6 Continuing the Revolution of Love

6

Continuing the Revolution of Love

(Interview with Dan Wooding, 2003)

George Verwer, the colorful New Jersey-native and Founder and International Coordinator of Operation Mobilisation (OM), a worldwide ministry of evangelism, discipleship training and church planting, has become a British Old Aged Pensioner and has also handed over the leadership of OM.

On his 65th birthday, Verwer “passed the mantle” onto British- born Peter Maiden, who became the International Director of OM in the Keswick Convention tent in the British Lake District, where 2,000 OM leaders and supporters attended.

“Peter Maiden has proven a strong leader in God for over twenty years as he originally led the work in the UK,” Verwer said in a trans- Atlantic phone interview. “It is with great peace and joy that I pass on my leadership responsibilities on to him.”

Verwer went on to say that although he is handing over the leadership of OM and will be picking up a small UK old age pension, he is not retiring from ministry.

Leader to the “Whole Body of Christ”

“There is no retirement involved as a main chunk of my work is already writing, teaching, preaching and fund raising, all of which will continue. But I will not be leading OM from the closet,” said Verwer. “I will not be the chairman of the board. I really have full peace in my heart to retreat from OM leadership. I desire now to be a leader in the whole body of Christ as an example as I have more time. I am associated with many other mission agencies. I am very much connected with the World Evangelical Alliance as I am the chairman of the Mission Mobilization Network which used to be part of A.D. 2000 and now it’s part of the Mission Commission of WEA.

“I will now get a few Pounds from the British Old Age Pension. My wife Drena and I have always lived on our support. For the past 15 years, we have been able to live on 20 percent of our support and give 80 percent to literature and keep the work going.

“The Movement is letting me keep a small team called Special Projects Ministries which I have been handling for 30 years. It is a benevolent networking fund through which I have financed literature and other media projects—medium sized and small; that includes a whole new thing that I am doing with HIV/AIDS. This is one of the things I whole heartedly want to give more time to in the future.”

How He Found Christ

George Verwer became a believer at the age of 16 at Jack Wyrtzen meeting where Billy Graham spoke in Madison Square Garden, New York. He returned to his school in northern New Jersey. Within a year about 200 of his classmates found a relationship with the living God.

George had a growing conviction to share the Word of God on foreign soil. He started with the distribution of Gospel of John in the year 1957 at Mexico along with two friends and this continued with others during summer holidays. After high school in Maryville College, he transferred to Moody Bible Institute where he met Drena, a fellow student who later became his wife. They were led together in discipling young Christians, while concurrently carrying out a rigorous program of world evangelism.

Verwer then gave some of the highlights of the extraordinary ministry of OM:

“1957—This is one of the most important years in my life when we began evangelizing door to door and other ways in New Jersey. With the Billy Graham Crusade in New York City, leaving immediately for Mexico, Walter Borchard, Dale Rhoton and myself were to experience amazing answers to prayer, discovering that God could use even young people in a foreign country. We had met in a providential way at Maryville College, where I got involved in all kinds of ministry; and experienced greater reality in the Holy Spirit and the Word of God that continued to change my life.

“1958—Dale Rhoton transferred to Wheaton College in the fall of 1957 and we followed six months later, with Walter also going to Wheaton and my going to Moody Bible Institute. I was soon to meet Drena Knecht who on January 31, 1960 became my wife. She also went to Mexico the previous summer and Christmas. I met four others at Moody who went back to Mexico that summer and we started our first bookshop and other facets of ministry especially in Monterrey and Saltillo. Baldemar Aguilar became our first full-time worker. A small group of business people back in New Jersey set up a Board and legally registered under the name I felt God gave me, “Send The Light.”

“1959—We took meetings around Chicago sharing the vision. Nights of prayer were born at Moody, which soon had a focus on the unreached peoples and especially the Communist and Muslim worlds. Again during summer and Christmas we were back at Mexico with large groups in different cities reaching hundreds of thousands with the Word of God and opening more Christian bookshops.

“1960—The vision had spread to Wheaton, Emmaus and other colleges. Dale Rhoton after thoughts about other directions, came into the work and made a commitment to the forgotten, needy land of Turkey. Soon he was to be joined by others like Roger Malstead. Drena and I immediately after marriage headed back to Mexico with the vision of more shops and ministries. Later turned it all over to the Mexicans and Dick and Helen Griffin who were to go there long term; they have been there ever since. After a summer of spreading the vision in the USA, we headed for Spain and on October 29, God gave us our son Benjamin. We soon opened an unusual bookshop as well as other ministries mainly flooding the Word of God across Spain via the post. A small number of Spaniards joined us by faith and the work grew very quickly.

“1961—That summer was to change my life because due to a silly mistake Roger Malstead and I were arrested by the Soviet police and the KGB who accused of being spies. After confirming we were religious people, they took us to the Austrian border. During a day of prayer God gave me the vision and the name—“Operation Mobilisation.” We wanted to mobilize God’s people in Europe to reach their own continent and then spread into the Muslim and Communist worlds. A dozen or so people joined from the United States and together with a few Spaniards, we had the first European conference in Madrid. We decided to go ahead by faith and drafted a manifesto that got distributed around the world. Teams headed out to many countries, including Turkey, which became a priority field.

“1962—At the end of 1961 I took a strategic trip back to Mexico and the USA. In early 1962 Drena, Ben and I, moved to London where God quickly opened many doors. By the summer about 200 people gathered in Paris and moved out across Europe with over 25 million pieces of literature in many languages. This was the first operation mobilisation and the name has stuck with us ever since. In September a much bigger group gathered at Madrid and we waited on God about the future.

“1963—In some ways this was OM’s turning point, which brought close to 2,000 people to the summer mobilization and evangelization. We soon had over 100 vehicles with teams and literature on the road. At the end of the summer our main conferences shifted to the north of England where a UK Board of Directors was formed. The first teams for India headed out overland from this conference, which in those days was a very difficult journey taking up to a month. I was to meet them at New Delhi in January and this proved to be a life-changing experience for me. Within a few weeks of traveling around India, I felt this was the place God wanted Drena and me to be.

“1964—Daniel was born in November 1962 after which we moved to the Netherlands to help in the preparations for that summer campaign. Christa was born on June 30 and by September we were all in India as a family, based in Bombay. We ministered all over the nation, of course, with a team of people like Greg Livingstone and Thomas Samuel. This was the beginning of what would become OM’s largest and, in some ways, most fruitful field. A major literature ministry was birthed simultaneously with all the other aspects of ministry enabling us in the years to come to give the Word of God to literally hundreds of millions of precious people.

“1965—For the next three years we were to spend half the year in India and half in Europe. More coworkers were staying for the year and longer-term programs, and each September we started the new year in OM with a leadership training and a new recruits’ conference. This was to continue for a couple of decades and led eventually to over 100,000 people taking part in OM. The work in the UK was in two sections, with Keith Beckwith leading the basic OM work and John Watts, the literature work which went under the old name of Send the Light or STL. In December 1966 they were both killed in a car accident in Poland which led us to come back to London, asking Gerry and Jean Davey to return from Spain to take up the challenge of STL.

“1966—At the September conference, in a small room at a pub in Bolton, Lancashire that we had converted into a Christian bookshop, the idea first came to us about getting an ocean-going ship. I shared it with only a small group of leaders and we knew we had to wait on the Lord and do lots of research, which went on for the next couple of years. Meanwhile, the work continued to grow in many different countries including the nations behind the Iron Curtain as Dale Rhoton had to leave Turkey as director of the work in Eastern Europe.

“1967—The work in India was growing very rapidly and much of our early thinking about the ship was in connection with our burden and vision for India. I was soon to become persona non grata due to my own blunders and some false reports. But what seemed like a setback was a further push to make sure the work was built on Indian leadership. Alfy Franks and Ray Eicher stepped into the main leadership role, with me acting as the area leader for two more decades, often meeting in Nepal with the leaders who came from all over India.

“1968—Refused entry into India, we ended up living and ministering in Nepal. We operated under the name EBE (Educational Books Exhibits) which later became an official company and responsible for the first ship. Many of the summer efforts in Europe and other places emphasized on follow-up and church planting. In France, Mike Evans, who was surely one of our most outstanding leaders, wanted to see more churches planted. He led us in a huge effort to touch every part of France in the summers of 1970 and

“1971. A French publishing house called Farel was born, that later became independent and continues to this day.

“1969—Jonathan McRostie was doing a great job coordinating the work in Europe. The campaigns continued every summer with more people wanting to stay on for a year or longer. Of course, there were always plenty of problems and often a great shortfall of finance. Sometimes under pressure there were tensions and divisions, but repeatedly we saw amazing answers to prayer and it was clear that God had bonded together a long-term staff that would enable us to do a better job with all those who were coming for short term. The work in Mexico continued under Dick Griffin; Paul and Ilse Troper were to lead the work in the USA for about two decades. It was always clear that we had more lessons to learn, particularly about grace.

“1970—Moving on progressively, some of us felt that was the hour for the ship, and I circulated a memo to that effect with a photo of a ship. Captain Graham Scott joined us who helped in presenting this faith vision in different churches. Money started coming in and other crew members were signing up. In October of that year we purchased the Umanak from the Danish Government and it became Logos. I would urge you to read The Logos Story, the book about this ship and her ministry until we lost her in 1988.

“1971—Drena and I, with our family, moved to the ship Logos in Rotterdam where she was repaired and refurbished and we were soon on our way around the whole of Africa to India. This was to be one of the most stretching and exciting years of our lives. As we sailed into Cochin Harbor, the OMers came out to meet us in small boats, I wept with praise and thanksgiving. A new and effective ministry had been born which was to grow beyond our expectations with Doulos being added in 1977 and later Logos II in 1990 (and now Logos Hope in 2008).”

He concluded by saying, “I still believe with all my heart that evangelism is a top priority, but the biggest change that has happened in OM during the last decade is that we have accepted from the Lord that we are to be a holistic ministry. We must be concerned about the whole person of a human being. So OM is transformed and some people are worried about it. We are into earthquake and flood relief work and into helping the poor. We are also into the HIV/AIDS challenge. Every field is finding its own ministry strengths even as every field has to find its own money. We know there are problems, even though we are doing this and have received this from the Word and from other men and women who have helped us. We are a movement influenced by many godly people.

“Evangelism and prayer must be in our whole movement. Our whole movement is 100 percent committed to evangelism. It does seem that I, as an older person moving out of the leadership, that OM can still be alive and well.”

Dan Wooding is an award-winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma. He is the founder and International Director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times). Wooding is also a syndicated columnist, and was for ten years a commentator on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. Wooding is the author of some 41 books, one of which is Blind Faith which he coauthored with his 93-year- old mother Anne Wooding, who was a pioneer missionary to the blind of Nigeria in the 1930’s. Copies of this book are available from the ASSIST USA office at P0 Box 2126, Garden Grove, CA 92842-2 126. His writings are on the ASSIST Website at: www.assistnews.net