Give Me This Mountain
Missio Nexus’ leadership thoughtfully summarize books, giving you the Leader’s Edge to help inform, stimulate and provoke profitable discussion.
Leader’s Edge: Missionary Biographies
Give Me This Mountain*
By Helen Roseveare
Christian Focus, 2006
160 Pages
*As an Amazon Associate Missio Nexus earns from qualifying purchases.
Give me this Mountain is a compelling page turner that tells the story of a well-educated British woman who met God while in college. Trained to be a medical doctor, she sensed a call to missions in her late 20s. Sent out under WEC, she arrived in East Congo in 1953; she served there until 1964. At that time, civil war exploded and the ensuing chaos and violence eventually forced all mission personnel to leave. She went back to Congo in 1966 to rebuild and expand what was destroyed during the war. Returning to England in 1973, Roseveare went on to write devotional books and an autobiography, as well as becoming a beloved conference speaker well into her 80s. Her 2016 death in Northern Ireland was mourned by those she served in Africa, Europe and North America.
Who is this person? Dr. Helen Roseveare
Born in the 1920s to well-to-do English parents and raised during the pre-war 1930s, Helen Roseveare displayed unusual intelligence and an independent spirit as a child. At the age of eight, she sensed a desire to be a missionary. While strong willed and competitive, she felt deeply the need to be loved, admired and respected, despite the bold face put on before family and friends. These contrary traits dogged her for years before finally finding profound love and acceptance by God.
After graduating from Cambridge, she completed Medical School, joined WEC and went to Eastern Congo in 1953. There, before and after the former Belgian colony’s troubled independence in 1960, she partnered with fellow missionaries and national Christians to build clinics and hospitals, and helped train nurses and medical aids. In 1964, civil war broke out and she was taken captive for five months, surviving terrible abuse and rape by vicious rebel soldiers. After she and her companions were rescued, she returned to England to rest, recover and recount the story of God’s abiding presence during those dark days. In 1966, she went back once again to the people she loved and helped establish a medical school and hospital and rebuild health facilities destroyed during the violence. With her elderly mother needing care and sensing her time on the field coming to a close, she left for England in 1973.
Leader’s Edge
No portion of Leader’s Edge may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, nor copied for public use without the permission of Missio Nexus. Send a request to: Info@MissioNexus.org
Responses