The Biblical call to “make disciples of all nations” has driven missionaries to some of the most remote regions on earth—areas inhabited by indigenous peoples with diverse languages, religions, and cultural traditions. From the steppes of China and the Pacific islands to the Andes highlands and the African Sahara, missionaries have striven to carry the Gospel to all communities and peoples across the globe. Wheaton Archives & Special Collections preserves extensive records of missionary work among indigenous communities in remote and urban settings, including outreach to the Lisu and Hmong people in Asia, the Zulu and Kikuyu in Africa, and the Zapotec and Waodani in the Americas, among many others.
This month, we feature a pictorial report from missionary Ernest Fowler that documents the early stages of Latin America Mission’s outreach to the Emberá people of northern Colombia.
Ernie Fowler with two men in Colombia. (Photo File: LAM – Colombia).Continue reading →
On March 19, 2025, the Evangelism Missions Archives received a wonderful item for its Zamzam collection (Collection 624): A 58-page typescript with handwritten notes of a diary kept by one of the ship’s passengers, along with a photo.
Photo included with the transcript. The back reads, “Released internees (Shipwrecked), S. S. Zam zam [sic], S. S. Port Brisbane.” The only man in the picture, in the back row, is Dr. Dudley Wright. Perhaps the older woman, sitting down slightly to his left, is Ethel Wright. The Port of Brisbane was torpedoed near Australia in November 1940.
The Zamzamwas an Egyptian vessel which had been chartered in early 1941 to take passengers to Africa, including over 100 missionaries. Travel was dangerous, of course, because war had broken out between Germany, Great Britain, and France and was being waged on land and sea. As a civilian vessel under a neutral flag, it should have been exempt from attack. However, the German commerce raider Atlantis mistook it for a troop transport and started shelling the ship on April 17, 1941. The captain of the Zamzam used a flashlight to frantically signal the German ship that the Zamzam was a noncombatant vessel with women and children aboard and the German stopped the attack, but the damage was done. The Zamzam was sunk. However, all the passengers and crew were pulled out of the sea by the Germans. They were transferred to a German supply ship and taken to Nazi-occupied Europe. America was not yet in the war, so American citizens were repatriated back home. But all British citizens, as well as members of the British Empire such as Canadians, were sent to German internment camps where many stayed until the end of the war in 1945. For about one day, the sinking of the Zamzam was big news in American and British newspapers, until it was known that all passengers and crew had been plucked from the waters.
In 1974, Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association embarked on an ambitious project – The Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. While the beginnings of construction on the expansive College Ave building was the most visible sign of the new plans, the purpose of the Center was fixed not in a building but in the diverse work of the global church. As a 1976 slide presentation promoting the Graham Center outlined, “The three basic goals of the Billy Graham Center are, first, to advance Biblical evangelism and to contribute to world evangelization. Second, to cooperate as widely as possible with all evangelical Christians in advancing world evangelization in every possible way, and third, to reflect and extend the evangelistic ministry of Billy Graham.”
Billy Graham Center pamphlet, c. 1980s. (Acc. 2017-042).
Integral to plans for “advancing world evangelization” at the new Billy Graham Center (BGC) was the desire to support students “who will go from the Center with the Gospel of Jesus Christ into foreign missions, evangelistic organizational leadership, humanitarian efforts, and so many, many more wonderful ministries.” This vision took tangible form through initiatives like the BGC Scholarship program, which aimed to equip international students for global ministry leadership. In the fall of 1975, international students from South Africa, Kenya, and Australia received the first BGC Scholarship funds to begin their studies in the Wheaton College Graduate School.
Front piece of the notebook, showing Wismer on the left and Elliot on the right.
One of the most interesting recent additions to Wheaton Archives & Special Collections arrived in 2021 when Janet Wismer gave the Archives a notebook that consisted of a quarter-century of letters, cards, photos, and a variety of ephemera. All were artifacts of her abiding friendship with missionary, author, and teacher Elisabeth Elliot.
Elliot had been a Plymouth Brethren missionary to Ecuador when her husband Jim and four other missionaries were killed by warriors of the Waorani people, a tribe they had hoped to tell about Jesus. Elisabeth wrote an enormously popular book about this, Through Gates of Splendor. Then she and Rachel Saint, sister of another one of the men who was killed, went to live among the Waorani at the tribal people’s invitation. The two began the work of Bible translation and evangelism, alongside the Waorani woman Dayuma, a Christian convert. The whole story has been told most recently and completely in Dr. Kathryn Long’s book, God in the Rainforest: A Tale of Martyrdom and Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador.
This week, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections shares a guest post from Andre-Ross Gennette, who is interning with the Archives this academic year. Andre-Ross Gennette is a junior at Wheaton College, dual majoring in History and Biblical and Theological Studies, as well as a Wheaton Aequitas Fellow with the cohort for the Fellowship in Public Humanities and the Arts. Along with his work processing Wheaton College alumni scrapbooks, Andre-Ross curated three exhibits for the Archives this spring, including one on the Archives’ extensive collection of religious postcards.
This February, Wheaton Archives and Special Collections digs into its collection of evangelical postcards, a now forgotten but vitally important resource for 20th century Christians in the United States.
In 1873, the United States Postal Service introduced the “postal card”—a small and plain card that had its postage pre-printed on it, and cost just one cent, equivalent to about 25 cents today. It wasn’t big enough to send a full letter but was enough for a few sentences. Despite its simplicity, the postal card was a resounding success. For the first time in United States history, short form communication via cheap and accessible postal cards began to replace full-size letters.
1981: Rev. Pannell leading a Christian Community Development workshop at the Voice of Calvary Ministries’ Study Center in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. (PF: Voice of Calvary – Conferences and Meetings)
In celebration of Black History Month this February, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections features our oral history collection with Rev. Dr. William E. Pannell, who passed away last October. Over more than five decades of ministry, Dr. Pannell served as a youth pastor in Detroit, directed training for Youth for Christ, helped lead Tom Skinner Associates as Vice President, and taught future generations of pastors and evangelists at Fuller Theological Seminary as the assistant professor of evangelism and director of the Black Pastors’ program. Along with his busy work as an evangelist and teacher, Dr. Pannell published several influential books on race and the evangelical church, including My Friend, the Enemy (1968), Evangelism from the Bottom Up (1992), and The Coming Race Wars?: A Cry for Reconciliation (1993).
From 1995 to 2007, Wheaton archivist Bob Shuster sat down with Dr. Pannell for several sessions of oral history interviews. Totaling more than seven hours, the recordings include Dr. Pannell’s reflections on his childhood, education, Christian faith, ministry development, and race relations in the American church. Wheaton Archives & Special Collections recently released the complete transcripts to these interviews, which are now available through the online guide to Collection 498: William E. Pannell Oral History Interviews. Below are selections from the interviews covering Dr. Pannell’s early life, growing racial consciousness, visit to the 1966 Congress on Evangelism, and development of his work with B.M. Nottage and Tom Skinner. The selections have been edited for clarity and brevity.
As we celebrate the start of a new year, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections looks back at some of the interesting accessions of historical documents that the Archives received in 2024 and the new or updated collections we processed and opened to researchers.
New Accessions
For almost seventy years, the story of missionaries’ attempts to bring Christianity to the Waorani people of the Amazon (called the Aucas by their enemies) has been well known to American evangelicals. This year we received the files of Dr. Kathryn Long, who wrote God in the Rainforest (2017), which tells the story from the killing of the five missionaries who first made the attempt to reach the Waorani in 1956 through the development of an Indigenous Christian community among the Waorani in later years. She generously gave her voluminous research files and relevant books to the Archives, including material from her own trips to Ecuador and documents about her work on the staff of Campus Crusade in South America in the 1980s.
Boat used for Unevangelized Fields Mission (later CrossWorld) for river ministry in Brazil.Continue reading →
Portrait of Aimee Semple McPherson. Photo File: McPherson, Aimee Semple.
Ranging from brief outlines and research notes to full sermon transcripts and covering a wide variety of Biblical and pastoral topics, these manuscripts showcase evangelists’ great diversity in style and approach to sharing the gospel. This December, in celebration of the Christmas season, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections features three Advent sermons from one of the most unique and charismatic communicators in our collections – Aimee Semple McPherson.
Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) was a pioneering evangelist and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Converted at a Pentecostal tent revival in 1908, she began her ministry career as a missionary alongside her first husband, Robert Semple, before his untimely death in China. She returned to the U.S. and after a troubled second marriage, she launched an itinerant revival ministry, ultimately founding the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles in 1923. Known for her dramatic and musical preaching, she brought thousands into the Angelus Temple for multiple services every week, made several transcontinental speaking tours, and became the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio.
Portrait of Billy Graham, c. 1940s. Taken by local Wheaton photographer (and Wheaton College alum) Orlin Kohli. Photo File: Graham, Billy 1940s
Seeking to add a liberal arts education to his Bible College background, Billy Graham enrolled in Wheaton College for the fall of 1940. With previous credits from Florida Bible Institute and Bob Jones University, Graham came to Wheaton as a Sophomore, graduating in the spring of 1943.
In 2010, the staff of the Evangelism & Missions Archives at Wheaton College contacted dozens of Graham’s surviving classmates, asking them to fill out questionnaires about their memories of Wheaton in the 1940s and especially their memories of Billy Graham. The staff also taped and transcribed oral history interviews with more than twenty-eight of these classmates. The interviews are all online in the guide to Collection 74 and can be accessed there. Below are excerpts from the interviews, documents, and questionnaires. The excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Known to friends as “The Pioneer,” Percy Crawford (1902-1960) was an American evangelist and entrepreneur, who founded, among other things, the Pinebrook Bible Conference, Pinebrook Christian camps for boys and girls, a radio ministry, King’s College, a mission, and a chain of Christian radio and televisions stations. He also produced the first nationwide evangelism television program. These were in addition to the evangelistic tours and “Youtharama” rallies he led across the United States. His restless energy, vision, and strong personality made a deep impression on those who knew or worked with him.
When Crawford committed his life to ministry at Los Angeles’ Church of the Open Door in 1923, radio was just beginning to emerge as a powerful national platform for entertainment, news, politics, and religion. Inspired by Christian radio pioneers like Paul Rader in Chicago and Walter Maier in St. Louis, Crawford began broadcasting in 1931 with The Young People’s Church of the Air. During the summer months, these broadcasts often came from Pinebrook in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains.
