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St Francis Magazine Vol 9, No 4 | August 2013
Middle East. It did not charge NAM for this airtime. 28
1.2.3 Closure of the Studio in Morocco: 1961-1963
In late 1961 NAM began distributing a Bible Correspondence Course (BCC) that had been
developed by Warren Gaston, who had been NAM’s Regional Superintendent for Tunisia since
1957. NAM used French and MSA for those courses. They were initially developed as a response to
the growing need for a more systematic scheme of Bible study for the increasing number of inquirers
and converts in North Africa. 29 During the Tunisia Industrial Fair in autumn 1961, NAM
missionaries widely distributed a leaflet advertising the BCC. In the years thereafter they had a
booth during that fair in which they advertised their ‘Free Lessons on the Life of Jesus Christ and
the Scriptures’. In Algeria, Operation Mobilization distributed the same leaflets. About 75,000
leaflets were spread in total, and 700 people asked for the first lessons. Later, most new students
came because students told their friends about the courses. 30
When William Bell, who worked for the BCCs of NAM, evaluated the success of the BCC’s, he
mentioned that many young people enrolled because they were very eager to read anything they
could lay their hands on. Only when Tunisia and Morocco became independent in 1956 and Algeria
in 1962, did public education became available for all. Many of the ones doing the courses were teenagers
of 13 to 15 years old, who were the first in their family to be able to read and write. Bell realized
that the 1960s were a special time for North Africa:
I don’t believe we could have done it in the middle 50’s. I am not sure that we could do it ten years from
now. But in this decade this was what was accepted in North Africa. This is why we find that the
movement had snow-balled when we get into the village or quarter of the city where one or two students
started reading the lessons and their friends heard about it and they all wanted it. 31
NAM’s experience was that of all people starting its first ‘One God, One Way’ course in the
1960s, 18 percent would finish the 12 lessons. While NAM was still allowed to work openly in
North Africa, it organized public meetings where students of the BCC’s would be invited for
discussions of what they had been reading in the lessons. The students would come in good
numbers. One goal of the organizers was to show that they were not attacking Islam. The approach
would be ‘simply basically to ignore Islam and to present the good news’. According to Bell, it
worked ‘very, very well in Tunisia’. 32
In about 18 months from late 1961, about 20,000 teenagers in Tunisia enrolled in the BCC.
Because of complaints to the minister of education, NAM’s work was investigated. Warren Gaston
later said that according to the Governor of the province of Tunis, NAM was on the verge of
‘creating a Christian minority in the country’. Therefore in March 1963 NAM’s Centre Chrétien
(Christian Center) in Tunis was closed. Gaston and his house were placed under constant
surveillance for months before they were escorted to a ship sailing for Marseille. 33 NAM decided
that the BCC with its office staff in Tunis, and the radio production in Immūzār, should be taken out
of North Africa, after their Centre Chrétien was closed. 34
Shortly thereafter, NAM had to stop its work in Tunisia altogether. Bell thought that part of the
trouble in Tunisia was caused by the fact that they ministered to children that were too young. ‘It
28 ‘RSB/AWM Media Historical Notes.’
29 Letter of Warren Gaston to Chris Ford (1 march 1994), from the NAM/AWM files in Worthing. Gaston wrote that
‘Arabic correspondence courses were duplicated in our apartment in Tunis on a borrowed duplicating machine in 1957’, but
that date is most probably not correct in the light of all other publications that mention 1961 as the beginning of the usage
of the first courses.
30 ‘Effective Methods in Reaching Muslims by Correspondence Courses - Report by William Bell - Radio School of the
Bible’, in Raymond H. Joyce (ed), Message to Islam. Report of Study Conference on Literature, Correspondence Courses &
Broadcasting in the Arab World including Panel Discussions on Communicating the Gospel to the Muslim (Beirut, 1969), pp. 27-28.
31 Ibid., pp. 28, 41.
32 Ibid., pp. 28-29.
33 Letter of Warren Gaston to Chris Ford (1 March 1994). Was this Industrial Fair in 1961 That is the year mentioned
by William Bell in a letter to Chris Ford (14 March 1994), from the NAM/AWM files in Worthing..
34 Stalley, No Frontiers, pp. 12, 26.
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