Click here to listen to an audio file of this interview (102 minutes)
This is a complete and accurate transcript of the oral history interview of Paul Pinney Stough
(CN 89, #T2) in the archives of the Billy Graham Center. No spoken words which were recorded
are omitted. In a very few cases, the transcribers could not understand what was said, in which
case "[unclear]' was inserted. Also, grunts, verbal hesitations such as "ah" or "um" were usually
omitted. Readers of this transcript should remember that this is a transcript of spoken English,
which follows a different rhythm and even rule than written English.
... Three dots indicate an interruption or break in the train of thought within the sentence of the speaker.
.... Four dots indicate what the transcriber believes to be the end of an incomplete sentence.
() Word in parentheses are asides made by the speaker.
[] Words in brackets are comments made by the transcriber.
This transcription was made October-December 1986 by Robert Shuster and John von Rosenberg, revised by Shuster August 1992
CN 89, Tape #T2 Interview of Paul Pinney Stough by Herbert V. Klem, October 8, 1979
KLEM: This is the second tape in a series of tapes that were recorded as discussions between Herbert V. Klem(the interviewer) and the narrator, Paul P. Stough. This session was interviewed on Monday, October 8, 1979, also at the home of Rev. Paul Stough. In our last session, I think we had come up to,asking the question about the economy and the level of income that the people had when you first arrived in Zaire.
STOUGH: Yes; I think that we covered that fairly well. I think I told you that the income was very low because they were a, a people a agriculture people and they provided for their own needs from their gardens. Monetary on a monetary standpoint their income was very low, but taking them in their culture, that to which they were accustomed we...they had the necessities of life, but they didn't have the luxuries as we know them, [laughs] what we today consider necessities.
KLEM: Right. Well, I'm not sure that we moved on to the effects that this had on your method of presentation of the Gospel or the outlook the people had in receiving the Gospel from you. Did this economic situation have an impact on your program for evangelism?
STOUGH: Well, of course I suppose it's one of those things that had a black eye in recent years. There was a paternalistic attitude. What we had we shared with them. All that we had was so strange to them, and like our children we tried to help them to grow in understanding of these things. we gave employment to people who...well, we actually needed their work, but we gave employment largely in order to bring them on to the mission station and get them under the hearing of the Gospel, and although the monetary rewards were infinitesimal I would say that almost a hundred percent of the people who came to live on our mission stations worked there, attended daily devotional time, attended the services on Sunday, came to know the Lord, in a more or less deep way. Some were more committed. Some were like here at home. They were nominal believers. But because of their economic situation they did come and were willing to work for a small amount partly because their hours were short and they were given time to work in their own gardens to augment their support, partly because they wanted to be under the influence of the Gospel.
KLEM: Now was conversion necessary for them to move on to the compound?
STOUGH: No, no, conversion was not necessary. many of them found the Lord while they were on the compound, but no anyone who wanted to come and live there and be under the influence of the Gospel was welcome. Of course we had our rules and regulations that they had to abide by. We didn't permit heathen dancing and we didn't permit use of tobacco or native beer on the mission station, and anyone who insisted on following these things was not permitted to remain. We did have our standards, our rules, but anyone was welcome if they wanted to abide by the rules.
KLEM: Financially or, maybe financially is the wrong word, but in a broad sense, were they better of economically than the general population at large if they came on station?
STOUGH: [chuckles] Well, I would say yes they were better of in that they received a few francs each month with which they could buy cloth and they could buy palm oil and whatever else they thought they needed for their diet or for clothing. It was easier to buy these things with money, but they weren't on the station and it didn't necessitate their selling any of their livestock to get money to do these things. So they... it was an advantage. Nobody got rich. Some of them learned skills like carpentry whey they were around the station that they could use later on. But it was no great financial advantage for them to be there although the petty cash that we saved they earned was helpful. In the villages of course where we had our evangelists living this economic factor didn't enter into it. People just lived their normal lives in the villages and came to school when the drum beat at six o'clock in the morning, and they had an hour or so of.... They had first the devotional time and the evangelist would bring a message from the word of God. They learned to sing hymns and then they would go into school and spend a couple of hours learning as we said the other day to read and write so that they could read the word, but this didn't interfere with their normal way of living in the villages.
KLEM: One of the beautiful things I noticed about the Nigerian church was that the drums would go of at five in the morning or a church bell and the Christians would gather. Would they do that in the Christian areas also?
STOUGH: Oh yes, yes.
KLEM: Devotions before farming.
STOUGH: Right, right. In the villages we didn't have bells. Bells were hard to come by. [Chuckles] We did have drums. The drums called the people. They woke them up and called the people to the Gospel service first thing in the morning before they went to their gardens, or before they went to the, their school.
KLEM: Now in, was this part of the traditional religion that they would worship early in the morning.
STOUGH: No, I don't think so.
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: I think their traditional religion was a very informal thing. It was one of these things that they did when they felt that they were threatened in some way, they would offer their sacrifices of appeasement, but so far as I know they had no regular time for formal worship....
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: ...as animists.
KLEM: But in parts of Nigeria some people would get up and greet their deities before they dare do anything else, and it was beautiful to see the idea of worshiping the true God to begin the day carried right over in a way that was more rigorous than European Christianity.
STOUGH: Well, we didn't have anything like that that I was aware of and I'm sure I would have been.
KLEM: But the pattern of daily morning devotions was still a something the church found feasible.
STOUGH: Oh, yes, yes.
KLEM: I see.
STOUGH: we used to say that our church membership was fed by the schools the village preaching center. , these children were brought daily under the influence of the Gospel. Many of them accepted the Lord and went into catechism classes (I don't know what you call them, catechism classes was what we called them). But they were believer's classes, instruction for baptism and...
KLEM: Baptismal classes.
STOUGH: Baptismal classes. And these baptismal classes.... We sometimes were criticized for making a new convert wait for a couple of years for baptism, but baptism as I understand it is an outward testimony of death and burial with Christ, resurrection into a new life, and we... we felt that in order to be sure that these people really understood the confession of faith that they had made and in order that the pastors might see fruit of that conversion in their lives, we had them in these instruction classes that lasted for two years. Now theologically that can be argued. [chuckles]
KLEM: Yes it is indeed [unclear].
STOUGH: With Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. He said "Here's water why can't I be baptized?" Philip said "If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart you can," and they went immediately into the waters of baptism, but we have seen that happen in Africa. We've seen places where tens of thousands of people have been baptized where today you won't find ten or a dozen people who are following the Lord. I don't know what was going on in their minds when they accepted baptism, but we found that the baptism was not anything that really transformed their lives or indicated that their lives were transformed. So we felt that the waiting period and instruction period was profitable and we never heard the Africans complain about it, it was always missionaries who complained about it. [chuckles] I suppose from the theological standpoint.
KLEM: Well, [Donald] McGavran is one person who complains about it claiming that the crucial period of training is after baptism, although the prebaptismal training is important from his point of view, but it seems very difficult to make a universal policy when I think the Lord wants us to adjust to various pastoral situations, on such things as timing of baptism or something like that.
STOUGH: Oh, yes, well, people, people have different ideas who was it several years ago, Oswald Smith wasn't it at one time was advocating that no person shouldn't hear the Gospel twice until everyone has heard it once,[laughs] and, well, people get different ideas. We don't quarrel with them, but we have felt in our experience that this period of waiting was a good thing.
KLEM: Now do you think that the period of waiting helped them make a break from the traditional religions?
STOUGH: Oh yes. It was a period of instruction and a [chuckles] period in terms of drugs shall we say, a time of withdrawal, withdrawal from the heathen practices and a time of strengthening to resist the temptations of the village.
KLEM: Now did you find the people who received Christ were able to combat the traditional religions when there was something of a power conflict were they delivered by the Holy Spirit or did they go through a crisis of attack where they were hurt by the practitioners of the traditional religions.
STOUGH: Well, that's hard to say. It.... They all of them must more or less have suffered times of severe temptation to revert to the old religions. I know we would have cases come to us where a person had reverted, had fallen into the old pattern and had to be dealt with. There were, there was opposition. I remember one evangelist who was poisoned by the witch doctor in his village because of his testimony for Christ and because he was turning people away from the old religion and to the Lord, and there was opposition, strong opposition from Satan at times manifested in different ways. As I say this lad was poisoned and died. And I remember another chap who was in his house one night (of course the houses are just made of grass) and a spear came hurtling through the grass and imbedded itself in the ground in the floor of his house.
KLEM: Ayei!
STOUGH: It didn't hit him. No one was hit fortunately, but that wasn't the fault of the man who threw the spear. He was trying to hurt someone. And others had their houses burn down over them. There was that opposition, many of them were arrested and in a Roman Catholic country the authorities thought that they were appeasing the Belgians by persecuting some of our people. Many of them were in prison, many of them were whipped with a little hippo hide thimble as we call it. a lot of them suffered, not everyone but a lot of them did suffer for their witness for the Lord.
KLEM: Now, the persecution was in the beginning, probably, but how long did it continue?
STOUGH: Well, it's hard to say. The work there in Blukwa opened at about 1918. I got there about 1928, and the persecution was going on to a greater or less degree right up until I suppose the mid 40s or 50s. So it continued for a long time.
KLEM: Is there still opposition to Protestant missions from Roman Catholic sources?
STOUGH: Well, since Vatican Two, [Pope]John XXIII, opposition has lessened greatly because he pleaded for tolerance. He also encouraged his people to read the Bible and the Catholics found that we were the only ones who had the Bible. Some they bought Bibles from us. And as they were encouraged to read the Bible, I think their opposition decreased too.
KLEM: Amazing.
STOUGH: Yeah.
KLEM: Yeah. As the Pope just visiting in New York and Chicago spoke eloquently about the need for acceptance at least in terms of religious freedom and it would certainly be totally against the idea of persecuting people...
STOUGH: Oh yes.
KLEM: For accepting a Protestant form of Christianity.
STOUGH: I was amazed at this Pope John Paul in Chicago, the things that he said. It was just unbelievable. "We must all work together for the spread of the Gospel to the people who still are in need." And before he went to bed at night from Cardinal Cody's [Archbishop of Chicago] porch...no, it was in the, the sacred...Sacred Name was it, Holy Name...Holy Name Cathedral. He said very forcefully, "There's no other name under heaven given amongst men whereby we must be saved." And he spoke...
KLEM: The name of Jesus.
STOUGH: ...he spoke over and over again about our loyalty to the Lo... Jesus Christ, and the preeminence of Jesus Christ in our faith over and over again. Did you listen on the TV?
KLEM: I caught many of his performances but not that one.
STOUGH: Well, that was the last night here in Chicago. And then he taught them to sing this hallelujah chorus. Did you hear that?
KLEM: No.
STOUGH: On the porch of Cardinal Cody's place this crowd had waited until he came home to go to bed. Came out on the porch and greeted people, and then he started singing this: [sings] Hallelujah, hallelujah. And he sang it all the way through and he said, "Come on you sing it with me." And [chuckles] so he sang it through again and a few people, there were mostly catholics there of course and they didn't know it, but a few people down in the crowd tried to sing it with him. And I was very impressed that a song like that had reached him and he had learned it and he tried...was trying to teach it to his people.
KLEM: Well...
STOUGH: Then in Grant Park they sang "Amazing Grace."
KLEM: Do you think there's....Yes....Do you think there's a foundation for working with some Roman Catholic groups in Zaire, Protestant, Catholic.
STOUGH: Yeah, well, the question is how far does the, shall we call it for a lack of better word, evangelical faith of Pope John Paul, how far down the line does that filter?
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: Does it get to the local Belgian priest or does it get to the local Zairian chief...
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: ...priest?
KLEM: Are there born again people...
STOUGH: Yeah.
KLEM: ...in...
STOUGH: Yeah.
KLEM: ...that...that structure?
STOUGH: How far down does it go? But there hasn't been....since Vatican II [1962-1965] there hasn't been the animosity toward us that was ex..exhibited before.
KLEM: Well, I guess the question that is here is do you find in some other areas they, they feel the traditional religious concepts persist or interfere with the understanding of the Gospel among converts. did you find that there were a persistence of traditional beliefs or practices penetrating the believers?
STOUGH: Well, the only answer I can give to that I guess is that all the time that I was working there in the Congo,we would have cases come up where people spoke in terms of evil spirits and they still would say that a...a person had cursed me through an evil spirit. And those...those cases would crop up occasionally, but they weren't dominant by any means. Occasionally they would come.
KLEM: How would the elders deal with that kind of thing?
STOUGH: Well, they tried to help them and, and make them realize that if they had their faith, trust in Christ that the evil spirits wouldn't have any power over them. They tried to help them that way. often it was a suspicion that someone had cursed them, too. They had no way of knowing, they suspected it. And then they, if they suspected it and that other person was also a member of the church or a member of the Christian community, they would call that person in and also try to...
KLEM: Wow.
STOUGH: ...deal with him. Even though they denied it they work on the supposition that he either he had or he might have or some day he might do it, and therefore try to show him...
KLEM: Well...
STOUGH: the danger of it.
KLEM: It's at least a sign that there was a, a pastoral problem between the two people.
STOUGH: Oh yes, yes.
KLEM: Well, another area of concern is.... you told us that many of your people did not know how to read when they became Christians. and you had a school system to help people learn how to read. How about for adult converts? What was your literacy policy for them?
STOUGH: Well, we had on our mission station we had a, a school for the workmen, the adults. My wife had a school for the adult women. There was also school for boys and school for girls on a station that was a little more extensive. They had a fuller curriculum, but.... Yes we had schools for adults on the, on the mission station, where we had missionaries to help with the teaching, supervision. in the villages, if an older person wanted to come to the school why he could he could come along with the children and the teacher would give him help.
KLEM: Would you baptize people if they were still unable to read?
STOUGH: We tried not to, but of course we made exceptions.
KLEM: On what...what kind...what would be the basis...
STOUGH: The basis for that was...
KLEM: [simultaneously] ...for the exceptions?
STOUGH: ...that if they couldn't read, they wouldn't be able to read the Word of God, and they wouldn't be able to grow in their Christian experience, and so we thought that a knowledge of the word was essential. And therefore they should know to read, but as I say with older people we did make exceptions. Older women where it would be hopeless for them to try to learn to read.
KLEM: Would you try a cataclysmic approach for them or...
STOUGH: Yes we...
KLEM: ...alternate forms.
STOUGH: ...we gave them instruction orally in classes and tried to get them to put the Word away in their hearts too, but as I say we, we didn't insist that older people.... when I mean older people, I don't mean folks in their twenties, I mean folks fifty, sixty, aged people. We made the exceptions for them.
KLEM: I see. What were you...what was the...do you need...?
STOUGH: Sorry about that but you were about ready to touch the...the reel there.
KLEM: That's fine. What types of Gospel presentation were usually most effective?
STOUGH: I don't know what you mean.
KLEM: Well, lets put it more broadly. What were the best approaches to present the Gospel? Now I'm thinking.... well, let's divide it two ways. There's issues to present, and there's techniques of presentation, and I suppose preaching in churches or preaching in the open air, or age group evangelism, are some possible methods. And the other would be themes. So let's deal with the occasions or styles of presenting the Gospel.
STOUGH: [chuckle] I can't imagine that any of our people ever considered any of these things. They just took a Gospel text and a parable or an event in the Scriptures and they'd build their Gospel message on that. I don't...I don't remember.... I've got a whole book of sermon outlines...simple sermons...Gospel sermon outlines that I used in villages, in market meetings, in the prisons. I went to...I got permission from the government officials to go into the prisons and we had Gospel meetings with them.
KLEM: These are outlines of materials you developed?
STOUGH: Yeah. Just , just simple little Gospel messages, nothing elaborate.
KLEM: You know we would love to...
STOUGH: No.
KLEM: ...see some of that, and if you're....
STOUGH: If I showed 'em to you, you'd sit down and examine them from a homolitical standpoint. [both laugh] You'd say...
KLEM: Not necessarily.
STOUGH: You'd say, "This guy, [chuckles] what's he trying to do?"
KLEM: No, well....
STOUGH: I'll only give you a little....I say this because people have ideas of how it should be done, especially theologians. And I won't mention any names, but at the time this man was president of our mission, and he and our home secretary and another man whose name you wouldn't know, were coming out to study the work on the field. And they wrote ahead, because this man who was president of a big Bible college wanted the privilege of preaching the Gospel to someone who had never heard. So he came out. And they wrote to one of our farthest away mission stations and said to this missionary in charge, "So and so is coming and he would like to preach the Gospel to someone who has never heard." Now that's a funny thing to say to a missionary. And this missionary said, " Well, the Lord forgive me if there's anybody in this area who hasn't heard the Gospel." [both laugh] And he said, "Well, maybe in the leper camp, there, there maybe some folks who have just come into the leper camp, and there maybe someone who hasn't heard." So when this guy came, he got up to preach and here were this crowd of, I suppose forty or fifty lepers squatting on the ground, some of them with deformed fingers and toes gone and that sort of thing, nodules on their faces. He started in. Now this is a president of a Bible college. [chuckles] He hadn't gone three minutes, maybe five minutes; he turned to the missionary and he said, "Floyd," he said, "you go on and finish this message. I don't know what to say to them. I don't know how to approach them. I've got no contact with them. There's no relationship here." He said, "I, I don't know how to go on; you take it from here." So the missionary just gives them a simple Gospel talk and dismissed them. Well, I thought that was a very significant. We had a chap come out here, you'd know his name too. he was going to do six months or something or other of evangelistic work, evangelist from America. And I heard him in his first sermon. [chuckles] Fortunately I didn't have to translate for him. Somebody else was doing it. But he said, "I'm going to talk to you today about Adam and Eve. Do you know that when Adam and Eve were here God created them and put them in the Garden of Eden. That Adam was the handsomest man in the world. And that Eve was the most beautiful woman." Of course that went straight over their heads. They didn't immediately say, well, they were the only man and woman therefore they were the handsomest man, and anyway the Africans don't generally think to much in terms of beauty like that. There idea of beauty and mine are entirely different. I remember ever.... my wife.... she wasn't my wife then, but she had a girl's home on mission station the day, the time we arrived and there were three of us fellows in the.... four of us fellows in our party. We arrived on this station and for some reason or another my wife asked the girls in the girls home which one they thought was the handsomest man in that party, and they picked out one guy, and they said.... she said, "Well, why do you think he's the most handsomest man." They said, "He's got a head just like a football." [laughs] That'd be a soccer ball. And so there ideas of beauty are [unclear]. So this fell flat. And then he said, "We want you to know that life in those days was not a bed of roses." [laughs] So this missionary translated it the best way he could, but it couldn't make any sense at all.
KLEM: I guess not.
STOUGH: And we get people, evangelists from home who want to preach to Africans, and they use some of their old sermon notes that they've had here at home, but it doesn't make contact. There's no point to it. Well, this fellow who talked about the bed of roses and Adam and Eve being handsome and so forth....he stayed out there a while, and he eventually learned what he could do and what he couldn't do. And he arranged his approach in a different way and he had a ministry after a matter of a several weeks he got himself adjusted so that he could make an approach. So as I say if I gave you my, my notes you would think that they were silly.
KLEM: Because they were related to the African context.
STOUGH: Well, yes and they relate to...in...in the simplest possible way, they try to present Gospel truth.
KLEM: Well, that's....
STOUGH: No fancy illustrations, no digression into theology and that sort of thing, but just a simple presentation of the sacrifice of Christ, the love of Christ, the love of God the necessity for faith, the necessity for accepting what God has offered through the sacrifice of Christ, and so on. And they're very simple things, but it's what you have to use. For you're...you're trying to present the Gospel to a people who have never heard, the whole concept is strange. It's different from what you would present to an American audience, I think.
KLEM: Well, I think it should be.
STOUGH: [chuckles] Well, it has to be.
KLEM: We had the fellow that came out and talked about the roller coast to Christian life. [laughs] It just was... I thought it was a good concept, but certainly his illustration was...
STOUGH: Good concept for Americans who know anything about roller coasters.
KLEM: Yea.
STOUGH: But if you don't know anything about roller coasters then what does it mean?
KLEM: Now would you say that the Gospel was gladly received. Would you call your area of ministry in a bright...
STOUGH: Yeah.
KLEM: ...area.
STOUGH: Well. You know, on deputation work we used to come home and tell people that Africa's arms are outstretched to receive the Gospel. And in a sense that was true, but they weren't pleading for the Gospel really. A lot of them were pleading for whatever came along with the Gospel, material blessings, education, promotion in life, these things. They saw that these things came sometimes after the result of a person accepting and studying and bettering himself and so forth. But I, I, I question in my own mind whether Africa ever was on its knees holding out its arms begging for the Gospel.
KLEM: But it did...
STOUGH: They accepted it.
KLEM: Well... O.K.
STOUGH: They accepted it. I mean when you came and presented it the Gospel to them and showed them their need,they accepted it and even though they didn't accept it they weren't antagonistic. Now whether that's due to the natural courtesy of the Africans, I don't know. Africans are naturally very courteous; they're very generally very kindly, unless they feel you're a threat. Generally they're very kindly. And of course that is a bad thing too in a way because their so anxious to please that they'll agree with you whether they know what you're talking about or not. There's that danger too.
KLEM: Well....
STOUGH: And so we didn't run across much active opposition. There were those who accepted the Gospel and believed and there are others who just let it pass by without making a fuss.
KLEM: So if individuals were persecuted for accepting Christ that was not the lot of everyone who accepted Christ.
STOUGH: Not the lot of everyone, no.
KLEM: Well, if people are coming to Christ partly for the side effects or indirectly how did you structure or arrange the...the distribution of either education or medical help or social work like orph...orphanages how did you relate these to the evangelistic thrust?
STOUGH: Well, in our hospitals and in our dispensaries we always had a Gospel service before the dispensary opened. This was done in different ways and I know it's been criticized, been criticized by Africans actually, African church leaders. In fact I even heard Gottfried Osei-Mensah criticize the fact that some hospitals they made them listen to the Gospel before they gave the medicine. And his.... the implication of what he said was that it should be given freely to everyone without regard to their listening to the Gospel, but we didn't follow that policy. We always felt that people should listen to the Gospel before they went in, unless you know they were emergency cases (critical) then of course we didn't. But the average person coming for pills for headache or stomach ache or itch or sores or ulcers or what have you, they could wait half hour. It didn't make any difference to their physical condition and so we always had a Gospel message. We had, I suppose you call him here, a chaplain. They called him in the hospital evangelist actually out there, but we had this evangelist who would go from bed to bed and minister to people, and (how long were you in Nigeria?)
KLEM: Ten years.
STOUGH: Yeah, well, you know then that in an African hospital the people come... the people who are sick are put in bed and the family comes and sleeps under the bed or in the corridors and they have to prepare food for the sick people and so forth, but maybe you were more advanced than we were. You were able to control that, but where we were people had to come to take care of the patients, and so they were ministered to, the folks that came along with the patients. But we didn't make any distinction there, I mean everyone was welcome who had a need. The same is true of the schools. Anyone could come to school. Anyone could come to our girls'... we had a girls' home on our station at Blukwa we had an orphanage there of about a hundred orphans at one time. And anyone was welcome who was in need and while they were there of course they were under the influence of the Gospel. So our medical work and our school work was not restricted to people who were professed believers.
KLEM: Uh huh. So it was....
STOUGH: We hope that as.... while they were there they would find the Lord and there would be conversion.
KLEM: There was proclamation alongside the education...
STOUGH: Of the ministry.
KLEM: ...and medical work.
STOUGH: Education or what have you.
KLEM: Now how did the...the business or the colonial white people generally react to this ongoing ministry?
STOUGH: Well, it was very interesting, the Catholic bishop in the town about fifty miles away insisted upon having a Protestant chauffeur because he knew his Protestant chauffeur wouldn't go off and get drunk, wouldn't run him in the ditch.
KLEM: [laughs]
STOUGH: Our...the merchants, the government officials like to have protestant young men for house servants, clerks in the stores, the owners of shops, if they had an African clerk they preferred to have a protestant boy to work for them because they felt they could trust him, but there again you run into a problem. A Belgian official wanted a, because he was clean, because he was honest, because he wouldn't.... he was depending on that he wouldn't go off and get drunk and that sort of thing. But on the other hand they wouldn't give them time off to come to church. And so we used to remonstrate with them and say.... we say, "You like this Protestant boy because he's a Christian and he is honest and he is sober because he's a Christian, but you don't permit him to grow in his Christian faith. You don't permit him to exercise his Christian faith by going to church. So if that's the way you do it don't be surprised if some day he falls."
KLEM: Would they relent or generally hold...?
STOUGH: Sometimes they would. Or else the boy would just get fed up and he'd quit because they wouldn't let him have time off to go to church. [jumbled words]
KLEM: How often would he need time off to go to church?
STOUGH: Every Sunday.
KLEM: Wow that's a long work week then isn't it?
STOUGH: Well, they work six days a week and if they'd let him have Sunday off why, that wouldn't hurt them any.
KLEM: What was the format of the typical church service?
STOUGH: Oh they were much the same as they are here, because missionaries transported their [laughing] methodology overseas. you know they had singing, song service, prayer, Scripture reading, the message, invitation sometimes, not always.
KLEM: Western hymn tunes?
STOUGH: The hymn tunes were all Western hymn tunes modified, shall we say, by the African ear. Some of our African tribes you know only have five notes in their scale and when you try to teach them songs that use an eight note scale with some half tones and so forth in the tune they find it very difficult.
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: They modify them themselves. They sharp them or flat them you know to get them into their musical scale. we have.... I just got something the other day from the mission. We have a woman in Kenya now who is making a special study of African tunes, scales, and getting Africans to write music to their scales for use for hymn tunes. And I know that's been done in other places. We haven't done it until just now but one thing my wife worked on for a long time was...was, with a committee, adapting the music so that you could, express the words according to their tonal pattern.
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: Now you take in Swahili...Swahili, the...the accent is always on the next to the last syllable. Well, you...you have a phrase then in, in Swahili and sometimes you can fit it into the music okay and sometimes you can't. And you...you'll say the word in an unintelligible way because the accent is wrong. I remember a lady, a pastor's wife, who came to visit us up in the Congo, and she remarked.... I heard her remark to her husband, "Did you notice that you can understand all the words that they sang in that hymn because the accents were right?"
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: And that's a European ear that actually picked that up, noticed it.
KLEM: Is that because you adjusted it...
STOUGH: We added an extra note on the end of the line very often in music you have a half note through the end of the line, and they would break that into two quarters.
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: The French do that. The French do that in their hymns. They often add an extra note at the end of the.... Do you know, do you know French?
KLEM: Well, some.
STOUGH: Well, you know that they add to many of the words they have what they call a mute syllable.
KLEM: Yes.
STOUGH: And the French in their singing.... they add a note in the line to take care of that mute syllable which is actually not mute, but pronounced.
KLEM: Right.
STOUGH: And so we did that.... my...my wife knew that so we did that in the Swahili. And it made a lot of difference in the singing.
KLEM: What about the instrumentation?
STOUGH: Some of our places used drums. We discouraged it ourselves. We had a missionary, Austin Paul, who played a trumpet and he organized a little band. I remember he, he got a some trumpets, cornets, trom...and trombones, and he taught the Africans.... he had a little music school, and he taught the Africans to play these instruments and so they could accompany. Well, you know when an African learns something, somebody else wants him to teach him and so these fellows that learned to play the instruments were teaching other people to play, and he was importing instruments like mad. You know go around to churches...
KLEM: Sure.
STOUGH: ...anybody got any old cornets, trumpets or trombones, baritones that you don't need- let me take them to Africa cause we have Africans who will learn to play them. And he got, I don't know- innumerable instruments, and of course he was careful how he distributed them, but these folks taught each other...taught each other to play, and now in many of our churches there'll be two or three, four fellows who have instruments who can lead the singing.
KLEM: Tremendous. Of course they only play on the Western seven note scale.
STOUGH: Yeah.
KLEM: And so that moves it off away from the five note...
STOUGH: Yes that's true, but I'm not sure that all African scales are five notes...
KLEM: Well, they vary.
STOUGH: I know some of them are.
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: Many of them are.
KLEM: Did we cover the topic of the disparity between the life style of the missionaries and the locals.
STOUGH: Yes, I told you about this woman that lived in this grass hut, you remember...
KLEM: That's right.
STOUGH: ...and when she went home on furlough the Africans built her a brick house. [chuckles].
KLEM: Okay. Well, I think that completes that section... could you comment for us on your...the...either your policy or the missions policy of transferring the work into national hands and the type of leadership program that was envisioned for that?
STOUGH: Now when I was appointed station superintendent (that was when my...beginning of my second term on the field) our station at Blukwa.... We had about six or eight missionaries working there and we had a very large church at that time. We had something like, well, at one time it got up to as high as three hundred and fifty African evangelists working in the villages around Blukwa.
KLEM: Wow.
STOUGH: And we had a good size church that met on the station composed primarily of the workmen and the workmen's wives and their children, the school boys, the teachers in the boy's school, the girls in the girls', home, the orphans, and the congregation was composed largely of them. We had our own elders and eventually we had our own ordained pastors. We had two of them because there were two tribes on that station the Walenda and the Wahemba and we had one pastor from each tribe. I've never forgotten when we had the ordination service for these two men and after the service we sat down took our place in the front with the elders and the pastors then went on and carried on the communion service for the first time. It really was a moving thing for me to realize that these folks that we had grown up with, or they had grown up with us, were now taking responsibility in the church, leadership. These men had had two years of training in the Bible school and they had many, many years of practical experience in church leadership and on the basis of their knowledge of the Word they were chosen (and responsibility and experience) they were ordained as pastors. every Thursday we used to gather in my office, the elders, and I think I mentioned this the other day any cases that came before the church. As I, I think I mentioned the other day that the church took care of all matters of discipline problems, and so forth. Well, I tried then to put myself in the background and let the elders carry on, and.... [chuckles] It was always a bit embarrassing you know. Sometimes they had met before hand; before they came to the office they'd sat around their fire somewhere and discussed these things and so a case would come to the office and they'd say, "Well, now this case we have before us today.... it involves this and this and this. What, what would you do in a case like this, Bwana?" [laughs] And they'd put me on the spot and so I would think for a few minutes and say "Well, I think we should do thus and so." And then they would sort of smile and say "Yeah we discussed this already before and that's the decision we came to." [laughs] I was always very gratified and relieved when I found out that I'd came up with the same answer that they had, and if my answer was different of course then I'd explain why I had come to my conclusion.
KLEM: So you could say that your nationalization policy went way back...
STOUGH: Oh yes it went way, way back and we were always trying to stimulate responsibility and.... Responsibility is something that the Africans don't come by naturally. They don't like to assume responsibility, make decisions themselves. They'd rather do it in a group, and we tried to develop that. I remember for example one time the elders decided that they were going to buy a cow. They wanted to buy a cow for the church and they could sell the milk and the proceeds from the milk would go into the church treasury. And I said, "No brothers you don't want to do that." "Oh yes, yes we do; we, we want to buy a cow." I said, "Well, I...I won't argue with them." I'd let them buy a cow. And so they bought the cow. First they had to get money out of the church treasury to pay for the cow, then they had to find a place to keep the cow, then they had to find someone to take care of the cow and someone to deliver the milk to the mission, by the way, we had to buy the milk [laughs] and somebody to deliver the milk, and then the cow got loose and got into somebody's garden and they had to pay damages for the crops that had been spoiled in somebody's garden. And this went on for oh a matter of several months. Finally one day the elders came to the elder's meeting and said, "Bwana, we decided that we're going to sell the cow." [laughs] And I said "Well, I think that's a very good idea to sell the cow, because that's not the way that the Lord intended that we should support his work; we don't need to go into commercialism in order to support the Lord's work." And they learned their lesson. I had made up my mind that I wasn't going to lay down the law and say, "No, you can't buy a cow," because that isn't the way to teach them, and they learned it the hard way. They learned it by, by experience and maybe the Lord had his hand in it too, but they found that that wasn't the way to support the Lord's work. Well, that's just an illustration of how you try to teach them something that's inconsequential like that, you let them go ahead and learn it by experience.
KLEM: Was there a push toward higher theological training while you were there?
STOUGH:, yes that eventually came as our school system gradually improved and we had.... first we had three grades and then we had five grades and then we had six grades and as the school system improved the entrance requirements for the Bible schools was raised. [It] used to be that they had to be able to read and write, then they had to finish second grade, then the had to finish third grade, then they had to finish fifth grade, and I don't think they ever raised it much above fifth grade for entrance to a Bible school, but we did have a junior high school and a high school, at that time then we established a theological school, a Eccole Theologie in our town at Bunia, and they accepted then only those who had graduated from high school for entrance into this theological school.
KLEM: That's, that's the new school at Bunia or the...
STOUGH: That's the school in Bunia, yes.
KLEM: How long has that been there?
STOUGH: Oh that's been going on (goodness) I suppose it's been going on ten, twelve years. The head of the school now is Dr. Pierre Marini, who is one of our people who graduated form our high school and went on to a university. And went to Paris, and.... He went the school that John Winston is the head of, in Beau outside of Paris. And then he stayed on and did some work in the university in Paris (I'm not sure which university it was, University of Paris I think) and he took his Doctor of Philosophy from Paris University. He came back and was made director of education, or he taught in one of the government universities and then was director of education for all Protestant missions, finally he has came back and heads up the school in Bunia.
KLEM: Now is that a church school or a missions school or a combination?
STOUGH: It is an inter-missions school. [The] faculty's been provided by various missions (the Conservative Baptists by the way) and Unevangelized Fields Mission, Heart of Africa Mission and I'm not sure whether the...
KLEM: So...
STOUGH: ...the African Inland Mission....
KLEM: ...that school is not under national church administration...
STOUGH: Not under any one church administration no. It's under national administration.
KLEM: I see.
STOUGH: But staff, the missionary staff is provided by various missions.
KLEM: I see.
STOUGH: And as I say Dr. Pierre Marini is the director of it now.
KLEM: Oh so he's a...
STOUGH: He's a national.
KLEM: ...Zairian church leader who is running it.
STOUGH: Right.
KLEM: Is it under the auspices of the missions, or of the respective churches, or both?
STOUGH: I can't tell you exactly how it's operated...
KLEM: Okay.
STOUGH: ...because it is a cooperative thing. It must be operated by a committee with representatives from the various missions, because these missions are providing personnel staff for it.
KLEM: Now SIM [Sudan Interior Mission] in Nigeria is making a transition toward putting the basic mission program under the auspices of the local church as it operates in Nigeria, although it has a funding base in the states, and recruitment, and training program here in for sending people into the work in Nigeria, but when it comes to Nigeria it's under the banner of the national church.
STOUGH: That's the same way it is in...in our fields.
KLEM: I see. how would you describe the transition from the mission coming out and running the process? Do you think the transfer has been handled smoothly? Are you satisfied with the transition or is that a difficult question to try to handle?
STOUGH: Well, you just can't handle it in a word. when I was in Kenya, (cause I was in Kenya for twelve years), and when I was in Kenya, I was secretary for the field council and so these meetings that were held with the leaders of the church, the central church council had representatives and the mission had representatives, and we met to try to come to some compromise about the administration of mission work. there were those who...of the Africans, who wanted us to turn everything immediately over to them. The pattern for this was found in government where the British government got together with leaders of the Kenyans in a Lancaster House conference in London, and there the British government arranged to turn over everything over to the African... the Kenyan government, which was then African, and with that as a pattern there were those of the church leaders who felt that we should just automatically turn everything over to them. This of course, you can understand, met with resistance on the part of the missionaries. They didn't understand what the Africans wanted and I don't think that the Africans understood what they wanted. There were a few, probably, who knew what they wanted, but generally I don't think that the African church as a whole realized what they were asking for. So we, we worked after many stormy sessions.... we worked out a compromise, and there was to be a gradual transition. The first think that we did: we turned over all of the mission stations, the titles to the property of all the mission stations to the Africans. then we formed a joint committee for assigning personnel, missionary personnel.
KLEM: About when was that, roughly
STOUGH: Oh, dear I wish I.... It was around 1974, but I, I could look it up for you. Then we.... It must have been before that. Well, anyway then we formed committees, committees under the church to govern the hospitals, the medical work, and the literature department, the Bible schools and so forth, and these were, were joint committees with missionary membership. This was done partially because they needed the missionary expertise. For example in the operation of the hospital you could get the most intelligent African, and if he knew nothing about hospital administration, it was impossible, we can get the most intelligent missionary too and just dump it in his lap and say OK administer this hospital, he wouldn't know where to begin. You'd have to be taught. And the same is true of the same is true of the radio department and other departments. The radio department went over first and one of the first and the reason for that was because we had Timothy Kammo[?] who had been working in the radio department for years and he was aware of the problems and he was able to take over and administer. Hospitals came more slowly. Of course we've been forced by the government to give up our educational program in Kenya much earlier and so that wasn't really a problem. So gradually these things have turned over, been turned over to the church. The only departments actually that were held by the mission were the school for missionaries' children, which now accepts African children too from Christian African homes, and the mission guest house in Nairobi. Those are the...
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: ...only two functions that weren't actually turned over to the church and rightly so because they had nothing to do with the church.
KLEM: Well, if we're turning everything over to the national church is there still a need for missionaries?
STOUGH: Oh, you ask the African leaders and they say, "Yes by all means we need missionaries now more than ever. We need the expertise of, of trained missionaries. We need people who are familiar with Christian education programs for example. We need missionaries to help to teach in our Bible schools." We have a Scot Theological college which is a post-high school, post-secondary. They're trying eventually to develop it to a higher degree so that can grant a degree, grant degrees, and they need missionaries to teach there. We have some Africans who are there, but not enough.
KLEM: Yeah, I'm...I expected an answer like that, I....
STOUGH: Yeah sure.
KLEM: I thought that it would be good to have it on record.
STOUGH: The people who don't want missionaries are people in liberal churches. John Gottu[?] for example, has been very vocal. He's a member of the central committee of the royal council of churches. He's a Presbyterian, and he's been very vocal about "missionaries go home", and about having a missionary moratorium, and"let's send the missionaries home and get along without the missionaries for so many years, and then access the situation and see if we want to have them back." But that is not the attitude of the smaller missions or the so called faith missions, the churches of those societies. The African Inland Missions is the largest church in Kenya. We have seen various recent estimates of the community of the African inland mission is somewhere around a million people, which is a large proportion of Kenya. And I mean it is a large proportion of the Christians in Kenya. And the African Inland Church is begging for more workers. The only thing is when the workers come out, they want the workers to work under the church. And rightly so. Rightly so. Just so everybody knows where the parameters are, everybody knows what you can do, what you can't do, what's expected of you, and so on. And so long as that's clear the's no reason why workers should not go out and work under the church.
KLEM: Now what are some of the major problems in the persist in the life of the church either in Kenya or in Zaire as you see it?
STOUGH: Yeah, well, we have much the same situation in Zaire, of course I've been away from Zaire these many years (fourteen fifteen years) but my son has been working there and he's been on the council and the council is composed of the church leaders and missionaries, and they face up to all the problems that concern the future of the work of the church there.
KLEM: Oh, it's a united council.
STOUGH: It's a united council yes.
KLEM: You made some very interesting comments about giving, but I don't think they're on the tape.
STOUGH: [Laughs] No, because the paper here asks a question about giving and how do you... how much do people give and so on, and I remarked that it is impossible to answer a question like that in the terms of dollars and cents. I've tried in times past when I was engaged in that work to assess the, the giving of the church, and the only way I could access it was in terms of days' labor. If a person, you say in America, gets, oh, say a thousand dollars a year to the church. What is that in terms of his income? And out there I tried to figure the same thing. Well, the average man's daily income was say one franc and the church offerings were so much. This represented a very high proportion of a man's days labor, his giving. I remember one time when, for example Christmas the offering at Bogoro was something like fifty thousand francs. Well, that would have been the equivalent of fifty thousand days of a man's labor.
KLEM: Out of a church how big?
STOUGH: Out of a church membership I suppose of around oh say seven or eight hundred.
KLEM: Oh wow, that's....
STOUGH: It was tremendous giving. They'd bring a cow, a man would bring a cow and donate a cow. Another man would bring a goat and they would bring produce from their gardens as well as bringing money, baskets, handicraft, things of that sort that they made that represented perhaps many days of labor. If a man has a herd of goats and maybe he has ten goats and in the course of a year he may have six or eight kids, well, then he brings a goat. That's considerably over a tithe of his income from his flock. And you have to figure it in...in terms like that rather than put it in dollars and cents...
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: ...and given the right incentive, the people can be very, very generous.
KLEM: Now in terms of paying for the cost of Christian ministry though out of cash,does this give the African church leader a problem of trying to buy the materials he needs for his ministry?
STOUGH: Well, there again [laughs] I haven't yet seen an African pastor either in Kenya or in Congo who was supported by his church wholly. He always had his own gardens. some of them had the ability to trade. They were traders and they always had adequate income.
KLEM: But they had to have something on the side.
STOUGH: But they did... a lot of it they produced for themselves like the apostle Paul.
KLEM: Now did the denomination frown on this outside secular activity?
STOUGH: No, because we, we felt as a.... well, you mean the denomi...you mean the mission?
KLEM: Well, the church per se.
STOUGH: No, no
KLEM: They knew the pastors were working?
STOUGH: The church accepted this as one of the facts of life. The mission has long had a policy. Fifty years ago the mission established a policy that they would not support African workers, lay evangelists or teachers or pastors. They expected the local church to support or he had, the pastor had to look to the Lord himself for support and as I told you the other day they received a small token out of the offerings which was nowhere near enough to support them, but they did get help: they would have their gardens and the school children and the Christians in the village would help them with their gardens at times and if they needed repairs on their house they would get grass and help them to keep their house in shape. It was a, a cooperative thing. It all stems out of the, the African extended family idea and within the Christian community that was an extended family and they helped one another. But when it comes to taking a cash collection in the church and paying a salary to the pastor, that was foreign to them and I'm not sure that.... I don't know of any church that sup... fully supported their pastor.
KLEM: That.... I've never heard that stated before. That's...
STOUGH: I don't say I haven't....
KLEM: ...amazing.
STOUGH: My experience is limited to our mission.
KLEM: Yeah.
STOUGH: But I.... For instance a church like [unclear], they might give a pastor (this is just a guess) five hundred fr...sh...francs a month. Which would be a rather largish amount, but that wouldn't be enough to pay all his expenses. He...he's forced to keep his... to have a garden...
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: ...and raise produce to feed himself and his family.
KLEM: I must say though, it fits in general with part of what I've seen, but I just wouldn't have stated it that way, and maybe it's correct to state it that way.
STOUGH: I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but I do feel though that the idea of the African idea of the extended family is expressed in the care the congregation has for its pastor, whether they give him in cash or they give him in labor and help.
KLEM: Well, that's very interesting. Well, I'd, I'd like to switch gears a little bit here. I think we've covered somewhat of the government attitude toward Christianity both in Zaire and maybe you could comment on what you perceive the government policy to be in Kenya.
STOUGH: Well, the government policy in Kenya is religious liberty.
KLEM: Uh huh.
STOUGH: ...complete religious liberty. You've got everybody and his brother there including Hari Krishna. [chuckles] These young European boys walking around the street with their heads shaved wearing yellow robes...
KLEM: [laughs]
STOUGH: ...and what not, just like you have here.
KLEM: They were perceived in a strange way weren't they?
STOUGH: Yes they were.
KLEM: both Kenya and Zaire have large number of ethnic groups in them. did this complicate mission work among them or in the two countries?
STOUGH: When you say ethnic groups you mean tribal...
KLEM: Yes. Yeah, tribes, languages...
STOUGH: Yes I don't think it did. Kenya and Congo operated on two different basic principles. In Congo, for years and we still do.... we operated on the basis of what we call Christian comity. And a mission moved into an area that was unoccupied, where there was no Gospel witness. They established their work, and another mission which came later would not go into that area to proselytize or to work. They would find themselves an area that wasn't yet touched and from the very beginning in Congo this principle of comity was observed. And there were always boundaries between the mission working areas. that policy has been criticized. it's been criticized by people who,other groups now who want to come in and they want to establish their work and they want to build, making on another mans's foundation, or they may feel that the mission that was originally there was not adequately doing the work, or there may be doctrinal differences that they want to emphasize, but generally speaking throughout all of the Congo, the principle of comity has been observed with the result that the whole area of Congo has been reached...
KLEM: Do you think...
STOUGH: ...more or less.
KLEM: ...now that the national Christians are moving around and crossing over some of these lines, and opening churches in the cities that there have...will be or has been an erosion of the comity policies?
STOUGH: There could be, there could be for example we had a line of demarcation between AIM and the...the Anglican church in Congo, but when you come to the town of Bunia, the Anglican church comes into the town of Bunia, the AIC church is there(and I don't think they're are others there).
KLEM: Do the churches tend to be ethnic then according to the area of origin or are they blending?
STOUGH: No, they're blending. For instance any Anglican from whatever tribe he came from would go and worship in the Anglican church, and the AIC people, they would have worship with us. And we had AIC people. Well, we had folks from other missions too. We had folks from all over Congo who came to the city and they would grab a take to the Protestant church there. They wouldn't grab a take to the Anglican church because of the nature of the Anglican form of worship.
KLEM: That....
STOUGH: That would be strange to them and they would naturally come to the one they were familiar with.
KLEM: Were you in Kenya during the time of the Mau Mau?
STOUGH: No.
KLEM: That was...
STOUGH: No....
KLEM: ...slightly before you got there?
STOUGH: I visited in Kenya during the time of the Mau Mau, but I wasn't stationed there.
KLEM: Now, I would say that that was a an instance, and there have been in Zaire too, instances of uprising against the colonial regime and against the foreign domination then implied. Did this work out to be hostility or resentment against the Christianity or the church as a spinoff from these other tensions?
STOUGH: I would say generally speaking.... Well, we've got to separate that. Mau Mau was against Christians because they felt that Christians were supporting the government, Christians supported the status quo.
KLEM: Was that true?
STOUGH: Generally speaking I'd say it was. They were not hostile, the Christians were not hostile to the colonial government. They reckoned that they'd received fair treatment. They had no ax to grind with them. They were taught to respect the powers that be, they were ordained by God according to the Scriptures, and there were neutral probably as much as anything. They weren't anti-government; they weren't anti-Mau Mau, but they weren't pro-Mau Mau, and because they were not pro-Mau Mau (and Mau Mau was a violent organization)Christians couldn't go along with them, and because Christians refused to go along with them, many, many Christians were murdered in Kenya. Now the same is not true in, in, in Zaire at the time of the uprisings there until the last one, they were largely political. They were anti-white, anti-European as personifying the colonial regime, the quote-unquote oppressive regime, and but they were not against the church. They were not anti-Christian or anti-church. Now we evacuated three times from Congo. I evacuated once because we thought we had to take our... well, we ought to take our daughter, who was then about ten, out of the country. She was getting so terrified of what was going on there, the violence and what not, and it wasn't safe to go outdoors and she was very... becoming disturbed emotionally for a ten year old so we thought she should to come home. So we evacuated and went over to Kampala. We stayed in Kampala I think about a week or two weeks and then we came back. The second time we evacuated, we, a group of us about ten car loads of us escaped in the middle of the night down through the forest and across the river into Uganda. we were gone that time about a month.
KLEM: [Sneezes] Now you were fleeing for the safety of the group, or...?
STOUGH: Yes because of the uncertainty. This time it was the time when Lumumba was the head of state. He was pro-communist and we were ordered by the American embassy to leave the country because the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency of the United States] had reports that Lumumba and the, the Russians, the soviets, the communists had ordered that all white people in the eastern province of Congo should be massacred. They...
KLEM: Wow.
STOUGH: ...had this... the embassy had this (how they got it I don't know). But anyway, they sent orders out that told us that we were to leave, and everyone left. except as we got to the border we were intercepted by some local police and Dr. Becker who didn't want to go anyway talked with the, the head of the police and said, "Well, you let these people go and I'll go back and run the hospital." Of course nothing... no harm would come to him as a doctor. They needed him. And so we all left and we were gone at that time for about a month or six weeks; I forgot, and we came back again. Then we came home on furlough and we went back to Bunia again and the third time we evacuated was under the Simba rebellion. And the Simba rebellion was stimulated by the Chinese communists. They were armed by them and they were anti-Christian as well as being anti-white. but there again the they tried to work through some of the Simbas as we called them (the members of this revolutionary group)... actually came to our church as Simbas they came to our church because they had their roots in protestant churches back where they come from, and they weren't really anti, anti-Christian or anti-church.... They were anti-European and anti-American, and we would have had a very difficult time if we would have stayed. This was the group that murdered Paul Carlson. Do you know Chuck Davis? Did you...
KLEM: Yes.
STOUGH: ...hear Chuck Davis? Chuck, Chuck was imprisoned...
KLEM: ...escaped with his life.
STOUGH: ...at that time. And.... None of our people were involved in that actually except Chuck Davis who happened to be down there at Stanleyville at the time, 'cause he'd been teaching in the seminary, but a good many of the...the UFM [Unevangelized Field Mission] people, the Heart of Africa Mission people, the British Baptist people lost their lives. We lost about twenty one of our friends that were murdered by the Simbas. Of course we evacuated then for the third time during this Simba rebellion and we were out then... the mission was out of Zaire for about a year at that time. I went back for a survey trip with one other missionary after about a year and we had quite an experience with government red tape and government confusion and so forth, but we were joyfully received every place we went, and the natives begged us to come back and eventually the mission did come back on a smaller scale than they'd been there before.
KLEM: Were the people sorry for the loss of life...
STOUGH: Oh yes, the Christians were.
KLEM: ...of the missionaries?
STOUGH: Christians were. Here again we had a very good friend sort of like a son to us who told us about it. He said that anybody who wore a neck tie was aft to be arrested and shot. Now this was communist, anti...what...bourgeois? The anti-bourgeois. Anyone who was educated, anyone who was able to do clerical work and have... could have a...a place of responsibility, a responsible position, or a place in government unless he was with their party he was liquidated.
KLEM: So there was tremendous loss of life in the country at that time.
STOUGH: Oh there was, and all of the, the.... I can't say all of them. Largely it centered against the...the educated.
KLEM: Has this retarded the development then of...
STOUGH: Oh my!
KLEM: ...Zaire?
STOUGH: My, my, I should say. It's gone back fifty years.
KLEM: And you attribute that with the Simba uprising?
STOUGH: Largely. Oh the whole, the whole independence movement has taken them back because Congo was given independence. They weren't ready, and you had people with a grade-school education or less who were given high government offices with correspondingly high salaries (and I mean high salaries like fifty thousand dollars a year salary to a chap who's never had anything) and this led to greed and corruption and the economy was ruined simply by this corruption and lack of ability to govern. There were very few who governed with justice and equality.
KLEM: We're still on.
STOUGH: Well, so it has set the Congo back, but I don't think of any of our pastors or evangelists who were liquidated at that time.
KLEM: That's remarkable.
STOUGH: We had one who almost was. He was arrested, put in prison, taken off with a group to be executed, and the Lord intervened and there was this trouble and that trouble and the other trouble. They couldn't get the truck started. They got all the people on the truck to take them down to shoot them, and the truck wouldn't start, and they all had to get out to push the truck to make it start. And then they went down to the police station and they were already a half hour late and the police commandant was upset and he said, "Line up here!", and he lined them up. Count off: one two, one two, one two, one two. And they counted off and our pastor was in number two and he said, "All those in number ones fall in. Double time down to the monument." And they went down to the monument and they were shot. And the number twos were put back in truck and sent back to prison. And our pastor was a number two. And they got back to the prison, there were ten of them all together.... they got back to prison and he said those fellows gathered around and said, "Oh, pastor what are we going to do?" And he said, "Well," he says, "For me it doesn't make any difference if they shoot me, I'll just go to heaven, because I'm a child of God." "Well, what can we do?" And eight out of the nine who were there accepted the Lord then. I don't know what happened to them in the future. And then they came over, someone's policeman or someone came over to the prison and said, "Where is pastor, the Protestant pastor?" And they said, "He's here." And he said, "Well, this is all a mistake. He shouldn't have been arrested." And they took him back, they let him go, took him back over to chapel and there were all the Christians on their knees praying for the pastor.
KLEM: Incredible.
STOUGH: Well, it was just like Peter [the story of Peter in Acts 12:6-16]. It's a repetition of Peter. And so I don't think it was actually against the pastor or the church, but he got caught up in some sort of a... mix up, and he almost lost his life, but beside from that, I don't know of any of our pastors or church leaders who were executed during the Simba rebellion.
KLEM: Well, it's been an exciting series of issues that we've covered. I'd like to move to the summary section.
STOUGH: Okay
KLEM: could you just summarize your present relationship to the mission board and your current activities in relationship to missions?
STOUGH: Well, I came home in 1976. That's a little over three years ago, got here in April.
KLEM: Is that a retirement?
STOUGH: yes we came home to retire. I have done forty-eight years, and Betty had done thirtysome.
KLEM: Bless you.
STOUGH: And Betty was not as well as she had been. She's spending a lot more time in bed, from fatigue, illness of.... that comes from fatigue, and so we said what's the use. Running a mission guest house is no joke, you know. It's seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day you're apt to be called day or night, and there's no relief unless somebody out of the kindness of his heart comes and says, "I'll take over for you." So it was pressure. We did it for twelve years. (longer than anybody else has ever done it) And we did it as a, a service to the Lord. , nobody wanted to do that kind of job because it wasn't preaching the Gospel. [chuckles]
KLEM: And yet it needs to be done...
STOUGH: You know what I mean.
KLEM: ...for the preaching to go on.
STOUGH: Sure.
STOUGH: We've always felt that our mission work was team work, that we were part of a team, and someone had to do this work, and we were willing to do it. We had done a lot of entertaining when we were working Congo, and we enjoyed having guests and so we were willing to do this work. So we prayed about it and the Lord seemed to indicate that at the end of these three years we should come home. So we did. We came home to retire. Well, you know, you don't retire as easily as that. [chuckles] Then I got a job at the College a[Wheaton College] and within a couple of months I was working for the Lausanne Committee, [laughs] and I edited their information bulletin for two and a half years. And then when that was finished the church asked me if I would become a minister for visitation with the church. And I've been doing that. And a lot of our friends have retired and gone down to Florida to our mission retirement place and they're living happily down there in the sunshine, but I have thanked the Lord.... I think I told you the other day... I thank the Lord that He's given me back the years that the cankerworm ate and I thank the Lord for sparing me. But I do.... I am a member of the local committee, the central committee, of the African Inland Mission, that is the central states area, and that has responsibility for passing on candidates primarily. So I have that relationship with the mission, but other than that I don't do much for them. They don't do much for me.
KLEM: [laughs]
STOUGH: It's, it's astonishing you know in mission organizations (at least in ours) how you can give almost a half century of work to that organization and then, then just quietly just disappear at the end of fifty years [laughs] as if you've never existed.
KLEM: Do you have a retire...
STOUGH: I'm not speaking only of myself, I'm speaking about...?
KLEM: Do you have a retirement fund through them or the churches?
STOUGH: Well, they started one now. They didn't have one when I was there. They do have a retirement place and you can buy into it, that is, you invest in housing and then you can live down there, but we haven't felt a necessity for that yet. The Lord has provided for us in other ways. , I expect that the work will go on. I expect that the Christians over there as they get a little more training will (I mean by that educational training)... that they will be able to step in to greater mission responsibilities in Kenya in Zaire. In Kenya I'm just a little afraid that some of the church leaders, not by and large, but some of the church leaders have their eyes on the material assets of the mission, and I'm just a little afraid of that as I've see them. You see, the church of England turned everything over to the church, and all of their properties they turned over to the church and some of the properties now the Anglican church lets... rents out as income producing property. The Christian Council of Kenya received great sums of money from the... through the World Council of Churches and through churches in Germany and what not for projects of which they siphoned off (I think it was) five percent or maybe ten percent to the council and the council then use that for investments and invest them in apartment buildings and what not which they rent which produce income for the Kenya Christian Council. So they've had an example. The...the African Inland Church has had an example of that in other...
KLEM: Of investment....
STOUGH: ...denominations and councils and I think they would sort of like to do that too. I may be wrong. I hope I am, but that's my impression and I think that is a problem that has to be faced.
KLEM: Now you've given your life for the planting of Christianity in Africa, in Zaire, and in Kenya. Do you see that as being well on its way to being accomplished?
STOUGH: Yes I do. I do. I think that Christianity is firmly rooted in Africa. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but someone remarked that the church in Africa by and large is rooted and grounded in the Word of God, and it's ecumenical. It's ecumenical in that denominational differences that have come in.... [Break in tape]
KLEM: This is side two of the same tape. We were talking about you were talking about the churches of Africa being broadly ecumenical in disposition or...?
STOUGH: Yes, well, I said that the church in Africa, by and large, is rooted and grounded in the Word of God, they are ecumenical. Because of these differences, denominational difference that have been introduced for one reason or another,due to perhaps theological differences, due to national origins of the missions, and so forth. These are purely artificial as far as the Africans are concerned. And when we get... have got together in conferences, churches of the Conservative Baptist, the Anglicans, the Africa Inland Church, the church from the Heart of Africa Mission, and the church from the, the UFM, the Unevangelized Fields Missions, and the Plymouth Brethren and so forth, when we get together in a general church conference, we are all united around the Word of God. There is no, there is no real difference. The primary difference, the outstanding difference in a conference is the form of the worship of the Anglicans. but aside from that, all the rest of them have more or less the same form of worship...
KLEM: Now...
STOUGH: ...they believe the same things.
KLEM: ...this loss of loyalty toward the denominational distinctive, do you see this as a gain, loss, or mixture?
STOUGH: [chuckles] Well, if you're talking about the permanence of Christianity in Africa, I don't think that this matters at all, because Christianity as such will continue in Africa regardless of denominational lines. For instance, we've got a station down in the forest. its a AIC [Africa Inland Church] station. It borders on a large tribe, the Walanda tribe. Farther south from us, the Conservative baptists, and there's a split-off group from the Conservative Baptists who work among the same tribe. Well, now, they're coming in and beginning to encroach on the territorial area covered by our station at Oicha. And some of the church leaders, our church leaders, said, "Well, why do we let them come in?" And the folks down there in Oicha said, "Well, what difference does it make? They believe the same things we do and if they can staff outstations and staff churches and so forth in this area, what difference does it make?" And so Africans aren't nearly... don't get nearly as upset about these encroachments as missionaries would who hold a more... a deeper loyalty to their organization. So I think the future of Christianity as such, in Africa, in very good, promising.
KLEM: Well, is there anything else you would like to say by way of conclusion?
STOUGH:, [pause] All I'd like to say in conclusion is that I thank God for the privilege He has given me for almost half a century to work in Africa, for the part he has given me in planting his church there, in helping to train church leaders and my heart rejoices as I hear news from Africa that the work is going forward, that souls are being saved, that revival is breaking out in some places and that the name of the Lord is being glorified and more and more people are hearing about Him. I am happy that the Lord gave me a chance to have a part of it.
KLEM: Well, I'd like to thank you very much for giving us your time to share your insights with us. And may the Lord bless this and guide in the use of it that whoever hears and studies it might make of it, that it may be for the Lord's glory and the advancement of His Kingdom.
END OF TAPE