"If You Believe . . . It's
Yours"
"Hal-le-lu-jah!"
Most of the graduating seminary students merely accepted their diplomas, shook hands with the president and the chairman of the board and went back to their seats. But Erik Stadell, from Sweden and a missionary to Greenland, turned to the audience, raised his diploma high and shouted "Hal-le-lu-jah!"
Everyone laughed. Everyone loved Erik. His faith was vibrantly enthusiastic and he obviously loved his Lord. But in day-to-day matters, it was difficult to take him very seriously. He was too mystical, too unrealistic.
Ralph and I also wondered what to think about him. Tall and gangly with a Pinocchio nose and a puckish smile, he seemed the opposite of the dedicated scholar, the competent mission leader. His English was good, but a bit unusual. His mannerisms seemed overly animated, exaggeratedly enthusiastic — "different," yet in a lovable way.
As we came to find out, however, Erik was far more than what he seemed. For several years he had prayed that the Lord would send more laborers into His harvest.
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Increasingly, he began to be burdened with the necessity of setting up a new mission agency for Swedish candidates. It was a big step to take, and he didn't know how to go about it.
Ralph was the faculty mentor for Erik's master's dissertation. Ralph, also, had never set up a mission agency, but by that date he had been involved in the incorporation process of a number of organizations. When Erik told him of his burden, Ralph looked at him and wondered. But he also remembered how improbably a leader Hudson Taylor had seemed to the older missionaries of his day. Perhaps God was in this. But first Erik would have to work out all his plans on paper.
Erik was delighted when Ralph encouraged him to write of that dream and the practical way in which God might accomplish it. Could he set up a new Swedish mission board? How would he work out the legal papers? How could he attract and train candidates? While he wrote up the details for his dissertation, he began to carry them out in reality, praying all the while that God would send him twenty Swedish missionary candidates by the next summer.
We were not the only ones amazed when by July he had his first contingent of candidates, ready to begin their training in Pasadena. He asked Ralph to come and speak to them their first night of classes, and I went along.
I was a bit bemused as I sat in the lounge of the former girls dorm on the Pasadena College campus, where those Swedish students were housed. Did Erik have what it took to start a mission board? He seemed so much a dreamer. But when that meeting began I saw an Erik I hadn't known existed. This man had charisma; he was dynamic, forceful — a tremendous leader! The young people from Sweeden all responded to him with obvious deference; they believed in him; they trusted him to hear from God and to lead them.
Erik had his own dreams, and they were large. But at one point his and ours converged.
Two years before, he had come with his family to
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Pasadena, supernaturally led all the way from Greenland to a school he hadn't even known existed. Housing was found for him in one of the vacant houses bordering the Pasadena (Nazarene) College campus. The college had recently purchased a new, larger campus in San Diego, and workmen were busily moving furniture, disassembling offices, and vacating the premises. Erik noticed the activity and started asking questions. He had been praying for some time that the Lord would provide property somewhere which would be utilized solely for world missions, "perhaps even for a new world mission center." And here was a 17 1/2 acre campus, vacant. Could this be God's answer to his prayer?
Eric was dreaming his dreams and praying for a mission center just about the same time that the faculty of the School of World Mission faculty were drawing up their plans for the hoped-for implementing annex. Their dream was not less huge than his, and it too seemed impossible.
Some years earlier, Pasadena College had built a small prayer chapel at the heart of the campus. As Erik dreamed, he began circling the campus in prayer claiming it for the cause of missions. One day, a workman, also a Christian, saw him standing praying by the prayer chapel, and asked him if he would like to pray inside.
"I went in and a burden of prayer came over me. I prayed all day and into the night. My wife sent my children looking for me, but I told them I couldn't leave — not yet. I prayed there for a week before the Lord let me leave," he told us almost four years later.
Before moving, the college had a sure offer to purchase by a group which wanted to start a Christian college. Now that the Nazarenes were gone, this offer fell through. Others made bids, over 100 organizations in all, but something always happened to prevent the sale. Meanwhile, Erik was praying that somehow the Lord would hold this campus for missions.
August 10, 1975 was a blistering hot day, as many days
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in August are in Pasadena. Erik and his family had been invited to spend a few days at a friend's cottage on the beach at San Clemente, and this seemed the perfect day to go. They all looked forward eagerly to a swim in the cool ocean. Neither Greenland nor Sweden had prepared them for this climate.
Erik watched his family race to the beach, but felt somehow he couldn't follow them. Not yet. He still had something to settle with God.
His diary of prayer for that day records that the Lord impressed him with this verse: "Thou shalt speak and say before the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 26:5). And he went on to claim the campus in Pasadena: "Before the face of the Lord our God we both speak and confess that the campus of Pasadena College is consecrated for world missions and can never belong to any other purpose."
He later told us that peace immediately settled over his soul. He dashed to the water and frolicked joyously with his family.
There were other times and other prayers about the campus, and Erik wrote in his thesis:
"Never before in my life have I experienced that a prayer must become a reality as the prayer that (the) Pasadena College campus will be used for the purpose of world mission. In the name of Jesus Christ, I know that this miracle is predestined by God Himself. Written at Pasadena College, Wednesday, December 10, 1975."
The preceeding summer the Lord had begun, quite independently, to lay this same burden on Ralph.
