EMQ » October–December 2018 » Volume 54 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder”]By Prayer to the Nations: A Short History of SIM
By Gary R. Corwin
Credo House Publishers,
Grand Rapids, MI, 2018
478 pages
ISBN: 978-1625860828
USD $29.99
Reviewed by Dwight P. Baker, program director/associate director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center (2002–2011) and associate editor of the International Bulletin of Mission Research (2002–2015).
In 1893 three young Canadian men set out to take the gospel to the inhabitants of Africa’s interior (roughly today’s Sahel). Within months of their arrival, two were dead and the third, Rowland Bingham, was so ill that he was forced to return to Canada. Based there, he went on to become general director of SIM, serving until his death in 1942.
What’s in a name? The answer, I suspect lies in what has been cultivated and invested in it. SIM has wrestled with that question, making several adjustments to its name both in its early years and in recent decades.
Originally designated Soudan Interior Mission (later Sudan Interior Mission), in SIM’s early years the meaning was heavily locational. Where the mission intended to focus its efforts set it apart from other missions working within the “faith mission” tradition. The rationale behind more recent shifts in SIM’s name have focused on its character. SIM now has a presence worldwide—and missionaries from all corners of the earth serve within it. But what forms its core? What is the center from which it seeks to work and witness?
Since 2000 “SIM” has stood for “Serving in Mission,” articulating a set of core missional values that have continuity all the way back to those forged in the mission’s founding era. But those values have been refined, sharpened, and extended, reflecting tensions and tests brought by time and growth in organizational scale and widening fields of ministry.
Viewed from a business or organizational perspective, through the years SIM has been open to mergers or, maybe more appropriately, friendly takeovers and absorption of other mission organizations with compatible values, spirit, and objectives. These mergers have lent depth and enlarged scope of ministry to SIM. They have taken it into corners of the world far from the African Sahel and given it a worldwide presence. The story of SIM mergers and growth composes a central strand of By Prayer to the Nations.
Belaboring SIM’s shortcomings is not the purpose of By Prayer to the Nations, but the book includes sufficient acknowledgment of the mission’s historical blind spots and belated efforts to make amends to indicate an effort at candor and repentance—and intentionality in its quest, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to grow in righteousness in the conduct of mission.
SIM may be a river with many tributaries or it may be a tapestry blending a number of subsidiary strands into a dominant image. This book, too, is a tapestry, woven together from letters, documents, field reports, articles, contributed chapters, photos, maps, sidebars, and supplemental materials. Gary Corwin supplies the dominant voice that persists throughout the account and ties it all together. The whole is more than just an assemblage; it holds together as an account of SIM’s first century and a quarter. From the many parts, the strength of the SIM story emerges as of interest in itself and as instructive for mission conducted with faithfulness and integrity.
