William Leslie's Legacy

 A man and woman walking down the gangplank of the SS Vaderland. Their footsteps are slow and deliberate. It’s November 1929 and already the dark evening is encroaching. It’s cold. They look cold. In fact they look defeated.

The couple are Dr William Leslie and his wife Clara. They are returning from many years as missionaries in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They have faced charging buffaloes, armies of ants, fierce hurricanes; one of them on the eve of their first child being born. They have been beaten and thrown out of towns they worked in. They have witnessed many atrocities against the local population by the Belgian overlords.

They have cleared jungles to build mission stations. They have faced leopard attacks and dealt with cannibals.

But as this Canadian couple arrive back in North America after so many years, the last 17 of them in the Congo, they feel defeated. They feel they had failed. Failed to make an impact. Failed to establish anything that was long-lasting. Failed to see many come to a faith in Christ.

It hadn’t started like that. William Leslie had responded to his faith in God by training as a doctor, having already been working as a pharmacist. His initial work in both the Congo and Angola included meeting a young nurse who helped him recover from an illness. He and Clara married in 1896.

Their hardest work involved clearing jungle in order to build a new mission station along the Kwilu River at Vanga . And it’s from here that they worked out into the seemingly impenetrable jungle areas reaching distant tribes, some of whom were still cannibals.

After 17 years at Vanga, there was a disagreement with some of the tribal leaders. Although reconciliation was achieved, William and Clara knew it was time to return to the States.

They felt the disappointment.

In 2010, missionary Eric Ramsey travelled to Vanga. The two and a half hour flight from Kinshasa to Vanga was then followed by a canoe trip over the river and a 10 mile hike through the jungle.

Ramsey was keen to make contact with the Yansi people. As far as he was aware, there had been some contact with Christians in the past, but he was not expecting what he found.

‘When we got in there, we found a network of reproducing churches throughout the jungle’, Ramsey reports. ‘Each village had its own gospel choir, although they wouldn’t call it that,’ he notes. ‘They wrote their own songs and would have sing-offs from village to village.’

Ramsey found a church in each of the eight villages he and his team visited, scattered across 34 miles. They even found a 1000-seat stone “cathedral” in one of the villages. They learned that this church had become so crowded in the 1980s – with many walking miles to attend — that a church planting movement had begun in the surrounding villages.

It took a bit of detective work to find out how this had happened. The tribal people remembered a missionary. They remembered a name but Ramsey wasn’t sure it was a first or second name.

The name was Leslie.

Back in the States, Ramsey did his homework. William Leslie and his wife Clara had been missionaries with the American Baptist Missionary Union. They would travel at least once a year to these outlying villages. Clara would play her portable organ- although it’s not clear this was always taken with them. William would preach the gospel, teach the tribal children how to read and write, and he even set up a rudimentary educational system.

Those tribes responded. And the Holy Spirit did the rest.

As two tired, disheartened missionaries walked down the gangplank and into the depths of a November evening in New York in 1929, they had no idea as to what God had done.

What a legacy.

We never know the impact we have had as Christians. One day we will find out.

Further Reading:

God reports, May 2014
Our Ancestry Site - Dr William H. Leslie