James Dickie Crawford and
Jenny Crawford
As told by James D Crawford
When I was six years old, my parents moved from the city of Glasgow to a small farm in Newton Mearns, where I was brought up. We went to the meetings in the Gospel Hall in the village of Newton Mearns, about seven kilometers from the farm. To get there we walked for 2 km and then 5km by bus, and even so it was difficult for my father to miss a meeting. There were no full time workers in our assembly, but each brother and sister contributed to the welfare of all.
My father started the hymns at the Breaking of Bread and liked to work among the children, something that I also like to do until this day. Yearly the assembly invited an evangelist to have a gospel campaign, and now and again, we would receive teachers to minister the Word.
In my parents´ home there were always visitors, some for health reasons and other missionaries from several parts of the world: India, Africa and South America. I had the opportunity to meet many of the “pioneers” in the Lord’s work in various parts and we were thrilled when they gave their reports in our assembly.
I was saved in my teens and after finishing my school years, I began to work with my father on the farm. Our youth was spent under the shadow of the 2nd World War (1939 – 1945), during this time the theme was “economy in everything!”. No doubt during these years I learned many lessons that equipped me well for missionary work.
During the war I was baptized and began to court a girl called Jenny Allan, whose parents were in fellowship in the same assembly. We were already involved in the assembly work and in 1946 the meetings or conferences recommenced, twice a year in the city of Glasgow. We wanted to attend the meetings in the main hall, but it was completely full so the overflow was directed to another hall where we managed to attend one of the meetings, not where we had intended to go, but the preacher Mr. Archie Naismith challenged us in such a way that we decided to hand over our lives to the Lord.
After the meeting I was afraid of commenting anything with Jenny (about the fact) that God had spoken to me and I thought: “Maybe she might not have felt the Lord calling her and thus bring an end to our courtship”. The following weekend when we met, I plucked up courage to speak to her, and she said: “But I thought that the Lord was speaking only to me and I have decided that I am going to take up Nursing.” Jenny left her job as a secretary in an office and entered the Victoria Infirmary for a course of five years. The brethren in our assembly helped me a lot and encouraged me to study the Emmaus Bible Courses, and get more involved in the assembly work.
The work of the Lord in Brazil was always before us, because my sister Leila was in Brazil together with her husband William Maxwell, serving the Lord since 1938. When they returned to Scotland in 1946 they spent some months on my parents’ farm.
In 1950 and 1951 I spent my holidays helping brother Willie Scott, an evangelist in the south of Scotland, and I learned a lot from him. Later on he opened the first old folks´ home, among the brethren in the United Kingdom. When the young missionary Alex Simpson from Scotland and Brazil died, the brethren from “Greenview Hall, Pollokshaws”, held a special meeting, and one of the preachers was brother Leonard Nye from Sacramento – M.G., Brazil, and once again I felt the desire to go and fill in “the gaps in the ranks”.
We got married in December 1951 and receiving the commendation from the assembly we left for Brazil in April 1952. During the years of preparation to serve the Lord in Brazil, we had saved sufficient to pay the trip from Scotland to Brazil and also to support us in the transition period. After this, the Lord took over the responsibility to supply ALL OUR NEEDS: spiritual, emotional and material, and after 51 years our testimony is that GOD IS FAITHFUL despite our UNFAITHFULNESS.
We arrived in Santos on the 20/04/1952, on a Sunday, after a sea voyage of 18 days. The brethren William Maxwell, Harry Ruston and George Orr were there to meet us and help us through customs, always a traumatic experience! Then we went up to São Paulo where we stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Richard Jones until the Monday evening, when we began our trip to Uberaba and we arrived in the afternoon of the Tuesday. Willie and Leila had prepared a spacious room for us to stay in with them and we met with them at the Gospel Hall until January 1953. They were our Portuguese teachers and at the same time taught us many important things about the Brazilian culture.
In July of that year, there arose a big problem in the assembly in São Joalquim da Barra with the arrival of two ladies who tried to turn aside the new Christians from Bible doctrine. This caused a lot of worry to our brother and sister Willie and Leila, as they were the pioneers of the work in that town.
In December of 1952, they suggested that we moved to São Joaquim da Barra to give our support to the brethren resident there. We considered that they (Willie and Leila) understood the needs of the work a lot more than we did and we moved to São Joaquim da Barra in January 1953, which became our “Jerusalem” from where we began to work in the region.
We are not “specialists” in anything, but we have learned to do with our might ALL that the Lord puts before us and for Him “only the best will do”.
Since our youth we have had the privilege of meeting many servants of the Lord. One of them, on leaving my parents´ home for the last time, put his hand on my head and said: “James, aim high and keep low”; another one said: “Always try to build up and bind together the people of God”. Another who was an intimate friend until the Lord called him Home said: “James, always keep in the middle of the road, even although you’ll get splashes from both sides”! The same God that called us continues to call, we only need to put ourselves in a position to hear Him, and hearing Him, be willing to OBEY (Acts 26:19).
O Jesus, Lord and Saviour, I give myself to Thee,
For Thou, in Thy atonement, didst give Thyself for me;
I own no other Master, my heart shall be Thy throne,
My life I live, henceforth to live, O Christ, for Thee alone.