When we first started raising funds to support our mission endeavor in Turkey, people often asked us, “Have you read the amazing book called Diamondola?” After we read it, we started asking people the same question. It is indeed an amazing book. It is the true story of a young Adventist girl who spoke six languages and helped establish the Adventist movement in Turkey during a time of violent revolution. The greatest miracle of the biographical narrative is that the heroine dies in the middle of the book, and an Adventist elder prays and raises her to life!

After reading this incredible story, my wife and I badly wanted to meet the author, Mildred Olsen, who had personally interviewed the resurrected missionary, Diamondola.

In our support-raising journey through the American Northwest, we ran into someone who knew Mildred and gave us her phone number. We called her, and to our delight she was thrilled to hear of our modern mission venture for Turkey. She not only invited us to visit but also to stay a night at her home.

She was likely about 80 at the time but full of vim and vigor. She kept us in amazement with stories of her own mission work throughout the Middle East. (She wrote a series of books about herself called Midge in the Middle East.)

One unforgettable story she told was about a man named Theodore Anthony. He was the first one to bring the Adventist message to Turkey. Soon after her personal retelling of the story to us, it appeared as a cover story in the Adventist Review. (To read that interesting missionary article yourself, loaded with detail, you can find it at www.gotential.org/free-things.)

The story of Theodore is especially dear to me now because this gospel entrepreneur was a tentmaker—he received no funding from the church for his intrepid frontier mission. To be precise, he was a shoemaker. Here is a very short summary of his story.

“Theodore Anthony was a poor cobbler living in an obscure village at the foot of Mount Ararat,” Mildred Olsen begins the story. Theodore badly wanted to move to America, so he applied to the U.S. government for immigration. He had to wait 28 years for the paperwork to return! (How’s that for a bureaucratic delay?)

Finally, around 1888, he moved to California. He didn’t speak English, and no one nearby spoke any Turkish. Fortunately he knew some Greek and made a few Greek friends. One day he saw a tent being erected, and he thought a circus had come to town. He was delighted. He had never been to a circus before. He came early and took a seat. But there were no elephants, no bears, no clowns. The tent filled up, and Theodore was surprised when a chorister began to lead the crowd in singing. Then a man began to speak from the Bible.

What was most thrilling to Theodore was that the man was preaching in Turkish! Even the chorister was singing in Turkish. It warmed his heart to hear his native tongue for the first time in more than a year. Theodore returned night after night to hear the Bible messages. After some 20 nights, the speaker made an appeal for baptism. Theodore stood to his feet and came forward. Jesus was Lord of all—he was convicted.

But when Theodore got to the front and began to talk to the speaker, both he and the speaker got a shock. It immediately became clear that the speaker didn’t know a word of Turkish! A Greek was brought forward to translate, and questions and answers began to flow back and forth. Theodore answered all the questions correctly. He had truly heard all 20 lectures in Turkish! God had performed a miracle for the salvation of this man and the future of Turkey.

After his baptism, Theodore began to think about all he had learned about the Sabbath and the Second Coming. He thought about all the men and women back home who had no one to teach them. Theodore determined that he should forsake his long-awaited U.S. citizenship, move back to Turkey and become a missionary to his own people.

How would he support his mission? Of course, he would make and repair shoes. It was the business he knew best. He moved back to Turkey, to Constantinople. Living on his meager cobbler’s income, he began to fervently testify to his fellow Armenians about scriptures they had never considered before.

Theodore won his first convert in 1890, a young man who became the first to get a “seminary” education in Switzerland.

Years passed, and the church Theodore started in this unreached land grew rapidly. How? Not by salaried church personnel, but by tentmakers. Here is a paragraph directly from Mildred Olsen’s research:

“The national government’s Ministry of Religion granted only two types of missionary permits—one to the Orthodox churches, and the other to Protestants. The Orthodox could not, and the Protestants would not recognize Adventists, so the church in Turkey resorted to the same method for evangelism employed by the apostolic church: Capable craftsmen settled in various territories of Turkey and plied their trade while they witnessed for the truth. Theodore Anthony went to Bursa. Two Armenians, a tailor and an umbrella maker went to Nicodemia. A Greek artisan went to Samsun; an Armenian carpenter moved to Adana. An Armenian colporteur sold literature on ships at Constantinople.”

I hope that excites you, because what once propelled the Advent movement around the globe must happen again—lay people armed with professional skills and conviction spreading the Good News. Notice that conviction pushed Theodore and these other tradesmen to move the location of their work for purposes of strategic gospel telling. For Theodore, that meant foregoing a 28-year dream of living in America.

If God could use a common shoemaker, umbrella maker and other humble tradesmen, what might He do with you and your profession? Where could you go? To whom are you now telling this news?

If you would like to increase your purpose by witnessing in the marketplace at home or abroad, I have begun a monthly email that provides succinct training on being salt and light in your work world to help you to be a tentmaker and give voice to your beliefs among those you associate with in your career. Sign up at www.bit.do/gotential.

Ephesians 6:15 says to have “your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” Anyone know any good shoemakers?

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