Always communicating
If you spend your day in front of a computer and want to take less than a couple of minutes off do this: Google: ‘George Verwer exercise’. On your screen will appear this lean, balding, 60 something looking man in a colourful jacket with the map of the world printed all over it. Standing in the disabled toilet of a jumbo jet on his way to Chicago, his New York voices rasps, ‘Well, here we are’ and then he is interrupted by the sound of the flush. He smiles and starts his exercise programme singing the 1960’s hit, ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Bill Halley. It ends with a cut to our fitness fan on an exercise bike wearing a baseball cap, calling out: ‘If you don’t exercise you should repent!’ He has made you smile, and think a bit about exercising in just over a minute: not bad communicating.
This man is indeed one of Christendom’s greatest communicators.
Whether it be with his 5,000 friends on facebook, on in one of the 18,000 emails or snail mails he writes a year, or in his books which have sold over a million, or preaching at hundreds of meetings a year, George Verwer is always communicating. With that New York Woody Allen like sharpness for the absurd, he is usually funny. And he is always serious. He doesn’t just communicate because he’s good at it, but because he’s got an important message. For the non Christian, that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the Christian it is to be totally sold out
Meeting Christ, March 3rd, 1955
From a loving and hard-working Dutch immigrant family to the US, the young Verwer did not come to Christ because he was a miserable sinner. He was a happy, intelligent, energetic teenager enjoying the Big Apple, ready to jive to the latest Elvis Presley hit. He came to Christ when he was 16 because from across the road from the well regarded Ramsey High School in New Jersey he attended a devout Christian woman, Dorothea Clapp, was praying God would touch the pupils, and impact Christian mission through them. A part of her prayer campaign involved sending out Gospels of John, and one came to George Verwer. On March 3rd 1955, encouraged by a friend in his street, he went to hear the famous evangelist Billy Graham preach in Madison Square Garden. He gave his life to Christ.
Catcher In The Rye
The communicating about Christ started straight away. Back at Ramsey High School Verwer was elected president of the school council and used his position to give out 1,000 Gospels of John. He would also pass on Christian books, often putting a title about sex at the top to get attention. And he started preaching, once packing out the school auditorium with about 600 pupils. 125 stood at the end to give their lives to Christ, including George Verwer senior. After school he went to the prestigious Presbyterian Maryville College in Tennessee where his highly energetic Christian activism continued with two new friends, Dale Rhoton and Walter Borchard. Together they visited local schools, prisons, and hospitals sharing Christ and selling Christian books. Many years later Verwer explained his passion to reach the lost
‘I don’t know how we can look at any lost person, whether across the street or at the ends of the earth, and not want to do something about that person’s eternal destiny. I don’t think we can separate a concern for souls from our commitment to Jesus Christ’
Understanding the Gospel made George Verwer into ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, the name of the famous novel by J.S. Sallinger published in 1951 about the teenager Holden Caulfield who ran away from school. The world was full of children playing in a field of rye, but if not warned they would fall over a terrible cliff. Someone needed to catch them. This is what the fictional New Yorker Holden Caulfield wanted to do, but at the end of Sallinger’s classic novel, he draws back. There was no turning back for George Verwer. Once he had given his life to Christ, he was going to run along that cliff with the Gospel, catching souls falling into hell.
The Original Three
While at Maryville George Verwer learned that in Mexico 70% of the people had no Scriptures. They were falling over that cliff. Something should be done. Why should he spend the summer holidays of 1957 in Bible soaked America, when he could go to Mexico? He was convinced and immediately asked Dale Rhoton who said he would pray. After a few minutes on their knees, George again asked, “‘Well, are you ready to go?’ ‘George it takes longer than that. I’ll never forget the pained look on his face as he lamented, ‘Why does it take people so long to see it?’” Later Dale Rhoton wrote, ‘I did ‘see it’ and I did go’, as did their other friend, Walter Borchard. They sold personal possessions to raise funds, and set off for Mexico in a 1949 Dodge track packed full of Gospels and tracts. The three eighteen year olds did not know it then, but this was the start of Operation Mobilisation.
In Mexico people fought to get a Gospel and the literature soon ran out. Seeing this spiritual hunger changed George Verwer: ‘After that first summer in Mexico, I knew that God wanted me on the mission field as soon as possible.’ That ‘as soon as possible’ meant he needed more intense Bible training. So in January 1958 he moved from Maryville to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, one of the premiere evangelical schools in the US. Chicago soon knew that young Verwer was in the city. He was very active. That summer the original three again went to Mexico, but this time three others from Moody joined them, and this group then continued to meet for daily prayer meetings back at college, some of them lasting all night. They were determined to be sold out followers of Christ – and to get others to join them. They did.
For the Christmas outreach to Mexico nineteen went, the year after it was forty nine. By 1960 now the work in Mexico had its own roots, and George Verwer, only 21, was looking for harder challenges. Spain was an obvious target. Those who had gone with him to Mexico already knew the language and the Catholic culture, and apparently it was ‘closed’ to Protestant evangelists. As the OM historian noted, ‘that made it a magnet’ . In the late summer of 1960 George and his new wife Drena moved to Spain, and the teams followed him, both from the USA, and from all over Europe. In 1962 there were about 200 on the summer teams and 1963 saw this new movement led by a twenty three year old make serious waves in old Europe. Two thousand people joined George Verwer for his short term summer campaigns from over thirty different countries. A few of them stayed on, determined to take the Gospel to even harder countries: Turkey, India, and also Iran, a country much visited by George Verwer and still close to his heart.
There was also the communist bloc with its atheist madness denying millions the right to hear the Gospel. This too was ‘a magnet’ for George Verwer. He and a friend, Roger Malstead, set off for what was then the Iron Curtain in August 1961 in a station wagon with literature and printing equipment. They got into Russia and started printing tracts in a hotel room. The plan was then to post them using addresses in the phone book, as they had done in Spain. It was not to be. A guard found one of their thrown away tracts; the two were arrested as spies and deported. They made their way to Austria where George Verwer had a time of prayer that involved climbing a tree, and, as recounted in numerous sermons, that is where the name ‘Operation Mobilisation’ came to him. Mobilise was very much a Second World War term, meaning to get ready for combat. That is exactly what George Verwer wanted to see thousands of Christians doing, he wanted to see them mobilised for combat, taking the Gospel to the lost to stop them falling over that cliff. And this is what has happened. In 1957 there was just the original three mobilised for action in Mexico. Now fifty three years later there are over 5,500 Christians working in over 100 countries and two ships that tour the world’s busy ports doing what all OMers do – sharing Christ and selling Christian literature. The prayers of Dorothea Clapp have more than been answered.
Against The Phonies
In 1950’s America there were thousands of ambitious evangelicals wanting to spread the Gospel. What attracted so many Christians to join George Verwer’s movement? The answer becomes clear when you read the early literature. In 1961 ‘The Madrid Manifesto’ made a call for total abandonment to Christ and a clear judgement on the alternative: ‘Outside this sphere of total abandonment is the nauseating, insipid Christianity of our day.’ Right from the start George Verwer picked on a tension in the Christian life that he still preaches about: the tension of talk but not walk:
Many of us don’t have a passion for souls because we’ve been deceived into accepting a spiritual dichotomy. We’ve got our Sunday life, and then we have our Monday-through-Saturday life. Unless we break that dichotomy and live our entire life under the lordship of Christ, we will never become committed to reaching the world with the Gospel .
Or to put it more bluntly, he was saying many Christians were hypocrites. Thousands of other young people in the 1950’s and 1960’s saw this ‘nauseating, insipid Christianity’ giving a superficial covering to a seemingly corrupt establishment, epitomised later by Nixon, and walked away. Again it is the fictional New Yorker Holden Caulfield who spoke for this generation with his constant complaining about adult phonies. And it was the very real New Yorker George Verwer who spelt out it was possible to be a Christian and not be a phony. But you had to be radical, revolutionary, totally sold-out, taking the Bible commands and promises literally.
What attracted others to George Verwer was not that he just preached this message constantly, always backed up by many verses from the New Testament – but he very much lived it. The legendary story of his honeymoon sums it up. There was no honeymoon. After the wedding he gave away his presents and then took his new bride down to Mexico, using the wedding cake as barter for petrol. Since he told her, Drena (nee Knecht) while courting that if she married him she might get eaten by cannibals, just losing the cake was not so bad. There are many stories about George Verwer’s sacrificial life-style. Once after an evening church meeting in Mexico he found out the pastor did not have his own suit. He was about George Verwer’s size. So in the darkness the suit came off and it was given to the surprised pastor. George Verwer drove back to the OM flat in his underwear . As with simple living, so too with prayer: George Verwer has always been totally committed to the prayer meeting, sees prayer as being the fuel behind all of God’s work, and for many years nobody in the movement he founded was allowed to ask directly for funds. All had to come in as an answer to prayer. At Moody he led all night prayer meetings and this commitment to prayer has remained. Every month he marks in his diary: ‘Prayer Emphasis Day’. This willingness to go the extra mile in all areas of the Christian life was seen by those who worked with him. Details were noticed – ready to sleep in any corner of a room, waiting to make sure others had food, working all through the day, and sometimes night, giving things randomly away, being ready to apologise. One aspect of his Christian living that has helped hundreds of thousands of believers (especially men) has been his willingness to talk about his struggles with sexual temptation: and to confess publicly when he has fallen. Most male preachers have probably had their moments of shame, but few have had the courage like George Verwer to admit to them.
Honest and sacrificial Christian living has always attracted others, but this was especially the case in the West in the 1960’s where a whole generation was turning away from the phonies and their ‘insipid’ Christianity: thankfully some though the example of George Verwer saw that following Christ could be real, and absolutely not insipid.
Co-ordinator, not a one man band
George Verwer has a loud voice. He has a dominating presence. He likes to see things happen. And already by his early twenties thousands of other Christians were supporting his vision. Worldly wise observers would have muttered to one another that this was going to be another one man band Christian show. But it was not to be: because of George Verwer’s determination to live out Jesus’ example of coming not to be served, but to serve others: and his realism and integrity. He was a young man with a huge vision: he wanted to re-vitalise Christendom for dynamic mission across the whole world. That was not going to happen through a one man band top down structure with all the decisions coming back to him. He needed men and women of equal passion to work along side him, to launch and run their own operations. That is what happened and some of the finest from the evangelical world came and pioneered new fields for OM, too many to mention here . For a man with so much energy and passion, the title of ‘international co-ordinator’ seemed rather lame, but this is the title he gladly used, and he had the integrity to accept that in the organisation he had started, he did not have the authority to demand things happened in a certain way. He had influence, but not power. The influence was ploughed self sacrificially into the lives of thousands of Christians, some of them on a one to one basis over several months, and it was an influence that saw OM grow and adapt.
Preaching and books
George Verwer’s influence on Christians also spread way beyond just Operation Mobilisation, especially through his preaching and his passion for Christian books. He will usually have hundreds in the congregation, occasionally thousands. His preaching will typically start with an update on the situation in wherever he has just come from and then he will start holding up different books, talking about them with such zeal that listeners will think that reading them really will change their lives, as he insists Christian books have changed his. And the prices at the large book display he takes with him usually seals the sales pitch. His preaching is rarely of the expository, systematic type, delving into the details of the Greek, or the symbolism embedded in Leviticus. Nor is it Pentecostal. There are no words of knowledge, prophesies, or calls for the sick to come forward for prayer . Rather the preaching is down to earth, practical, passionate, laced with plenty of humour, stamped with conviction. It’s often not what George Verwer is saying, but how he is saying it. He usually ends with a call for people to commit themselves more to Christ . In the early days of his ministry, there was a strong emphasis on forsaking all for Christ, the ‘Revolution of Love’: discipline and sacrifice. In the 1980’s the challenge to flat out Christianity remained, but there was also an emphasis on balance, that Christians have human needs as well as spiritual. And strongly mixed in there is an emphasis on grace, with George Verwer often being his most poignant when talking about his own foibles and failures, and God’s kindness to him .’
Lessons among many: faithfulness and integrity
George Verwer gave up leading OM in 2003, and now aged over 70, goes on doing what he has always done: he shares the Gospel, encourages Christians and their ministries. He has kept on running in the fast lane for fifty five years, and while not all would be able to keep up with him, all of us can learn from his faithful determination to press on: and while running there has been no cheating. When he’s messed up, he’s owned up. Vast amounts of money have been given to him, and he has passed it on, scrupulously making sure there are good accounts. There have been no exaggerated claims in his reports, but down to earth accounts of how things are with an emphasis on the vastness of the challenges and myriad difficulties. And there has certainly been no claim to have any pat answers for the complexities of life, but instead a readiness to admit there is much he does not understand. All of this is best summed up by the word integrity. There are many other lessons to learn from this man who has done more than most for Christian mission in our generation, but these two are well worth reflecting on: faithfulness and integrity. And, of course, exercising.
If you spend your day in front of a computer and want to take less than a couple of minutes off do this: Google: ‘George Verwer exercise’. On your screen will appear this lean, balding, 60 something looking man in a colourful jacket with the map of the world printed all over it. Standing in the disabled toilet of a jumbo jet on his way to Chicago, his New York voices rasps, ‘Well, here we are’ and then he is interrupted by the sound of the flush. He smiles and starts his exercise programme singing the 1960’s hit, ‘Rock Around The Clock’ by Bill Halley. It ends with a cut to our fitness fan on an exercise bike wearing a baseball cap, calling out: ‘If you don’t exercise you should repent!’ He has made you smile, and think a bit about exercising in just over a minute: not bad communicating.
This man is indeed one of Christendom’s greatest communicators.
Whether it be with his 5,000 friends on facebook, on in one of the 18,000 emails or snail mails he writes a year, or in his books which have sold over a million, or preaching at hundreds of meetings a year, George Verwer is always communicating. With that New York Woody Allen like sharpness for the absurd, he is usually funny. And he is always serious. He doesn’t just communicate because he’s good at it, but because he’s got an important message. For the non Christian, that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For the Christian it is to be totally sold out
Meeting Christ, March 3rd, 1955
From a loving and hard-working Dutch immigrant family to the US, the young Verwer did not come to Christ because he was a miserable sinner. He was a happy, intelligent, energetic teenager enjoying the Big Apple, ready to jive to the latest Elvis Presley hit. He came to Christ when he was 16 because from across the road from the well regarded Ramsey High School in New Jersey he attended a devout Christian woman, Dorothea Clapp, was praying God would touch the pupils, and impact Christian mission through them. A part of her prayer campaign involved sending out Gospels of John, and one came to George Verwer. On March 3rd 1955, encouraged by a friend in his street, he went to hear the famous evangelist Billy Graham preach in Madison Square Garden. He gave his life to Christ.
Catcher In The Rye
The communicating about Christ started straight away. Back at Ramsey High School Verwer was elected president of the school council and used his position to give out 1,000 Gospels of John. He would also pass on Christian books, often putting a title about sex at the top to get attention. And he started preaching, once packing out the school auditorium with about 600 pupils. 125 stood at the end to give their lives to Christ, including George Verwer senior. After school he went to the prestigious Presbyterian Maryville College in Tennessee where his highly energetic Christian activism continued with two new friends, Dale Rhoton and Walter Borchard. Together they visited local schools, prisons, and hospitals sharing Christ and selling Christian books. Many years later Verwer explained his passion to reach the lost
‘I don’t know how we can look at any lost person, whether across the street or at the ends of the earth, and not want to do something about that person’s eternal destiny. I don’t think we can separate a concern for souls from our commitment to Jesus Christ’
Understanding the Gospel made George Verwer into ‘The Catcher In The Rye’, the name of the famous novel by J.S. Sallinger published in 1951 about the teenager Holden Caulfield who ran away from school. The world was full of children playing in a field of rye, but if not warned they would fall over a terrible cliff. Someone needed to catch them. This is what the fictional New Yorker Holden Caulfield wanted to do, but at the end of Sallinger’s classic novel, he draws back. There was no turning back for George Verwer. Once he had given his life to Christ, he was going to run along that cliff with the Gospel, catching souls falling into hell.
The Original Three
While at Maryville George Verwer learned that in Mexico 70% of the people had no Scriptures. They were falling over that cliff. Something should be done. Why should he spend the summer holidays of 1957 in Bible soaked America, when he could go to Mexico? He was convinced and immediately asked Dale Rhoton who said he would pray. After a few minutes on their knees, George again asked, “‘Well, are you ready to go?’ ‘George it takes longer than that. I’ll never forget the pained look on his face as he lamented, ‘Why does it take people so long to see it?’” Later Dale Rhoton wrote, ‘I did ‘see it’ and I did go’, as did their other friend, Walter Borchard. They sold personal possessions to raise funds, and set off for Mexico in a 1949 Dodge track packed full of Gospels and tracts. The three eighteen year olds did not know it then, but this was the start of Operation Mobilisation.
In Mexico people fought to get a Gospel and the literature soon ran out. Seeing this spiritual hunger changed George Verwer: ‘After that first summer in Mexico, I knew that God wanted me on the mission field as soon as possible.’ That ‘as soon as possible’ meant he needed more intense Bible training. So in January 1958 he moved from Maryville to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, one of the premiere evangelical schools in the US. Chicago soon knew that young Verwer was in the city. He was very active. That summer the original three again went to Mexico, but this time three others from Moody joined them, and this group then continued to meet for daily prayer meetings back at college, some of them lasting all night. They were determined to be sold out followers of Christ – and to get others to join them. They did.
For the Christmas outreach to Mexico nineteen went, the year after it was forty nine. By 1960 now the work in Mexico had its own roots, and George Verwer, only 21, was looking for harder challenges. Spain was an obvious target. Those who had gone with him to Mexico already knew the language and the Catholic culture, and apparently it was ‘closed’ to Protestant evangelists. As the OM historian noted, ‘that made it a magnet’ . In the late summer of 1960 George and his new wife Drena moved to Spain, and the teams followed him, both from the USA, and from all over Europe. In 1962 there were about 200 on the summer teams and 1963 saw this new movement led by a twenty three year old make serious waves in old Europe. Two thousand people joined George Verwer for his short term summer campaigns from over thirty different countries. A few of them stayed on, determined to take the Gospel to even harder countries: Turkey, India, and also Iran, a country much visited by George Verwer and still close to his heart.
There was also the communist bloc with its atheist madness denying millions the right to hear the Gospel. This too was ‘a magnet’ for George Verwer. He and a friend, Roger Malstead, set off for what was then the Iron Curtain in August 1961 in a station wagon with literature and printing equipment. They got into Russia and started printing tracts in a hotel room. The plan was then to post them using addresses in the phone book, as they had done in Spain. It was not to be. A guard found one of their thrown away tracts; the two were arrested as spies and deported. They made their way to Austria where George Verwer had a time of prayer that involved climbing a tree, and, as recounted in numerous sermons, that is where the name ‘Operation Mobilisation’ came to him. Mobilise was very much a Second World War term, meaning to get ready for combat. That is exactly what George Verwer wanted to see thousands of Christians doing, he wanted to see them mobilised for combat, taking the Gospel to the lost to stop them falling over that cliff. And this is what has happened. In 1957 there was just the original three mobilised for action in Mexico. Now fifty three years later there are over 5,500 Christians working in over 100 countries and two ships that tour the world’s busy ports doing what all OMers do – sharing Christ and selling Christian literature. The prayers of Dorothea Clapp have more than been answered.
Against The Phonies
In 1950’s America there were thousands of ambitious evangelicals wanting to spread the Gospel. What attracted so many Christians to join George Verwer’s movement? The answer becomes clear when you read the early literature. In 1961 ‘The Madrid Manifesto’ made a call for total abandonment to Christ and a clear judgement on the alternative: ‘Outside this sphere of total abandonment is the nauseating, insipid Christianity of our day.’ Right from the start George Verwer picked on a tension in the Christian life that he still preaches about: the tension of talk but not walk:
Many of us don’t have a passion for souls because we’ve been deceived into accepting a spiritual dichotomy. We’ve got our Sunday life, and then we have our Monday-through-Saturday life. Unless we break that dichotomy and live our entire life under the lordship of Christ, we will never become committed to reaching the world with the Gospel .
Or to put it more bluntly, he was saying many Christians were hypocrites. Thousands of other young people in the 1950’s and 1960’s saw this ‘nauseating, insipid Christianity’ giving a superficial covering to a seemingly corrupt establishment, epitomised later by Nixon, and walked away. Again it is the fictional New Yorker Holden Caulfield who spoke for this generation with his constant complaining about adult phonies. And it was the very real New Yorker George Verwer who spelt out it was possible to be a Christian and not be a phony. But you had to be radical, revolutionary, totally sold-out, taking the Bible commands and promises literally.
What attracted others to George Verwer was not that he just preached this message constantly, always backed up by many verses from the New Testament – but he very much lived it. The legendary story of his honeymoon sums it up. There was no honeymoon. After the wedding he gave away his presents and then took his new bride down to Mexico, using the wedding cake as barter for petrol. Since he told her, Drena (nee Knecht) while courting that if she married him she might get eaten by cannibals, just losing the cake was not so bad. There are many stories about George Verwer’s sacrificial life-style. Once after an evening church meeting in Mexico he found out the pastor did not have his own suit. He was about George Verwer’s size. So in the darkness the suit came off and it was given to the surprised pastor. George Verwer drove back to the OM flat in his underwear . As with simple living, so too with prayer: George Verwer has always been totally committed to the prayer meeting, sees prayer as being the fuel behind all of God’s work, and for many years nobody in the movement he founded was allowed to ask directly for funds. All had to come in as an answer to prayer. At Moody he led all night prayer meetings and this commitment to prayer has remained. Every month he marks in his diary: ‘Prayer Emphasis Day’. This willingness to go the extra mile in all areas of the Christian life was seen by those who worked with him. Details were noticed – ready to sleep in any corner of a room, waiting to make sure others had food, working all through the day, and sometimes night, giving things randomly away, being ready to apologise. One aspect of his Christian living that has helped hundreds of thousands of believers (especially men) has been his willingness to talk about his struggles with sexual temptation: and to confess publicly when he has fallen. Most male preachers have probably had their moments of shame, but few have had the courage like George Verwer to admit to them.
Honest and sacrificial Christian living has always attracted others, but this was especially the case in the West in the 1960’s where a whole generation was turning away from the phonies and their ‘insipid’ Christianity: thankfully some though the example of George Verwer saw that following Christ could be real, and absolutely not insipid.
Co-ordinator, not a one man band
George Verwer has a loud voice. He has a dominating presence. He likes to see things happen. And already by his early twenties thousands of other Christians were supporting his vision. Worldly wise observers would have muttered to one another that this was going to be another one man band Christian show. But it was not to be: because of George Verwer’s determination to live out Jesus’ example of coming not to be served, but to serve others: and his realism and integrity. He was a young man with a huge vision: he wanted to re-vitalise Christendom for dynamic mission across the whole world. That was not going to happen through a one man band top down structure with all the decisions coming back to him. He needed men and women of equal passion to work along side him, to launch and run their own operations. That is what happened and some of the finest from the evangelical world came and pioneered new fields for OM, too many to mention here . For a man with so much energy and passion, the title of ‘international co-ordinator’ seemed rather lame, but this is the title he gladly used, and he had the integrity to accept that in the organisation he had started, he did not have the authority to demand things happened in a certain way. He had influence, but not power. The influence was ploughed self sacrificially into the lives of thousands of Christians, some of them on a one to one basis over several months, and it was an influence that saw OM grow and adapt.
Preaching and books
George Verwer’s influence on Christians also spread way beyond just Operation Mobilisation, especially through his preaching and his passion for Christian books. He will usually have hundreds in the congregation, occasionally thousands. His preaching will typically start with an update on the situation in wherever he has just come from and then he will start holding up different books, talking about them with such zeal that listeners will think that reading them really will change their lives, as he insists Christian books have changed his. And the prices at the large book display he takes with him usually seals the sales pitch. His preaching is rarely of the expository, systematic type, delving into the details of the Greek, or the symbolism embedded in Leviticus. Nor is it Pentecostal. There are no words of knowledge, prophesies, or calls for the sick to come forward for prayer . Rather the preaching is down to earth, practical, passionate, laced with plenty of humour, stamped with conviction. It’s often not what George Verwer is saying, but how he is saying it. He usually ends with a call for people to commit themselves more to Christ . In the early days of his ministry, there was a strong emphasis on forsaking all for Christ, the ‘Revolution of Love’: discipline and sacrifice. In the 1980’s the challenge to flat out Christianity remained, but there was also an emphasis on balance, that Christians have human needs as well as spiritual. And strongly mixed in there is an emphasis on grace, with George Verwer often being his most poignant when talking about his own foibles and failures, and God’s kindness to him .’
Lessons among many: faithfulness and integrity
George Verwer gave up leading OM in 2003, and now aged over 70, goes on doing what he has always done: he shares the Gospel, encourages Christians and their ministries. He has kept on running in the fast lane for fifty five years, and while not all would be able to keep up with him, all of us can learn from his faithful determination to press on: and while running there has been no cheating. When he’s messed up, he’s owned up. Vast amounts of money have been given to him, and he has passed it on, scrupulously making sure there are good accounts. There have been no exaggerated claims in his reports, but down to earth accounts of how things are with an emphasis on the vastness of the challenges and myriad difficulties. And there has certainly been no claim to have any pat answers for the complexities of life, but instead a readiness to admit there is much he does not understand. All of this is best summed up by the word integrity. There are many other lessons to learn from this man who has done more than most for Christian mission in our generation, but these two are well worth reflecting on: faithfulness and integrity. And, of course, exercising.
What a beautiful tribute to a great man of God, thank you Tom !
ReplyDeleteAn insightful summary on George’s life. Worth the read.
ReplyDelete