SIM’s forgotten pioneers

PART IV SIM’S FORGOTTEN PIONEERS

by Tim Geysbeek, Church History Consultant, SIM Nigeria and Rev. Jonathan Obi, ECWA Archivist, Nigeria

HISTORY

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This is the last of four articles about the founding of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). Walter Gowans, Tom Kent, and Rowland Bingham reached Lagos, in what is now Nigeria, on December 4, 1893 – the date now celebrated as the founding of SIM. Gowans, Kent, their Liberian cook, Tom Coffee and 19 other employees left for the interior on February 24, 1894. Bingham stayed behind, recovering from malaria. Gowans died in mid-November 1894, and Kent three weeks later. This final article takes us to the official founding of SIM in 1898 and introduces SIM’s fourth and fifth members, Robert Lee and David Loynd.

Walter Gowans, Tom Kent, Rowland Bingham, learn Hausa and Arabic. At 271 km (169 mi) Robert Lee and David Loynd met in the home of inland, it was the most interior station of any John and Alice Hindle in Southport, England in European-based organisation at that time. October 1893. Bingham and Loynd returned to the coast on

There they resolved to go to the Sudan as April 9 and left for England later that month, independent missionaries because no mission where they parted ways. Bingham later arrived agency would send them into the interior of in Canada, where he formally established the Africa. They ignored warnings from the Wesleyan mission with a board in 1898. Loynd tried to join Methodists in Lagos that neither they nor their SIM’s team in Nigeria in 1901 but never did so, children would ever see Sudan. allegedly because he could not raise support.

Gowans, Kent and Bingham set sail for West Hindle, who became SIM’s de facto publicist, Africa after the meeting but Lee, who would go listed Loynd as an SIM missionary in May, 1894 on to become SIM’s UK director, and Loynd but Bingham only mentioned Loynd once in lacked the funding. It took Loynd, an article and never in his booklets who came from Bolton, England, or his book "Seven Sevens of Years the best part of a year to raise and a Jubilee. " Neither did he support. Bingham eventually recognise Loynd as an SIM welcomed him in Lagos on missionary in a handNovember 14, 1894. written list he later made.

Together, they set Writing about this out for the interior, Southport meeting following Gowans and in the mid-1970s, Kent. Their goal was SIM International to “open a station at publication secretary a point just beyond Kerry Lovering called existing stations” as Loynd and Lee SIM’s close to Gowans and “forgotten pioneers.” Kent “as possible and yet The foundation of maintain contact” with SIM rests not only on the friends in Lagos. work of Gowans, Kent,

Their attempts to and Bingham, but also establish bases in Ilorin Coffee, Loynd, Lee and and Iwo failed, so they David and Alice Loynd drowned after a others whose stories are settled for a few weeks German U-boat sunk the Lusitania on May beginning to appear in the in Ogbomosho, where 7, 1915, en route from the United States to pages of history. American Southern England. Another causality of the Lusitania For sources, contact Baptists ran a station, to was Rowland Bingham’s sister Winifred. tim.geysbeek@sim.org.