Octogenarians continue to pioneer
Patient prayer expecting answers leads to adventure
By
Patrick Erskine
Special to ChristianWeek
BUFFALO HEAD PRAIRIE, AB–An elderly northern Alberta couple continue to make a significant impact on their world by centring their life together on prayer, seeking God’s will and being alert for answers.
"We always try to sense the leading of the Holy Spirit. It’s mostly an inner voice, but we also look to people in leadership whom we trust," says Samuel Nafziger, 89. Our telephone interview was delayed an hour while he and Martha, 88, completed a morning of fasting and prayer. It’s how they begin each Monday prior to a productive week of work and ministry.
Samuel uses his metal turning lathe and skills to make steel tools. The latest: an escalator to help Martha access the basement laundry room of their home, 800 km north of Edmonton. He also sits on the local co-op board and has designed a web site to collect money to build churches in Russia (www.telusplanet/public/sziger.net).
Martha’s hospitality is well-known around La Crete where she leads pray-for-revival meetings, visits widows and chairs the decorating committee at Bethel Bergthaler Mennonite, their Sunday church. They also attend Tompkins Evangelical, to the southwest, Wednesday evenings.
The two have written books and tracts for their recently-launched venture, Starrywood Publishers, and Martha’s second book should be out "in a year or two."
The couple is used to trailblazing. They arrived here before the highway in 1953 as an answer to the prayers of Old Colony Mennonites who wanted a German-speaking teacher who would attend their church.
Samuel and Martha had grown up in conservative Mennonite communities and were baptized as adults before being married in 1939. After a decade in the American mid-west, the school Samuel helped lead folded. They lived with family and friends for a year. Samuel began concrete contracting and, as they prayed for direction, told Martha he sensed God had something for them to do among Russian Mennonites.
At a church conference in Ontario, a man told them about the situation in the northwest and everything fell into place.
Out of their comfort zone
Says Martha: "It wasn’t like a door opening, but like a wall falling out! Seven weeks later, we were in Alberta feeling like Abraham. It was a completely different way of life!"
"Different" means a distinct style of dress, keeping religious holidays and speaking the then-unwritten Plautdietsch (low German) dialect. They used alum to purify muddy drinking water, going without electricity and indoor plumbing. Their car became the community ambulance and errand-runner. They dispensed medicine and food and sold second-hand clothes, using proceeds to establish a library. They wrote letters in English and lent money for financial emergencies. At first, they and three children shared the one-room schoolhouse with four carpenters constructing the teacherage. (Two more children were born later.)
"It was an adventure in modesty," Martha recalls.
The one-year term stretched to 17 before ill health forced Samuel to scale back his activities. Until it improved, he confined himself to running a small farm and selling steel to neighbors to build their own equipment as they prayed and waited for further directions.
"I had an idea," explains Martha, "that I did not want to waste my older years but serve the Lord as long as I lived. I took this seriously and began praying. God impressed on me I Chronicles 4:10 [where Jabez asks God to enlarge his territory and keep him pain-free]. I had no idea what that meant, but I prayed about it daily for seven or eight years.
"Samuel’s health improved and we became acquainted with a Canadian Bible Society rep who sometimes stayed with us. He told us that most men he trained to take his place found the north too ‘hard, cold and brutal’ and quickly moved south. Samuel said, ‘That’s something we could do,’ so I typed the letter he wrote and we spent the next 14 years touring the high Arctic and northwest in a trailer we built."
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It took three years for them
to complete a circuit of 600 churches in 130
communities from the Pacific coast to the Arctic.
It was only when a film of their work was
produced that the public demanded they be
relieved of their dangerous travel and another
hiatus began, leaving them available for their
next assignment: Russia’s Black Sea city,
Novorossiysk. Russian odyssey "There’s no use applying," Samuel remembers thinking. Nevertheless, they did, as it was on their minds increasingly. Following strenuous training, they flew to Moscow where, after a day of sightseeing, Martha fainted. "They wanted her to return home, but I said, ‘May God forbid it! That stress would be worse than if she stayed!’ and she had many doctors checking on her for a while," says Samuel. |
| On
the road: the Nafzigers’ work with Canadian Bible Society took them on the road throughout British Columbia. |
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They worked with Gospel
Missionary Union (GMU), which had been approached
by the Department of Education in Moscow to
develop curriculum and train teachers to teach
"Christian morality and ethics" through
CoMission. "The people were open but the Russian Orthodox Church fought us tooth and nail. We had free access to the schools but their maneuvering delayed us six to eight months," Samuel recalls. While waiting, they placed ads at bus stop kiosks and taught English to adults using the Bible as textbook. About 80 attended and a dozen of them also came to a Saturday Bible study. They also used videos on sin and grace for blind folks. Once they were able to work in schools, they met with a class of 10 English-speaking students whose Christian teacher promised to disciple the five who responded to the gospel. |
| Photos
courtesy of Samuel Nafziger Samel Nafziger celebrates his 81st birthday with wife Martha while they were missionaries to Russia. |
(Teachers there often accompany students through their school years. That Christian teacher’s own children are too weak from hunger to attend their classes.)
The Nafzigers still communicate with some of the contacts they made, but regret that in-fighting and red tape have made it difficult for those they converted to continue meeting. Hence, the web-site collection.
Next summer, Lord willing, the Nafzigers will celebrate 60 years of marriage: a life together characterized by pioneering and adventure after patiently waiting for answers to their prayers.
