The missionary man

Lloyd Augustus (and not Aloysius as was published in Part I) George Cooke grew up the son of an Anglican minister. In church, he heard much about missionary journeys from Jamaica to several faraway lands.

When he was a 17-year-old Cornwall College student living at Cambridge in St James, Cooke attended an open-air meeting outside the smallest of his father’s six churches at Chigwell in Hanover. The sermon was delivered by an Anglican Church Army captain, and Cooke was impressed. “I soon became aware that the Lord was calling me to serve Him, but desired to stay within my denomination and become a Church Army evangelist,” he recalled.

In 1959, Cooke was converted, and one of his first desires was to serve God as a missionary. Shortly after his conversion he read two Reader’s Digest condensed books about missionary work.

He began to proselytise to other young people by way of distributing literature and personal witnessing. He then applied to join the Church Army, the evangelistic ministry of his church. Bishop Percival W. Gibson referred him to the new Church Army director in Jamaica, Captain Cousins, who directed him to go to the United Kingdom for training in 1962. That did not happen.

In 1961 Cooke attended Teen-Time Camp in Mandeville. There, he met Reverend Gallimore and his wife Helen, who had been instrumental in beginning work among the Chinese of Jamaica, leading to the establishment of the Chinese Christian Group, and the Swallowfield Chapel. His father had known Reverend Gallimore when he was a priest at St Luke’s Church in Cross Roads. Helen Gallimore was one of the Clark cousins who had been a missionary to China. This chance meeting with the Gallimores would inspire his father to allow him to return to the camp.

However, in a strange twist of fate, Cooke left the Anglican Church in 1962 and departed for Kingston, where he met a group of young people called the Ambassadors for Christ. Among them was a Marva Johnson, with whom Cooke became much acquainted. They travelled with the group to the eastern Caribbean for the first time in April 1962.

“I later surrendered my life to go to Bible school and into missionary service … . Knowing the Lord was leading me into missionary service, I wrote to the late Dr Oswald J. Smith of the People’s Church, Toronto, Canada, for advice on missionary schools in Canada. He replied, recommending two such schools, but with the suggestion that I contacted Jamaica Bible College (JBC) in Mandeville, Manchester, saying ‘it is quite good’,” he shared.

Cooke applied to the recommended schools and was accepted, but he could not take up the offers because he was not financially able. He was, however, also accepted at JBC, where, he later found out, Dr Smith’s two sisters, who were married to missionaries, were now lecturers. In the summer of 1963, Cooke and Johnson returned with the Ambassadors for Christ to Dominica, and in August he enrolled into JBC. Marva Johnson joined him there in 1964 to also prepare herself for missionary work. In that year they made another mission to Dominica.

In his book, The Story of the Jamaican Missions, Cooke says his days at JBC “only served to increase his desire for missionary service”. He wrote poems and a missionary play that was performed several times at JBC and Youth for Christ rallies. “One person who was led to renew her commitment to serve as a missionary was Elaine Huie, who saw this play … ,” Cooke writes. She was to become his second wife.

When Cooke and Johnson were at JBC, they first heard of the International Missionary Fellowship (IMF) from a Tom Northern. It was a serendipitous moment for them, a portal to the mission field that they had desired to venture on to. They shortened Johnson’s course of study at JBC by one year, got married in the summer of 1967, and enrolled at the IMF Training Centre at St D’Acre in St Ann in September. After nine months of intense training, Cooke and Johnson, now pregnant with their first child, graduated and began to garner support for their departure to Dominica.

There, they served with the Gospel Mission, a local church group established by missionaries of the British-based World Evangelisation Crusade. They continued the summer camp work that they had started in 1966, as well as established a church in the village of Grand Bay, where the summer teams of 1965 and ’66 had converted a number of locals. Just as the work was getting off the ground, in early 1971, they were recalled to Jamaica to lead the IMF Training Centre. “But, a foundation had been laid which God built on. A thriving church now stands in that village in Dominica,” Cooke writes.