A sermon preached at
Camp-of-the-Woods, Speculator, New York
August 26, 1994

Ernest Fowler was a man who was faithful in all things, and who made a difference in people's lives. Most of you have never heard his name before. He died 28 years ago this month (on August 3, 1966). He never wrote a book or hosted a TV show. He never called in to a radio talk show. He worked for 32 years at his life's work, and, when he died, it appeared as though it was all for nothing. He had almost nothing to show for his life's work, in ordinary human terms. He was an unsung hero of the faith, in the same tradition of the Biblical characters we have looked at this week. He lived in the 20th century, not Bible times, but, nevertheless, he is a latter-day descendant of that great cloud of witnesses mentioned in Hebrews 11 (see Heb. 12:1).

Ernest Fowler was a missionary to Colombia from 1934 to 1966. He was a simple man, having grown up on a ranch in western Montana. When I knew him, he was a thin, weather-beaten, leather-skinned man who always had a smile on his face and a good story to keep you entertained. God called him to be a missionary to Colombia in the 1930's, and he went. Soon after he arrived, he developed a love for the Indians of northeastern Colombia, and began work among them. After a furlough to the United States in 1940, he returned to Colombia in 1942. Early in 1943, he set out on a difficult trip into the mountainous jungles of northeastern Colombia, accompanied by two other missionaries, Harvey Hammond and Alick Clark. Their goal was to reach the Motilon (or Yukpa) Indians and begin to share the Gospel with them.

Their trip took them up into almost impenetrable jungle areas. They literally had to hack their way through the bush a yard at a time with machetes, for days on end.

If any of you saw the movie "Romancing the Stone" several years ago, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, you may remember that it was set in northern Colombia. The jungle scenes in that movie were set in almost exactly the same territory in which these three missionaries were traveling. (The movie "The Mission," set in southern Colombia, also gives a good picture of the denseness of these jungles.)

During this trip, the other two missionaries, Harvey Hammond and Alick Clark, became sick with malaria, and they had to stop their traveling. After several days, Harvey Hammond died there, and Ernest Fowler had to bury him in a rock cave high in the mountains. He nursed Alick Clark back to enough health that they made it out into civilization without any further trouble. Nevertheless, this attempt to reach the Motilon Indians for Christ was unsuccessful, and exacted a heavy cost.

Several years later, Ernest Fowler and his new wife were able to establish a home high in the mountains among the Motilon Indians, along with Alick Clark and his wife, and another missionary couple. They were delighted at what appeared to be the opening for the Gospel that they had been waiting for. "Friendships were established and progress was made in language analysis. A few of the Yukpas, including old chief Papa Marte, indicated some understanding of the gospel and a desire to follow Christ."

But, there was trouble ahead again. One year, while the Fowlers were on furlough in the U.S., the house which they shared with the Clarks was ransacked amidst a wave of violence that was to hold Colombia -- especially its rural areas -- in its grip for ten years. Again Ernest Fowler was driven out of northeastern Colombia and his desire to minister to the Motilon Indians was again thwarted.

There followed 16 years of varied ministries in Colombia, but Ernest Fowler's heart always wanted to get back to working with the Indians. I got to know Ernest and his family personally during those years, because my family arrived as missionaries in Colombia in 1958 -- sent out from Camp-of-the-Woods, in fact -- and Ernest stayed in our home many times. He had a son, Johnny, who was my age and who became my good friend.

In all of these years, however, Ernest Fowler was faithful to the duties set before him. For a number of years, he was asked to be the Field Director of the Latin America Mission's work in Colombia, which he did cheerfully and faithfully, even though he did not enjoy administration. Then, in 1958, my father arrived in Colombia to take his place, a 30-year-old replacing a 50-year-old. Yet, Ernest cheerfully stepped aside and became one of my father's closest supporters, confidants, and mentors.

During the following years, Ernest was responsible for the mission's church relations, i.e., as a liaison person with the Colombian churches. He performed this task cheerfully and faithfully, until it became clear that some Colombians were actively working against him and undermining his work, and he lost the trust of many people he had served faithfully for many years.

Next, the mission lost its main maintenance man, a Colombian, and Ernest was asked to oversee that area -- not to do things himself, but to make sure they got hired out and done. Yet, as it turned out, he did much of the work himself, again, cheerfully and faithfully.

So, in a matter of less than a decade, Ernest's "career track" had gone -- downward, from a secular perspective! -- from Field Director to church relations man to a glorified janitor! He did all of this without complaint, although, through it all, it was still clear that his heart was with the Indians.

In 1965, the Latin America Mission finally released him to make yet one more attempt to evangelize the Motilon Indians of northeastern Colombia. This time, a young linguist and his wife, Carl Lehmann, had built a home up in the Motilon Indian territory, and the Fowlers, Lehmanns, and Alick Clark and his wife shared the ministry together. My father, who was the Director of the Latin America Mission's work in Colombia at the time, visited Ernest in early 1966, and clearly Ernest was in his element there, and significant work was being done in terms of the language and communicating with the Indians.

In late July of 1966, I was privileged to visit the Fowler family up in the remote mountains. Johnny and I were both 14 years old, and I spent ten days with the family. Peter Clark, Alick Clark's ten-year old son, was also with us during this time. The Fowler family included 15-year-old Valerie, Johnny, 10-year-old Alison, and a 17-year-old Colombian girl who was a live-in household helper. Bill and Sandy Gogel, young American teachers in the city where we lived, were with us most of the time, but they left before the fateful events of August 3.

I spend a wonderful week with the Fowlers. Johnny and I camped out two different nights in unspeakably beautiful spots within a couple of hours of the house (the house itself was an eight-hour hike up from the nearest town). I enjoyed getting to know the Indians and learning a few words of the Yukpa language. All in all, it was an idyllic eight days.

Then, Wednesday, August 3 arrived. We all were scheduled to leave to return to civilization on Friday, the 5th. So, on Wednesday, Mr. Fowler took a "girls only" picnic with his daughter Valerie and the Colombian girl, Elvira, up to a nearby ridge. The rest of us spent the day quietly around the house.

At 4:00 p.m., I was lying in my hammock, reading, under the thatched-roof shelter about 25 yards from the house, where I had been staying while there, when I heard Mrs. Fowler call, "Davey, come here. I need you." I supposed she needed some help shelling beans or something, and I somewhat reluctantly got up to go help.

I got there and she was standing in front of the house. There were seven men standing there, they were all dressed like policemen and they were heavily armed. They had guns on their belts and over their shoulders. They were just chatting politely, making conversation. They said they were looking for gente mala "bad people." We knew what that meant. We were close to the border with Venezuela, and we knew there was a lot of contraband coming through from across the border. We thought they were looking for smugglers.

We invited them in and asked if we could serve them some lemonade or something. They came in, but before we went in, they asked for the three missionaries working there by name: Ernest Fowler, Alick Clark, and Carl Lehmann. None of them was there--just the Fowler family, and Mr. Fowler was up on the ridge. We invited them in, served them lemonade, chatted for a few minutes, and Mrs. Fowler got some coffee started. As she was just about to serve the coffee, the men stood up. She said, "Don't go, don't go! I've got some coffee here." She insisted that it was all ready.

They said, "No, no!" They pulled out their guns, and spread out through the house, putting two men at the doors, one with a machine gun at this door, another with a shotgun at the other door, and they blocked us in with another man in front of us. They said, "You all move against the kitchen table." He had a pistol in his hand, the pistol was cocked, and he waved it back and forth. Whenever he stopped waving it back and forth, it was pointed right at me, six feet away.

They announced that they were going to search the house. I thought, "My goodness, this is a pretty intense search here. We've nothing to hide."

They took Mrs. Fowler into the bedroom, and started looking around. Pretty soon we noticed that they had brought knapsacks that were empty, and they began putting some of our stuff in the knapsacks. Pretty soon they took tape recorders, along with the language files. I don't know exactly when, but pretty soon we realized these were not policemen--these were the bandits that you heard so much about in Colombia. But there was nothing we could do. There was this man pointing the gun at us, finger on the trigger, pistol cocked, right at me.

At that point I thought we were going to die. The typical pattern in Colombia during the violence period - - it was called La Violencia -- was that a house would get attacked; everything would be stolen; women would be raped; people would be killed; house would be burned down, and no trace of anything left. This is what I thought would happen to us. I was convinced that we were all going to die. Obviously, however, it didn't happen for me.

At that point I began to be very afraid. I was afraid of dying. But that only lasted a couple of minutes. As a fourteen-year-old, I didn't have the perspectives of an adult; I didn't have the cares that I have today as a 42-year old. I thought, "My goodness. If I'm going to die, I better get right with the Lord!" I began praying, but I didn't pray that the Lord would save us out of this situation. Rather I prayed for forgiveness of sin, and I prayed that I would be worthy of meeting him when I died. I fully expected--I was absolutely convinced--that in the next hour I would be seeing the face of Jesus Christ. It became an exciting thought. It's hard to explain. But I was excited that this is now the time. I had known about Christ ever since I could remember, and here was the goal we are all looking for--to make it to heaven, to be in glory with the Lord. And here I was facing the opportunity to do that, the privilege of arriving there.

So it was a different sensation, a different feeling. They didn't kill us, though. After a while, as they searched the house looking for things, they became angry that we, who were Americans - and they thought all Americans were rich - had no true valuables. They kept demanding to know where the money and the jewels were. They obviously didn't know missionary life. Somebody came in the bedroom trying to get Mrs. Fowler's wedding ring off. They kept trying, but since she probably never had taken it off, the ring wouldn't budge. A man came in with a knife to cut it off, but he got distracted by someone else who came in and said, "Hey! Look what I found!" The man with the knife looked away, he forgot about the wedding ring, and her finger was saved.

At first, when they started looking for things, they would take items, and then carefully replace them. After a while they just scattered things around. Toward the end they took a deck of cards, and threw them across the floor. Back on those days we still had fountain pens and ink wells, and they took the ink well and just dripped it across the cards. They were in a destructive mood. After about 45 minutes, they said, "You! Come here!" They were speaking to us four children: Allison, Johnny, Peter Clark, and me. "You four come here!"

I thought, "This is it." I figured they were going to line us up against the wall and shoot us down. The only thing I hoped for was that it would be a painless death.

But no, they didn't shoot us. They took us into a little room, one used as a bathroom--a washroom where were we washed up. The outhouse was outside, of course. This was a washroom with a basin, and stored supplies. It was a very small room, and they put us in there. There was a window, but it was boarded up. They told us to stay in there, and that if we came out, they were not responsible for what would happen. The leader told us that he was going to put a man outside the window and a man outside the door. If we would come out, he would not be responsible for what would happen. As he closed the door, the leader told the man stationed outside the door, "Si salen, delen plomo." "If they come out, fill them with lead." So we decided to stay put.

We sat down. The house was made of concrete block up to about four feet high, then wood, and then a tin roof. We at least got down below the top of the concrete block, thinking they might try to machine-gun us through the walls and kill us. Then we noticed that we were sitting among all the kerosene cans. We had only kerosene lanterns for light, and we noticed all these. "Oh no!" we thought. "They're going to burn the house down, and here we are!"

We decided if that should happen, we were just going to burst through the door and take our chances being shot down. We would rather be shot than burned to death. I began praying that the Lord would let me die by being shot rather than by being burned to death.

A few minutes later they threw Mrs. Fowler into the room. She was obviously very shaken. She gathered us around and prayed. We didn't know what was going on. The house quieted down. We didn't know this at the time, but they went up to where my stuff was and stole all my things, including things that are valuable to an eighth-grader. I had a class ring from eighth-grade graduation and some other things. The point is--they left. The problem was that we didn't know it. We still thought there might be somebody outside the door and the window. Things were quiet.

Pretty soon we heard three shots. I'll never forget those shots. They echoed through the valley. There were two in a row, and then a third one a few seconds later. We thought it was Mr. Fowler and the two girls. But, tt wasn't the two girls, because they began screaming. We didn't know if they had been injured, but it turned out that they were not shot at all. They actually ran back to the house.

Here I'll digress to tell how the attackers met Ernest. They were actually leaving to return to civilization. It was about 5:00 p.m. now. They were going down the main trail. We lived about eight hours from the nearest civilization--eight hours coming up, perhaps five, six hours coming down. It was getting dark at that time in the mountains. The attackers were leaving. The trail that Mr. Fowler and his daughters took to get to that ridge came down and joined the main trail about one-third of a mile from the house. The main trail that these men were taking headed down toward the nearest settlement. They met Mr. Fowler and his daughters within 100 yards from the junction where they joined the mail trail.

Two minutes would have made all the difference! The attackers would have passed the trail junction, and they never would have met Mr. Fowler and the girls. As a matter of fact, at one point Mr. Fowler had lost his glasses. He had glaucoma--he had glasses and could hardly see without them. He lost his glasses, and they even went back for 10-15 minutes to look for the glasses. If they would have spent two more minutes looking for the glasses, things would have changed. But they didn't.

They joined the main trail, met the bandits, who immediately stopped them, pulled out their guns, surrounded them on the trail. They pointed their guns at them, and they again pretended to be policemen. They asked Mr. Fowler for his gun--he had a gun for hunting. He gave it to them, asking for a receipt where he could pick it up later. That was a typical practice. Then he noticed that they had some of their stuff in their knapsacks. He noticed the tape recorders and language files. He asked them, "What are you doing with that stuff?" The guy said, "Shut up!"

Mr. Fowler began to realize that something was going on, that something was wrong here. I don't know how the conversation went, but they asked him for his machete. Mr. Fowler had a machete for cutting through the grass. He didn't want to give it to them--he was resisting that. Finally he grudgingly gave them the machete. When he did that the one man standing in front of him shot him point blank in the face. Mr. Fowler fell down, and the man shot him again right away in the back, through the heart. A few seconds later they heard a noise in the bushes, and they shot a third time into the bushes. They didn't know what it was. The girls were not harmed. The men were nervous, they were scared, and they wantedto get away. They kept saying, "Let's get out of here!"

The girls were screaming. The men said roughly, "Shut up! If you don't shut up, we're going to do the same thing to you!" In God's providence, they didn't. They didn't touch them.

The girls came home, expecting to find us all dead in the house. We still didn't know if there was anybody standing guard at the house. So we didn't come out. They came into the house, they couldn't find us. Finally Johnny whispered through the door, "Valerie, is there anybody out there?" She said, "No!"

We came out. She said, "They killed daddy!"

I think Mrs. Fowler said, "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I turned him over, I turned his body over. His face, his mouth was full of blood. I turned his head over and emptied the blood."

Mrs. Fowler gathered us around. She's a remarkable woman. She's still alive--she lives in Billings, Montana. She prayed. She was a woman with all these children. She didn't know what to do. They had stolen all the food. We had no food left. The mountains getting dark. She sat down and prayed. Do you know what she prayed? She prayed for those attackers! She asked God to forgive them.

We had to go get the body. There were a couple of Indians in the house who had come down, and we asked them to go help us, but they wouldn't help us. Their custom was that only the immediate family could touch the dead body. We got a ladder and a canvas tarp, and I got a towel. I ran ahead with the towel to the body. I got there. Ernest was laying on the trail, face up, because Valerie had already turned him over. I couldn't see any of his face--it was blown away. I wrapped his face with a towel. Johnny came along behind me, saw him, threw himself down onto his father's chest, and cried. We put the ladder on the trail below him, and put the tarp over the ladder, rolled him on to the ladder, covered him with the tarp, and picked up the ladder. It was very heavy! We were fourteen years old and could hardly carry it. Every 30-40 yards we had to stop and rest. We asked the Indians to help us, but they wouldn't even help us do that.

So we walked a quarter mile, finally got back to the house, put the body under a tree, and tried to decide what to do. We didn't want to stay in the house--the house was demolished, destroyed, in terms of the insides. And we did not know if these men were going to come back and continue to attack us. We decided to spend the night in the field right in front of the house. We began to hear voices shouting from down the trail. I won't tell you all the details, but we ended up leaving that place, because were afraid. We left and went up to an Indian village a half-hour away, and spent the night there. Johnny went up farther during the middle of the night with another Indian man two hours farther up to the home of a Christian man, Jesús Perez, who helped us. He said that we couldn't touch the house or the body until the authorities come. He sent his own hired man down now, ten hours to civilization, in the middle of the night. He himself arrived 5:00 a.m. the next morning in the Indian village for us, and was very much helpful to us that day (Thursday). There was not much we could do. We dug the grave, but we couldn't touch the body. We couldn't really do anything with the house. By Thursday evening word had gotten down to the city and a crew of about five policemen plus Alick Clark, the missionary, arrived at our house around 11:30 that night. They took depositions from us at that time. At 5:30 a.m. Friday morning we had a little burial service. The body was just wrapped in the tarp. Mr. Clark opened the tarp, pulled off the wedding ring, and gave it to Mrs. Fowler. She was in the house, and didn't want to see the body. We buried him, and then cleaned up the house and went down out of the mountains.

Word had gotten out by this time of the killing. My father was director of the Latin America Mission at the time. He was in another city at the time - Medellin. He immediately flew to the nearest city to us. The reports he heard were very sketchy: all he heard was that somebody had been killed. He didn't know if everybody was killed, if one person had been killed, if there were injuries. By Friday afternoon, he had arrived at the base of the mountain. We still had not come out. This was almost 48 hours after the initial attack. My father had a son there, and he didn't know if his son was dead or alive. He had a close colleague whom he knew had been killed, and he had friends there.

The Colombian army was going in when my father arrived - a company of 25 men coming up the mountains to investigate this now Friday afternoon. Dad took off and he outstripped them just racing up the mountain. He thought we were all dead. He says that one of the most emotional moments in his life was when he came around the bend of a trail and he heard a shout: "Dad!" That was me! I was first, leading the pack at that moment, along with a Colombian Indian boy who had joined the party somewhere during our trip down.

He came up. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, okay. Everything's okay, but they killed Mr. Fowler."

We went down and then came out to civilization.

APPLICATION

What are the lessons we can learn from this story? I think there are at least two things we can learn.

The FIRST is that Ernest Fowler did make a difference, because he was faithful in all things, large and small. Ernest Fowler got dirty many times and served others his whole life. I haven't even mentioned the dozens of ways that he served the Lord and others during the years when he wasn't able to be with the Indians that he so much loved. However, as we were coming down the mountain after we had buried him, his wife said something to my father that was very profound, and that very much captured the spirit of his life:

"Ernest was always ready to step aside for those in a hurry to get ahead, and step back to help and encourage those who were lagging behind."

In terms of one of our Scripture passages for today, Ernest Fowler was "faithful, even to the point of death" in his ministry for Christ and his concern for others. The apostle John wrote these words in Revelation 2:8-11 (NIV):

{8} To the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. {9} I know your afflictions and your poverty--yet you are rich! I know the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. {10} Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and i will give you the crown of life. {11} He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.

SECOND, is a lesson that's closer to home and more personal. I personally was greatly affected by the experiences of August 3, 1966. The following year, when my family was back in the U.S. on furlough, I was reflecting on these experiences, and wondering about a "life verse" that would characterize what I wanted my life to be. The verses that came to me were from the second passage of Scripture for this morning, from Philippians 1:20-21. The apostle Paul, speaking to the church at Philippi, says that

{19} I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. {20} I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. {21} For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.

These have proven to be powerful verses in my life over the years. I certainly do not always live up to the ideal in them -- I fail more often than not, it seems -- but this is a worthy set of goals and values to have for oneself.

What this experience -- and these verses -- taught me is that God had something for me to do. To this day, I don't know why we weren't all killed that day on August 3. But, we weren't. The Lord spared us, and, for me, it has been a constant reminder that I do need to make a difference, wherever I am. It was an encouragement to me in high school, and later in college. It has been an encouragement to me in my adult life, as well.

I certainly don't go around thinking about this experience all the time. But, when I do reflect back on it, I am humbled that the Lord spared me and the others, and I am reminded that Christ should be magnified in my body, whether by life -- perhaps ESPECIALLY by life -- or by death.

We all can make a difference, as we remain faithful to our Lord. Remember the words of the apostle John:

Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer.... Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life (Rev. 2:10).

God isn't calling most of use here to be martyrs for him, the way he did Ernest Fowler. He wants us merely to be faithful, in WHATEVER circumstances we are in, to magnify Christ through our lives, so that, as we live our lives, to live is indeed Christ, and to die, that's so much the better.

How can we be faithful and make a difference for Christ? There are hundreds of ways, of course. And, we must remember that Christians and non-Christians alike can make a difference in our world, of course. There is much good around the world that is done by people who are not Christians, or who have never even heard of Christ. However, the most significant differences we can make are those that come when our actions and words are rooted in our faith in Jesus Christ, and we are faithfully doing what he has for us, whether it is doing something as exotic as slogging through an impenetrable jungle, as Ernest Fowler did, or something as mundane as fixing someone's washing machine, as Ernest Fowler did, or something as "spiritual" as sharing Christ with a friend, neighbor, or stranger, as Ernest Fowler did countless times, or whether it is something as dramatic as dying for Christ, as Ernest Fowler did.

In any and all of these ways, and countless others, we glorify Christ and we do indeed make a difference, if we are truly doing it for him and his glory, and not for ourselves and our own glory.

David M. Howard, Jr.