The Jaffray Centre for Global Initiatives at Ambrose University and the Jaffray Project of The Alliance Canada (C&MA) are two Canadian endeavours underlining the importance of ongoing missional focus in the denomination. Both are named after Dr. Robert Alexander Jaffray, one of the first missionaries sent out by the C&MA in Canada.
Robert Jaffray, known by his family as Rob, was born in Toronto, Ontario, on December 16, 1873, to Robert Jaffray and Sarah Bugg. Rob’s father had immigrated to Canada from Scotland and first worked in a grocery store, which he later owned. Eventually, he moved into politics as campaign manager for Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) George Brown, owner of the Globe Printing Company. From being on the board of the newspaper to eventual ownership of The Toronto Globe, Mr. Jaffray sought to modernize the newspaper, bringing in illustrations and the use of linotype. In 1906 he was appointed to the Canadian Senate. His oldest son William became president of the newspaper until it was sold in 1936.
Early Life – Spiritual Legacy
While Mr. Jaffray was not a committed Christian, his wife Sarah was, and they attended the Gould Street Presbyterian Church. Rob experienced health issues as a young man, including a weak heart and diabetes. At age sixteen, Rob was converted under the influence of his Sunday school teacher, Miss Annie Gowan, a follower of Dr. A.B. Simpson1, who first began preaching in Toronto in 1889. Articles in The Toronto Globe at the time described Simpson’s preaching about divine healing.
After several years of college in Toronto, Rob began work at a life insurance company. As Dr. Simpson continued coming to Toronto and Hamilton to preach on diving healing, the deeper life, and world missions, Rob attended meetings at Bethany Chapel and personally felt the call to foreign missions. His first step would be Bible training at the newly opened Missionary Training Institute founded by Dr. Simpson in Nyack, New York.
Rob’s father was not in favour of this and proposed his son attend the Presbyterian seminary in Canada with his support. However, Rob felt the unmistakable call of God and decided to move to New York and support himself by working his way through college. His three years of study focused on training in the Bible and practical ministry, including student preaching at a small church in Kenwood Heights, New York. The theme of “bringing back the King” was much a part of the teaching at the Missionary Training Institute, and Rob was strongly influenced by the need to take the Gospel to every tongue and tribe and nation, so then, the King (Jesus) would return.
In the later part of his ministry, while starting the Bible school in Makassar, Jaffray reflected on his time at Nyack:
“I personally remember definite impressions made by the Spirit of God on my heart as I sat under the teaching of men of God, including Dr. A.B. Simpson, [at] the home Bible School. These deep impressions have continued with me and have been like guiding stars in my whole missionary career, for over forty years. I often pray that my words to the students may in like manner cause deep impressions of the Spirit to be made upon their hearts.”
In 1894, Jaffray travelled to raise prayer and financial support with Robert Glover. He was examined for his ordination by Dr. A.B. Simpson in Nyack in 1896.
That same year, Alliance missionary conventions first became an annual event in Canada and were written up in the local newspapers. On January 20, 1896, seven ministers placed their hands on Robert Jaffray and George Shields while Dr. Simpson prayed, consecrating them to missionary service. An official announcement of this ceremony was reported the following day in The Toronto Globe owned by Jaffray’s father.
This was the first ordination of Alliance missionaries in Canada. However, several other missionaries had already been sent overseas including Elizabeth Hawkins to China in 1894, William Wallbrook to Congo in 1895, and Margaret Quinn to Tibet in 1897, likely travelling with George Shields.
Family Life
In 1897, a few months before turning twenty-four, Robert Jaffray and three other new missionaries travelled by ship to China. Jaffray and Dr. Robert Glover arrived in Guangxi Province. They studied the Chinese language in Teng County, joining a small group of missionaries who had been in China for three years already, including American missionary Minnie Donner.
Minnie was born in Medway, Ohio, on October 21, 1871. After becoming a believer at age seventeen, she soon felt the call to missions and was in one of the first classes of the Missionary Training school in New York. She went to South China in 1894, where her sister, Maizie, was married to Rev. Isaac Hess, field chairman.
The Chinese called Minnie “Sister Duna” and referred to her as a “preacher,” showing her involvement as an active Bible-teaching missionary in her own right. Jaffray married her in Hong Kong on August 7, 1900.
Minnie’s compassion drew her to the sex trafficking of young girls and women into slavery in the brothels, especially along the riverfronts. She was involved in the Door of Hope Mission organization in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. Working with Chinese helpers while based in Wuchow, Mrs. Jaffray endeavoured to visit women enslaved in these brothels.
Their daughter Margaret Morrison was born in 1907. When she was of school age, she studied in Chefoo, North China. The Chefoo School was founded by China Inland Mission in Yantai (Chefoo). As a Christian boarding school, with separate schools for boys and girls at the time Margaret attended, the students were given a British preparatory school education from a Christian perspective. Children were usually only able to visit their parents during December and January when the weather was healthier in the south and because travel to and from the school could take weeks at a time. By the time Margaret attended the Chefoo school, students were given Chinese language lessons to preserve the language they may have learned from their Chinese nanny (ayah).
Margaret attended high school in Toronto, where her Uncle William lived. She then took a business course and returned to China, where she worked as her father’s secretary while studying Chinese.
Missionary Strategy
Jaffray’s leadership abilities were quickly put to use in China. Shortly after learning the Chinese language, Dr. Glover and the Jaffrays moved to Zhangzhou, where Jaffray followed Glover’s leadership in setting up the Jiandao (Wuchow) Bible College. When Dr. Glover returned to New York to become Foreign Secretary of the C&MA, Jaffray added the role of principal to his position as professor of the seminary. After the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, the college was moved to Hong Kong, where it became the Jiandao Theological Seminary or the Alliance Seminary in Hong Kong.
Wuchow was also the location of a guest home for missionaries, which Mrs. Jaffray headed up; her duties included orienting new missionaries to China. Jaffray was the head pastor of the Wuchow church, and when Rev. Isaac Hess (Jaffray’s brother-in-law) retired in 1916, Jaffray was elected chairman of the South China field.
The Alliance workers in China followed a pattern of evangelism based on the strategies of the Apostle Paul. They sought to preach the Gospel, often in the local markets, disciple individual Christians, form local churches, and train leaders to lead those churches. Churches might begin as a loosely organized group of believers and later be more formally organized with a pastor, deacons, and elders. While the missionaries brought financial and spiritual support in the early days, they quickly formed local congregations and sent leaders to the Bible school for training.
From a Publishing Family
New believers were brought to Wuchow to the Bible school, then sent out to preach God’s Word and make disciples all around China. Jaffray was most aware of their need for further training in the Bible and in church planting methods, so he began writing to each graduate individually. Eventually, Jaffray realized the necessity of more formal ongoing communication and training.
In 1911, Jaffray began what became a pattern for him in ministry, first in China, then in Vietnam, and finally in the East Indies: establish a publishing company to write, print, and distribute Christian materials to strengthen local believers and Bible teachers. While he did not take over leadership at The Toronto Globe, the influence of his family remained clear throughout his ministry in Asia.
Lacking mission funds, Jaffray wrote to his supporters, raising funds for a printing press, and the South China Press was established. Located for many years in Wuchow, the company eventually moved to Hong Kong. Jaffray’s Bible Magazine was written in literary and colloquial Chinese. While Jaffray did most of the writing, he employed a Chinese secretary to edit and perfect his written Chinese. Using material from his Bible school lectures, he published commentaries, hymnals, devotionals, and the Bible Magazine; literature was distributed all over China and to Chinese readers throughout Asia, the United States, and Europe.
When news of Jaffray’s death reached the mission leadership in 1945, one of the first questions asked, as reported by Foreign Secretary Alfred Snead, was how would the Chinese Bible Magazine continue without Robert Jaffray to write its main articles each month?
Deeper Life
In his prayer letters in 1907, Jaffray wrote about a revival among the missionaries in Wuchow, South China. He described how several, though not all, missionaries received the gift of speaking in tongues and explained how the “anointing” he received gave him a “deeper love for, and understanding of the Word of God than ever before” and “an unction in witnessing and preaching.” He carefully noted the gift of tongues was not the only evidence of being filled with the Holy Spirit. While even a year and a half after this conference, Jaffray recorded he continued to speak in tongues and his anointing “abideth” to that day, he also wrote, “One lamentable lack in connection with this outpouring of the Holy Spirit has been the spirit of evangelism. Divine unction bestowed on a child of God should lead that one out to seek and save the lost as Jesus did.” First and foremost, Jaffray’s calling was to seek and to save the lost.
Entering Vietnam
In 1898, just a year after arriving in China, Jaffray made his first trip to Vietnam, called Annan at that time. Eventually, missionaries were sent to Vietnam from the China field, and the field grew despite opposition from the French government and the difficulties caused by World War I.
In 1916, while remaining in Wuchow, Jaffray became the director of the mission to French Indochina or Vietnam. Jaffray visited the French Governor-General in Vietnam and persuaded him to allow the preaching of the Gospel in that colony. Using at least eleven languages, missionaries worked to spread the Gospel. Bible translation into the main language was emphasized, and under Jaffray’s leadership, a printing press and publishing house were set up in Hanoi. Hymnals, tracts, books, and Bibles were published and widely distributed.
Jaffray was repeatedly re-elected field chairman of the Vietnam field while still superintending the South China field from his home in Wuchow. To keep the mission work in Vietnam progressing well, Jaffray encouraged the field in their election of Walter Oldfield as vice-chairman. Jaffray made frequent trips to Vietnam, on occasion accompanied by his wife, Minnie. In 1920, they made a six-week trip to open a chapel in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and take a vision trip to the as yet unreached Cambodia. They travelled more than one thousand miles north to Tourane and Hanoi.
Self-government
Jaffray was earnest in his desire to bring the Gospel to China and plant an independent, autonomous, self-leading Chinese church. This was not an opinion held by all the members of the Chinese mission field, and many of his fellow missionaries felt the church should not be fully autonomous until the church was financially self-supporting. Jaffray was forced to compromise and set up governance by three committees: one of missionaries, one of Chinese Christians, and one of leaders from both groups. When there was a difference of opinion, Jaffray brought himself into conflict with his fellow missionaries, often siding with the Chinese church.
By 1925, there were seventy-seven Alliance stations in Kwangsi in China. But in the face of the 1,533 market towns in the region, Tozer notes that Jaffray asked, “What are seventy-seven stations among these?”
Political Stress and Theology of Risk
In the 1920s, China became politically unstable with outside influences from Bolshevik Russia and roving bands of armed militia became commonplace. In 1923, a militia group laid siege to the city of Kweilin for seventy-seven days. Among those in the city were several Alliance workers who watched over the Chinese girls’ boarding home at the Alliance school. One of their number, Rev. Cunningham, was shot. In Wuchow, Jaffray and the rest of the Alliance team prayed for Kweilin and eventually decided to try to rescue their fellow workers.
On their way to Kweilin, their riverboat was attacked by militia who demanded they pay a toll or ransom, and their armed escort of eighty soldiers abandoned them. The militia took the missionaries with them into the mountains and held them for ransom. With good humour, Jaffray later recounted how God had made sure he was wearing his most comfortable shoes when he was taken, so he could march without getting blisters. Jaffray continually proclaimed the Gospel to the militia despite their mistreatment. Eventually, a ransom was paid by Chinese officials, and the missionaries were released. Tozer notes, Jaffray found at the end of this ordeal, “his condition was definitely improved,” and he was able to “enjoy better health from that time forward.”
Later in the 1920s, the British were expelled from China, and soon other foreigners, including North American missionaries, also left. Then the persecution began to include local believers who endured beatings and imprisonment. In 1925, many Alliance missionaries were sent to Hong Kong to be safer under British protection. By 1927, five thousand missionaries had been forced to leave China.
Alliance missionaries re-entered China for a short time, but the continuing persecution and turmoil increased pressure on the local church and the North American missionaries. Jaffray used this time to encourage giving more independence to the Chinese church and to its leaders. During the four years of political instability, the Alliance workers continued with their evangelism, using gospel advertising on billboards, and publishing the Bible Magazine every month, smuggling issues of the magazine through roadblocks as necessary.
The Power of a Dream
In 1927, Jaffray turned fifty-five. After thirty years of ministry in China, he was asked to return to the U.S. as vice president of the C&MA. Holding his call to foreign missions tightly, Jaffray refused politely, suggesting to work in the home office would be a step down.
By then, Jaffray was looking ahead to a world outside of China. The reality of thousands of Chinese working in the port cities of the South Seas without a gospel witness could not be ignored. In 1928, Jaffray made an exploratory trip by freighter to Sandakan, British Borneo, then later to Balik-papan in Dutch Borneo.
While in Balik-papan, Jaffray sensed a cloud of darkness there. He wrote, “It came upon me like a dark, thick cloud of gloom, and I could not shake it off. Only His light and joy finally dispelled the darkness. [I realized] I was on the enemy’s territory. Yes, here is a place where the supreme rule of Satan has never been disputed.”
Jaffray wrote in his prayer letter, “I hear the call of the great cities of Makassar and Surabaya. Those names were new to me…. Now they ring in my ears all day long and in my dreams at night! Makassar! Makassar! Surabaya! Surabaya! They now represent to me places of midnight darkness.”
Once back in China, Jaffray sent his report to New York and his request for funds to open a new mission in Borneo was denied. Yet, the needs of the people in the unevangelized area would continue to pursue him. One night, Jaffray had a dream which spoke to him clearly. He described it in 1928 in The Pioneer, “But the Lord gave me a dream. One of those vivid dreams which leaves a deep and lasting impression. I have seldom had such dreams in my life, but when He sends them, there is no question but that the dream is from Him.”
Jaffray continued, “It was a horrible dream. …I was a fugitive fleeing from justice. I thought I had stains of human blood on my hands. I thought the Lord Jesus was pursuing me. I was full of fear and was running for my life…. I awoke. My first words were, ‘Oh Lord Jesus, what does this mean?’” Jaffray, as he reflected on his dream, heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him, “If I warn them not, if I preach not the Gospel to them, I will be accountable for their blood. No wonder I have heard in my ears all these days the cry of the people of Borneo.”
In response, Jaffray wrote again to the board in New York but did not request funds or personnel. Instead, he told them that he was going to the Dutch East Indies or Borneo with their support or without. In response, a cable came giving permission to go, but with no promise of funding.
As Jaffray prayed over the lack of personnel and funding for this new outreach, the Lord clearly spoke to him, and the decision was made to send Chinese Christian workers to the Dutch East Indies as missionaries. Jaffray wrote in the South China Alliance Tidings, “Suddenly I was conscious the ‘Still Small Voice’ was speaking to my listening heart. I love to hear his voice.”
The East Indies
In July 1928, only a few months after his trip to the area, Chinese missionaries S.W. Chue and later Leland Wang reached out to the Chinese in the East Indies. In 1929, Jaffray made another trip south, taking two more Chinese workers with him, and upon his return, more support for the endeavour came. Throughout the various articles written by Jaffray about the work in the East Indies, there is a reference to his Chinese fellow workers. He often mentions Pastor Chue, stating that he “was the first resident missionary in our work in the N.E.I., and …labored for many years, in Makassar, [and now] is in charge of the work in Soembawa.”
Pastor Chue led the outreach to Chinese merchants in the East Indies and reached out to the Indonesians in his region. In 1941, Jaffray noted in the annual report while, at first, the Chinese missionaries worked with the Chinese along the coast, they “soon felt … that their call was not to the coast towns but to the Dyaks in the interior.” Their work led to more than seven hundred Dyaks coming to the Lord at that time.
Jaffray used his own personal funds while supporters throughout Canada and the USA also sent in finances. As Jaffray wrote detailed descriptions of every region of the East Indies in his prayer letters, word went out about Borneo, head-hunters, and the Dyaks. New missionaries from North America volunteered and were soon studying the Malay language. Within a few months, a gospel hall was built, and a new magazine started, The Borneo Pioneer, which was first printed in Wuchow. Jaffray also made plans for a printing press to publish the Bible Magazine in the Malay language and for a Bible school.
In 1930, at age fifty-seven, despite his ongoing struggle with diabetes, Jaffray continued to live in Wuchow and make frequent trips to the various islands of the East Indies. On a trip in 1930, Jaffray wrote of how he felt the Lord saying to him, “We pray, ‘Even so, come Lord Jesus, COME QUICKLY. But He seems to say to me, ‘Even so Disciple GO, GO QUICKLY. When you have gone into all the world with my Gospel to every land and kindred, then will I come.’”
By 1931, thirteen foreign missionaries were on the new field, along with numerous Chinese co-workers, working in eight different mission stations. At the highest, there were thirty foreign workers, twenty Chinese workers, and one hundred and forty local evangelists. Despite limited financing from North America due to the depression, the work in the East Indies went forward.
Sense of Humour
Showing the appreciation fellow missionaries had for their field director’s wife, on Mrs. Jaffray’s forty-sixth birthday, Rev. and Mrs. Alvin Field wrote a long humorous poem about Minnie, reminding us, while missionaries work hard, they also play hard and celebrate well together as a family. They wrote about her work with newly arrived missionaries and her delight in giving generously to the poor, among other accolades:
“Who takes each new recruit in hand,
And fits him out so find and grand,
He’s glad he came to China-land?
Mrs. Jaffray.
Who gives her husband’s clothes away
Till he never knows in what array
He may appear in class next day?
Mrs. Jaffray.
But here our praise begins to halt;
We must confess she has a fault!
The Customs caught her smuggling salt!!!
Mrs. Jaffray.”
The move to the tropical East Indies from a more temperate South China was not without its difficulties. In one of the earliest editions of The Pioneer in 1929, Jaffray published a humour piece by Rev. Clench, one of the five North American missionaries who had just arrived in Makassar with Jaffray. Clench described with sarcastic wit life in a small hut, shared with a Chinese missionary family, sleeping on a cot under a mosquito net, and working daily on his Malay language study:
“Let us locate ourselves in our Missionary Home in Balik-papan. It is twelve o’clock midnight. You are stretched out on a little, hard, narrow, hot, folding cot, perhaps your legs are draped out over the edge of the thing, and as for your arms, you have moved and shifted them so many times that you’ve forgotten just where they really are. A herd of mosquitoes have stampeded their way into the private sanctum of your net, and it’s a ‘slap here, a slap there, everywhere a slap;’ when will morning come?”
In one of his General Letters in 1934, Jaffray’s sense of humour was again shown when a Balinese man in Lombok tried to guess his age, and when told how old he was, remarked, “But, what wonderful teeth he has for a man of his age!!” Jaffray wryly noted, “I have a quick knowing look at Mr. Brill, and, mum was the word. ‘Where ignorance is bliss’ etc.” Jaffray was making reference to his dentures, perhaps?
Move from China
In 1931, Jaffray and his wife left their home of thirty-four years in Wuchow, China. While Jaffray’s role as missionary statesman led him to travel throughout China, Vietnam, and later the East Indies, he always wrote frequent letters home to his wife Minnie and daughter Margaret.
In February 1931, Mrs. Jaffray and Margaret, age twenty-four, sailed for North America, where Mrs. Jaffray stayed for two years. Margaret attended the Missionary Training Institute in Nyack, New York, then worked in ministry in Kentucky before arriving in Asia as a missionary. Mrs. Jaffray met her in Hong Kong and accompanied her to her post in Makassar in October 1934. Margaret wrote in The Pioneer in 1934:
“I’m glad to be home again! Four years have passed since I bade farewell to Makassar, and the shores of the Netherlands East Indies to attend the Missionary Training Institute at Nyack. Surely the goodness of and Mercy of the Lord have followed me these years, and I thank Him from the depths of my heart for leading me back to these needy islands.”
Margaret continued, “Four years have passed―and what are my impressions as I return to Makassar? How wonderfully the Lord has developed the work here at headquarters in this short time! Then, there was no Bible School. Now, over seventy students assemble daily to study the Word of God…. Four years ago, seven missionaries composed the staff of foreign workers. Now we are 17. Then we had no… converts in the city of Makassar, and during these years over a hundred have been saved and baptized.”
Jaffray wrote to his supporters while his family was in North America, “During these days alone here I have made it an almost invariable rule to retire early… and then to rise early in the morning at 4:30 or 5:00 o’clock and give three hours of the best part of the day to the Word and Prayer. I am having a wonderful time in the book of Revelation…. Thus, after three hours before breakfast in the Word of God and waiting on Him, I am ready for the 101 duties of the day.” It was also in the early morning hours when Jaffray often composed his many articles for The Bible Magazine.
Printing and Praying
The printing press in Wuchow was burned in the fall of 1932 and could not be sent to Makassar. Using his own money and again gifts from his supporters, new presses were sent out and set up in Makassar to print hymn books, tracts, commentaries, and devotionals. Jaffray continued to write how the still, small voice of the Lord was speaking to him. In 1935, he noted the Lord “whispered in my ear time and again that He has ‘much people’ in Bali.”
Jaffray used the Scriptures in his prayer times, and during a visit to Bali, seeing the persecution of new believers, he spent time in prayer for them, and the words of Acts 8:1 came to him “with great force, and they proved to be a help and strength to Pastor Tsang and the Christians.” It is clear here how Jaffray prayed using Scripture and how he worked alongside Chinese missionaries sent from the church he had helped to plant in South China.
Jaffray wrote, “We must lengthen as well as strengthen” and underlined it was not enough to see more than forty-five hundred conversions by 1934, but strengthening by systematic training in Bible schools must be undertaken. By 1941, two hundred and nine local believers studied in the Makassar Bible Institute, and seventy-four Sunday schools, reaching over thirty-two hundred students, were organized. The church was also nearly financially self-supporting.
Jaffray also extended the mission into Malaya, three hundred miles north of Singapore, and purchased land for a mission station and Bible school using his own funds from the sale of The Toronto Globe in 1936. This independent initiative was not without criticism from the Home Office. William Smalley said, “Dr. Jaffray’s keen desire to have a part in every effort of getting the gospel to all men everywhere may have caused him to close his eye to what some thought were serious errors in judgement and administration.” In the end, with the Japanese invasion of Singapore, the project never progressed.
Jaffray also wrote in The Pioneer in 1933 about his own love of reading maps and praying about where God would next send the Gospel: “But the pouring over a map will not do any good, or bring the Gospel to lost souls, unless it begets prayer. We did pray, and we offered ourselves to go to these still unoccupied parts. The Holy Spirit has given us some experience in travail in prayer for these who sit in utter darkness and the shadow of death.”
One of the essential needs in the work in the East Indies was a place at a higher elevation, with cooler weather, where the missionaries could go for rest and healing from tropical diseases. In his letter in 1937, Jaffray thanked those friends whose gifts had made possible a “Rest Resort” in the mountains of Benteng- Tinggi, not too far from Makassar. Jaffray spent time there when he was ill for several months in 1937. Also, the annual mission conferences were held there.
Jaffray noted, “Some of our missionaries came to Conference badly broken in health, and in need of a prolonged rest and change ere they will be able to go back to work again.” Jaffray talked of the need for prayer on the one hand, and on the other hand, he blessed his supporters for their provision of this restful area for missionaries to have time to heal in body and spirit within the region.
Home Visits
The life of the Jaffray family included brief visits to Canada or the USA every three to four years. Jaffray needed to see doctors for his personal health issues, and as a member of The Toronto Globe board of directors, he needed to attend meetings at least periodically. As well, as an ordained minister, Robert Jaffray was also part of the leadership of the fledgling C&MA in Canada. On a year-long furlough in Canada in 1900, Jaffray and Rev. Salmon, who had presided over his ordination in 1896 along with Dr. Simpson, were together made associate superintendents of the districts of Ontario and Quebec.
In 1909, the Jaffray family was again in Canada for furlough, and their September 1909 farewell service was presided over by A.B. Simpson. Jaffray’s father, now a Senator, was listed as one of those attending. Rev. Salmon was not part of this service as he had already left on a world tour of Alliance missions in August where he would visit the Jaffray family, and other Alliance workers, in China.
Rev. Salmon described his visit to Wuchow, “I hear the mission well-spoken of before reaching Wuchow. The home is on the top of a large hill…. It overlooks the city and is designed to be a home for missionaries in coming and going to their fields of labor. I spent a happy Christmas among brethren and sisters though. I had the privilege that day of addressing about five hundred Chinese Christians in a union meeting of Wesleyans, Baptists, and Alliance people.… On the Lord’s day I preached morning and evening through Mr. Jaffray interpreting. I learned from a missionary in another body that Brother Jaffray is the best interpreter in South China.”
Jaffray’s last visit to Canada was in 1938 with his wife. While at home, he was extremely ill, and refusing surgery, he prayed for and received healing. He wrote in his General Letter of how, as he prayed, the Lord spoke to him in the still small voice, saying, “With long life I will satisfy him.” He continued, “Then I felt a slight sensation in my upper bowel as though Someone had touched me; and again, He touched me. I knew that the stoppage was opened. The pain ceased, and has never returned.”
During the 1938 furlough, Wheaton College conferred on Jaffray an honorary Doctorate of Divinity. His brother Will, now the head of The Toronto Globe, attended this ceremony, putting to rest rumours of Jaffray being alienated from his family.
On their return to the field in 1938, Jaffray and Minnie travelled by steamboat. He records, “We were met by our daughter in Singapore, and, were we glad to see her again?” After a few days in Singapore, Margaret traveled to Makassar with her father, leaving Mrs. Jaffray in Singapore “to follow later.”
Spiritual Warfare and Divine Healing
During his time in Makassar, Jaffray, now age sixty-three, wrote clearly in The Pioneer about spiritual warfare: “How can we scatter this terrible Satanic Darkness? …What I know about the ministry of prayer, and its power, is not equal to the task of enlightening this thick, black darkness.” Two years later, he stated, “We are fighting, in these last days, the last battles of the Age, and we are confronted with the most fearful powers of the kingdom of darkness that the Christian Church has ever known…. It is a warfare of faith, a conflict with the powers of darkness…. Only by the faith of prayer-warriors can we prevail.”
Jaffray also ensured the Makassar Gospel Tabernacle held monthly healing services for both believers and unbelievers. He wrote in 1934 in The Pioneer, “We have come to feel strongly that we need such ‘signs and wonders’ in the Name of the Lord Jesus to attest the message of the Gospel here in Makassar.” Jaffray described training Bible school students to pray for healing and for individuals to be delivered from demonic influences.
Jaffray further noted, “We laid down no restrictions as to the use or non-use of remedies, leaving everyone free to consult doctors… and use of ordinary means desired, but we emphatically claimed that the right thing to do in any case was to come first to the Lord Jesus, to commit our case to Him, be anointed with oil in the name of the Lord, and then obey His will as He would indicate…. We have seen nothing spectacular, but there have been some very definite answers to prayer for the sick, and some clear ringing testimonies of the healing power of the Lord Jesus.”
Jaffray, while diabetic, having heart issues, and later a gastric ulcer, determined to live life as a healthy man in God’s power. He wrote about his belief in God’s provision of the health necessary for service, stating, “I have already experienced definite touches of His life in my body in times of need. I fully expect to be restored to full health and strength.” Throughout his time in China, Vietnam, and East Asia, he travelled incessantly, eating local food and going third class to save money.
In the fall of 1938, Jaffray, Minnie, and Margaret returned to Makassar from Canada despite inklings of worldwide instability and war. Margaret continued to teach at the Bible School and, for a time, in the Women’s School. Jaffray wrote of their return to Makassar, “If I do not go back now, there is little likelihood that I can ever go back at all. I must return to the Far East. I want to die out there where my life has been.”
In 1939, war was declared in Europe and funds to the field dropped off. Jaffray spoke to his team of the joy it will be in Heaven to meet the new believers from Borneo face to face: “No sacrifice that we have made will then seem too great.”
World War II
In 1941, fearing if they took their regular year-long home assignment in Canada, they would not be able to return to Makassar, the Jaffray family, including Minnie and Margaret, travelled to Manila, The Philippines, for a much-needed six-month furlough instead. Shortly after this, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, and Hong Kong was soon captured, along with Manila and Singapore.
Jaffray gave permission to the missionaries under him to return quickly to the U.S., and while some did leave, many stayed, including Robert, Minnie, and Margaret. Jaffray wrote, “I cannot leave while one missionary remains on the field.”
Within a short time, the Japanese took hold of the Dutch East Indies, the mission plane was captured, and the pilot, Rev. F.C. Jackson, was executed. Another worker, Rev. Andrew Sande, was also killed, and his wife and infant son soon after.
Jaffray moved the missionary team from Makassar to the mission rest home in Benteng Tinggi. But, on March 13, 1942, the Japanese placed the men under arrest in the police barracks in Makassar and interned the women in Benteng Tinggi, where Jaffray was kept with his wife and daughter. A total of ten Alliance missionaries were interned. Later, Jaffray was moved to camps in Molino and Pare-Pare. Allied planes flew over Pare-Pare and bombed the area. The prisoners were then moved to a mountain camp. Those interned were forced to work hard and fed barely enough to stay alive.
Life for the women missionaries interned at the Kampili Protection Camp, where they were moved to, was difficult. Mrs. Deibler wrote her family in North America in 1943 when she found her husband had died three months before. After two years of internment, Mrs. Deibler wrote, “It seemed even worse things could not happen but they did. Miss Jaffray and Miss Seely were both quite mentally deranged for some time but are, thank God, quite well at the present.” What type of abuse these young single women endured can only be imagined.
Rev. W.E. Presswood, who was interned with Jaffray, wrote two-thirds of the six hundred men interned had dysentery, and many died. Food was minimal, and it was the rainy season. The guards beat and abused the interned men. Presswood writes of Jaffray, “He weakened rapidly, like everyone else, but because of his age he could not hold out as long.”
Robert Jaffray passed away on July 29, 1945. Living in the camp with him was independent missionary Rev. F.R. Whetzel, who later wrote, “One of the great blessings of my life was the privilege I had of being interned with Dr. Jaffray on the island Celebes. I learned to love him as a great man of vision and faith.” The day after Jaffray died, Rev. Presswood conducted a funeral service for him, and a combined choir of interned Catholic and Protestant workers sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” Later a memorial service was held at the gravesite.
Mrs. Jaffray and Margaret had not been with Jaffray in two years and had no way to learn of his death until their own eventual release from the women’s internment camp. A memorial stands in Makassar at the site where his grave was moved after the war.
In his last prayer letter, written in 1942 upon his return to Makassar from the Philippines, Jaffray had written, “The promise is ‘When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.’ He is with us not only before and after the danger, but when we pass through it. His promise is very real to our hearts.”
After their release, Minnie and Margaret Jaffray returned to North America. Mrs. Jaffray, despite her ill health after years of internment, travelled throughout the U.S. to visit friends and family. She passed away very suddenly on November 10, 1946. The Pioneer in 1947 described Mrs. Jaffray as a “veteran of many years of consecrated missionary service in China, and finally also in the Netherlands, Indies. [She] endured the long and terrible ordeal of internment. God was pleased to bring her through this long period and give her the joy of reunion with loved ones and friends in North America. And then suddenly, she who had spent many years in His service, was removed from this earthly scene…. The strength of purpose, and the whole-hearted devotion to the Lord Jesus, which distinguished the life of our lamented and esteemed sister, were truly a challenge to us.”
The Pioneer in 1948 noted, before WWII, Margaret Jaffray had previously spent a term in the East Indies as a missionary, then was interned by the Japanese with the other missionaries. After her time in Toronto, she had now returned to Indonesia. By 1950, Margaret was teaching Dyak believers in the Malay language at the Long Bia Bible School in East Kalimantan, Borneo. In May 1950, violence between pro-Dutch and nationalist Indonesians brought violence to the Makassar, and Margaret described how God protected them with only a few shots being fired. She noted the missionaries were taking refuge from the violence at the Mission Home, and some were aboard the Borneo boat, hoping to leave the area soon.
In 1951, Margaret left by plane for the United States and then Canada due to ill health. In The Pioneer, it was written her “command of the Indonesian language has made her ministry a great blessing among the students” and it was hoped God would “touch her with His quickening power and give her a ministry among you also.” Back in Toronto, Margaret taught Sunday school in the Alliance Tabernacle but unfortunately, in 1959, she passed away after being in a car accident with friends in Orillia, Ontario.
Conclusion
After his death, the Board of Managers in New York approved the Jaffray Memorial Fund to raise fifty thousand dollars as a memorial to Dr. R.A. Jaffray. The funds were to go to the projects in line with Jaffray’s vision: pioneer evangelism in New Guinea, and literature ministries and publication work in Indonesia, New Guinea, Vietnam, and China.
Jaffray’s legacy of praying over maps and strategizing how to reach those who had not yet heard the name of Jesus, of making Bible schools accessible for the training of new believers in their mother tongue, of using literature and publishing as a means of discipleship and training, of planting churches by grouping new believers into fellowships and training their leaders, and of involving recently trained believers from non-North American fields in the mission enterprise stands yet today as a path forward to reaching the world with the Gospel of the Kingdom.
Editor’s Note: Today there are people all over the world who are eager to hear more about God. Alliance Canada introduced the Jaffray Project in 2016, which sends international workers to least-reached people groups such as the Fulani, Wolof, Yazidis, and Huichol. The Jaffray Project brings awareness, increases prayer, and raises financial resources for new efforts to send and support workers around the world to share the hope found in Jesus. Your support launches new workers and supports the Global Advance Fund—cmacan.org/jaffray/. Like Robert Jaffray, we want to continue sharing the Good News! The Alliance Canada is committed to Jesus and His mission. We want to bring access to Jesus.
This is an excerpt from the book, On Mission Volume 2. Download your free copy today.