Samuel Zwemer
“You did not choose me, but I chose you to go and bear fruit…” (John 15:16).
The term Christian was first used as a term of derision to describe those who had followed Jesus Christ, and when Adoniram Judson was in Burma, he was often called “Jesus Christ’s man in Burma.” But when Samuel Zwemer walked down the streets of Bahrain, where he had gone to work among Muslims, he was often identified as the “Do You Pray?” man because Zwemer had authored a little tract by that title which had been widely circulated. Zwemer not only wrote tracts about praying, he prayed, and the God who answers prayer used this energetic, scholarly man to help change the world.
Samuel Zwemer was not an ordinary person in any sense of the word. The thirteenth of fifteen children born to a Reformed Church pastor, it seemed natural that Samuel would follow his father in Christian work as did four of his five surviving brothers.
From the beginning Zwemer never asked for an easy lot in life. Choosing to work among the most difficult people on earth, Zwemer worked among the Muslims of Arabia and in so doing became the “Apostle to Islam,” as missionary history has dubbed him. From the beginning his was not an easy lot. Turned down by the Reformed Board of Missions because the board considered a mission to the Muslim world “impractical,” Zwemer teamed up with James Cantine, a fellow classmate, and they established their own mission, each raising support for the other until enough had been raised for them both to sail.
“Lethargy of the pastors,” wrote Zwemer, “is the great drawback.” But it wasn’t only lethargy which annoyed him; it was legalism as well. In some churches he could speak on Sunday, but he wasn’t allowed to hang his chart on the wall showing the concentration of Muslims in the world.
In the year 1890, Zwemer sailed for Arabia, settling in on the little island of Bahrain in the now oil-rich Persian Gulf. For five long years, he labored there alone. Then in 1885 Samuel met and married Amy Wilkes, a beautiful missionary nurse who became his companion and co-laborer.
Zwemer’s life was far less than romantic. It was not only the difficult language which he wrestled with but loneliness and suffering as well. In July, 1904 the Zwemers’ two little daughters, ages four and seven, died within two days of each other, and for a period of time he was not allowed by local authorities even to bury the girls lest the soil be contaminated by the bodies of these non-Muslim pagans. Eventually, he dug the tiny graves himself and laid the bodies of the two children in the ground.
Eventually, the Zwemers located in Cairo where this brilliant intellectual influenced thousands of young men and women in the universities. It could hardly be said that Zwemer was a great evangelist who swept multitudes of Muslims into the kingdom of God. The fact is that he was able to bring no more than a dozen people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, yet Zwemer did what no one else had yet done. He confronted the claims of Islam and began to awaken the church to the impact of Islam on the world. In his lifetime Zwemer traveled all over the world speaking in conferences, raising large sums of money, challenging the narrow view of the Christian world, asking them to consider the vast number of people in the Muslim world whose knowledge of Jesus Christ is unclear and fragmented.
Toward the end of his life, Zwemer looked back over fifty years of missionary ministry and said, “The sheer joy of it all comes back. Gladly would I do it all over again….” Samuel Zwemer, Apostle to the Muslims. (Quotes from Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, (Grand Rapids: Adacemie Books, Zondervan Publishing House, 1983), 227.
Resource reading: Isaiah 6.