Book honours pioneering humanitarians
Kaitlyn Betts
Bachelor of Arts student
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
Co-writers Brad Watson and Lester Hawkes at the launch of their book, When God Calls, Expect Adventure. The collection of short stories remind us that “missionary work has always been successful where you have an empowering message, but where you also provide a life-changing service,” says Brad. Credit: Lagani Gairo.
A must-read manuscript has moved an Avondale lecturer to help publish the stories of two of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s pioneering humanitarian workers.
Brad Watson first read what is now When God Calls, Expect Adventure during the worship service at his local Seventh-day Adventist Church. Another member of the church, Lester Hawkes, had written over 40 years about his and wife Freda’s time as medical missionaries in the then Papua and New Guinea and on Pitcairn Island. “I spend the whole sermon reading his stories,” says Brad, a senior lecturer in international poverty and development studies in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts. “I thought afterwards, I better help Lester get this published.”
Help he did—Brad and Lester as co-writers launched the book, which is published by Signs Publishing Company, in the foyer of Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church, September 19.
Brad describes Lester and Freda’s ministry as blending service and medical work with evangelism. “They were our church’s first humanitarian workers,” he says, “and they remind us missionary work has always been successful where you have an empowering message, but where you also provide a life-changing service.”
In 1945, Lester felt the “call” to go as a medical missionary to Papua and to New Guinea. The following year, Lester and Freda travelled to Papua to begin what would be 30 years of service. “We were there from the primitive [time] through to the educated [time],” says Lester, “and hardly anyone had done that.”
Lester says the book is intended to “honour God” and encourage readers “that God should be seen more readily and spoken of more easily.” Freda hopes the book will inspire others to “want to get out and do the same sort of work.”
Dr Barry Oliver, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific and a former missionary, wrote the foreword. He is “in awe” of the early missionaries and describes them as having “incredible commitment.” “By the time my family and I got to Papua New Guinea, the headquarters were already established, the schools were established [and] the clinics were established, but they got there and there was nothing.”
When God Calls, Expect Adventure is available from Adventist Book Centres.