The Greatest Generation, Part 2

"If You Aren't Careful, I'll Have To..."

Ray Hendrix is the son of Spurgeon and Fae Hendrix, who served as missionaries in Argentina, Cuba, in addition to other short-term assignments.

We were living in Argentina when Pearl Harbor was bombed. My parents listened to the news through short-wave radio, and I recall their fear. I remember the ships we traveled on had to zigzag through the ocean to avoid German U-boats. And I remember the daily evacuation drills. I thought it was great fun, but my mother was petrified. Dad was an educator, so he was responsible for the education of the ministers at the Bible school as His greatest joy was to take young people—rustic as they may be—and with God's help see them through education and into successful ministries. Many products of Dad's ministry exist today. Also, Mother was an ordained elder and a pastor, and she loved leading people to the Lord. The typical comments I'd hear around the dinner table were, "Well, somebody found the Lord today," or, "Boy, that student really got it right." My parents never made any negative comments—always positive. 

We found a joy in seeing it all happen, especially since this was during a time when being an evangelical Protestant in a Catholic-dominated country was very, very difficult.

It was so difficult at times that when Dad held open-air meetings on busy corners, people would throw stones at him. I kept playing my trumpet, and watching my father be abused. I was the fearful one, not him. One day these fellows started getting out of hand with their abuse, through both their language and the things they were throwing. Dad seldom showed any temper, but this time he got upset. He meant to say, "If you're not careful, I'm going to call the police to take you down to the police station." But he got the language a little off and said, "If you aren't careful, I'm going to take you to the shirt shop to buy you some shirts." Terrible punishment!

"Tell Us About This Book"

Jo Cunningham and Kiddy Sullivan grew up in the Cape Verde Islands, where their parents, Everette and Garnet Howard, were missionaries from 1935 to 1951. Kiddy was a toddler when her parents went to Cape Verde. Jo was born there the year after they arrived. Together, they tell us about an incident in their lives.

During World War II a concentration camp, most likely for political prisoners, was hidden in Cape Verde. Luciano Barros (father of Nazarene leader Jorge Barros, and grandfather of worship minister Paulo Barros) was the government's official photographer. When he went to the prison to take photos, he would take our father with him to help. They would carry boxes of photographic equipment marked "Do Not Open Except in a Dark Room." Underneath the equipment were stacks of New Testaments. When prisoners would get their pictures taken, Luciano and Dad would give each of them a New Testament. That went on for a long time, but one day Dad got a call from a government official asking him and Luciano to come to the prison. The man said they needed to talk about something. Well, this is it, we thought. 

We told Daddy good-bye, thinking we would never see him again.

During the war, people just disappeared. They went somewhere and never came back. So Dad and Luciano went to the prison. The men passed through all the doors that clanged shut behind them. Finally when they entered the main room, government officials sat on each side of a long table—with a New Testament in the center of it. When Dad saw the Bible on the table, his heart sank. He thought he was finished. One of the men said, "Senhor Everette, we want you to tell us about this book. We've been reading it. Tell us what it means." So instead of being locked up, Luciano and Dad told the government officials about the gospel that could set all men—prisoners or not—free.

They Only Saw Feet

Anita Birchard Reglin's grandfather, Richard Simpson Anderson, helped to pioneer missionary work in Guatemala in 1904. Her parents, Russell and Margaret Birchard, were missionaries in Guatemala for 29 years and in Nicaragua for 10 years. She was born in Guatemala.

My grandparents sensed God calling them to the mission field when they were in a Bible school in their late teens and early 20s. They clung to the call, even though they wondered about it during those early days in Guatemala. And they had reason to wonder about their call. Because of the heavy Catholic influence in the region, people were afraid to enter the little Protestant church my grandparents started.

So for a solid year my grandmother played the organ and my grandfather preached to an empty building.

Not one person would come inside. But my grandparents knew the Guatemalans were listening because there was a space between the wooden walls and the ground, and they could see the people's feet. All this time, the Guatemalans stood around the outside of the walls listening to the gospel. Then, finally, after a year, some soul had the courage to step inside and accept the Lord. Forty years after my grandfather died, the government of Guatemala named a public school after him. I thought that decision was made by the local school council where he had served for so long, but then I found out the decision was made at the national level. Many of the boys and girls he taught are now in positions of leadership in the government, and they wanted to honor him.

"Maybe God's Not Calling Me To Preach"

John Seaman's parents, Lauren and Nell Seaman, were medical missionaries in Swaziland. John was born in Africa. He and his wife Linda were missionaries in Martinique and in West Africa.

As a child and teen, my dad was very driven, and very focused on his studies to become a doctor. For a long time, he resisted Christ because he was afraid he couldn't be a doctor if he became a Christian. Then a revival hit the high school campus at Northwest Nazarene College and it was one of those clean sweeps-except for my dad. The students kept praying, and finally, Lauren Seaman got saved.

Suddenly that same discipline and tenacity and stubbornness was refocused. He now wanted to be everything God wanted him to be, and he was fixed on that until the day he died. After his salvation, though, he wrestled with this issue of God's call. Once he had given his life to Christ, it was all or nothing. "I'm going to do what God wants, I'm going to serve God, the whole deal," was his commitment. Dad came from a family and a church where it was not unusual for people to say to those who wanted to serve God, "Well, you need to be a pastor. You need to preach." They were well meaning, and dad was very sensitive to them, and wanted to do the right thing. So he said, "Well, they know what they're talking about. They're godly men and women." So he abandoned his medical studies to enter theological studies and prepare to be a minister. As soon as he did that, a spiritual malaise overwhelmed him.

He wasn't happy, he wasn't joyful. He lost the thrill of it all, and his spiritual life became a struggle.

Finally, he realized, "Maybe Sister So-and-So is calling me to preach, but God isn't."

He returned to his medical studies and immediately regained the joy of serving Christ, of being a witness, and of studying theology and the Word. It's pretty ironic that he had to abandon desires to be a preacher to be able to plunge deeply into the Word and theology. A leading educator at the time told him he was the finest lay theologian he had met.

Dean Nelson is a prolific author and director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University. Read similar stories in his book, Every Full Moon Night, to be released by Beacon Hill Press, June 2005.

Holiness Today, September/October 2004

Please note: This article was originally published in 2004. All facts, figures, and titles were accurate to the best of our knowledge at that time but may have since changed.