#53 on top 100 Books list
Touching the Invisible by Norman Grubb
Who was Norman Grubb? Author of Rees Howell, Intercessor and other great works. He founded the Inter-Varsity Fellowship.
While recovering from his bullet wound in 1917 from the war, Grubb was handed a tract about the Heart of Africa Mission and the work of C.T. Studd in the Belgian Congo. After reading this tract he felt a calling to join Studd in his missionary activities.
Before setting out for Africa, however, Grubb studied for a while at Cambridge, where he had the vision for the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions (IVF) (now the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) whose primary goal was the sharing of the Christian message with other students.
In 1920 the Grubb’s left for the Congo. They spent ten years there, working with C.T. Studd in evangelizing the Africans. While there he translated the New Testament into Bangala.[ He was also struck by the words of Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth within me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” This verse was to become central to his philosophy. The kernel of his Christian belief was Jesus Christ’s teaching that He is the vine and we are the branches (John 15), and that Christians are new creations in Him and therefore exist in union with him.
Before C.T. Studd’s death in 1931 Norman and Pauline returned to England where they ran the mission from its London headquarters. In the book Samuel Rees Howells: A Life of Intercession, Norman explains what happened when C.T. Studd died: “When C.T. Studd died in 1931 we were in a helpless condition. That month we had thirty-five missionaries and we had one pound a week for that month. That was all we had! People said to us, ‘You’d better give up. Your founder is dead, the mission is so weak, give up.’ But we learned, mainly through Rees Howells, to change our whole attitude and the Lord told us not to give up. The Lord talked to us about going to the world and we laughed. Here we were two missionaries at home, thirty-five starving missionaries on the field and the Lord is speaking to us about going to the world! How does anything get done? By faith of course! Faith is the ability, inspired by the Spirit, to believe something offered to you. It isn’t I doing it, it is Him doing it.”
After Studd’s death in 1931, it was learned that he had left a letter appointing Grubb as president of the ministry he had founded, World Evangelisation Crusade (W.E.C., WEC International), in place of himself. Grubb, however, thought it would be better to be called secretary instead. W.E.C. grew from one mission field with 35 workers to a worldwide mission operating in over 40 fields with thousands of workers from around the world, all living according to the principle that all needs will be supplied by God with no appeals to man. The mission continues to this day under the name of Worldwide Evangelization for Christ.
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