D
uring the late 1800s and early 1900s, Adventist missionaries began penetrating East Asia and the South Pacific with the gospel. Many survived, serving for years; others paid the ultimate price.
Hubert and Pearl Tolhurst
Hubert Leonard Tolhurst and Pearl Philips, graduates of Australasian Missionary College in Australia, were married in 1915. Hubert was 24 and Pearl was 23. Within weeks of their wedding, they sailed for the Tongan archipelago to take charge of a mission station.
Those were happy years for the couple, but Hubert and Pearl started to suffer sustained illnesses. By late 1918, Australian church leaders learned that Pearl’s health was failing and sent messages for the couple to return to Sydney. But it was too late. The influenza pandemic of 1918 had reached Tonga, and Hubert and Pearl readily succumbed to the disease. Despite this, as an obituary describes, they worked “long hours ministering to the sick and stricken people, and then succumbed to the plague themselves.” Hubert recovered, but Pearl “gradually grew weaker. After a four-months’ struggle for life she fell asleep in his [Hubert’s] arms,” dying on March 14, 1919, four days after her twenty-eighth birthday.1
Pearl’s parents greeted the news of her death with a sense of willing sacrifice: “It came as a great shock. . . But God’s will be done. Our dear girl has fallen at her post and we thank the dear Lord that He has seen fit to use her for a time in His cause. . . We feel deeply burdened about the work in Haapai and will gladly release another of our girls if it will help, till another worker is appointed.” Remarkably, this offer was to be taken up.2
Back in Australia, Hubert became better acquainted with Elsmer, one of Pearl’s sisters. They married on March 15, 1921, and served in Tonga, New Zealand, and other islands of the South Pacific for the next 20 years.
Norman and Alma Wiles
In late 1914, having just graduated, Norman Wiles volunteered to serve in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). But he was single, and the Australasian Union committee felt that a missionary ought to be married. During his college years, Norman had been friends with Alma Butz, the daughter of American missionaries to Pitcairn Island, Tonga, New Zealand, and Australia.
It was suggested that Norman marry Alma, and then they could be sent. She later recalled her anger, writing, “I would not submit. . . I would not be bought or sold by committee action.” But after her mother counseled with her, she agreed to meet Norman. According to Alma, “We talked over the advisability and the future possibilities at some length. Norman never proposed in the usual way. We simply felt that if this was the action of the committee, the Lord was leading and that settled the matter.”3
In early 1915, the newlyweds studied at Sydney Sanitarium, taking a course in tropical medicine. Later that year, they sailed for the New Hebrides, where they initially worked as part of a larger group of missionaries based in Atchin. By February 1916, Norman and Alma began preparing to establish a new station on the larger island of Malekula. In early April, when Norman was 23 and Alma was 21, they took up residence there. The tribes who lived on the island included “warlike cannibals,” and the murders of missionaries were not uncommon. A local chief “vowed to eat nothing until he had feasted on the flesh of a white man,” and “Norman was the only white man available.”4
For the next two years, Norman and Alma won the local people over, learning their languages and making friends. By October 1917, the church leaders in Australia recognized that Norman and Alma had “been working to the point of breaking down their health,” so they “felt obliged to send them home to build up again.” In November, Norman was suffering badly from repeated attacks of malaria, and, according to another missionary, was “very pale and thin.” In 1918, Norman filled responsibilities back in his homeland. In January 1920, however, to the Wileses’ delight, they returned to Malekula. By April, they were receiving requests for Adventist teachers from tribes on the island who had never before contacted them.5
But on May 1, 1920, Norman succumbed to blackwater fever. By the third, he was “vomiting all the time, and suffering from chills.” By the fifth, Alma confided her anxiety to her diary: “Hard as it all was, my Father strengthened my faith, so that I never once doubted, nor was my confidence in Him shaken. . . Again and again I pled that if it could be to His honor and glory, my darling might be spared me, but He gave me strength to add, ‘Thy will be done.’”6
On May 5, 1920, Norman Wiles died after five days of terrible suffering. Alma dressed her husband’s body in a new shirt and then covered his corpse in a shroud. Friendly tribesmen helped her to dig a grave and bury Norman in it. She wrote that her heart “was too full for words.”7
Norman was only 27 years old when he died; Alma was 25 when she was widowed. But just as Hubert Tolhurst returned to the Pacific Island mission fields, so, too, did Alma Wiles. She later served as a missionary in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria. A passion for mission ran deep in her soul—and in those of many of her contemporaries.
Elmer and Leatha Coulston
On August 14, 1930, Dr. Elmer F. Coulston, a graduate of the College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda, California, married Leatha Wenke, a nursing graduate of Emmanuel Missionary College and Battle Creek Sanitarium. Both were twenty-four years old. Barely two weeks after their wedding, they sailed for China, where they studied Chinese in Beijing. After a year of learning the language, they traveled northwest to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) to the North China Sanitarium. Dr. Coulston was its first medical superintendent, and he threw himself unreservedly into the medical ministry work.
On November 30, 1931, a son, Chris, was born in Kalgan. Sadly, little Chris was buried there too. He died on October 4, 1932. Less than two years later, Elmer contracted diphtheria. Although taken to Beijing for treatment, he died on May 26, 1934. His body was taken back to Kalgan and buried in the same grave as his son. He was only twenty-eight.
Elmer was young, charismatic, and magnetic; remarkably fluent in Chinese; and generally judged to possess “brilliant talents.” His death was regarded as a “terrible loss” by non-Adventist expatriates in northern China and church workers both inside and outside China and mourned by the local community in Kalgan. Yet his “sudden illness and death” did not come entirely as a surprise.”8
In his three years at Kalgan, he was often ill, regularly “battling with pleurisy and fever.” The problem was that he prioritized his patients ahead of himself. He commonly worked closely with highly contagious patients. A year before his death, he required a major surgery “which of necessity required that he remain in bed for many days.” But “a few days after his operation an acute case whose life depended on surgery was brought to the hospital.” Elmer had “the man . . . placed on a cot by his bed, and he, while lying down, reached over and successfully operated on this patient, saving his life.”9
Even in Elmer’s final illness, after falling ill on a Friday, on “Sunday he responded to an emergency call, labouring over a dying person . . . for three hours until exhausted.” Having “learned to love” the Chinese people, Elmer and Leatha let nothing stand in the way of modeling Christ’s healing ministry to them.10
Elmer had been mentored by Dr. Harry Miller, president of the China Division and a surgeon himself. Miller identified the underlying cause of his protégé’s death as overwork, commenting, “His one fault was working beyond his strength.” But Elmer had told Miller shortly after arriving in China, “Whatever sacrifice is necessary, I shall willingly make for my Master. Truly, I shall be at the front line trenches.”11
1. “Life-Sketch of Pastor H. L. Tolhurst,” 13; C. H. Prettyman, “The Death of Sister Pearl Tolhurst,” Australasian Record, May 26, 1919, 8; Tolhurst, “Tolhurst,” 7.
2. Prettyman, “Death of Sister Pearl Tolhurst,” 8.
3. Roy Brandstater, Man-Eaters of Malekula (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2017), 46.
4. H. M. Blunden, “In the New Hebrides: No. 4—In the Perils of the Heathen,” Australasian Record 26, no. 1 (January 9, 1922): 2, 3; Brandstater, Man-Eaters, 46, 54, 55, and see also 35, 46–49, 51, 53, 132; C. H. Parker, “Atchin, New Hebrides,” Australasian Record 19, no. 25 (June 21, 1915): 4.
5. G. F. Jones, “The Melanesian Mission,” in “Reports of Tenth Session of the Australasian Union Conference,” special issue no. 1, Australasian Record 22, no. 22 (October 21, 1918): 54; Letter from Sister Jones, quoted in Australasian Record 21, no. 39 (December 17, 1917): 8; Brandstater, Man-Eaters, 58, 60.
6. Brandstater, Man-Eaters, 61, 62, 65, 66.
7. Brandstater, Man-Eaters, 62, 66–68, 70–74; see also A. G. Stewart, “Wiles,” Obituary, Australasian Record 24, no. 16 (August 9, 1920): 6.
8. D. H. Gray, “Died at His Post,” Australasian Record 38, no. 42 (October 15, 1934): 2, 3; “From Pastor Geo. J. Appel,” China Division Reporter 4, no. 7 (July 1934): 3; H. W. Miller, quoted in Gray, “Died at His Post,” 3. See the collection of report clippings on Coulston’s death in Chinese an American newspapers (not church papers) in Loma Linda University’s Elmer F. Coulston Collection.
9. Miller, quoted in Gray, “Died at His Post,” 2. See also Coulston, “North China Sanitarium,” 15, 16.
10. Miller, quoted in Gray, “Died at His Post,” 3; Miller, “Dr. E. F. Coulston,” 21; Obituary, China Division Reporter, July 1934, 22.
11. Miller, “Memoirs to the Late Doctor,” 23; Miller, q
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