Martyrs’ blood is seed of the church

Eric Gaudion reflects on how a tragic event in Elim’s history ignited a bushfire around the world that is still bearing fruit

I stood beside the gravestone bearing the names of my friends and their children. I was in the cemetery in Mutare, in Eastern Zimbabwe, where the nine adults and four children, massacred at the Elim Mission in the Vumba in June 1978, were buried. Their simple memorial said that ‘their lives were taken on 23rd June 1978’.

The horrific manner of their deaths, though, shocked the world, both Christian and secular, and brought great pain to their families and loved ones, as well as to the communities they served in Christ’s name.

It was twelve years later, and I was then a missionary in Mutare, trying to rebuild and extend the Elim churches in that land. Around me were gathered the graduates from our first batch of Project Timothy trainees, a programme of Bible training and preparation in evangelism for young men, and later girls too, who would go out into the towns and villages, two by two, to preach the gospel and plant churches. The silence was broken only by the occasional shrill of birdsong and the pesky hum of mosquitos in the noonday heat.

But there was weeping too. Some of these young men had been taught by the missionaries at school, others had been brought into the world by these Elim nurses and midwives. I looked at them all, loved them deeply, and felt it right to say to them: “You are the fruit of their ministry and their sacrifice. They prayed for you. Now it is time for you to step out among your own people and lay down your lives in mission and service.” There was not a dry eye. I went from one to the other, praying for the power of the same Holy Spirit that had inspired their spiritual parents to fill them and fire them up for their own tasks and calling. They prayed aloud together, mostly in tongues but also in their native Shona, asking God to make them worthy of the price that had been paid at Calvary, and by their mentors in the Vumba. Neither they nor I would ever forget that day.

It was a strange but compelling part of the tragic story of the deaths of the Elim missionaries in the Vumba that in the weeks and months following, the Elim International Missions board began to receive a flood of applications for overseas service. It was as if the flame so sorely and cruelly extinguished in Zimbabwe had ignited a bushfire around the world and especially in the ranks of young people in our Elim churches. It was an unprecedented season of missions volunteering.

In his remarkable book The Axe and the Tree, Dr Stephen Griffiths, who is the son of the late Peter Griffiths, headmaster of Emmanuel Secondary School, the Elim school that relocated to the Vumba during the war, tells of the tremendous expansion of the Elim work in that land since the massacre.

As Tertullian, one of the Early Church Fathers of the second century said, it truly is a case of ‘the blood of the martyrs becoming the seed of the church’. Elim’s church life in that nation has never been more vigorous despite the enormous social and economic challenges of today.

So, as Elim folk reflect on this dark stain on our movement’s history, we can thank God that although a seed planted may have to die, it will bring forth much fruit. As in George Matheson’s great hymn: O Cross, that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee; I lay in dust, life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red, Life that shall endless be.

Eric Gaudion is a retired Elim pastor and author of ‘Through the Storms’ and other books

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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