Global Missions

Bob Shuster Reflects on 50 Years of the Evangelism & Mission Archives

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Earlier this August, archivist Robert (Bob) Shuster retired from Wheaton College after 51 years. From the first days of the Billy Graham Center Archives in 1975, Bob has built, guided, and championed the Archives as a major research collection documenting evangelical global missions and evangelism. This month, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections features an interview with Bob reflecting on his five decades of work in the Archives. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What first drew you to archival work?

Bob Shuster in the Carol Stream warehouse with early BGC Archives collections, 1976. (ASC Photo Files).

Well, I knew I wanted to make a living in history, and I didn’t want to work for a living, so I didn’t want to be a teacher [laughs]. We had at our school in the library this vocational dictionary with different occupations, and I saw archivists in there. And it seemed like that’s something I could do. It would be interesting. I went to Wheaton College and I got a degree in history. Then I went up to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, because they were one of the relatively few schools at that time who had a program in archive administration. I was taught by their archivist, F. Gerald Ham. When I went to Wheaton, Earle Cairns was a history professor here, and head of the department, and I was his assistant, and then he gave me a reference to Jerry Ham, who was his old student. So that’s how I got into the program up at Wisconsin.

What aspects of that education or internship prepared you the most for the profession?

The master’s degree I got at Madison was in history with a minor in archive administration. And more valuable than the degree, or the minor, I actually worked at the State Historical Society in Wisconsin when I was a graduate student up there for two years. So, I went on field trips with John Fleckner, and I wrote guides. I did one whole collection on my own. It was the papers of someone who had an A&W root beer stand in some suburb of Milwaukee. So, putting that together gave me some actual experience. The archive administration courses were helpful grounding. So, it was all beneficial, but particularly, as you would expect, the actual hands on experience.

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A Practical Woman: The Purpose-Filled (and Adventurous) Life of Nina Eleanor (Gemmell) Vleck

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The Evangelism & Missions Archives includes the records of dozens of Christian organizations and each of these has reports, letters, photos, scrapbooks and audio and video records that tell the stories of hundreds of people who spent their lives ministering and sharing the Gospel. From all this multitude, this month we highlight the remarkable life and ministry of one – Nina Eleanor Gemmell van Vleck.

Nina Gemmell as a young woman, ca. 1915. PF: Gemmell, Nina.

At 24 years old, Nina Gemmell sailed to China in 1919 to work with China Inland Mission (later the Overseas Missionary Fellowship), just a few weeks after the end of the First World War. Born in 1895, she had grown up in Kansas and been educated as a teacher at Washington State Normal School. She then taught for a few years in rural schools in the state. Years later she remembered,  “On September 14, 1914, the first day of the first World War, was also the first day of my teaching in the white schoolhouse. I was escorted  by the three Batie children, over two board fences and two barbed wire fences and through a lot where there were horses and a field of cattle. The school children, of which there were about 38, stood around the door eyeing the new teacher, who arrived on foot dressed in a shirtwaist and hobble skirt.”[1]

After landing in China and spending time acquiring the Chinese language, she was sent to teach at a girls’ school in Yuanchow (Yuanzou) in the province of Kiangsi (Jiangxi). She found her work there immensely rewarding, as illustrated by this excerpt from a 1922 letter to her supporters, “Two weeks ago we were glad and thankful to see four profess a faith in the gospel. After a quiet afternoon I noticed a serious look on their faces as they finished their evening work….  Toward evening I noticed a group at my door waiting for an interview….  Seeing their patient waiting  and with a prayer for wisdom and understanding as to how to deal with their calamity or whatever it might be, [I approached them.]  One searching look at their faces drove away all fear and immediately four of them stepped forward and handed me four small pieces of paper.  This is a sample of what they contained:  “From this day and henceforth until the coming of the Lord, I want to believe on and follow the Lord Jesus Christ and worship the true God. I want to be very good.  Signed, Golden Lily.”[2] 

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An Artist with Pen and Brush: Introducing the Lilias Trotter Papers

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Lilias Trotter, c. 1870s. Lilias Trotter Legacy.

As we near the end of Women’s History Month, the Wheaton Archives & Special Collections shines a special spotlight on the life and ministry of Lilias Trotter—artist, author, and missionary to Algeria for 40 years. Comprising journals, sketchbooks, and watercolor paintings, the Lilias Trotter Papers were placed on deposit at the Wheaton Archives & Special Collections more than a decade ago. In 2023, these unique materials became part of the permanent collections through a generous gift from the Lilias Trotter Legacy.

Today, the Lilias Trotter Papers are a cherished and much-requested collection, accessed by scholars and writers to explore a range of academic disciples—theology, art, missiology, gender studies, and life writing. But more frequently, the materials are used by members of the public hoping for a personal encounter with Lilias Trotter through the words and artwork captured in the pages of her journals and sketchbooks. 

Lilias Trotter’s beginnings were inauspicious enough. Born in 1853, Isabella Lilias Trotter was one of nine children raised in John and Isabella’s comfortable home in London’s West End. Young Lilias received the advantage of a middle-class Victorian education, including private education and travel to fashionable locales in Switzerland and Italy.

Rough sketch of a saw mill from Lilias Trotter’s 1876 sketchbook captured during a European tour. 
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“Nothing new but that which hath been before”: 2025 Accession Review

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With the start of a new year comes a favorite tradition at Wheaton Archives & Special Collections – taking a moment to look back at some of the fascinating “new” old materials that found their way to the Archives over the last year. Below is a review of selected highlights from the Archives’ 2025 acquisitions:

Evangelism & Missions Archives

Overhead showing the relationship of foreign missions to local ministry for the Brazil field of Unevangelized Field Missions. (Crossworld)

Perhaps the most significant additions to the Evangelism & Missions Archives were the large accessions we received from evangelical foreign mission associations. SEND International (formerly Far Eastern Gospel Crusade), Crossworld (formerly Unevangelized Field Mission), The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), and SIM International are each multimillion dollar organizations that between them have thousands of workers on five continents. SIM, in particular, was born out of the merger of several different missions active in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Together these mission organizations gave more than 100 linear feet of their files to the Archives (TEAM has been donating materials since 2022) with other large accessions from SIM expected in 2026. In addition, the family of John Gration, a missionary of Africa Inland Mission and long-time professor of missions at Wheaton College, gave his files on the history of AIM, including the manuscript of his dissertation. Together these different accessions give an extraordinarily detailed pictures of North American Protestant missions around the world in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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The Jim Elliot Bible Project

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Ava Pardue and Mariah Sray

In November of 2024, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections collaborated with the Museum of the Bible to digitize Jim Elliot’s three college-era annotated Bibles held in CN 277: Jim Elliot Collection. After digitization was completed in February 2025, two archives interns, Ava Pardue and Mariah Sray, both part of Wheaton’s Aequitas Fellows Program in Public Humanities and Arts, spent the summer indexing all the annotations in the Bibles.

Ava Pardue just finished her freshman year at Wheaton. Along with being an Aequitas Fellow, she plans to major in English and Classical Languages. Mariah Sray is a senior at Wheaton with a major in Classical Languages integrated with Choral Studies.

Below, we feature an interview with Ava and Mariah about their work on the project.

What drew you to the Jim Elliot Bible project?

Ava: When I heard about the opportunity to work with Elliot’s Bibles, I jumped at the chance to engage with language, theology, and history in a way that could be useful to the public. One of the three Bibles is a Greek New Testament, which I was particularly interested in studying with the knowledge of Koine Greek that I’ve picked up during the last several years. And ultimately, I think the biggest thing that drew me to the project was a chance to look at Jim Elliot—a man hailed as a martyr, hero, and catalyst for modern missions—as an ordinary college student.

Mariah: An interest in exploring archival work drew me to this internship, but I was also curious to learn more about Jim Elliot. I knew the broad contours of his death in Ecuador but wasn’t familiar with the details of his life. I was also interested to how Jim interacted with his Bible, especially his Greek New Testament.

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“Por Una Patria Mejor”: Evangelism-In-Depth in Latin America

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After a decade of citywide evangelistic campaigns through the 1950s, Latin America Mission and LAM director, Robert Kenneth Strachan, launched a new program for mass evangelism in 1959 — “Evangelism-in-Depth” (E/D) or, as it was known in South America, “Evangelismo a Fondo.” Building on LAM’s efforts to “Latin Americanize” mission work, the program grew from Strachan’s central principle that “the growth of any movement is in direct proportion to the success of that movement in mobilizing its total membership in the constant propagation of belief” (E/D Manual, CN 236, Folder 138-7).

E/D shifted the focus of evangelism from presenting a single professional evangelist in a one-time event to a countrywide, congregation and laity-based, year-long effort. Proposing “a lasting revolution in missionary strategy,” the E/D program sought to impart “an increased vision and a renewed conviction” to individual Christians, local churches, and national leaders “that the total evangelization of their community in their generation is a distinct possibility and their definite responsibility” (Folder 138-7).

While designed to be adapted to different regional contexts, the core of the E/D program consisted of organized prayer, training for lay Christians, preparation for counselors, follow-up with new Christians, widespread publicity, door-to-door visitation, local and regional evangelistic meetings, regional and national parades, radio and television programs, and widespread Bible and tract distribution. The program flourished on a broad scale in fourteen Latin American countries until 1971, continuing afterwards in Mexico.

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Seeing with Both Eyes: Church History in a New Perspective

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Malla Moe was a legend among missionaries during her own lifetime. Born in Norway in 1863, she immigrated to Chicago as a young woman to live with her sister. However, after meeting Frederick Franson and hearing of his work with the nascent Scandinavian Alliance Mission, she felt a strong call to missions. In 1892 she traveled to Port Natal (Durban) in South Africa to begin missionary and language training. She then went to live and work in the Swaziland (now Eswatini) countryside, traveling between Swazi homesteads (sometimes called kraals in Afrikaans). From that time on, in the words of one biographical dictionary, “she served as evangelist, church planter, teacher, and preacher.”  Although she often rubbed other missionaries the wrong way, she loved and was loved by her African congregations. When it became difficult for her to walk, she traveled in a specially built gospel wagon. By the time of her death in 1953, Swaziland and Tonga were dotted with the dozens of churches she helped to found.

“This is a church. A good evangelist, Johann Muosi[?], died there like a good soldier in the fever country for the work of God. He left his good home for Jesus’ sake. He was happy when he went to be with the Lord. Malla Moe.” (From Acc. 2007-031).

That is the story told in many Western histories of missions. But it is incomplete. (An exception is TEAM’s own history, God Made It Grow, by Vernon Mortenson). Some of those histories mention a Swazi helper named Gamede or sometimes just indicate she had an anonymous native helper. Sometimes no African worker is mentioned.

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A Trip Down the Río Sinú

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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).
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The Zamzam Sails Again

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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 Zamzam was 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.

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50 Years of the Billy Graham Scholarship Program

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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.

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