Small Beginnings

Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.
—Zechariah 4:10 (NLT)

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And what I can do, I ought to do. And what I ought to do, by God’s grace I will do.
—Anonymous

I’ve always liked history, and one of my favorite bits of trivia is this brief entry purportedly from the diary of England’s King George III: “Nothing much happened today.”

The date was July 4, 1776. King George might have thought nothing much happened that day, but we know better. A few American patriots bravely signed a document asserting their freedom—a document that could easily have been their death warrant. What looked like a small, insignificant piece of paper to the king set off a revolution that changed history.

I also like biblical history, and one of my favorite Scripture verses is from Zechariah chapter 4 when Zerubbabel was rebuilding the temple: “Then he [the angel] said to me, ‘This is what the Lord says to Zerubbabel: It is not by force nor by strength, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty . . . Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin, to see the plumb line in Zerubbabel’s hand’” (Zechariah 4:6, 9-10 NLT).

To some people, our new mission might have looked like a “small beginning,” but the Lord continually reminded me not to despise the day of small beginnings. Like Zerubbabel rebuilding the temple, we were laying the foundation, but we knew the job wasn’t going to get done by our might or power—only by the Spirit of the Lord.

There was no manual we could read on how to start a mission. The only experience I could rely on was the teamwork I learned in the Marine Corps, and the know-how I gained at Mobil Oil Company and The Wall Street Journal about relying on the Lord to ensure that a venture would prosper and grow.

Just as those enterprises started small, so did this new mission, but the Lord was about to expand our work beyond anything we could have dreamed. It began in a very “small” way—a casual conversation with Harry Liu, a Chinese-American missionary whom I had met a number of years earlier. Harry was in town for a mission conference at Faith Bible Church. It was just a few weeks after my meeting with Dr. Ralph Winter, and I couldn’t get out of my mind the one billion unreached people living in the People’s Republic of China. At that time, China was just beginning to open after the devastating Cultural Revolution and was still suspicious of foreigners and intolerant of Christians. Chinese believers who managed to survive the Cultural Revolution were severely persecuted and faced arrest, torture, imprisonment and even death.

Needless to say, missionaries were forbidden to enter the country. You just couldn’t walk up to the Chinese Embassy and ask for a visa to evangelize in Tiananmen Square. Of course, most unreached peoples live in countries that don’t grant missionary visas. But Jesus didn’t say, “Go into the parts of the world where you can get a missionary visa.” He just said, “Go into all the world.”

It proved what Peggy and I believed—that there was no such thing as a “closed” country, and if the doors seem to be closed, we should check the windows.

When I asked Harry Liu how we could get Christian English teachers into China, his response was simple: “We make friends.” Harry explained that nothing happens in China apart from relationships. We had to make some friends, and Harry knew just how to do it.

The next thing I knew, we were in my car driving to the Chinese Embassy in downtown Washington, D.C. Here I was, head of a Christian mission agency that wanted access to the people of a highly suspicious, communist and atheist country so that I could share the gospel with them, and Harry was taking me right to their embassy. Of course, Harry didn’t tell them that. He introduced me as a former businessman who was interested in helping relations between the U.S. and China. And he introduced himself as a teacher. (After the meeting was over, I said, “Harry, I didn’t know you were a teacher in China,” and he replied with a smile, “I was—a Bible teacher!”)

Harry asked the receptionist if we could meet with the person who was in charge of placing English teachers in China. We were ushered into a room beautifully decorated with Chinese carvings, where we met with a man I’ll call Mr. Cheng—who was in charge of recruiting English teachers for China!

Mr. Cheng had just recently arrived in the U.S. and seemed incredibly nervous even talking with us. After all, not too many Americans walked in off the streets just to make friends. Harry started talking with him in Mandarin, trying to make him feel at ease as he explained our love of China and desire to help.

Harry also had a guaranteed door-opener in his pocket: a letter on White House stationery signed by President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The letter had nothing to do with me, but Brzezinski mentioned Harry . . . and I was Harry’s friend. Harry was a master at seizing an opportunity, and he planned to use that letter to the fullest. It seemed to give both of us official status, as if we were important people with connections in high places.

As Harry and Mr. Cheng chatted, they discovered they were from the same city in China—a city, it turned out, that needed Westerners to come and teach English. By the end of our meeting, Mr. Cheng asked me to help find them! God had performed a miracle.

It proved what Peggy and I believed—that there was no such thing as a “closed” country, and if the doors seem to be closed, we should check the windows. Maybe some people thought we were naïve (we certainly didn’t have enough experience under our belts to make us experts), but we sincerely believed that God would open doors to enter these so-called “closed” countries, and give us the strategies for evangelism and church planting. After all, we weren’t going to these difficult-to-reach peoples because they wanted us. We were going because God wanted them!

Once the red-lacquered doors to mainland China had swung wide open for us, we immediately began recruiting and sending English teachers to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. Meanwhile, our relationship with Mr. Cheng grew, and he became a friend of our family, giving each of our children pet names. In fact, whenever he called our home, he would insist on talking with each of them—not only to practice his English-language skills, but also to develop a relationship with his new American friends. He would often read us accounts that he had written about his daily experiences in the U.S. We had many opportunities to share our faith with him. He once asked Arlene, “Do you think God would forgive me for some terrible things I’ve done in my life?” She assured him that our Lord is full of mercy, always ready to forgive a repentant sinner who turns to Christ for salvation.

Years later when my son, John, and I were in Beijing, we had dinner with Mr. Cheng and his son at a hotel restaurant. He gave us a beautiful vase as a gift. It must have cost him a month’s salary to honor us in such a gracious way. He knew we were Christians, and possibly was even aware of what we were really doing, but he also knew we loved China. He had obviously grown to love us, too, and appreciate our friendship, as we did his.

At the same time that God cracked open the window for us to the world’s most populous country, He was also widening the door He had already opened for us in Papua New Guinea—this time to tribes that had very little, if any, contact with the gospel.

How did we recruit missionaries willing to live in a snake-infested jungle, survive under primitive conditions and befriend tribal people whose cultures were rooted in cannibalism? The answer is that God found them for us. Not long after we returned from our 1979 trip to Papua New Guinea and began aggressively recruiting missionaries to live among the unreached tribes there, God sent us Vance and Patty Woodyard. We had met the Woodyards before they were even married—while they were students at Washington Bible College where our three oldest children attended. Vance and Patty were members of the Islands of the Sea prayer band, which met regularly to intercede for the unreached tribal peoples of the world. They told us they wanted to become missionaries to an unreached tribe. I contacted Bob Callaghan, who was general director of Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM) in Australia, and recommended them. In January 1980, I was delighted to receive his quick response inviting Vance and Patty to spend a year with APCM working in the Biami tribe, which Peggy and I had visited the year before.

It was gratifying that Bob Callaghan and APCM welcomed our missionaries as full members, especially at a time when many other mission agencies had reservations about us, in part because our missionaries were all young and untested. When we had nothing more than a vision and a handful of missionaries, APCM helped us get our first team established. In fact, Bob said he hoped this was the beginning of “deeper fellowship” between our two missions—exactly what we wanted to hear. We felt our visions were compatible and were happy to work with them and to learn from them. We eventually set up a working agreement for our missionaries to be “seconded” (loaned) to the APCM team in Papua New Guinea.

That summer, our daughter Arlene went to Papua New Guinea on a summer team through APCM. She was just a teenager at the time, and Peggy and I will never forget one of her letters home describing a trek through the jungle where she saw a human skull hanging from a tree. That would have been challenging enough for a teenager, but then she learned that the person had been eaten by the very man who was guiding her team through the jungle. I’m sure many people could not understand how Peggy and I would let our young daughter travel in such a rough place, but we had long ago given back our children to the Lord, knowing He could do a much better job watching out for them than we could. It was actually a privilege to see Arlene step out into the unknown so early in life, knowing that God was guiding her steps.

Arlene loved Papua New Guinea, and so did Vance and Patty. The Woodyards had signed up to work there for a year, and during that time the Lord gave them a burden for the Konai, an unreached tribe of about 600 people who’d had only limited contact with Westerners. Outgoing and friendly, they could also be volatile and belligerent, but they won the Woodyards’ hearts. Vance and Patty eventually returned to live among them, continuing that ministry for 13 years.

A lot of prayer went into the Woodyards’ work. Their older children grew up knowing the jungle as their only home, and the Konai as their playmates. The family learned the unwritten language, and Vance and Patty analyzed the language and developed an alphabet so that they could begin translating the Scriptures. By the time the Woodyards left Papua New Guinea 13 years later, more than 150 Konai had come to Christ, and many of the new Christians were even reaching out to their former enemies. There was a Bible school, discipleship program and some translated portions of Scripture. A team from Wycliffe Bible Translators is now completing the Konai New Testament.

The wonderful story of reaching the Konai started with a “day of small beginnings”—something that we would see repeated in resistant areas all over the world. The work in India, for example, began with numbers that seemed overwhelming: a country of nearly one billion people, with 30 babies born every minute, most of whom will live and die serving Hindu gods.

How could we ever reach such a vast country with 3,000 people groups (2,900 considered unreached), 600,000 villages, 33 million Hindu gods, and 200 million sacred cows?

Through our work in Nigeria, we knew how effective it was to work with national Christian leaders. In India, even though the numbers of unreached were formidable, there was already a small, but significant, number of national Christians and Christian ministries at work. If someone could provide them with resources and help mobilize them, they could reach India for Christ.

Nothing has ever given me more of a sense of the degradation of lost humanity than the streets of Calcutta. John and I walked them in 1980 with Dr. Philip Steyne, a mission professor at Columbia Bible College and Seminary and a new member of our board of directors. Beggars to my right and to my left quickly formed a chain behind us as we pressed forward through the hordes of people. Their broken lives and mutilated bodies bore little testament of the fact that they were created in God’s image. Standing on Howrah Bridge and looking toward the city, we saw a mass of humanity. An average of five bodies a day wash up on the banks of the Hoogley River, usually to be eaten by wild dogs. Death was visible at every point—and no wonder. Calcutta is named after Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, and she is so highly revered in this city that she has a death grip on the 12 million people who live there and worship her.

We were also moved in ways that are hard to describe when we went to Mother Teresa’s House of Dying Destitutes. This was a city—and a country—that needed the love and power of Jesus. There was no other hope.

We returned from India with heavy, yet hopeful, hearts, knowing we had to do something to help evangelize the unreached in this vast country. Once again, God gave us a strategy and then began linking us with the people to get the job done—starting with Samuel Paulson, an Indian national. Our children had been fellow students with Sam at Washington Bible College. After graduation, he returned to India with a vision to mobilize 1,000 workers to plant churches in 1,000 villages. Needless to say, Sam was just the kind of national leader with whom we wanted to work.

At that time, India was still closed to outside ministries and missionaries, but Sam knew many national workers in India who were trained and excited about reaching their country for Christ. They had the zeal but lacked some of the basics. Many, for example, rode bicycles or walked from village to village because they couldn’t afford cars, motorbikes or even public transportation. India was a strategic challenge with so many unreached people, but if we could mobilize the national workers, they could get the job done much better than we could. We knew that the Lord was showing us another open door, and by our spring 1981 board meeting, Sam and his wife, Rachel, became our first non-Western members. Sam was especially encouraged by my brother-in-law Jack Hoey, who helped to expand Sam’s contacts with local churches in the United States and undergird the ministry financially. In the next two decades, Sam, Rachel and their national workers would plant 300 churches in India.

One more significant event occurred during that 1980 trip to India. John and I went to Nepal, where we took a bus ride across the Himalayas to the border with mainland China. We couldn’t cross the border, but we wanted to get as close to China as possible. As we looked across the Friendship Bridge that linked the two countries, I could see some Chinese soldiers pacing back and forth, watching us as we watched them. Suddenly, I had a flashback to 30 years earlier when I was in Korea. I had seen Chinese soldiers there, too, but then they were the enemy, and I was trying to kill them. Now I desperately wanted to meet these soldiers, befriend them and share the love of Jesus with them. For the moment, however, that was impossible. All we could do was bow our heads and pray quietly that God would open the doors to this great country and that multitudes would come to know His love.

A year later, Peggy and I took our first trip to China together, joined by Harry and Bertha Liu and Phil Steyne. Like every trip we had taken, this one opened our eyes and enlarged our hearts. The guidebooks didn’t mention it, and the handful of tourists didn’t see it, but China was in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Christians who had survived the horrendous years of the Cultural Revolution were now taking on the task of evangelizing their country, and the church was growing at an astonishing rate, in spite of severe persecution. Whenever Christians have been persecuted throughout history, the church has grown, and China was no exception. When the communists took over in 1949, all foreign missionaries were expelled from the country, and there were only about 5 million Chinese Christians in the entire country. By 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution, many of these Christians were killed or imprisoned, but the persecution purified and strengthened the indigenous church. Now, in the summer of 1981, nobody knew how many Christians there were—only that the number was growing rapidly.

God was doing something extraordinary in this “closed” land, and we wanted to be part of it. As we packed for that trip, we loaded our luggage with Bibles and other Christian materials, which we planned to secretly distribute to underground Chinese Christians. This was totally illegal, according to Chinese law (it still is). So our first challenge was to get our luggage through customs without anyone spotting our precious cargo, and the second was to deliver everything to the underground Christians without getting them or us arrested. We didn’t have a clue how we would do either, but, thankfully, God had a plan.

When our plane landed in Shanghai, however, we had to wonder what God was planning because the customs area was a sea of open suitcases, with clothing and personal belongings strewn everywhere. As the line of passengers inched forward, stern Chinese police were meticulously going through every piece of luggage—and our turn was rapidly approaching. In a few moments, they would find the Bibles and we would be in big trouble.

Suddenly I heard a voice calling in English, “Mr. Fletcher, over here, please.” I turned to see a young Chinese woman who approached us and smiled. She shook hands with all of us, and bowed and nodded a couple of times, and then said our car was waiting. While we stood there mystified, she said something in Chinese to the customs clerk, who nodded in return. Before we knew it, our luggage was collected, and we were whisked to the front of the line and out the door. Our suitcases were never opened, and our Bibles were safely inside communist China.

As we drove off, we learned the reason for this red-carpet treatment. Before we left for China, Harry had sent a telegram to a Shanghai business contact of my brother Bill, saying that we were coming to visit his city and letting him know our arrival date and flight number. The young woman explained that she worked at that company and was at our service during our stay in Shanghai.

God did indeed have a plan. The next day, we were the honored guests at a dinner hosted by a group of Shanghai business and government leaders. To my further astonishment, I was asked to pray over the dinner! I prayed and gave thanks for the food, and Harry gave each person a bilingual gospel of John.

Later that week, we secretly met with underground Chinese pastors and gave them the Scriptures we had brought into the country. They were so grateful to receive the literature. One dear pastor had been horribly tortured for his faith, and his crippled hands were disfigured with knuckles that had been broken by police. His faith was passionate and all-consuming, with no cost too great for the sake of the Savior.

A Chinese believer in another city arranged for us to visit a small “house church,” one of the secret congregations where even today Chinese Christians risk their lives to meet and worship. We walked down narrow back streets, making sure we weren’t followed, then up three flights of dark stairs and into a crowded room where an electrifying meeting was already underway. Just as we entered, a woman was reading a letter she had received that day, announcing that a Christian from America named “Brother Ted” would be coming for a visit with his wife and friends.

Imagine their surprise and ours when we walked in just at that moment! A colleague of my brother Bill, who knew we were traveling to China, had mailed the letter a month earlier. This dear lady planned to leave the city the next morning, so we were all astounded by God’s supernatural timing.

I was invited to share about our heart for China and what the Lord was calling us to do to encourage our Chinese brothers and sisters in their work of spreading the gospel in their land. When the meeting was over, they took me to yet another gathering to share the same message with those believers.

Against all conventional wisdom, we blitzed the city with whatever literature we had left. I can think of no other spiritual experience in my life more potent than that evening. Peggy and I walked through the crowded, dimly lit streets, softly singing hymns and choruses as we smiled at people and gave them Gospels. The extraordinary power of God and the sense of His leading cemented our vision for China.

That first trip to China was significant for Peggy and me for another more personal reason: It was funded by my mother, who by this time was in her seventies. Thirty years earlier, Mom had sent her son to Korea to fight against the Chinese. This time, she sent him to the Chinese with a message of forgiveness, hope and love that could only be found in the gospel of Christ. About six months after Peggy and I returned from China, Mom went home to be with her Lord—full of life and service right up to the end.

The door to China still seemed closed, but God started answering our prayers to find the “window” into this needy country. Mr. Cheng from the Chinese Embassy in Washington arranged for us to send a group of English teachers to the People’s University in Beijing for the summer. It was a wonderful opportunity at the leading Marxist institution in the country, but we had no teachers and no one to lead them.

Right in the midst of wondering what we were going to do, I received a phone call from Dr. Lee Bruckner, who was head of the cross-cultural department at Liberty University. Lee and his wife, Dr. Lila, had served as missionaries to Afghanistan and also had a long-standing interest in China. He had heard about our desire to send a summer team to China, so he called to introduce himself.

Lee and Lila ended up leading our first summer team to China in 1982 and led a team there every summer for the next eight years. Lee also served as a member of our board of directors and worked with us into his seventies, opening new fields and traveling like a man in his twenties. We often joke that it’s difficult to find a spot on the globe where he hasn’t already been, since his well-worn passport shows stamps from scores of countries. We can truly say of him what Paul said of Timothy: “Our brother and God’s fellow worker in spreading the gospel of Christ” (1 Thessalonians 3:2 NIV).

Peggy organized that summer team in 1982, as she had organized each of the summer teams since the first one in 1979, and it became virtually a full-time, year-round job for her. By the year 2000, we had helped to mobilize several thousand summer missionaries and short-term volunteers to serve alongside full-time workers all around the globe. God subsequently called many of these short-term workers to full-time missionary service.

As the Lord continued to link us up with the right people, it certainly helped that we were based in Washington, D.C., an international city where diplomats and dignitaries regularly passed through. The world was at our doorstep. One of the events we looked forward to each year was the National Prayer Breakfast, a significant Christian gathering that draws believers from across the country and around the world. The president of the United States always attends, and organizers also invite ambassadors and other international leaders of many different faiths who serve in the nation’s capital.

You never knew who might sit at your table. At the 1982 breakfast, Peggy and I were surprised to be seated with the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Another year, we saw our friend Sir Peter Kenilorea, prime minister of the Solomon Islands, whom we had met a few years earlier when we took our first survey trip to his country. We invited the prime minister to our home for dinner, and the Secret Service agreed to provide the security—after a complete check of the house and external surroundings.

I wonder what our neighbors thought when a parade of black limousines and Secret Service agents turned onto our street, blocking it at both ends. The prime minister joined us as we feasted on a wonderful turkey dinner and enjoyed Christian fellowship. There was plenty of food, so Peggy asked the Secret Service man in charge if he and his agents would like to come inside and join us. Suddenly the walkie-talkies started buzzing and agents seemed to appear out of nowhere to enjoy Peggy’s great cooking.

The mission grew, and in 1982 we held our first official Candidate Orientation Program, attended by 19 prospective missionaries who eventually served in Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. Each year, the number seemed to rise, and by 1986, we had 26 candidates at Candidate Orientation, 50 summer missionaries, 51 U.S. members and more than 100 national workers in seven countries. We also had a growing team of volunteers, supporters and prayer partners. We had survived the day of small beginnings, and it was now time to step into the future.