discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 83
From Every Nation 83
the American Board did make clear that she was to share in the mission’s primary
work.
African-American Christians may not have put a high priority on global
evangelism because their own leaders have encouraged them to center their attention
on Black America or at least look no further afield than the lands of
their ancestors in sub-Saharan Africa. The story of Eliza Davis George illustrates
the reactions that young African-Americans often got when they testified
to a missionary call. In the early 1900s, Eliza taught at Central Texas College
in Waco, Texas. During a morning devotional time on February 2, 1911, she
had a vision of Africans passing before Christ’s judgment seat. Weeping and
moaning, those Africans in her vision were saying to Jesus, “No one ever told
us You died for us.”
The vision took her back to when she had been a student at Guadelupe
College, a Black Baptist school near San Antonio, Texas. During the young lady’s
college years, the Guadelupe student body had been challenged to offer
themselves as foreign missionaries and Eliza Davis George had responded affirmatively.
Now, she felt this vision was prodding her to go to Africa. The college
president tried to dissuade her by saying, “Don’t let yourself get carried
away by that foolishness. You don’t have to go over there to be a missionary—
we have enough Africa over here.”
Two more years elapsed. Finally, Eliza got up the courage to leave her
teaching position and head to Liberia. In her resignation speech at the college,
she read an original poem with these lines, “My African brother is calling me. /
Hark! Hark! I heard his voice. . . . / Would you have me stay when God said
go?” On December 12, 1913, Eliza Davis George sailed from New York as a
National Baptist missionary.
While these are great stories, they stand out because they are exceptions.
Even with the excitement one might expect would be generated by the recounting
of stories like these, global evangelism has never involved many
African-Americans or other minorities. The amount of mission involvement
that might be expected considering the numbers of minority churches around
the world just has not been there. For instance, the word missionary in the
name of the Missionary Baptist denomination does not have the world evangelism
nuance that it does in A. B. Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance
Church or the Missionary Church of Mennonite origins.
In recent years Marilyn Lewis tried to awaken Black American churches to
their global mission responsibility. Marilyn, a schoolteacher in Pasadena, California,
spoke often of her desire to go as a missionary to Brazil. Just prior to
Marilyn’s untimely death from a heart attack, she had written this call-to-action
plea: