After they had moved to Kimberley, the basic Bible Doctrines lessons by correspondence really began to bear fruit. The first English version booklet was printed commercially in Kimberley as the hand cranked Gstetner stencil machine simply could not cope. Soon Bob located a tiny Multilith offset printer, but this one had to be hand fed and required two people to operate it. One person fanned small stacks of about fifty to a hundred sheets of paper and handed them to the operator who using a rubber finger-tip fed them a sheet at a time into the hopper. Soon it was apparent that other languages were needed so Bob was printing, processing the returned booklets, typing the material for new languages as the translations were available and preparing tracts and a monthly newsletter to accompany the returned materials to the students. When other languages came on line, the distribution mushroomed.
The small printer was sold and a new A.B. Dick Offset Printer was bought. This machine was a great improvement. One person could operate it with a greatly improved output, but now it was necessary to add dark room equipment to prepare the metal printing plates. This learning process was not entirely without problems. Bob was learning as he went, and one finger of his left hand has to this day a damaged nail where one of the paper strippers penetrated the base of the nail. This was, fortunately, an injury during the clean up process when the machine was being rotated by hand and not by motor.
The mailings became huge, as there had been literally hundreds of thousands of packets of lessons mailed out and were many to be marked and returned as well. They were being mailed in large quantities to boarding school children as well as to prisons and others who simply learned of them by word of mouth or through the magazine advertisements. They could only be handled in the many languages because they were almost entirely of Scriptures with brief comments.
Praise to the Lord that three other countries opened their doors and people askd for missionaries to come and work there. Through them also at least three excellent black ministers in South Africa attended the Minister's Training School after completing these the introductory lessons and being recommended to continue their study in the classroom. They would never have known anything about the New Testament Church had they not received those lessons.
It was at this stage that Bob was granted the Restoration Award plaque, reading "Fifth Annual Lincoln Christian College Alumni Association Restoration Award, presented to Robert S. Mills for Outstanding Service in Christian Missions, March 6th, 1970" but it wasn't Bob, it was the Lord's Word that did it with the His blessings.
Read the Word.
II Timothy 2:15s.
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment