I said that tonight I would tell you
something of personal testimony.
I think I told you already I was
converged when I was nine years of age,
but it wasn't a dramatic conversion.
Before my conversion I had not shot a
single policeman or robbed a bank or run
away with anyone's wife or anything like that.
I was just a boy of nine.
However, ten years later, I went to a
friend of mine called Jim Wilkinson.
I said, Jim, would you like to go
out preaching with me?
He said, can you preach?
I said, no, can you?
Well, he said, I've read a paper at
the Young People's Society.
I said, I've read two papers.
Well, who's going to ask us to preach?
I said, let's go out in the open
air.
I'll invite you, then you can invite me.
Well, he said, I'm game if you're game,
but how would you get a crowd?
I said, we'll get a crowd all right.
I had a little ukulele about this size.
My friend Wilkinson had a great pair of
lungs, but he couldn't sing in tune.
If I played in G, he always sang
an octave lower in H flat.
We never struck the same note together.
But a crowd of Irish music lovers gathered
to hear what was going on.
And then when we got a crowd, I
stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and
preached.
Then we sang again, and the crowd drifted
away, and some more came.
And then Jim gave his testimony.
That was our first experience.
We got such a thrill out of this,
we decided to form a band of 24
young men to do this kind of work.
We didn't want to be encumbered, so we
wouldn't let any girls join us, just 24
young fellows, who were all about 19, 20,
21.
And we kept a record of our prayers.
We used to meet for prayer at my
home before we started out on our bicycles.
Once a fellow said, does God answer prayer,
or is it just coincidence?
I said, well, let's find out.
How would you find out?
I said, let's keep a record.
So we got a notebook.
We ruled it carefully.
One side of the folio for the date
and the prayer request.
The other side of the folio for the
answer and the date, when it came.
There was the first request.
They all decided that my ukulele was too
quiet.
When 24 young men started to sing, you
couldn't hear the ukulele after the first note.
So we prayed for a banjo, mandolin, or
a piano accordion, or something with more volume.
About five days later, when I was in
business, I was in business at that time,
the phone rang, and the fellow said, is
this Edward Knorr?
I said, yes.
He told me his name.
I said, do I know you?
Well, he said, I'm a friend of Sidney
Murray.
I said, any friend of Sidney Murray?
He's a friend of mine.
He said, I hear you're having open air
meetings.
Could I come along?
Well, I said, can you do anything?
No, he said, I can't even give him
a testimony without getting confused.
He said, but I play a banjo, mandolin.
If that'll help, you'll bring it along.
That was our answer to prayer.
We filled in the answer and the date.
That was the spring of 1932.
In the fall, Lionel Fletcher, a very famous
evangelist, had a simultaneous campaign in the city
of Belfast.
And in the final meetings, I heard Dr.
Thomas Cochran say, God has answered my prayers
for 50 years.
So naturally, I thought of this notebook of
ours, and I looked it up to see
one or two I had to write in,
because I hadn't been keeping it up to
date.
Then I discovered that all our prayers had
been answered except one.
Now when I say all our prayers were
answered, I don't mean they were all answered
the way we expected.
For instance, one night we prayed it wouldn't
rain.
What do you think happened?
It came down in torrents.
We were hoping to have an open air
meeting, but we were forced to take shelter
in a little Presbyterian church where the midweek
service was struggling.
And the pastor thought we were angels from
heaven, 24 young men coming in with testimonies
and really waking up as people.
Well, all our prayers were answered except one,
and one was for the conversion of a
fellow who was really a tough nut to
crack.
I said, you see, the Lord has answered
all our prayers except for this fellow.
Somebody else suddenly came over and joined our
group.
Do you hear what happened?
One of the ones who went forward tonight
was so-and-so, and there was that
fellow converted.
I called Jim Wilkinson.
I said, Jim, I'm so encouraged about this.
Would you join with me in praying for
240 young men?
He said, that's a lot.
Let me pray about it.
Two days later he called me back to
tell me that he finally had enough faith.
Well, I said, Jim, I've been praying in
the meantime, and now I'm praying for 2
,400.
Now we let the girls in.
What we did was we linked up existing
groups, a Presbyterian Bible class, an Episcopal Rover
Scouts, Senior Scouts group, perhaps a Methodist Christian
Endeavor, and so forth.
And we put an open air meeting across
every main road running out of the city
of Belfast on Sunday night after church.
Those were the days of the Depression, when
you couldn't afford to go anywhere.
If a fellow was courting a girl, he
simply took her a walk.
I mean, that's all you could afford, to
go a nice walk.
You could pay your streetcar fare to the
end of the lines and then go walking
in the country.
But we put an open air meeting across
every main road.
Well, we called this the Revival Fellowship.
You say, why did you call it that?
My grandfather and grandmother, both sides of the
family had been converted the same year, which
intrigued me.
I'd heard about the 1859 Revival in Ireland.
I'd talked to you about the 1858 Revival
in this country.
It's the same movement spread over there.
So I was always interested in this subject.
So we called ourselves the Revival Fellowship, and
urged people to pray for revival.
The head of a big organization in London
heard of what I was doing in my
spare time, asked me to come to London,
which I did.
He offered me a job.
He wanted me to set up this kind
of work around the world.
And he offered to pay me a salary,
not only enough to pay my expenses, but
to take care of my mother, who was
a widow.
What an answer to prayer!
I went straight back to Belfast, told all
my friends.
They said, the Lord's opened a wonderful door
for you.
Oh, they rejoiced with me.
But the day after I gave up my
job, my friend in London disappointed me.
He had to go to India and China
and Japan and other countries for missionary conferences.
He was going to be away for about
a year.
His committee wouldn't be responsible for me while
he was away.
So he wrote me a nice letter and
told me to go back to work.
Now, I could have gotten my job back.
It's easier to get me back the job
than to train someone else for it.
But the more I prayed about it, the
more I felt I was called.
So I talked to my friends.
They changed their mind.
They said, this is a wonderful open door.
Now they said, the Lord has closed the
door.
I said, does this all depend upon one
man?
You told me last week that God was
calling me.
Has the Lord ceased to call me?
I had just finished reading the life of
Hudson Taylor.
I said, look at the way God answered
prayer for Hudson Taylor.
They said, yes, but he was somebody.
There was one fellow, I mentioned his name
already, Sidney Murray.
He's older than I am.
He's a ruling elder in the Irish Presbyterian
Church.
Quite a well-known man.
And in those days, he was encouraging in
one way.
All the others said I was crazy.
He said he didn't know whether I was
crazy or not.
I remember him with gratitude.
Well, and the big problem was my mother
was depending on me.
I was the only support of the home.
So I told mother, I'll send you the
usual amount of money each week.
She said, where will you get it?
I said, I don't know, but I'll send
it to you.
She said, I know you'll try, but where
will you get it?
This was during the Depression.
You know, the population of the United States
back then was about 100 million, but there
were 13 million unemployed, and proportionately high in
Britain.
They didn't have unemployment insurance.
They had soup kitchens and bread lines, and
it seemed to be the wrong time to
start anything.
While I waited upon God, a friend of
mine asked me to do a favor for
him in Liverpool.
He gave me a ticket across the Irish
Sea to Liverpool.
I arrived there with a bicycle, a change
of clothes, a Bible, and two shillings and
eightpence, about 65 cents in American money at
that time.
The only friend I had with 150 miles
of Liverpool was a Roman Catholic scoutmaster whom
I'd met at a jamboree.
I'd been what you call a rover scout,
senior scout, and I went to see him.
He said, where are you going to sleep
at night?
I said, in bed.
He said, very funny.
Where are you going to get your next
meal?
Well, I said, I don't know where I'll
get it, but I know where I'll put
it.
Now, I wasn't feeling quite as cheerful as
I sounded, perhaps as part of the Irish
character that when you're up against it, you
crack jokes and show good spirit and all
the rest of it.
But he said, look, what are you going
to do?
I said, I'm going to serve the Lord.
He said, in the Catholic Church, when a
man has a vocation for the priesthood, we
send him to a theological college.
Don't the Protestants do the same?
I said, yes.
Then why aren't you doing that?
Well, I said, I'm going to be an
evangelist.
Well, the only evangelists he knew were Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John.
They called them the evangelists.
He said, what do you mean?
I said, an evangelist is one who travels
with the word.
He said, I don't know what you're going
to do.
I'll tell you what, I'll lend you enough
money to go back to Ireland.
Go back and get that job again.
I've been out of work for three years.
I'm glad I've got a job now.
You go back and get your job again.
I said, but Frank, I don't want to
borrow your money.
I said, scripture says, my God shall supply
all your need.
If that's true, I can depend upon it.
If it's not true, the sooner I find
out, the better.
So I left Liverpool, crossed the Mersey at
Birkenhead, and started on my bicycle on a
journey that was to take me around the
world.
At present, I think I can say I've
been in 154 countries out of a possible
160.
You say, well, what happened?
When I reached Chester, an old English town
with a Roman wall around it, it began
to rain heavily.
So I prayed that I might reach Shrewsbury
about 40 miles south without getting wet.
Now you'll agree, you couldn't cycle 40 miles
in the rain without getting wet.
Of course, in those days I was very
thin.
But even that wouldn't explain it.
I got there without getting wet, and yet
it rained all the way.
You say, did you hitchhike?
Hitchhiking was unknown in England in those days.
It wasn't until the GIs went over and
showed the Limeys how to do it that
they found out what hitchhiking was.
In 1933, if you'd stood in a road
in England with your thumb out like that,
they would have thought you had a sore
thumb.
They wouldn't know what that meant.
So I didn't hitchhike.
In fact, I didn't know what hitchhiking was
until I came to this continent.
I was preaching in Toronto, and I had
to speak at Lockport.
Is there a place called Lockport in New
York?
And it was out in the country, some
kind of camp meeting.
And I had to go a certain distance
by train and then take a little distance
by bus, and then I had to call
them.
But I decided try and get a ride.
They asked me, how did you get here
so quickly?
I said, you Americans were so kind.
I said, excuse me, I was quite wrong
there.
I didn't take a bus.
I drove.
I borrowed Oswald Smith's car and drove down.
And they said, how did you ever find
us?
Well, every road I came to, there was
some fellow pointing the way this way.
So I just followed the signs.
Well, in England, nobody hitchhiked.
But I got there without getting wet, and
yet it rained all the way.
A truck driver stopped to tie a waterproof
cover over some bags of sugar.
He wheeled around and shouted, hello there, in
such a friendly way, I knew he must
have made a mistake.
English people are notoriously shy.
They don't speak to strangers.
I wheeled my bicycle over.
I said, did you mistake me for someone?
Oh, he said, I'm sorry, I thought you
were a friend of mine called Bert Cook.
I said, that's funny, I have a friend
called Bert Cook too.
He said, well, you're not English.
I said, no, I'm from Ireland.
He said, I knew you were a foreigner
since you opened your mouth.
He said, then you wouldn't know the Bert
Cook that I know, because of course he
was English.
But I said, I was in England once
before, and I met a fellow called Herbert
J.
Cook.
He was studying to be a Methodist minister
at Northampton.
He looked at me and then he said,
blimey, mate, it's the same bloke.
He said, where are you heading for?
I said, London, not tonight.
It'll take me three days on a bicycle.
How would you like to ride with me?
Are you going to London?
No, he said, I'm going down towards Wellington.
I didn't know where was, but he said,
that's on the old Roman road.
I'll take you as far as Wellington.
So we tied the bicycle on, and I
got on the truck with him.
I still remember the roads were narrow and
winding, just like in West Virginia, and the
windshield wiper going back and forth, back and
forth, and I witnessed to him.
Finally, he said, Mr. Orr, if you're right,
you don't need to be in a church
to give your heart to the Lord.
Could I be converted now?
I said, yes, and I explained, you must
pray.
He drove around a few more benches.
He said, well, if I pray right now,
am I supposed to close my eyes?
I said, keep your eyes open, the Lord
will understand.
And he got converted with his eyes open.
Now, I got to Shrewsbury about 11 o
'clock at night.
I didn't know where to stay, so I
stopped a policeman to see where I could
get a cheap accommodation for the night.
In those days, the Salvation Army had working
men's hostels where you could get a bed
for about a dime.
That was something in my line.
I'd already spent some of my 65 cents.
The policeman looked me up and down.
He said, what do you do for a
living?
Now I knew what was in his mind.
It's in the books in this country, as
well as in England, that you cannot be
a vagrant.
They can arrest you for vagrancy.
That means just hanging around.
The question they ask is if you have
any fixed abode or any visible means of
support.
You're supposed to have an address.
You can't just say, I don't live anywhere.
You're supposed to pay income tax and all
sorts of things, you see.
By the way, I'm digressing to tell you
this, but one time one week I was
cycling from Scotland to London, and when I
got down to Nantwich in Cheshire, beautiful full
moon, a bit frosty, just lovely for cycling.
So I decided to cycle all night.
The roads were clear, no rain, but I
stopped at four o'clock in the morning
by a sergeant of the police and a
constable.
The sergeant, very suspicious of somebody in the
roads at that time of night, wondered what
I was doing in the roads.
I tried to explain.
Finally the sergeant said, I'm afraid, young man,
you're of no fixed abode and no visible
means of support.
That's like saying you're warned that anything you
say may be used against you.
So I said, well, I do admit I've
got no fixed abode.
I just about live on this bicycle, but
I do have visible means of support.
He said, what are your visible means of
support?
I said, my suspenders.
Then he said, you claim to be an
evangelist?
He said, could you prove that?
I said, yes.
But I said, it would take five minutes.
Well, it's a wee long evening.
Don't be Jim.
He turns to the constable.
So I said, all right, you can give
me five minutes.
So I preached the gospel to them.
They decided I was an evangelist and let
me go.
That was a digression.
The policeman said, what do you do for
a living?
Now, what could I say?
I'd been a bookkeeper in business, but I'd
given that up.
I wasn't an itinerant bookkeeper.
I couldn't say I was a clergyman.
I'd not been ordained.
So I said, I'm an evangelist.
He said, you don't look like an evangelist
to me.
I said, what's an evangelist supposed to look
like?
Nowadays, of course, everyone tries to look like
Billy Graham, but in those days we didn't
have Billy Graham.
Well, he said, you're very young.
I said, I'm 21.
Anyone who's 21 doesn't like to be called
very young.
But he said, that's young for an evangelist.
How long have you been an evangelist?
Well, that's not very long.
How long?
Well, I said, just a little while.
He said, I have reasons for asking.
How long have you been an evangelist?
I said, well, sir, if you want to
be technical, I started at 8 o'clock
this morning.
He said, do you have anything to show
that you're genuine?
I said, some letters have been rejected.
When I was going away, I asked an
Episcopal director to give me a letter of
introduction to people in the Church of England.
I got a Presbyterian minister at Castles Quarter
to give me a letter of introduction to
people in the Church of Scotland.
I had one from the Methodists and one
from the Baptists.
The last letter from the French was written
by an obscure friend of mine who wasn't
well known.
He worked in what we'd call on this
side of the Atlantic a storefront mission.
He wasn't at all well known.
But he wrote the most enthusiastic letter.
By the way, I didn't ask him for
one, but when he heard I was going
away, he came and gave me a letter
of introduction.
I thought, this policeman in the middle of
England wouldn't know anyone in Ireland anyway.
35 million people in England and across the
sea to Ireland.
So it didn't really matter what letter I
showed him.
So I showed him the letter written by
my obscure friend.
He read it through.
Then he shook hands very warmly.
He was a converted policeman.
He was a deacon in the Shrewsbury Baptist
Church.
And he was a close friend of the
William Phillips that wrote that letter in Ireland.
He took me home that night.
I slept in a feather bed.
Next morning I had two eggs for breakfast.
That was my first day trusting the Lord.
And something clicked in my mind.
Frank Nelson had said, where are you going
to sleep at night?
Where are you going to get your next
meal?
There it was.
I thought, now if the Lord can do
it today, he can do it tomorrow, this
week, next week, this month, next month, this
year, next year.
Now that's about 50 years, a little over
50 years ago.
And apart from the fact that when I
was in the Air Force, Uncle Sam insisted
on paying me a salary.
And while I teach at Fuller part-time,
they pay me a stipend for the time
I'm there only.
I just live by faith.
Except when you get in the habit, it
doesn't bother you much.
First, you know, you can be in a
panic if you don't have the money.
But it didn't bother me.
Oh, I could tell you so many stories
of answers to prayer.
You see, when the apostles, the disciples said
to the Lord, Lord, increase our faith, he
didn't say, I'll give you a great big
ready-made faith.
You can put it on a shelf, you
can admire it, and any time you need
a little bit of faith, take it down
and take a little.
No, no.
He looked for the smallest thing he could
find, a grain of mustard seed.
He said, if you've got faith this size,
you can move mountains.
That's the secret.
You use the little faith that you have.
Because God's economy is not like ours.
You've only got a pint of faith, use
it.
You find you've got a gallon left.
Only got a gallon of faith, use it.
You find you've got a tank left.
That's the way it goes.
Now, for several months I travelled around England.
I made my headquarters in London.
But I didn't have enough money to go
back to Ireland for Christmas, so I knew
the Lord had some other plan for me.
An Englishman whom I'd never seen before asked
me to spend the Christmas vacation with his
family in Kent.
That's the county between England and France.
I cycled down there, but on the way
down, my old bicycle broke down.
I discovered I'd need new handlebars, and a
new front fork, new back wheel, a new
front wheel, new three-speed gear, new crank,
new pedals, new tires, new tubes, and several
other new parts.
So I decided to pray for a new
bicycle with the money to buy one.
Now, when I got to my friend's house,
they got tired waiting for me.
I had to wheel the bicycle ten miles.
Have you ever wheeled a bicycle for ten
miles?
You get all twisted up.
You wheel it this side, then you wheel
it that side.
So I was late getting there.
But they left the back door unlatched, and
food on the table, and a welcome note.
I was praying for a new bicycle with
the money to buy one.
The phone rang.
There was my answer to prayer.
A Baptist minister had taken ill in Essex.
His deacons were in desperation trying to get
another preacher to take his place two days
before Christmas.
They called various people, but most people have
made their Christmas arrangements more than two days
in advance, and they're reluctant to break.
I don't know how they got my name.
I certainly wouldn't know how they'd make the
phone call, but I told the man on
the phone, you don't know anything about me.
He said, Mr. Orr, don't be offended, but
we're so hard up, we'd take anybody.
Now I preached in that church, not a
soul in the church knew that I needed
a bicycle, or that I was praying for
one.
But a man came up to me after
the morning service, Christmas morning service.
To make a long story short, he wanted
to know if I'd be offended if he
offered me a Christmas present.
A bicycle that he had custom-built at
Coventry, at that time the best bicycle made
in the world.
Handball bearings.
You know, just like a Rolls-Royce.
Handball bearing, everything done by hand, beautiful machine.
I said, oh, what makes you offer it
to me?
Of course I had no intention of refusing
it, I just wanted to know why, because,
well, have you ever spoken at a church
and somebody came up and said, I want
to give you a bicycle?
Well, his face got red.
English people are very self-conscious.
There is a difference in national temperament, you
know, an Englishman's always afraid of making a
fool of himself, so he's very careful of
what he says.
An Irishman doesn't care whether he makes a
fool of himself or not, so he doesn't
care what he says.
An American doesn't realize when he's making a
fool of himself, so there is a sort
of difference in temperament.
So he apologized, he said his father died
and left him some money and he bought
a car.
He couldn't bother with a bicycle anymore.
He said, while I was preaching, he thought
the Lord told him, give that young fellow
your bicycle.
With that bicycle I visited every country from
Land's End to John O'Groats.
I sometimes meet British people and they ask
me how well I know.
I said, I've done every mile by bicycle.
That's the way to get to know a
country, by bicycle.
Oh, I roughed it, slept under haystacks on
occasion.
Remember walking up and down the embankment all
night in London trying to keep warm?
He said, well why didn't you pray for
a bed that night?
I did, but didn't get one.
But at two o'clock in the morning
I met a down and out unemployed man
who wouldn't have listened to a parson, but
was willing to listen to me.
And I was trying to win him to
the Lord.
Finally he said, well look, if what you
say is true, if God does answer prayer,
why are you walking the embankment tonight?
I said, that's the only way the Lord
could arrange for me to meet you.
And I had the joy of winning him
to the Lord.
He wrote to me several months later to
say he'd found a job as a butler.
He said, what about your mother?
I sent her the money every week that
I promised.
I remember the very first week I was
in London, I noticed T.B. Rees was
having a mission in a North London Episcopal
parish.
I knew T.B. Rees, so I went
along.
He said, this is a very small church,
but if you'd like to help, we can't
give you anything.
I'm sure they'll put you up.
So they put me up in the vicarage.
The vicar was an Irishman, his wife was
Irish, and we had a great time together.
On Tuesday morning I had to have the
money for my mother.
It hadn't come.
I prayed very earnestly.
I didn't mind going without, but I didn't
think it was right to not send it
to her.
But the maid in the vicarage put an
envelope beside my plate.
It was addressed to Mr. Hoare, H-O
-A-R-E.
That would be Cockney for Ore.
I opened it, inside was a note, I
feed it as the will of Jesus to
send you this.
And inside was one pound.
So I sent it to mother.
On another occasion, I met that Englishman who
put me up for the Christmas vacation.
He said, Edwin, what's your address?
I said, 341 Ormeau Road, Belfast, Ireland.
He said, I don't mean your home address,
you're never there.
How can people get in touch with you?
I said, I have an address in London,
92 Fleet Street.
Fleet Street is the great newspaper street of
London.
What, he says, you've got an office in
Fleet Street?
I said, it's a man who sells grape
juice.
It's an upstairs office and he lets me
use his address.
Why don't you let people know?
I said, how would you let people know?
He said, write a letter to the Christian
Herald about something.
You know, about anything.
And sign your name, J Edwin Orme, put
92 Fleet Street, and then people will know
how to get in touch with you.
I wanted to write to you and I
didn't know where to write.
I said, why don't you save yourself a
stamp.
He said, I wanted to send you some
money.
I was hoping to send some to mother
and it hadn't come.
I'd been on a journey three weeks around
the British Isles, no money when I got
back.
I didn't want to say, well, hurry up
and tell me.
I just waited.
He said, I wanted to send you some
money and I didn't have your address.
But he said, I remember your Irish address.
So he said, I'll tell you what I
did.
I sent it to your mother.
I said, how much?
Three weeks installment.
He said, you know, the Lord's been laying
you on my heart.
How would you feel if I supported your
mother for a year?
He was a builder.
That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
Oh, I could tell you so many stories
like that.
I wrote a book.
It was my first book, Can God?
That was from Can God Provide a Table
in the Wilderness?
Can God?
That book, by the way, sold about 100
,000 copies.
You might say, well, you must have made
a lot of money there.
The royalty was one cent per copy.
So over ten years I got about $1
,000.
You don't make much money writing books, you
know, unless you write a bestseller that sells
by the millions.
But one newspaper in Fleet Street criticized me
and said it's easy for these things to
happen in a Christian country like England, where
people are kind-hearted.
Well, I know English people are kind-hearted
people, but I believe God can answer prayer
anywhere.
So I decided to go to Soviet Russia.
By the way, this was not during the
Iron Curtain.
This was before that, during the Steel Curtain,
when conditions were worse.
You remember reading or have heard of Stalin's
purges?
Those were the days, in the 1930s.
So I prayed about it, and I left
England with about eleven shillings.
That would be about $2.75. Came back
with six shillings and sixpence, that would be
about $1.45. I had some wonderful experiences.
I don't have time to tell you all
about them, but I'll mention the sort.
When I arrived in Copenhagen, the temperature was
down to zero.
I didn't mind missing a meal or missing
a meeting, but I didn't want to spend
the night in the streets.
You can die of exposure.
Or if I tried to sleep in the
railway station, then I'd be picked up by
the police and be deported.
They can deport an alien from any country.
So I prayed very earnestly.
Then it came back to me.
Someone had told me that there was a
fine Lutheran layman called Sorensen in Copenhagen.
I said, get in touch with him.
He knows all the Lutheran churches, the state
churches, he knows the free churches, the Baptists
and the Methodists and others.
Get in touch with him.
So I looked up the telephone directory, and
to my dismay, there were more Sorensens in
Copenhagen proportionately than Smiths in Philadelphia.
I didn't know his initials.
Imagine a foreigner arriving, let's say, in Philadelphia
and telling a policeman, I'm looking for a
fellow called Smith.
He would say, what initials?
Well, I didn't know the initials.
By the way, I used to wonder where
all the Smiths came from, but I found
out.
When I was preaching in Toronto the first
time, I discovered, I was preaching there for
Oswald J.
Smith, I discovered on, what was the street
called, near the Union Station, near that, I
think I've forgotten the name of that street,
there was a big building with a big
sign on it, the Smith Manufacturing Company.
There must have been a Sorensen manufacturing company
because there were pages of them.
Then it came back to me, wasn't his
name Nils?
N-I-L-S.
I wasn't sure, but you know the way
you think now, you know sometimes the telephone
number, and you think, I'm not sure of
that, but they tried, that's it all right,
it's floating in the back of your mind.
So I looked up the telephone book, and
there were only five Nils Sorensens.
So I made a note of them.
He said, why didn't you phone?
I had only a dollar, about five Danish
kroner, and if you only got a dollar,
you're not going to waste a nickel on
the phone.
So I made a note of it, and
the first one, I walked to the house,
it took me about an hour and a
half finding the place.
He said, well how could you find the
place?
I'd stop a man, and I'd say in
my best Danish, Kleinsgatter, little street, that's the
name of the address, and they would point
this way and say something in Danish, and
I'd head in that direction.
If I went along, I'd say Kleinsgatter, and
they'd say, that way you see, I knew
I'd gone too far, so we'll go back
to the corner and try it again.
That was a big apartment block.
I read the names, went up, rang the
doorbell, said Herr Nils Sorensen.
The lady came to the door.
So I began in my best Danish, versus,
Nieler Herr Sorensen her, if you please, it's
Mr. Sorensen here.
She replied quickly in Danish, but her Danish
was quite different to my Danish.
I didn't understand her, so I said, if
you please, is Mr. Sorensen at home?
I could say, Hjemme, that means at home.
She replied the same thing again.
I couldn't understand, and don't be too hard
on me, I'd only been in Denmark two
hours, so I didn't speak the language very
fluently.
I was going to ask her the third
time, when she suddenly just closed the door
on me.
Most women are a little leery of someone
who asks, is your husband at home, asks
three times in a row, and you tell
him he's not at home.
She closed the door.
Well, what could I do?
I felt very frustrated.
It's useless to argue with a lady.
She always gets the last word, but if
you don't understand, the last word is humiliating.
So I went down the stairs.
Suddenly she called me back.
I didn't know what she was saying.
She was quite excited.
When in the house, she came out again
with a red-covered book in her hand.
It was my first book, published in English,
which she couldn't read.
Published in England, but it had my photograph
on the cover.
She pointed at the photograph.
She said, photograph, dee, dee, dee.
I replied in faultless Danish, ja, ja, ja,
ja, ja.
She brought me in.
She talked to me in Danish.
I couldn't understand her.
I talked to her in English.
She couldn't understand me.
She called her husband on the phone.
He spoke business English.
Good English, but with an accent.
Mr. Orr, he said, this sounds incredible.
I said, what does?
He said, Fruken Anna Christensen, Miss Anna Christensen
of the China Inland Mission, sent me your
book last week and told us to pray
you come to Denmark.
I read your book.
I thought it would be wonderful if you'd
come and stir up our young people.
I prayed that you'd come, but I did
not expect you'd come so quickly.
And now you telephoned me from my own
house.
Surely that is the hand of the Lord.
Let me talk to my wife again, please.
So I called her over and she was
giggling and talking to her husband in Danish.
I was trying to understand what she was
saying.
She laughed a lot.
Then she gave me back the phone.
He said, my wife says she has asked
you a number of times if you will
stay for lunch.
So I couldn't speak Danish, but I could
eat lunch, so I stayed for lunch.
I was hoping that that nice couple would
ask me to stay for the night as
well.
They asked me for supper.
I came back for supper after seeing the
sights.
But they didn't ask me to stay.
They're a married couple without children.
They're just a utility apartment downtown, close to
town.
And Sir Winston said, tonight, Mr. Orr, you
will have the opportunity of speaking to 500
people.
It's hard to arrange that so quickly.
Or he said, we have a campaign going
on.
We've taken the ballroom of the Technical Institute.
He said, Pastor Eric Larson from Sweden wants
to speak, but I've called Eric and instead
you will preach tonight and I will interpret
for you.
I had a wonderful time.
Spoke by interpretation.
I found it quite easy.
You say one sentence, another sentence, turn about.
You can't use slang.
They learn their English in books, they don't
know slang.
I had a friend, L.L. Legters from
Philadelphia.
He was speaking by interpretation in Shanghai in
the old days.
He used an expression, my friend was tickled
to death.
And the Chinese looked at him, all the
missionaries thought, I wonder how he'll translate this.
And he said in Mandarin, this I do
not understand.
Mr. Legters' friend scratched himself until he died.
Well, I spoke by interpretation.
Of course, it takes twice as long.
And the meeting was over.
Ten minutes past ten, I stepped out in
the cold.
The temperature had gone down.
I still had nowhere to sleep.
But I didn't advertise my needs.
I didn't beg or anything like that.
But as soon as I came out, he
said, brother, all that was splendid.
Now I want you to do me a
favor.
I said, what is that?
He said, I want you to change your
hotel.
I said, what for?
I should have said, what with?
I didn't have a hotel.
I'd left my suitcase in a little candy
store.
You may wonder why a candy store, because
they'd be open late at night.
He said, you see, down by the city
hall is a very excellent hotel run by
Christian Management.
They give special rates to preachers.
Now he said, I will go with you
to the hotel where you are staying to
apologize that you must make a change of
plans so late at night.
After all, we don't want to pay two
places.
That looked complicated to me.
So I said, look, you wait here.
I'll get my own baggage.
But he said, you don't speak the language.
I said, I'll manage.
So I went back to the candy store
and I gave the girl a dime for
looking after my bag.
Came back.
Well, he said, you weren't long.
I said, no.
No trouble?
I said, no.
You mean, he said, they were not disappointed
you did not sleep there tonight?
I said, apparently not.
He said, let me carry your bag.
He said, of course, you understand, Mr. O
'Rourke, while you're in Denmark, you will be
my guest.
That was good news.
I didn't know how I would pay, but
I was asked to pay in advance.
It was 11 o'clock now and he
introduced me to the booking clerk and he
went down to his list of rooms and
said, well, good night, Mr. O'Rourke.
I'll come for you tomorrow morning at 10
o'clock.
I must open the mail at the office
first.
Good night.
God bless you.
In the meantime, the clerk went down and
said, I'm sorry, Mr. O'Rourke, you don't
have a single room in the house.
And he had already gone.
My face may have shrunk as made, but,
oh, he said, don't misunderstand.
We have double rooms.
We have apartments.
We have suites of rooms, but the single
rooms are all occupied.
The others are more expensive.
However, he said, sir, I'm such a good
friend of ours.
There'll be nobody else this time at night.
We let you have a more expensive room
for the cheaper price.
Come upstairs.
I followed him along the corridor.
I was thanking the Lord in my heart
for the bed.
The man threw open the door and switched
on the light.
There was a big family apartment.
It was a grand piano and a piano
stool and a writing desk and reading lamp
and an easy chair, four other chairs and
four beds.
And he said, you can sleep in them.
Turn about if you like.
We charge the same price.
He thought that was a joke, but I
felt so exhilarated, I slept in all four
beds that night.
And when the maid came up to make
the beds, I was writing a letter to
my mother back home.
She looked at the beds and she looked
at me.
Then she began clearing her throat.
She was trying to think of something to
say in English.
She said, where is the rest of the
family?
But I was the only one there.
I preached every night I was in Denmark.
I met the Count and Countess of somewhere
or other.
I met all sorts of people.
The same thing happened in Norway.
Went across to Sweden.
Met Prince Oscar Bernadotte, the brother of the
King of Sweden.
Preached in the biggest church in Stockholm.
You'd think somebody had been ahead and made
all the arrangements.
Went on to Finland.
It was difficult getting a visa to Russia.
I met a Swede in the YMCA in
Helsinki.
He had heard I was going to Soviet
Russia.
He said, Mr. Orr, they will not even
let one Bible into Russia, let alone one
preacher.
I said, I'm going just the same.
He said, Mr. Orr, you will never get
in.
I said, look, I've come from Ireland.
Do you know where that is?
Here I am in Finland.
Mr. Orr, he said, you will never get
in.
You will never get in.
But I said, I've prayed about it.
He said, you will never get in.
You will never get in.
He wouldn't argue.
He had a one-track mind.
There's no good argument with him.
But when I went to the consulate to
get a visa, the young lady said to
me, have you a ticket back to London?
I said, no.
Do you have traveller's cheques to show us?
I said, I don't have traveller's cheques.
She said, how do you travel?
Oh, I said, my father is very wealthy
and he sends me whatever I need, just
when I need it.
She said, well, can we get in touch
with your father?
I said, I'm referring to our father who
art in heaven.
She looked very puzzled.
Let her lip curl.
She said, I'm a communist.
I do not believe in religious superstition.
However, she said, that's your affair.
This is my affair.
The regulations say, unless you have a ticket
back to country of origin, you cannot enter
Soviet Union.
I said, could I appeal to Moscow?
She said, on what grounds?
Well, I said, I've written a book.
I'm going to write another one.
I understood you welcome journalists.
Yes.
All right, she says, if you like to
pay for telegram both ways, it will take
one week.
Otherwise, it will take one month.
I paid for the telegram.
The answer came back, they gave me a
visa.
I don't know why, but I went along
to the Sweden YMCA and I said, what
do you think of that?
He turned around and said, Mr. Rohr, you
will never get out.
You will never get out.
So I get in and out again and
alive to tell the tale.
Well, I could tell you stories like that
throughout the rest of Europe.
Stories like that in Canada and United States.
Stories like that in Australia and Africa.
All sorts of places.
Even after I got married, I remember my
wife and I were in Adelaide in South
Australia and I had to take her to
a dentist to have an impacted wisdom tooth
taken out.
And that's pretty rough.
The dentist said, now, when the anesthetic wears
off, you're going to have a lot of
bleeding, Mrs. Orr.
So you must stay quiet and come here
every day.
But I said, I'm starting meetings in Ballarat
in the state of Victoria, the next state,
on Sunday.
This was Friday evening.
Well, and he said, you have to leave
your wife here.
When the anesthetic wears off, you're going to
have a lot of bleeding, Mrs. Orr.
So you must stay quiet and come here
every day.
But I said, I'm starting meetings in Ballarat
in the state of Victoria, the next state,
on Sunday.
This was Friday evening.
Well, and he said, you have to leave
your wife here.
I could see my wife not only having
the tooth out, she was rather tearful that
the idea had been left on her own
in a strange country.
She had never been in Australia before.
So finally the dentist relented.
Look, he said, don't take a sleeper.
Sit up all night.
And he said, you've got to be very
careful.
Trains are very shaky things and will start
the bleeding badly.
Be very careful.
Well, by two o'clock in the morning,
I'd used every big handkerchief I had.
And she was in misery.
There was a lady across the coach watching
us, and finally she came over, an Australian
lady of course.
She said to my wife, do you have
toothache, dear?
She was sitting with her handkerchief like this,
you see.
So I spoke for her.
I said, she doesn't have toothache, but she
had a wisdom tooth taken out and it's
bleeding a lot.
She said, I can help you.
I could see my wife was a little
reluctant to go with a stranger, but they
went back to the toilet at the back.
This woman had a zipper bag full of,
you would say, cotton batten.
They call it cotton wool.
That's the British term.
And a flask of hot water.
Went back and expertly plugged the hole.
She said, now that'll do for about an
hour.
Try and get some sleep, dear.
And I'll change it for you every hour.
I said, how do you happen to be
traveling all night, bag of cotton wool and
a flask of hot water?
Well, she said, Mr. O'Rourke, I belong
to the Church of England and I was
visiting my sister in Adelaide.
I'm going back to Melbourne.
And we had prayer before we left.
And I felt very clearly, at least I
thought I was going to help someone with
toothache.
So she brought this along.
But I said, why, why you?
She said, my husband is a well-known
dentist in Melbourne.
She said, I've often helped in the surgery.
Well, we got off the train at seven
o'clock in the morning.
There was frost on the ground.
So I said to my wife, now keep
your mouth covered up.
I said, you know, in all the fuss
having to take you to the dentist, I
didn't send a telegram to say when I
was arriving.
I said, nobody comes here.
We'll go straight to a hotel.
Don't expose your mouth to the cold.
Well, this tall man there looking around, he
looked at me and he looked away.
Nobody ever thinks I'm me for some reason
or other.
But everybody else went away.
He came over, he said, you're not Edwin
Orr are you?
That's my name.
Oh, he said, welcome to Ballarat.
He said, I've been appointed by the minister's
fraternal to welcome you.
You're going to be staying with me.
Is this Mrs. Orr?
I said, what's the trouble?
I said, you heard about answers to prayer?
What do you think of this?
And I told him about the lady on
the train.
He gave a short laugh.
He said, I'm the senior dentist here in
Ballarat.
And if your wife's having any trouble, let's
go to the surgery.
First of all, give her an injection.
And that illustrates two verses.
One is before you call, I will answer.
That man had been appointed to meet us
before she had the tooth taken out.
Oh, I can tell you story after story.
But that was a sort of apprenticeship.
You said, well, what were you doing all
this time?
I was preaching.
Of course, when I came to Canada, I
landed in, first of all, St. John's, Newfoundland,
then Halifax, and then I made my way
to Toronto.
But Oswald Smith, who was pastor of the
Great People's Church, arranged to have a meeting
advertised over the radio.
And crowds got so big, we had to
take the Massey Auditorium.
So he was so pleased, immediately he wrote
to all his friends in the States, Dr.
Ironside asked me to come and preach in
the Moody Church, and Dr. Talbot asked me
to preach in the Church of the Open
Door in Los Angeles, and so on.
I was just 23 years of age, but
I was having the time of my life.
Went on around the world, but I saw
revival in certain places.
I began to see that God's people could
experience revival.
In those days, lots of people believed that
we were no longer in the days of
revival.
These were the days of the apostasy, they
said, when God doesn't work.
But perhaps the best thing to do would
be to give you just one instance in
rounding this out.
In 1951, I had a strong urge to
go to South America.
My wife was not at all happy about
it.
She said, Well, who has invited you?
I said, No one.
She said, You're just restless.
You see, we've been married about 47 years,
and I suppose I've been away from home
about 25 years.
When a missionary goes to the field, it's
a sacrifice, but generally he has his wife
with him.
Sometimes he has to send his children home
for high school, but his home is not
quite broken up.
But in my particular case, I'd been away
about 25 years.
Well, in that time it wasn't as many,
of course.
That was after about 20 years of work,
and I'd been away maybe 11 or 12
years.
So she wasn't happy, but I gave her
all the money I had, and I started
off with South America.
I crossed the border at Tijuana, went by
a cheap Mexican line down to Mexico City,
on down to San Jose, Costa Rica.
Kenneth Strachan, the director of Latin American Mission,
founder of Evangelism in Depth, said, You couldn't
have come at a better moment.
The whole language school for missionaries has moved
from Colombia to Costa Rica.
So we had meetings there.
Now, I went to the Pan American to
see how I was going to get the
next lap of my journey, right across the
top of South America.
They said the plane left on Monday morning
at 5, so I'd have to get my
ticket on Saturday before noon.
This was Saturday at 11.
And it would be $247.23. And I
had to pay in American dollars, not local
currency, because I had an American passport.
Well, I was walking up and down the
parade when a jeep pulled up.
There was Kenneth Strachan and the president of
the student body of the American Missionary Students.
Hey, we've been looking for you.
We wanted to give you something.
The students took up an offering, they had
such blessing out of your meetings.
We didn't even count it.
We have it all in this bag.
We didn't bank it for you.
I said, How much is it?
Kenneth Strachan says, Well, it's all in American
money, because all these students are paid American
salaries.
So he said, I counted, it was $247
.73. It was 40 cents too much.
Now, perhaps I shouldn't have told him, but
I told him what an answer to prayer
it was.
He said, You mean you're going around to
Latin America like this?
Look, here's my credit card.
You buy a ticket right back to Los
Angeles, all the way around wherever you're going,
pay me when you can.
I said, No, I don't want to borrow.
So I wouldn't take it.
I traveled on.
When I got to Rio de Janeiro, I
stayed in a little hotel run by Presbyterian
management called Hotel Argentina on Flamengo.
That's a beach near Copacabana.
I had to walk five miles every day
to try and collect mail in case my
wife had written.
But they arranged for me to speak in
the big Presbyterian church in Rua Silva Jardim.
It's sometimes called the Presbyterian Cathedral.
There were several hundred ministers, and I spoke
to them about revival.
One got up, a very famous Presbyterian, and
he said, It's interesting to hear of revival
in other centuries and other countries.
But we don't expect revival in Brazil.
We are a minority here.
This is a Roman Catholic country.
I got up again.
I said, I'm from Ireland, and in Ireland
we've had great revivals.
I went on to Sao Paulo.
There was a Presbyterian engineer there.
His name was Vicente de Barros.
I remember because his cousin was governor of
Sao Paulo, ran for president, Ademar de Barros.
After I'd gone, he went around all the
churches in Sao Paulo and said, Did you
hear what that Irish evangelist said?
If we pray, perhaps God will visit us
by his Spirit.
Eighty-one churches started weekly prayer meetings for
revival.
I doubt if you could get that in
any American city.
When I got back to Los Angeles, told
my wife all about my adventures, I said,
Let's all go to Brazil for a year.
She said, Well, what about the children?
I said, We'll find some school where they
have missionary kids who teach them in English
so that their education isn't interrupted.
She said, How are we all going to
get there?
I mean, she could see me going along
the way I did, but could you imagine
with three children?
I said, We'll just have to wait on
the Lord.
Then I got a letter from the Foreign
Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church USA, saying
they had received a letter from the Presbyterian
Church of Brazil, the national church, saying that
in seven years time, 1959, they were celebrating
their centenary, the first missionary, Ashbel Green Simonton,
came from here to Brazil.
They wanted me to come out in 1952
to tell them about revival.
They thought the best way to celebrate their
centenary was to have a revival.
They asked the American Presbyterians to send me
the money.
There was a man called Richard Waddell there
at the time, and he told a Presbyterian
friend of mine, They're crazy.
He said, They're celebrating a Presbyterian centenary, so
they invite a Baptist.
He doesn't speak Portuguese.
That's the first thing we try to get
them to learn, good Portuguese.
However, they sent us enough money.
A Presbyterian friend of mine, Bill Dunlap, decided
he'd go with me.
He and his wife, and she was expecting
a second child, but he and his wife
and son went down, and my wife and
his wife set up Home and Come Fenas.
Then the first setback.
I met the Presbyterian Commission.
By the way, I had written to the
Baptists.
There were Southern Baptists, the missionaries in Rio.
What would the Baptists say if I accepted
a Presbyterian invitation to come back to Brazil?
One wise missionary wrote back and said, It
would take us Baptists about a year to
agree on that, but if you do come,
we'll all get on the bandwagon.
When anything good is going, the Southern Baptists
get on the bandwagon.
I wrote to the Presbyterians and said, You
know that I'm a Baptist minister, so I
want you to invite the Baptists and the
Methodists to start with, to join in with
you, and the others as you feel like
it.
But then they said, We don't want you
to preach.
I said, What did you invite me here
for?
They said, Well, you see, the Brazilians are
very nationalistic.
They take the attitude of, This man has
something to say to us, let him learn
our language.
It would take too long to learn a
language.
So the pastors and the theological students all
speak some English.
So you'll travel around holding institutes, that's what
they call them, explaining to the pastors the
whole concept of revival and the theological students,
because Brazilians know nothing about this.
Well, I wasn't too happy.
Bill Dunlap said, What am I supposed to
do?
Well, I said, I can't preach.
I don't think we're going to invite you
to preach.
However, on the Friday, I had a call
on the phone from the Reverend Buenos Aires
Ribeiro, who is the Senator of the Commission.
He's not President of the largest university in
Brazil.
But he said, I've been so busy writing
letters to different places on your behalf, I
don't have a message for Sunday night.
Would you preach for me?
I asked, Do you have an interpreter?
He said, I've got an Englishman married to
a Brazilian wife.
Brazilian is very good.
Portuguese.
So Bill Dunlap and I and Jack Goldsmith
and Pastor Ribeiro met in the pastor's vestry.
I was going to speak on what revival
is, what it does, but it's clearly as
if it's a word from heaven.
Make the way of salvation clear.
So I set aside my message and gave
an evangelistic message.
At the end of the message, I asked
any who would like to declare their faith
in Jesus Christ for the first time to
stand up.
There were 310 people in the meeting.
300 seats filled and 10 people standing, so
I was sure of my numbers.
About a hundred stood.
I said to Goldsmith, Did they understand me?
He said, I'm afraid not.
So I said, Please sit down again.
They sat down before that was interpreted.
So I said, Now, I'm not calling for
rededication.
Oh, if you want to rededicate your life
to the Lord, by all means do.
But the verse of scripture I've quoted is,
If you confess with your lips that Jesus
is Lord, as well as believe in your
heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved.
You must make confession unto salvation.
Therefore, I'm only asking those who wish to
confess Christ for the first time to stand
up.
Again, about a hundred stood.
So I said, Pastor Ribeiro, did they understand
me?
He shook his head.
The leading Presbyterian evangelist in Brazil told me
if any Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian pastor could
report 10 additions in a year, he thought
he was doing well.
Now, about a hundred people stood.
I asked them to sit down again.
Bill Dunlap says on the horse, Today I'm
going to do something.
He gave me a signal.
You can't have them standing up and sitting
down standing.
So I said, All right.
I said, If you really mean what you
said, would you go to the social hall
and my friend, Reverend William Dunlap and your
pastor, the Reverend Cornelius Ribeiro will counsel you.
One hundred and three were converted.
Out of three hundred and ten.
There was power in the meeting.
We just stayed eleven weeks.
The last meeting was in the Pacaembu Stadium.
Went from there to Belo Horizonte, started in
a tiny little Methodist church where the stairs
came up into the middle of the room.
It's a lovely church now.
We had to move to the biggest church
in town and then out to the auditorium
of the Secretariat of Health and then out
into the park.
The revival was on.
Went to a place called Governor Valdez.
The four churches there were having a feud.
Brazilians are very individualistic.
Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal.
But they knew they couldn't seat the crowd,
so they took a sports field.
I felt sorry for the people.
Most meetings lasted, by the way, from about
seven o'clock until midnight.
I felt sorry for people standing all that
time.
So one night I said, Tomorrow night we'll
have the church benches here.
Oh, that caused quite a stir.
The Presbyterian elders said, Nobody has ever asked
us to take benches out of the church
before.
But one man said, O servant of God,
the servant of God has asked us to
do this.
And the scripture says, Thy people shall be
willing in the days of thy power.
So there they had Baptist pews, Presbyterian pews,
Methodist pews, and Pentecostal pews.
The Pentecostal pews squeaked a little, but otherwise
there was no difference at all.
But the believers came and sat on the
pews.
I said, No, no, these seats are not
for believers.
I was going to say they're for non
-Christians, but you never call a Brazilian a
non-Christian.
If he's a Christian, then he considers himself
a Christian.
If his name is Paulo, he's a Christian.
Or if his name is Pedro, he's a
Christian.
He said, What do you think I am,
a Muslim?
So I said, These seats are for our
visitors.
If any believer wants to sit during these
meetings, let him bring his own chair.
Well, if you were a Brazilian businessman going
home from work, smoking a cigarette, and you
meet 2,000 people coming along the main
street, each with a chair over their head,
staring between the bars, what would you do?
Oh, we had the crowds, all right.
All those feuds were settled.
Went on to a place called President Soares,
and President Soares, we saw the streets packed
from wall to wall, the buses couldn't run.
One night, four churches packed out.
Went from there to Cachoeiro do Itapemarinho, the
ministers there were excited.
They talked about when the revival comes.
So the first discussion was, Where are we
going to have the meetings?
They suggested taking the Gloria Theatre.
The pastor of the First Baptist Church says,
My church is bigger than the theatre.
They didn't want to take a denominational church,
they wanted to try and have a mutual
place.
So they said, Well, maybe we should start
in the open air.
It's a rainy season.
Rainy season in the tropics, you get washed
out the first night.
A circus had come to town, Bartoli Brothers
Circus, the Barnum & Bailey of Brazil.
So they went to see the manager of
the circus.
They asked him how his business, he said,
Very poorly.
Well, what's your trouble?
Well, he said, Our lion is old, he
can roar, but he can't bite, he's lost
his teeth.
And the monkeys have dysentery, the clowns on
strike for higher wages, the people are just
not responding.
They said, Well, how much money are you
making?
He said, I'm losing money.
Well, how much would you need to break
even?
He mentioned so many thousand cruzeiros.
Could we hire the circus for that figure?
He said, What would your reverences want with
the circus?
They said, We don't want your circus, we
want your big tent.
They said, Get medical attention for the monkeys,
and you can have the lion fitted with
false teeth or whatever, but all we want
is the circus tent, the big top, and
the men to work the lights.
I met six ministers.
I said, Are we all here?
I was getting fluent in Portuguese by then.
They were all there.
So I said, Would you introduce yourselves?
Some Methodist, Christian, Baptists, and so forth.
I said, Is there no Pentecostal church here?
They said, We don't count them.
I said, I think the Lord counts them.
I said, Is it the Assembly of God?
Yes, Assemble de Dios.
I said, I move, we adjourn the meeting
until our brother of the Assembly of God
is here.
I adjourned the meeting, and they looked at
each other.
None of them worked with the Pentecostals.
But they got a taxi, and they went
straight to the pastor's house.
His wife was rather alarmed.
What do you want him for?
We want him right away.
Where is he?
He's visiting his people.
Well, how can we find him?
He's riding a red bicycle.
It'll be parked outside the door.
So they drove up and down the streets
until they saw a red bicycle.
Is Pastor so-and-so here?
Yes, he's in praying with the family.
They said, We want you.
He was quite alarmed.
They thought he was being taken for a
ride by the Presbyterians.
So they brought him back, and they sat
him there.
He was a little man.
There he was with the Baptists and Methodists
on either side.
He was like a pussycat with three dogs
on either side, really.
That's the impression I got.
But we had them all there.
Now, they filled the arena, no trouble this
time, with all the church pews, all the
school pews they could get.
The amphitheater was rather primal.
They walked on a plank and sat on
a plank higher up and left your feet
dangling.
It was a captive audience.
You couldn't leave the room, if you know
what I mean by that.
And as far as that was concerned, it
was strange.
I waited five nights before I gave an
invitation.
And I gave an invitation.
Anyone wanting to declare his faith in Jesus
Christ for the first time, to stand up.
The first man to stand up forgot he
wasn't standing on anything.
He disappeared among all the planks.
Had to be pulled up again.
A great roar of laughter.
I thought, Oh, it's spoiling my meeting.
But it hadn't.
The Brazilians have a great sense of humor.
That was the talk of the next day.
Next night, the Roman Catholic priest was there
in his cassock and sandals and a girdle
and concert head.
They offered him a seat, but he wasn't
sure whether he should take it or not.
He stood.
But then I noticed he was smiling and
listening.
He went back to Mass and he told
the people, I have been to hear the
Evangelista Irlandes, the Irish Evangelist.
No, a Protestant Protestant.
He said, he's not a Protestant, he's a
Christian.
Well, what he meant was I didn't attack
the Roman Catholic Church or the Pope or
anything like that.
Just preach Christ.
He urged them all to attend.
About one third of all the people we
counseled all over Brazil were nominal Roman Catholics.
That went on for a year.
By the way, the whole thing was supported
by the Brazilians, not a penny from anywhere
else.
There was a case.
I had to rent my house while I
was paying the mortgage.
I thought, well, who would want a house
in a hurry?
I called Bill Bright, Campus Crusade.
He was just starting work at UCLA.
I said, Bill, would you know anyone who
would like to rent a house near the
university?
He said, praise the Lord.
They had just rented a house to start
Campus Crusade.
And the people changed their mind and cancelled
the deal.
There they were due to begin.
Nowhere to begin.
So they rented the house.
I got a letter from the States, checked
for $200.
I said to my wife, I wonder what
this is for?
She said, what do you mean, what is
this for?
She said, we can always use money.
I said, but the Lord sends cruzeros in
Brazil.
You don't use dollars in Brazil.
Cruzeros.
I said, this must be for something.
Next letter I got in the mail was
from Bill Bright.
He said, everything's going well, but I'm sorry
to say your old water heater's blown up.
I said, I don't know whether we're responsible
or not, but I've talked to a man
who can get me a new one wholesale.
And it'll be $400.
It'll be all right if we pay $200
and you pay $200.
So I sent him the check for $200.
In Bahia, that's the second largest city, well,
it's the oldest city in Brazil, and Salvador.
We started in the town square.
Now, we found the Brazilian Roman Catholics very
friendly, but there were foreign Roman Catholic missionaries
who didn't like Protestant missionaries, Italians and others.
When they saw us starting in the town
square with about 5,000 people, they started
to ring their church bells to drown us
out.
Clang, clang, clang, clang.
Up got a Brazilian Presbyterian who was a
member of Parliament, a member of the Congress,
read the Constitution demanding freedom of speech, and
the noise got louder.
A man rushed around, another church started ringing
his bell.
Nine churches ringing their bells to drown us
out.
But on Wednesday in the local paper, O
Diario, there was an editorial apologizing to us.
It was called Por que nos sinos dobram,
For Whom the Bells Toll.
He said, Do these Italian priests realize that
the best protection His Holiness has in Rome
is not the Italian police, but United States
Army?
This was in the 1950s.
How then dare they insult on Brazilian soil
a chaplain of the Air Force of our
sister republic to the north?
That's me.
We urge all Brazilians of whatever faith to
show their abhorrence of such lack of hospitality
by attending these meetings.
Take bus 11A to the college gates, there
you'll find the crowds again.
Dr. Paul Pearson is Dean of the School
of World Mission.
He was a missionary in Brazil to the
Presbyterians.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation for Princeton.
You'll find from the statistics, the increase in
the Presbyterian church alone was three times that
of any other year for 50 years.
The enrollment at their seminaries at Campinas and
Recife doubled.
It was called the Revival of 1952.
I'll just quote one thing in conclusion.
The Bible Society's 1952 called it the Year
of Triumph.
While most of the growth of the evangelical
movement could be attributed to the day-by
-day witness of members, special efforts also drew
the attention of the people.
In a nationwide crusade that crossed denominational lines
and drew the interest of the multitudes, an
evangelistic team went from center to center calling
for repentance and dedication to Christ.
Time and time again, the largest auditoriums could
not seat the thousands who came to hear
the gospel.
Hundreds upon hundreds came forward accepting Christ as
their Savior.
Some there were who compared this movement with
the great nationwide revivals in the United States,
and there was a strong feeling that 1952
had been a crucial hour of victory in
the winning of Brazil to Christ.
According to the Secretary of the Church Council,
the unusual features of the revival were six
o'clock morning prayer meetings packed out.
Probably the most significant was the results were
greater after the campaigns than during the campaigns.
We saw thousands converted, but the thing went
into top gear after we left, when the
Brazilian pastors took up the thing.
And in the seven years following, all the
denominations showed a great gain.
Well I could tell you about revival in
other places, but you see it's not just
theory.
I try to make a study of this,
but I'm glad to say I've seen times
of revival in some places.
As far as these meetings are concerned, I'm
a veteran now in a sense, I'm over
70.
I'm not in a rush.
Have you noticed that although the Lord Jesus
was in the most important thing of all,
he was never fussed, never panicked, just fulfilled
his ministry.
My reason for coming here was just to
sow the seed, water it if necessary, because
if God in his good times sends an
awakening, we'd want it to be as thorough
as it could be.
Therefore we've got to wait upon him.
The secret is waiting upon him until we're
ready for him to take over and pour
out his spirit upon all our church members
of whatever denomination.
Well I've taken much more time than I
thought I would, but I hope you haven't
been bored.
Turn the meeting back to pastor.