Edna Lochner, a missionary in Swaziland for 38 years, has continued investing in Africa by founding and running Christian Literature for Africa since 1991.
Volunteer Linda Miller helps to process books. Volunteers remove or mark out personally identifying information.
Volunteer Marilyn Geist packs boxes of books in preparation for an upcoming shipment to Africa.
Volunteer Brent Starr loads boxes of books onto a truck.
“Show me in the Bible where witchcraft is wrong!” shouted a man who practiced witchcraft. He was standing in the crowd listening to a woman in Uganda preach on the dangers of witchcraft and why it displeases God.
The woman couldn't show him because she had no Bible.
Later she gratefully received a Bible through Christian Literature for Africa (CLA), a non-denominational, non-profit organization founded and run by retired Nazarene missionary Edna Lochner.
Since 1991, Lochner and her volunteers have shipped hundreds of thousands of donated Bibles and theology books for training pastors and Christian leaders, and to encourage children and youth, in 37 African countries. CLA also has raised funds to purchase 25 Risograph printers for mass producing locally translated and contextualized books and pamphlets.
And now a Web site is poised to make it even easier for donors to send CLA books that are specifically requested from the field: Amazon.com.
Wish lists
For the past 19 years, retiring pastors and other donors have shipped boxes or driven carloads of books to CLA at its Fort Wayne, Indiana, headquarters. Other donors send cash with which Edna shops for books she knows are most needed in Africa.
While the Bibles and used books given to CLA have been transformative in raising up and training leaders in Africa, in most cases educators in Africa simply had to hope that what was donated would match their needs.
This fall, the West Africa Field is taking a proactive stance by making use of a convenience technology already well-known among U.S. university students hoping to save money on their required reading textbooks.
Missionary Tim Eby set up a “wish list” on Amazon.com. The Web site allows the user to build a list of used and new books available for sale on Amazon, such as Introduction to Christian Theology, by H. Orton Wiley, and A Dictionary of the Bible and Christian Doctrine in Everyday English, by George Lyons – both prominent Nazarene theologians.
Ranging in price from $2.38 to $28 (US), the books can be purchased from the Web site individually and sent directly to the CLA headquarters where a 20-ton container of books is being assembled to ship to West Africa on Dec. 10.
(To view or donate from the wish list, click here, or visit Amazon.com and search "Timothy R. Eby" in "Wish Lists.")
More than words
Lochner’s heart for Africa and for education is rooted in the 38 years she served as a missionary in Swaziland. For 20 of those years she worked as a teacher in day schools, and 18 years directing Christian literature development. She also wrote books and condensed other works for leaders in the African church. When she retired to the United States at 66, the burden for Africa was not lifted from her heart.
“I didn’t know what it would be or how, but I knew when I left [Swaziland] I would be doing some kind of literature work for Africa,” she said.
In the first year of her retirement, Lochner began developing a vision to acquire and ship badly needed Bibles and theological and spiritual materials to Africa for use in churches and libraries to train and develop pastors and leaders throughout the continent.
She recruited three men to help her found the organization: nephew Richard Fahlsing, a CPA; Gene Snowden, a former state senator and mayor of Huntington, Indiana; and Robert Fosnaugh, a CPA and father of a former missionary to Papua New Guinea. All three have served on the board since its inception.
“Now I say I’m doing more missionary work than I ever did on the field. We’re working for 37 countries instead of just Swaziland.”
Books by the ton
While the organization has remained small, its reach is anything but.
Operating with just one part-time employee (Edna has never taken a salary), the ministry draws a handful of volunteers, and only in 2004 built its own building. Previously, it simply borrowed space for packing boxes in a local church, and ran an office from a friend's basement. With donated labor and supplies, CLA now owns a $120,000 building that cost just $80,000.
“It’s too small,” Lochner said. “At that time we weren’t sending by container. We need to expand.”
In total, CLA has shipped an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 Bibles, commentaries, training materials, Bible dictionaries and other reference books over the past 19 years, as well as devotional and holiness books and hymnals. Each 20-ton container costs $6,000 to $8,000 from Indiana to its arrival point in Africa.
Designated distributors agree to meet the containers and pay customs and transportation to the African countries where the books are intended to go. For instance, the next container going out in December has separately packed boxes of books destined for 12 countries.
Partnerships with Nazarenes as well as non-Nazarene groups make the expensive shipments possible.
About a year ago CLA began partnering with Christian Resource International, based in Michigan, which had requested permission to fill half of each shipment with books of their own.
“They have books to send, but no contacts in Africa to receive them, so they will donate half the Bibles and books to us and we pay the whole shipping,” Lochner explained.
Receiving 10 tons of books from Christian Resource International means that CLA gets its 20-ton shipments out more often than it would if it waited to receive an additional 10 tons of books.
The United Methodist Church allows CLA to send about 40 boxes of materials to Nazarenes in Africa through its program Operation Classroom. The Methodists escort the boxes through customs and alert Nazarene distributors when the boxes are ready for pickup in Africa.
The printed word
The other arm of CLA’s ministry is in purchasing and shipping Risograph printers to schools and churches in Africa where literature developers and translators are creating contextualized theological and training materials.
The Japanese-made Risograph is a high-speed digital copying system similar to a mimeograph machine, and can print about 130 pages per minute at low cost). A Nazarene salesperson gives CLA a good price on the printers, ink and accessories.
Nazarene literature coordinators and Bible college presidents request a Risograph, and CLA raises funds, purchases the machine and arranges for shipping to Africa. So far, 25 printers have been sent to 13 countries.
Missionary Greg Crofford, director of the Nazarene Theological Institute, which is responsible for theological education for the Africa West and French Equatorial fields, reported to CLA that a print shop in Accra, Ghana, is using its Risograph to mass reproduce handbooks for pastoral education.
“Thanks to those machines, one handbook costs only the equivalent of $1 U.S., making it affordable for pastors to purchase these as part of their courses toward ordination,” he wrote. “Without the Risograph, the book would cost several times that, and be too expensive for the pastors to buy.”
Missionary John Watton, who operates Africa West Field’s print shop, said its Risographs have counted 2 million ink passes while printing theological education booklets, discipleship series, Sunday school materials and soft cover books.
“It would be hard to imagine tackling the huge task of discipleship of new believers and leaders without these beautiful machines placed here by CLA,” Watton wrote in an e-mail. (To watch a video of the field’s Risograph in use to print materials, visit http://blip.tv/file/609641/)
Words of thanks
CLA receives many letters and e-mails of thanks, such as one from a pastor in rural northeast Liberia.
“Twenty-five pastors received your gift of the Bible,” Rev. Sam Lama wrote. “We are very grateful to you, for about 23 pastors never had Bibles. If they had anything, it was Bibles with missing books and covers. We appreciate your gift and yearn for more books and other Christian literatures that will help our ministry in rural Liberia.”
Nazarene missionaries Paul and Sharon Martin have agreed to receive and distribute books from CLA’s containers in Sierra Leone. Not long ago they sent Lochner a message about how the books were used.
“A new theological education training center recently opened on the peninsula down the coast from Freetown,” the Martins wrote. “In a recent class, Bible Survey, we gave Bibles to all the students. They were thrilled to get them!
“One of the students was from another world religion and was seeking truth. In the next class, Preaching, he was present again, and ready to give his life to Christ. He said that as he read his new Bible, he found two verses that really spoke to him about the fact that salvation is only through Jesus Christ: Jesus said, ‘I am the Way the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me.’ And ‘The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
“He prayed the sinners’ prayer and made public his faith in Christ. By the end of that class, he wrote in his journal, ‘God has called me to proclaim the Word of God, and I am willing to answer with great joy!’”