Biography
Dr. Clive Calver is President of World Relief in Wheaton, Illinois, the international assistance arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. A native of England, Clive was educated at the University of London and spent 14 years as General Director of the Evangelical Alliance, an umbrella organization for British evangelicals. He joined World Relief in 1997, and as President, he is chief spokesperson for the organization’s work in disaster relief, assistance to the poor, and refugee re-settlement. World Relief is sponsored by the 49 evangelical denominations that make up the National Association of Evangelicals, representing 43,000 congregations in America.[Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath" 
Just a few weeks ago I was in Sudan. As I sat among those who looked like skeletons, I know how the American servicemen felt when they released the victims of Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps. I watched these skeletons walking. As I watched, a twenty-four year old woman who had been deserted by her husband, lay down her eighteen-month old little daughter who she had managed to get to the feeding center, but too late. And she laid the daughter down to die.

I want to talk about death and about what it means to be a Christian in a world that is facing death and suffering. The story in I Kings, Chapter 17, of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath’s son is what always comes to mind for me. That wonderful moment when the widow of Zarephath, who has looked after Elijah, who has helped him in his time of trouble and difficulty, who has kept him alive, swings round on the prophet and says, “What do you have to do with me, oh man of God? Why have you caused the death of my son?” Her only son is dead and Elijah says, “Give me the boy.” He takes the boy upstairs to his room and he prays to God; he lays himself out on the boy and life returns to him and he takes the boy down to see his mother.

It is a very simple story. It is a very wonderful story. I want to draw three things to our attention and the first is this: Elijah says, “Give me the boy.” He doesn’t make excuses. He doesn’t try to answer the widow’s cry of frustration and horror with any cheap, glib answer. He just says, “Give me the problem. Give me the need. Let me handle it.”

I don’t know if you suffer from famine fatigue, shocked to see yet more pictures of the starving and the dying. I don’t know if you are turned off by the sight of poverty or human need, but that is not how Elijah acted. He took what responsibility he could himself and said, “Give me the boy.”

I was in Ruanda last year and met Janvier. Let me take you to Janvier’s house for a moment. It’s not really a house. It’s not much bigger than yours and my closet, and it’s quite dark. Your eyes have to get used to the gloom. You see a picture on the wall of Janvier when she was younger, about five years before, looking happy and very attractive. Now, she is sitting on a chair looking old and haggard. She can only be about thirty-five, with three little children by her feet. The picture was taken when she and her husband found out that they couldn’t have children, and her husband started going off with other women. He kept going off with other women but coming back to Janvier. Janvier, as she sits there, tells of how her husband kept coming back to her and the last gift he ever gave her was AIDS.

Just along the mud track from Janvier’s home is the home of Josephine. She was raped ten to fifteen times a day for ten days in a refugee camp. Josephine has AIDS too.

Janvier’s husband died in the genocide. The three little children are orphans because you have to look after orphans in Ruanda. You see, Janvier said, “Give me the boy” and literally cared for people in need. But Janvier is dying. She can’t do much sewing any more or keep herself and the three little orphans alive.

There is a bunch of Christians, teenage girls from a local church who come out and see Janvier and Josephine every time they can scrape enough together to feed them. They take them food to try to keep them alive for long enough to introduce them to the Jesus who is the real hope for the future. They want Janvier to meet Jesus before AIDS kills her. That is the wonder of that story. It’s the story of hope. “Give me the boy.”

Elijah says, “Give me the boy,” but he doesn’t keep the problem to himself, because it would crush him and overpower him. Instead he prays. He turns to the one person who can help and prays that God will move in that situation. He prays, “Oh, Lord, let this boy’s life return to him.” Now there has never been a resurrection in scripture up to this point. This is the first one. Elijah is praying, “Lord, I want you to do what I’ve never seen you do, what no one has ever seen you do. I want you to do the impossible.”

Sometimes we look at this world and it’s impossible to see how change can come and I believe God is waiting for a people who will take their little bit of responsibility on themselves. What can I pray for? What can I give to? What can I do? “Give me the boy” and then we’ll turn it over to God and say, “Lord, come and do what I have never seen you do. Come and use what I can do. Use it to your glory.” When we turn to God like that, we find that a world that is missing God actually receives something that it can get no other way, and that is the relevant presence of a God who is there.

Let me tell you about my mother, back in England, five years ago. You see, my dad died in 1980. He died of a heart attack, the first one. One moment he was there; the next minute he was gone. As a dutiful son, my duty was to go with my wife, Ruth, and see my mum and say, “Mum, would you like to come and live with us?” My mum was a teacher at business skills in London. She only had one child, me, and she loved her peace and quiet. She loved her profession. She looked at son, daughter-in-law, three screaming grandchildren and the likelihood of more, and she smiled weakly and said, “Thank you for the offer, but I’ll manage.” And she did. She looked after herself well and everything went well until the day we found she had Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is desperate. First of all, you get confused. Then you start to lose your judgment. Then you lose your identity and you lose the identity of others. My mum used to think I was a pink elephant. She couldn’t remember words any more. We were told that we couldn’t look after my mum because she might be violent to the children, so we put her in a specialists home to care for her and other Alzheimer’s victims. Either my wife, Ruth, or I would go and visit my mum every week. One week I was away in the north of England speaking and so Ruth went. My mum was crying, so Ruth went to one of the staff and said, “Why is my mother-in-law crying?” They said, “Oh, Flora does sometimes. She doesn’t know who she is or where she is, but we cheer her up. We tell her dirty jokes and she laughs.” Now that’s not the kind of thing that my mother would normally do, so Ruth was very concerned. She persuaded my mum to go to the lovely little private room she had. It took about fifteen minutes to get her the twenty yards to her room, but when Ruth got her there she said to my mum, “Would you like me to pray for you?” There was no way that my mum could understand, but somehow something clicked for her and she said, “Yes.” And Ruth prayed for her mother-in-law. But then my wife forgot where she was and said, “Mum, would you like to pray?” My mum couldn’t say anything coherent, but somehow a window came just for a moment. This isn’t changed one iota for the purpose of this talk. This is what my mother prayed. It was the last coherent thing she said in her life. She said, “Dear Lord, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am and I don’t know where I am, but please love me. Dear Lord, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am and I don’t know where I am, but please love me.”

You know, it’s that kind of moment where truth comes, when your body is being destroyed by cancer as hers was, and your mind is scrambled by Alzheimer’s disease as hers was. You still have a spirit to know and love God. We’re still a people who can say, “Give me the boy” and take our part of this world’s pain. We can still ask God to come and do what we’ve never seen Him do, because He doesn’t leave us but stays with us.

Elijah goes down and takes the boy, who is now alive, to his mother and the woman says, “Now I know you’re a man of God and that the word of God in your mouth is truth.” A few days later, Elijah was to take on 850 prophets of Baal and Ashtoreth on Mount Carmel. He was to defy them to see fire come from their God and then fire came from Elijah’s God as he went out on a limb and called for God to answer by fire. How could he have that faith? Very easily. He’d seen God bring life to a dead boy and a widow said, “Now I know you are a man of God.” He knew that God could do it again and this time a nation said, “The Lord is God.”

I believe that the widows and the orphans and the sick and the suffering of this world need to see a people who love God like that and love them. I watched as women in Sudan did not give the normal Sudanese greeting which is this [makes a gesture], “Welcome.” Instead they could barely life their arms off the ground. I got an interpreter to get his ear to their mouths, to find out what they were saying, and he turned to me and said, “Clive, they’re all saying the same thing. They’re saying, “Please go away. Please go away and get us help. Please go away and get us food.” I promised I’d come here and do that.

You see, we’ve got a job in this world. It’s a very simple one. Our job in this world is to take our responsibility, that bit that we can take, and pray, love and give to make a difference. We’ve got a responsibility to find the God who can come to our lives and change those lives and do what we’ve never seen Him do, make us useful in His service. And, you know, He starts in the small and then works in the big. He started with one widow, then a nation. God starts with the small, then He goes to the big. He starts with you, starts with me. May God bless you. Together let’s change our world.

Interview with Clive Calver
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Your stories that you talked about were very interesting. Tell us a little bit about the World Relief organization that you are head of and came to this country to lead.

Clive Calver: Certainly. We have about 850 staff around the world, but we are essentially a relief and development agency working with refugees here. One of the top three refugee providers in the states, working twenty-six countries of the world, the poorest and most needy with people who are suffering, struggling for life, to try to give them long-term hope to develop their objectives, to give them the means of supporting themselves. We do that from the churches, from Christian people here, to the churches and through the churches around the world. So we’ve always got an infrastructure to work through.

Brown: Well, that’s the difference. You work through churches to supply help to the local areas. You don’t have world organization camps set up where you give out food and this sort of thing. All the help goes directly to the churches.

Calver:  Yes. If we were to run a camp or if we are running a special project or a medical care or supply support system, we’re doing it with the churches. The great thing there, of course, is you’ve got local labor. You’ve got the means of insuring that corruption is kept to a minimum, that efficiency is maximized and that what you give your dollar to actually gets there.

Brown: That’s a real important statement that you’ve just made, because we all wonder, we all have different solicitations that come to us and they call them world organizations and sometimes it is difficult to make a choice. But yours is different in that you work through the churches and you do assure that most of it gets to the local people, the people who really need it.

Tell us a little bit. You come from England. You came to the United States, working in the evangelical church. How does the evangelical church differ in London than it does in the United States?

Calver:  I think, inevitably, cultures are different and I think that in Britain it is very significant that evangelical Christians are growing. They had gotten down to 2% of the population fifteen years ago. Now it’s about 7%. I think there is a real partnership between black and white evangelicals. I think people are not really politically, very partisan. They’re not very partisan about their denominations. I think you get desperate when you get small and there was a real desire to touch our nation, a real desire to be part of a world that was in need, as well. And so there is a lot more international awareness but part of that is because the states are just so vast.

Brown: Well, absolutely, but you just said something that is significant. You said you got about 7%, that you’ve grown to 7% from 2% where they were. That means that your attendance and involvement is on the ascendancy. I read an article not too long ago that church attendance was diminishing. What do you attribute this to?

Calver:  Well, I think church attendance in Britain is still diminishing because, of course, there was a tradition of church attendance, of nominal church going. That is still declining. What is increasing is the number of evangelical Christians. There are over 50% of Protestant church goers in Britain. It is those who have a personal relationship in their lives with Christ. And they are perhaps spontaneously committed to social justice and activism but their real heart is they want to be a biblical people, and as our own Prime Minister John Major asked me, “Why are we growing and no one else?” I think people have got enough (can’t get this word) of their own. They are looking for faith and faith that can be justified rationally and worked out in life. And as we sought to love and care for people, people were coming to faith in Jesus.

Brown: Tell me a little bit about the work of the evangelical church in Britain as opposed to the United States. Are your challenges still the same? Are you working in local communities or are you a world vision community? What are your efforts and what is your thrust?

Calver:  I think that the thrust in Britain wasn’t and isn’t today to really see a community touched with the love of Jesus, so there is very little emphasis on getting people to come into church. Much more in getting church out among people. So how do we go and adopt the abused? How do we go and care for the sick and the bereaved? How do we go and meet the needs of the homeless? It is that sort of emphasis and that concept. Then as people come to faith in Christ, they ask “Why do you do this?” And you talk about what knowing and loving Jesus means. Then you can draw people into the church for nurturing and support, so that they in turn go out and share their faith. That is really the concept, but then there is a passion for the world and that is, “How do you share this same message world wide?” We’re part of a world family.

Brown: And you’re doing great work, too, and we truly appreciate it. I can appreciate the thrust of what you get from the church if you are getting the people involved, because people seem to enjoy what they do more when they have that personal commitment and can get something done.

Calver: That’s right. I also think being part of a world family is critical for us all. I hope so.

Brown: Thank you very much. I truly enjoyed your message and I know our audience did, too. God bless you as you continue your great work.