CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 9
TREK THROUGH SOUTH AFRICA
On the last day of June 1936, Edwin Orr left Fremantle on board the steamer Nestor, reaching Durban on 15th July. In a pile of letters waiting for him was one from the Rev. Lionel
B. Fletcher, as follows :1
My Dear Edwin Orr, This is just a line to welcome you to South Africa. I want you to know that I am praying that God may give you great and mighty blessing right throughout this glorious country.
To a certain extent you will be going over some of the ground that I have already covered. If, by the goodness of God, you can stir up those thousands of converts to pursue a life of prayer and consecration, then you will have been God's instrument in doing the most important work that can be done in these days, when I am sure the revival tide is lapping at the very doors of the South African Churches.
I have followed the reports of your work with constant prayer, and have been very deeply moved by the news that has come from New Zealand and Australia. Here, in South
Africa, God has been giving us tremendous blessings, with overflowing crowds and thousands of professed conversions.
Orr's contacts with Lionel B. Fletcher may be regarded as a formative influence in his life. It. was. during the Fletcher Campaign. in Belfast..that..Orr developed. his. open-air. preaching band.2 Fletcher was holding evangelistic missions greatly blessed of God all. over the British Commonwealth. He was called the Empire Evangelist. He was well known for his thorough and careful methods of evangelism, although in later years Orr heldthat Billy Graham's follow-up procedures were vastly superior to those of Fletcher or Gipsy Smith. In the relationship between Fletcher and Orr there was much tenderness and solicitude on the part of the older man and a great deal of
affection and respect on the side of the younger.
Fletcher — described Orr as "'a sort of Timothy"' of his.
Edwin Orr was pleased to receive Fletcher's greeting and good wishes, and went on his way. When, several weeks later,
Fletcher was leaving South Africa, the two friends met in Capetown.? Fletcher was returning to England after many successful evangelistic campaigns. The two men went into the Capetown Gardens, took a seat and had a long and profitable talk together. Edwin Orr talked frankly, put before him his difficulties and asked for advice. Lionel Fletcher explained his method of dealing with inquirers, which precluded the use of personal workers. He much preferred to follow his evangelistic talk by giving counsel en masse to the inquirers who tarried.
Most of Lionel Fletcher's conversation with Edwin Orr concerned the pitfalls in the life of an evangelist. He asserted that he had not known of anyone so young (Orr was twentyfour years of age at the time) reaching a place of world-wide usefulness in so short a period. This spelled danger.
Upon the basis of observation, Fletcher was of the opinion that the two greatest temptations in the life of an evangelist were love of money and love of women. He warned the younger man of a world-famous evangelist (Orr had heard him in Ireland) who had undermined his own ministry in America, repeated the scandal in Britain and was caught in the act in New Zealand.
Orr told Fletcher that the only cure he knew for such a serious problem was to maintain whole hearted dedication in the realm of sex as well as money.
A quarter of a century later, Orr's friends who knew him most intimately could say that Fletcher's prayers for Orr had been answered through the keeping grace of God—although this contemporary and that had fallen by the wayside, not a majority of evangelists but a minority of tragic cases of the weakness of the flesh, even among Orr's own friends and acquaintances. Orr became as strongly convinced as Fletcher that sex and money were hazards to those who travelled far and wide and in public acclaim. He became grateful to Fletcher for warnings, grateful to God for deliverance.
Mischief makers had made insinuations and thrown doubts
ern, tion -evange iss, working int th : 'ane country at 'the same time, suggesting that they were rivals.
Such however was not the truth. In Capetown, Fletcher eae os Orr's arm and said to him:
"I want you to meet a converted prize-fighter.""
Orr shook hands with a Fletcher convert. The es happily ; told them:
"And my mate, another boxer, was converted in Orr's meeting ge the night before last."
Friends rejoiced to see the love and friendship between fe se two evangelists and their converts. in Southern Rhodesia. From the point of view of canines ; the Gainpaign held in Bulawayo was not remarkable. The European population in Bulawayo was then 12,000; there © was very short notice; and some of the ministers were unfriendly. But even so, of the two hundred people who came to the meetings, fifty made public profession, some backsliders.*
Orr's opportunities for sight-seeing were strictly limited.
He travelled quickly from place to place. Wherever he went his time was fully taken up with meetings and interviews. It if ha' was rarely he had time to see all the sights. There were not many ancient buildings in Rhodesia other than the Zimbabwe
_ ruins.
But he did enjoy the various aspects of nature—rivers, mountains, deserts, animals. Far beyond Livingstone on the Zambesi, he flew with a bush pilot over wild, unsettled country
:* We sighted a herd of roan antelope grazing quietly, with — the leader on guard. We went lower, zooming down over — his head, leaving him utterly bewildered not knowing which | way to turn. The herd bolted at a terrific pace across the veldt; — we went after them at about twenty feet from the ground.
About thirty beautiful animals of the size of an ox, but graceful in movement, went streaking away like greased lightning.
__ They appeared to be travelling at forty miles an hour. The © plane with double the speed was bound to overtake them
"Keep them on your right," I roared in the pilot's ear.
He did so. I got out my ''movie" camera, and took a film of the bolting beasts. I have seldom seen anything so beautiful as a herd of antelope in full flight alongside. We passed them.
A minute later I looked back; the herd had wheeled to the right, but was unable to pull up, and a great cloud of dust followed their stamping hoofs. I laughed heartily to myself
—I was thinking that when I started out on a push bicycle to tour the world on half-a-crown, I did not quite visualize myself in an aeroplane chasing a herd of big game across the skyline.
The following day he paid a visit to the Victoria Falls. There he saw a singularly attractive sight. Nature made a deep impression on him. His faith in God became deeper and stronger when he beheld its wonders.
Dr. David Livingstone, famous explorer and missionary, discovered the Victoria Falls in 1855 and named them after his sovereign. These magnificent falls are formed by the Zambesi, a mile and a quarter wide at this point, suddenly
'plunging into a narrow chasm 400 feet deep. The Victoria Falls are about two and a half times as high as Niagara and far surpass their American rival in grandeur. Just imagine— eighty million gallons of water falling every minute from a height greater than the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London—and this spectacle a mile wide.
* *
We have a glimpse of Orr's life of prayer during his campaign in Durban. The first meetings were held in the afternoon, and made a good start. The big, general meeting overcrowded the Central Baptist Church, and on that very first occasion, the real expectancy of revival was created. The meeting lasted for two and a half hours.* Orr commented:
Nevertheless, in my own heart there was not much hope of blessing—I felt dry and mechanical. But it so happened that I was sitting at a piano next morning when memory suggested the beautiful chorus learned in Auckland when revival began there:
Calvary covers it all— My life, with its guilt and shame:
I felt that I could not go on playing, so I slipped away to & ue the secret place.
'"' the wonder of it | dawned on my soul. I am not ashamed to say that I wept and prayed for about an hour—over my own hardness, subtle backsliding, in the face of the need of souls.
The meetings in Central Baptist Church became overcrowded, with people standing in the doorways and vestibules, in overflow meetings and outside the church windows. Hundreds of people professed conversion in the five week-night services although the topics chosen for preaching were meant for the Christians.
Two thousand people gathered in the City Hall on Sunday afternoon and an even larger crowd in the Princes Theatre on Sunday evening with a tenth of those attending making public
_profession of faith. The Rev. Charles Albertyn, a Methodist minister, was transformed in his ministry in the 1936 Orr
Campaign, according to his son Charles Murray Albertyn.'
The older Albertyn died in war service. tad, capital of East Griqu There was a very cordial feeling between the leaders—
Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian and a visiting Brethren evangelist—and their prayers were more than answered when half the adult population of the town turned up at the meeting and a tenth of the population professed conversion.
The movement among Europeans and Griquas was i effective after two Plate f
inquirer In: thie ened "Free State capital Edwin Orr peer to ie ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church.
His host, Dr. H. C. DeWet, wrote:®
One was surprised to note the similarity between the methods employed by Edwin Orr and those of Charles
Finney, the American revivalist who did such lasting work last century. Both take a firm stand on the Word of God and make the appeal to the conscience primarily, insisting at the same time upon the necessity of facing each sin separately. Finney considered it impossible to reach the unconverted till Christians got into right relationship with God— a truth emphasized by Edwin Orr."
Edwin Orr was told this so often by observers that he obtained a copy of Finney's Lectures on Revivals of Religion. His whimsical colleague, an Englishman named Jack Sherriff, looked up from reading these lectures and commented:
"I say! This chap Finney seems to have used a lot of your material!"
* * * As Orr and Sherriff were driving to Pretoria with a Baptist . pastor, J. Charles Stern, they saw a terrible motor smash on the highway.!° They saw a motor lorry approaching at about thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. Suddenly it crossed right over their line of approach—ten seconds farther along and they would have been smashed to matchwood. As it was, the heavy lorry bounced on the bank, and, before their horrified eyes, turned two complete somersaults—the steering rod had broken and it had punctured the hydraulic brake system.
The three men rushed across the road. Neither Mr. Stern nor Mr. Sherriff saw the terrible sight that Orr saw first, an Indian with his head shattered ...
In the meantime, Mr. Stern was bandaging the head of a native and Sherriff was attending to another. On the lorry there had been an Indian, two natives and a coloured driver.
One of the natives and the coloured driver escaped serious injury. The lorry driver was utterly distraught.
"My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' he kept crying. "Oh, the Indian man is dead. Oh God, he is dead.
What'll I do?"
I tried to soothe him. He told me something about the Indian which startled me. It appears that the Indian, a customer
of the firm, asked him for a lift to Johannesburg. Just before the accident, he looked at his watch and said:
"Half past twelve. My watch is fast. However, every minute is numbered by God, and every day. We do not live a minute longer than He allows."
He was a Moslem and a fatalist. Thirty seconds later, the brain that controlled his speech and formed his words was dashed out on the road. I shudder every time I think of itt As soon as they helped the injured native out of the ditch and sent for the ambulance, Orr took the driver for a walk.
He was a "near-white"' and very intelligent, but his speech was 'incoherent at first. Edwin Orr asked him gently if he had been prepared to die. The coloured folk are naturally religious, so Orr was not surprised when he told him that he had been neglecting God. Half an hour later, while they were waiting for the police, Orr sat beside him in the ditch and listened attentively to his prayer in Afrikaans. He was pleading with God for forgiveness of sin. He made his profession of faith in Christ, and he vowed his whole life's service to God, telling the evangelist that the Lord had sent him to meet him in his need.
All this took place long before Edwin Orr's war experiences in which sights of blood and of sudden death became commonplace. In Pretoria, the memory of the two men—one beyond spiritual help and the other spared to make his peace with God through Christ—stayed with the evangelist to give him a deeper passion for perishing souls. His evangelism took on a new urgency.
In Johannesburg, Edwin Orr greatly relished an opportunity of addressing a crowd of African gold-miners.'? At 9 o'clock on Sunday morning, in the native compound of the City Deep
Mine, his interpreter (A. W. Baker) by fluent language and descriptive gestures conveyed Orr's message of the Cross of Christ that cleanses from sin. They listened well, and twenty men came forward upon Mr. Baker's invitation to accept salvation. The professed converts were of Xhosa, Shangaan, Bechuana and Basuto tribal affiliation. Orr sang the chorus of a Zulu hymn for them. The meeting adjourned with a vote of thanks
on the part of the Bantu audience and an invitation to Orr to return and work with them for three months. Edwin Orr earned a Zulu name—"Tanda Bantu" which means "Loves the People"
Everywhere, the Bantu folk seemed immediately aware of his friendship.
The Johannesburg meetings were sponsored by the Witwatersrand Church Council and began with noonday meetings in Wesley Hall, evening meetings in the Centenary Hall in De Villiers Street, both series being transferred to the larger
Central Hall to accommodate the crowds. The final meetings on Sunday were held in the Bijou Theatre, with more than
2,000 people present in each service. Again there were more than 1,000 inquirers in the campaign, 55 per cent Dutch Reformed,
15 per cent Methodist, 8 per cent Anglican, 4 per cent Baptist, and 3 per cent Presbyterian, the remainder divided among a dozen categories of preference.?* After meetings in the Eastern Province cities, Edwin Orr was welcomed by the Cape Peninsula Church Council to Capetown, where the Evangelical Fellowship organized the mission in the historic Groote Kerk, South Africa's oldest and biggest church whose minister (Dr. A. J. van der Merwe, a long-timé
Moderator of the Federal Council of his denomination) became a life-long friend.
Orr completed his tour in South Africa. He travelled 12,000 miles in eight weeks and spoke in 120 meetings. Over 100,000 people had listened to his addresses, given generally in town halls or large churches. There were different degrees of revival in various places according to the readiness of the people.
Several thousand persons made public profession of faith in Christ.
Over fifty per cent of the people to whom Orr preached in South Africa belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, the Church of Andrew Murray. The spiritual situation in South
Africa differed quite a bit from that of Britain and Europe where lived masses of pagans without belief in God or concern for religion. The Afrikaans-speaking people (and in a lesser measure their English-speaking compatriots) generally believed in the Christian religion and knew orthodox teaching, but often lacked a vital religious experience.
Various criticisms of the ministry of Edwin Orr were made _in South Africa, particularly in ultra-conservative kirk circles.
He was rebuked for wearing a brown suit with a rosebud buttonhole in the pulpit; this was regarded as a scandal worthy of newspaper protest. It took him a long time to live down the indiscretion of teaching the melody and harmony of a new hymn by humming and whistliog—there is a superstition that whistling was originated by Satan. (Orr would never repeat the indiscretion of youth.) There was even criticism of his openair preaching, considered by some to be an affront to the predestination of the church as the vehicle of grace.14
Nevertheless, Edwin Orr won the hearts of the Afrikaners as did few before him or since. His Irish birth, his attempt at the language, and his appeal to the Scriptures combined to overcome the suspicions of a conseivative people.
The race problem in South Africa was already becoming acute. This was Edwin Orr's reaction based upon first impressions :15
First of all, South Africa is not and never will be a white man's country, like Australia or Canada. The Europeans are outnumbered four to one; and the natives are increasing much more rapidly than the whites. South Africa benefits from a superabundance of cheap labour and suffers from it too.
There are many sides to the question of colour prejudice.
(To some) it is a bread-and-butter matter, for unless the native and coloured person is made "to keep his place'', some day he may displace. the white man.
In Natal, there is a great outcry against the Indians. But who brought the Indians there? The white man who wanted cheap labour. In the Cape, comments are made about the increasing number of coloured people. What brought them there? The white man's interest in native women was the cause.
_ The Bantu themselves are very intelligent, and respond tremendously to education. So that (to some) either they must be kept ignorant or else they will demand a share of civilized life that the white man is not prepared to give them.
My sympathies are with the South African legislators,
They have ever-growing, complex problems to deal with year by year.
Edwin Orr wrote this in 1936. Since then, race relationships within South Africa have deteriorated steadily.
The segregation of different races by law in South Africa has outraged world opinion.
The race question apart, Edwin Orr developed a sympathy for South African nationalism. The courageous struggle of the republican farmers for freedom earned his sympathy.
He admired the generous granting of self-government by Britain and the brilliant Afrikaner leadership since 1910. The white
South Africans landed at the Cape about the same time that the black nations were crossing the Zambesi 1,000 miles north.
South Africa is home to them as much as to the Bantu.
Charles Murray Albertyn reported of Edwin Orr's views on the South African race problem twenty years later.1® As before, he condemned the attitude of the White Supremacist equally with that of the Race Radical. He showed sympathetic interest in the position of Progressive Integration as well as of Parallel
Development, his own view lying between the two but demanding the grace of true Christian understanding on all sides.
What were the permanent results of Edwin Orr's 1936 South African Campaign? One of the converts who became a Methodist minister later'? wrote in 1953 an article entitled "The Test of Time in Evangelism'', concluding by saying that the Lord Jesus
Christ had left behind three great agencies for the spread of the Gospel—the Church of God, the Spirit of God and the Word of God. He added that the 1936 Orr meetings had helped the churches under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to preach the Word of God effectively and powerfully.
Gibson claimed that: when Orr returned to South Africa in 1953 hundreds of converts claimed him as their spiritual father. These included pastors, evangelists, teachers and missionaries, and their leaders formed a committee of converts of the Orr 1936 Campaign to sponsor the 1953 Orr series.18
Their chairman was a Methodist minister, their secretary was an evangelist who served ably as President of the national
Youth for Christ work, and the 1953 campaigns were supported by the Archbishop of Capetown, Anglican and Lutheran
Bishops e Moderators' -Of the: Dutch : Reiommed re 'Biesby. ; terian | Sr euneis and the Presidents of Methodist, ie Meo e tackled ihe 'Capes a bien paburbe ian soeladed ten cSt later in the City Hall, the Metropolitan Church and the Groote Kerk. Each local campaign was supported by a majority of the churches in the neighbourhood. The ministry was directed towards reviving the churches but there were hundreds of conversions. The fullest
_ t of the Church leaders was forthcom s hannest 2x of t aa IMooiagets were held i in a tiiaeen towns with the sed support of all denominations. The Pretoria meetings commenced in St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, packed out Central
Baptist and Wesley Methodist and concluded in the Groot Kerk filled to overflowing. There was similar blessing in. Johannesburg, and the © committee "os the series ee teporied much reviving in the churches 't Elizabet st Lc n and Durban winthe Por Elisaban campaign! alg dlioors and Dutch Reformed and Interdenominational Fraternals supported the effort which filled St. John's
Church and the Moederkerk in turn." There was similar blessing in East London, but the Durban campaigns during the holiday season were poorly attended, though I understand it was in the poorest attended meeting of the poorest attended mission that young Murray Albertyn professed his faith—going on to — colleges and universities in Britain and United States to earn three graduate degrees.
_ towns. reg in nthe ches series, the gee isan interdeneeie tional co-operation as something unexpected because of the tensions over race, language and theology.