FOUZI AYOUB'S FUNERAL SERVICE

Mr Fouzi Ayoub was born in Palestine on Christmas Eve 1940. Raised as a Greek Orthodox he was sent by his parents to a Sunday School. Every day his father read from the book of Proverbs to him. "Are there no more books in the Bible?" he once asked his father. "No," he father said.

Fouzi was a very mischievous boy, experimenting and exploring. He once swallowed some chemicals and was painfully ill. The church came and prayed for him. His father vowed that if Fouzi was healed he would dedicate him to God.

He left Palestine for the Lebanon in 1948 on the back of a lorry. It was during those years there that he was converted to believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. He was thirteen years of age. God impressed upon his conscience that he was a sinner, and that unless he trusted in the Son of God he would remain a lost man. He saw that he needed to be saved by the grace of God. Fouzi was actually baptized in the river Jordan.

In the Lebanon he attended an evangelical school and the firm hand of Christian discipline was a kind restraint on his irrepressible character. His sister Sally paid for his education. The teachers at that school sent him to the Bible College of Wales in Swansea. While he was in Wales he met Wendy in 1962, and shortly after meeting her he told he was going to marry her. He joined Operation Mobilisation and worked with them all over the Middle East.

During 1964 he went back to the Lebanon as a married man and found a job as a teacher there. But, though a brilliant schoolmaster he needed professional qualifications and so in 1967 he returned to the United Kingdom and studied in Birmingham in the Selly Oak College. While he was there a lecturer gave him a low grade for a paper which he had taken some time and thought to write. Incensed at this injustice he sent copies of the paper to lecturers in colleges all over the country. Many of them graded the paper far higher than the miserable mark his lecturer had given him, a number awarding him an A grade. Fouzi announced this fact by getting to his feet in the middle of a lecture and informing that teacher and the whole class of the evident injustice. It was a salutary incident to the surprised lecturer who never assessed Fouzi's hard work so meanly again.

Fouzi then became a schoolteacher 'teaching English to the English' until 1981 when God called him to the work he will always be associated with. He had to be persuaded that this vocation was even viable. There were years when he dismissed what he was going to be engaged in during the most productive decades of his life as "a complete waste of time." As the germ of the idea persisted he raised one objection to it after another, only to see God blowing them all down like a house of cards. He told a friend, "Where could I base such an enterprise? I would need a house to keep all the materials being used." Two days later that friend was left a small terraced house and he gave it for the use of Fouzi.

For seven years Fouzi taught, and at the same time reached out to Muslims, but in the end it proved too much for him and the teaching was phased out, and he become fully involved in his work. It was initially a literature ministry. Telephone directories of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa provide a rich source of addresses of literate Arabs. To them would be mailed a letter and some Christian literature with an offer of an Arabic New Testament. Thousands of requests were received, and the next step was correspondence courses introducing inquirers to the faith. The next action was the most sensitive, of linking those who seemed genuine believers with other Christians.

Fouzi made regular trips to Muslim nations. He never went alone, and attempted to use different ports of entry. He would like to take a mechanic and a medical man with him. He would wear his splendid Arab clothes, and with all the guile and confidence that grace had given to him would engage in discussion with correspondents, officials and booksellers. He would, for example, enter a book shop and try to purchase a Bible. "We don't stock Bibles," the owner would say. "I will give you twenty pounds for a Bible," Fouzi would offer. "We do not stock them," replied the man. "I will give you fifty pounds for a Bible," he repeated. "We are not allowed to sell Bibles," the man responded. "I will give you a hundred pounds if you sell me a Bible," said Fouzi. The man was exasperated: "We are not allowed to stock Bibles and I do not have one to sell you." Fouzi would walk out of the shop in a huff. Then on to the next town and to its book shop where the whole process would be repeated, and this was a feature of his visits to north Africa and the Middle East. When a Christian observer asked him the purpose of this fruitless attempt to purchase Bibles, Fouzi said, "Those Arabs are very keen businessmen, and if they discover there is a market for Bibles, and that people are prepared to give a hundred pounds to purchase one, they will find a way of obtaining them, and then what good might come from that?"

His funeral service was held on the Wednesday morning of the Leicester Banner of Truth Conference, and number of ministers went to the Anglican Church in Wolverhampton to join the 600 mourners present.

GEOFF THOMAS