December 1893 was a time of great challenge in the life of “the Soudan Interior Mission”.
Three young men—Walter Gowans, Thomas Kent and Rowland Bingham—had landed by ship at Lagos, Nigeria. Their goal was to reach the 60 million people living in the area known as the “Soudan” with the Gospel. Yet among the three of them, they had only $150 with which to journey from Lagos into the great interior of the central Sudan.
Realising that their resources were inadequate for the long journey, they decided to spend a week in prayer. Afterwards, they all felt God calling them to sell any belongings that were not essential to their work, pool their funds, and cut their food budget. Still, they were far short of the funds they would need, so they continued praying for God’s provision.
The next mail brought them £500! This included some small gifts and a large gift of £300 from a servant known as Mary Jones. Mary served as a housekeeper most of her life, and Gowans, Kent and Bingham had spoken with her about their work while staying with the family she served in England. When she received a legacy of £300, she decided to give the whole amount to this Sudan enterprise. Her generosity moved her employer, who added £100 herself, and others added until the total became £500.
“The gift of this servant girl came just at the moment of our greatest need and made possible that first journey up into the Sudan,” Bingham wrote. “Out of that gift in a very real sense has come the great harvest which we are seeing today.”
Mary was an unknown in the world’s eyes, but her gift—and those inspired by it—made a huge impact in the ultimate advancement of the Gospel into Sudan. This first trip ended sadly with the deaths of Gowans and Kent from illness, but seven years later in 1901, four men reached Patigi, 500 miles up the Niger River, and the first mission station was established.
Today, SIM serves in over 70 countries with over 4 000 people representing 70 nationalities. We still rely on the generous and inspired gifts of people like Mary, her employer, and the others who joined them. Indeed, we have been blessed by so many similar stories of people giving at divinely critical moments.
I am grateful that I get to serve the Lord by helping SIM be faithful stewards of these gifts. One of the funds that I manage is our SIM “Partnership Fund” that is used to meet the needs of the mission to reach people who are living and dying without Christ.
This past twelve months, SIM Partnership received gifts totalling R285 615 from 60 known donors and gifts totalling R56 585 from donors unknown to us. Some of these anonymous donors purposely chose to stay anonymous, whereas others simply did not give us enough information to identify them.
We normally write to all our known donors to thank them for their gifts, but for our unknown donors, we can only say a big general thank you and that we are extremely grateful for your gifts, no matter how big or small.
Just like the gift of £300 from the relatively unknown servant girl, Mary Jones, every gift to SIM is a blessing to us. These gifts help us to meet our goal of reaching people who live and die without Christ. Jesus sees our giving (whether anonymous or not), and just like the poor widow who gave sacrificially out of her poverty everything she had to live on, He commends us when we give from a pure heart to please Him and to advance His kingdom.
If you would like to help us reach this goal, please visit sim.org.za/give-to-sim-southern-africa. You can give as a once-off gift or as a regular monthly gift through a SIM debit order or a stop order on your own account. If you would like to remain anonymous, please include this in the online form’s ‘Additional information: Donation notes (optional)’ at bottom, and we will treat it accordingly. Thank you, and God bless you.
This article is reprinted from SIMnow issue 157, available for download at https://sim.org.za/simnow/.
Text by John Berry, SIM South Africa Stewardship Officer
Photo by Brian Heffron, SIM South Africa Communications Manager