After
forty-seven years of serving with Evangelical Baptist Missions and
being Maplelawn missionaries for forty-six years, Bill and Lois
Carmichael have retired to Kokomo, Indiana. They have a ministry with Bible Baptist Church
with the senior saints and helping
with visitation. They will also do volunteer work at the mission
agency home office as needed.
For ten years,
the Carmichaels had been at a church Formby, England. Formby is
located in the northwest part of England, just north of Liverpool. The
church was started by EBM missionaries and at present ministers to
sixty to seventy people. It struggles to grow, but the Carmichaels
feel that the church is at a stage in its maturity where it can go
ahead on its own. An interim pastor will preach until a full-time
pastor can be found to shepherd the small flock.
Bill is a native
to England. He was born in Manchester, England (about forty miles from
Formby). His parents, with Bill and his sister Ann, moved to the
States when he was a young boy and settled in Muskegon, Michigan. It
was there that his parents were saved, and where his father led him
and his sister to the Lord.
His father
studied for the ministry and took his first pastorate at the First
Baptist Church in Newaygo, Michigan. The family then took up missions
work and moved to Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast), where they served
as missionaries with Baptist Mid-Missions for twenty-five to thirty
years. Bill spent his teenage years there and was exposed to the need
of missionaries among the Muslims of the southern Sahara Desert.
Bill came back
to Michigan to finish high school and met Lois. They both attended the
Baptist Bible Institute and, Bill, the School of Theology (now
Cornerstone University here in Grand Rapids) in the early 1950s. They
were married on July 17, 1953. In 1955, Bill and Lois were accepted as
missionaries with Evangelical Baptist Missions (then called Christian
Missions, Inc.). They went to France for a year of French language
study and then on to the French Sudan (now the Republic of Mali) in
West Africa. They ministered there for almost twenty years, mostly in
the village of Niafunke where the Sahara Desert meets the banks of the
Niger River.
After the years
in Africa, the Carmichaels visited some relatives in Scotland. While
there, the Lord spoke to Bill and Lois’s hearts about the spiritual
need in the United Kingdom. They moved to a suburb of Edinburgh,
Scotland, called Currie. There a church was established that is
thriving today under the ministry of a Scottish pastor.
They were in
Scotland for eight and a half years when the board of EBM asked Bill
to return to the States and serve at the home office in Kokomo,
Indiana, first as Candidate and Deputation Secretary and later as Area
Director for Europe. While there, Lois served as secretary in the
office. This lasted eight years. Toward the end of those eight years
(1988–1989), they were asked to go back to Mali for a few months to
oversee the building of a mission station/guest house in the capital
city of Bamako. The Carmichaels served there for a year and then took
the church in Formby.
Truly, Maplelawn owes the
Carmichaels a debt of thanks and gratitude for playing a small part in
its ministry around the world these past forty-six years. They close a
chapter rich with examples of servitude and love for their Savior.
Maplelawn
has been supporting them since 1956. The had their first meeting with us
in the old,
old building of Godwin Heights Baptist Church.
Lois and he were accepted by Christian Missions, Inc.
(today called Evangelical Baptist Missions) in November of 1955.
