enlightened, as I am, by Bill – not only Bill, but Christ in Bill form.
June 1, 1983
Norman P. Grubb
A Biography of Murray Webb-Peploe including his years of service
With Amy Carmichael at Dohnavur.
By: Katharine Makower – 1984
Used with permission of Kingsway Publications
FOREWORD
I was with Murray in both preparatory school and under-graduate years, and have been in continual touch all the years since, and he seemed always to me a stretch ahead of most of us in mental ability and a foot taller than all of us in spiritual stature; so he has always been a ‘special’ to me both in love and respect.
It was a quality about him; and how it reaches the reader as we follow through the various stages of his life! From Gunner Captain in the First World War, after first confronting and settling himself what he took to be the right attitude to war from his reading of Scriptures; on into his powerful influence after the war in revitalizing the Christian Union (CICCU) at Cambridge, which continues so strongly today in its witness to Christ and the evangelical faith; then through his medical training and early hospital practice in London; and thus on to his China years, only leaving just before arrest by communists. This was followed by his greatest twenty years with Amy Carmichael in Dohnavur, India; and finally the period with his family as a GP in the south of England, attracting such a number of patients that the practice had to be doubled.
There are those hundreds of readers, who knew and loved Murray, who will delight in all the details of these years; but I hope there will be many more who, having first read the early pages of his family background, will begin to find their hearts burn within them as they read of his daily walk with God, his seeking and findings of God’s will, the abandonment in loving service as a doctor in China and India; and will then be caught up with the one and only consuming love of his life, not for bodily healings—though there were plenty of them—but wholly and totally the bringing of Christ to all those ‘without God and having no hope’.
And this is the fascination of these pages. We learn of the special influences in his student days and onwards, which in a peculiar sense liberated him to be much more at east in contacts with those not readily responding to the Christian message—influences that some criticized, but that were of special benefit to Murray and many others of us. This really prepared him for his life’s work with that unusual almost irresistible attractiveness in his contact with others, with a naturalness, openness, humour, freedom, respect for others, which led straight on to ease in sharing the love of Christ; and it equally gave an originality and informality to his rich Bible insights and talks. The last chapter of the book, on his years in his medical practice in England, coupled with the wide-open hospitality in his family life with Oda and his sons, gives a heart-warming glimpse into the Spirit of the living God flowing into other lives.
The book does not hide the strains, stress, times of self-questioning, even depression, the crises of finding God’s will, in this man of unquenchable faith and endless love-action, well-called a ‘troubadour of God’ as in his own little poem:
Make us glad troubadours of God,
Loyal and guided, strong to dare,
And free to ride the world light-shod,
Living to love, and lift, and share.
My special hope is that, in this book, which relates persistent service rather than dramatic incidents, readers will penetrate through to the riches that are communicated from spirit to spirit, as we continue to catch the beauty and glory that radiates from a life which could have risen to heights in the world; but which went the way of the cross and so magnified his loved Lord Jesus Christ by life and death; the life of one described by a colleague as ‘one of the world’s outstanding characters.’
NORMAN GRUBB
By: Marion B. Parry – 1989
FOREWORD
By
Norman P. Grubb
I much like what my friend of many years, Marion, has poured out in her Prove Me life-story. I like it because, and I have much experience of writing, she does not write in a ‘put-on’ way. I don’t find it a ‘made-up’ heart and mind account of her pilgrimage in the Spirit, but just the plain attempt to share things as they were and are to her. This at once reached my heart – honesty to honesty.
Then, as I follow through with what she shares, it takes a little time to get to the kernel which I am seeking – her God-possessed and God-intoxicated life, and it usually does take time for the faithful ‘Hound of Heaven’ Spirit to get to our Satan-deluded selves (all of us since the Fall) back into focus; and, of course, the focus is when at last it is ‘GOD ONLY’ for us and as us, when at last we have been disillusioned enough and willing enough to recognize it – that we were Satan self-for-self expressors, but now, glory to God, through Calvary Christ self-for-others expressors, and the ‘zeal of His House has eaten us up’!
I have had years of correspondence with Marion as she shared, by quite laborious writings, great riches she gleaned from great men and women of the Spirit through the centuries. Great riches.
But the major point of what she shares with us fits her title PROVE ME. It struck right home to me, as I read on, because of its one unusual emphasis. There are many claimed healings, many preciously true, usually through some direct laying on of hands as in James 5; but the trouble then is that when there have been these sudden healings, what about the many who have not been healed? And back so many go into false condemnations. ‘You have failed in faith’!
But what hit home to me in Marion’s constantly repeated experiences is that she had a good deal of physical sickness and weakness through the years. To me, the great lesson learned is that she saw the promises of healing and then, in whatever was her painful physical condition, she went straight into the position of faith. She simply took God at His word. But then she hardly ever received any immediate release. That is the riches of her witness. She PERSEVERED. It was not just ‘through faith’ with her, but through ‘faith and patience’ inherited the promises. (Heb. 6:12), and that usually followed quite a period of continued pain and distress. But, at that point, she would not and did not give up her solid stand of FAITH. There she stood and then in instance after instance the relief and release would simply come into effect. So she thoroughly and unusually teaches us the PERSISTENCE OF FAITH and then faith ultimately becoming ‘substance’. – Heb. 11.1.
So thank you, Marion, for an emphasis I don’t find in most testimonies to physical healing. Yet, beyond all that, and as she herself became a teacher of the things of the Spirit, the whole of her life emphasis has been CHRIST MAGNIFIED IN HER BODY!
To her, ‘To me to live is Christ’. Amen. ‘Whose faith follow.’
By: Ann Watt Wiechmann
FOREWORD
This remarkable book, “Grow or Die,” thrilled me with the way everything is brought back to God. The author, knowledgeable in nutrition, shows how a person’s body/mind needs can find the answer in spirit-union with God. As I read the various references to the ultimate God-in-Jesus answer, I knew that the book was truly written to the glory of God.