Our History
Arab World Ministries has been in existence since 1881.
It all began in Algeria. George and Jane Pearse set off from England with the aim to share the Gospel with French occupying troops. On the first night of their arrival, Jane looked down from the balcony of their room and saw what seemed to be a pile of rags lying on the roadside. Early the next morning, at first opportunity, a closer inspection revealed the rags to be two men who had died, during the night, of starvation.
The Pearses returned to England with heavy hearts; they wanted to reach out to the poor people of Algeria. They shared this burden with friends, including Dr. and Mrs. H. Grattan Guinness, who encouraged them to begin a mission and even gave them their first donation. Later on they were joined by Edward Glenny, who formed a part of the first group to set off for Algeria, to the town of Djemma Sahridj.
Initially the Mission was called The Mission to the Kabyles and other Berber Races before it took on the less wordy and more memorable name North Africa Mission. As more heard about the need, more joined taking numbers up to 115 by the year 1900 - working from 17 separate 'mission stations' in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. During the 1960s, three other missions were incorporated: Algiers Mission Band, founded by Lilias Trotter; Southern Morocco Mission, founded by John Anderson; and Dades Valley Fellowship.
Around the same time, one missionary family had the idea to begin broadcasting the Gospel via radio in North Africa. No one could have predicted that such a great door to the Arab world would open from those small beginnings in 1959. Yet only two years later, the great door was thrown wide open and radio broadcasting was launched from a specially designed studio in the Atlas Mountains. The correspondence and radio ministries started to expand at a phenomenal rate, but the work in North Africa was under constant threat.
In 1964, for security reasons, the decision was made to move the work out of North Africa and the Radio School of the Bible (RSB) was founded in Marseille, France. Within a year, 5,300 new students requested Bible courses with 1,032 professions of faith. By the late 1990s, AWM Media had communicated with over 250,000 students who had responded to radio programmes.
In 1987 the name Arab World Ministries was finally adopted to reflect the emphasis of the Mission, no longer limited to North Africa but to all Arab world people, wherever they may be found. Since then we have also begun working in Europe and North America where large populations of Arab Muslims can be found today.
