Barbara Zarris

Okay, well, I'll start with, I was born in Hammond, Indiana. I'm 75 years old, so that puts me at 1949, just after the war. I'm the third of four children. I have two older brothers, one younger sister. My family was not saved. And so when I was nine years old, we were relatively poor, probably the poorest of any of the families in our area. And Hammond was a very modest town. So we're talking about very modest people. I was delivering newspapers on a Sunday morning and a neighbor invited me. stopped me and said, Barbara, do you want to go to church? And I said, church, what's that? So she called my mother, my mother said, if she wants to go to church, she can go to church. And that was the first day that I ever remember going to church. It was the following Sunday. I delivered my newspapers and when I got back to the house, there was a bus, this big yellow bus standing in front of my house. My mother said, hurry up, they're waiting for you. And I didn't know that anybody was sending a bus. So I just threw on whatever clothes and jumped on the bus and went to church. And that was how I got started at Hessville Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana. It was a GARB church and it was a very good church. Pastor Frink was my pastor and I was there quite a few years. I'm very grateful to the Lord for guiding me to that church. I did get saved about three or four weeks later. The one thing I do remember was standing in the second row right on the end in the middle in the aisle and he gave an invitation. By this time I must have heard the gospel three or four times. They didn't have children's church, so I was in the regular services. And I wanted to go forward, but somebody had taken a nail and they pounded my shoe to the floor and I couldn't get my foot to move. But finally I was able to lift up my foot and I took one step into the aisle and the pastor was not three feet away from me. And they sent me into the back room with the youth pastor's wife. Dodie Bymers and she showed me how to be saved and that was the day I got saved, May 30th, 1959. That was the day that changed my life though of course I would have had no idea that God would do that to me on that day because as a child you don't really know anything. I just heard the gospel, I responded and it made sense to me. I want to tell this story because it means a lot. About four or five weeks later I don't know how somehow I ended up going to a Christian camp. And the first day they had camp, Monday night service, I went forward and got saved. Tuesday morning, they gave an invitation, I went forward and got saved. Tuesday night, I went forward and got saved. Wednesday morning, I went forward and got saved. Wednesday night, I did the same. And on Thursday morning, when they gave the invitation, I was ready to go forward and get saved. And I said, wait a minute, I've already done this. And then… I've never doubted my salvation. I know I didn't doubt it before. I just didn't know that you don't have to go forward again. You don't have to pray again. But that was how little I knew or understood about the scriptures. So I gave my life to the Lord based on the Holy Spirit drawing me when I knew nothing else really. I'm very grateful for those people. And then I rode a bus every week of my life for the next 11 years until I got married and then George had to be responsible for taking me to church. But we had no car, never owned a car, and we lived ways out of town so there were no churches in our area. And frankly, if that one lady had not asked me if I wanted to go to church, I don't know that I ever would have gone to church because nobody ever said anything.

Anna Faith Fuller

That's really neat. I know you had shared a little bit before, but could you share with us the journey of going to college and how the Lord worked in that?

Barbara Zarris

Yeah. Well, I think I want to start with the… Life in an unsaved home is always difficult. And my dad was a difficult person. He was a very angry man. My mother was a gem. I don't know why she stayed with him, but she said she never had a father and she wanted to make sure that we had a father. Because I used to ask her to leave and go somewhere else and so we didn't have to live with my dad. But that's how life is. You don't know what to do when you're a kid and you think the best way out is. some simple way that's never simple. It's never easy as she stayed. So I was 14 and I was upstairs. We had a little teeny tiny house the size of a two car garage. It was 400 square feet. And it had this little tiny staircase up to an unfinished attic. It didn't even have any boards on the floor. But my dad would go down to the dump. And on occasion, he'd find a board and bring it home and he'd nail it over these. the cross boards, and then pretty soon we had an area where it was filled in. So when I was 14, in order to escape all the arguing downstairs, we only had two bedrooms, I went upstairs and I would sleep in this unfinished area, had no heat, had no air conditioning, had no, just these boards. I didn't even have a bed for, I couldn't tell you how many years. I'd roll up in a blanket and sleep up there, try to get away from the trouble. And it was 14 years old and it was winter and there's a little tiny window up there. I was looking out of the window. The snow was coming down in the alley. I could see the light and I just said, don't even know if I said the words, God, I don't wanna live like this the rest of my life. Now I got saved when I was nine, so I'd already been to church for five years. So at this point, I knew a lot about God because I'd gone every Sunday. It was very, very faithful. And I was a good student, I had read the Bible, so… You want to change your life, but you're a kid and you don't know how. I know that came from my heart whether I said the words or not. I cannot tell you that anything happened because I said those words. We got towards the end of April, maybe May, and a Sunday school teacher that I had at Hessville Baptist invited my mother to go to First Baptist in Hammond when Jack Kiles was the pastor. My mom came and went home and talked about him and what he said. And one Sunday night, I went to First Baptist Church. And honestly, I sat in that service. And the only thing I can tell you that I remember was somehow I said, this is a place where husbands and wives love each other. And I started going to First Baptist and Hammond, and that really did change the trajectory of my life. I was in a good church. I had very good Sunday school teachers and good people and a good pastor, but for whatever reason, and I can't tell you why, God just impressed me to go, and I went to First Baptist, and of course, the Lord just did. So now why did I go to college? My family was unsaved. I finished high school when I was 15, and I wanted to go to college, and that's a little young. And of course, I had to have a scholarship. So Indiana University and Gary, which was in our area, I received a scholarship to go there. They paid for all of the schooling. And I don't know, but I think books. I just had to figure out a way to get there, which was about 15 miles away. And so I went to college, but it was difficult. It was. not difficult college, but I just knew God wanted me in a Christian school. I knew that he wanted me, why am I at Indiana University? So when I turned 18, then I had to make that decision and I made the decision to go to Tennessee Temple. They gave me a scholarship, my dad found out about it and he wrote them and called them in something and said, she's not coming. And the school said, if you come on the first day of school, then we are scholarship is still available to you. So I had to get there. But every day in the summer, all night, I'd go to work. When I came home, my mom and my dad would grill me and. was a problem, and how can you explain? They wanted the best for me, I was a good student, they didn't wanna see my life wasted. Neither one of my parents got to go to college. They both were intelligent, they would've liked to. So they weren't thinking bad for me, they just didn't understand the Lord. And in any event, I had to make that decision. It was that summer when I had to decide, and I say now what I decided was do I really believe? I mean, All those years by that time, I'd been saved for at least six, seven, eight years. Did I really believe what I was taught? Was God calling me in my heart maybe? I didn't have the words for that. I wasn't in the big circle of Christianity to know all the words. I was just the bus kid that came every Sunday without fail. And I went to temple. My dad… sent a note somehow or called and they told me your dad's coming on the weekend to get you. Now if I'd had any sense I'd have known he couldn't do it because we didn't own a car and it was 10 or 12 hours away from my house but I was really concerned so I hid my luggage in another dormitory and then on Saturday I went out to outreach and we got on a bus and we were somewhere in one of the projects and when I got home that night he hadn't come. And on Monday, that following Monday, I got a letter, and it was $100. And my dad said, now, if you need anything, call. And do you want me to send my typewriter? He didn't know I'd taken his typewriter. It was the only thing I took that wasn't mine, because I knew I was going to need it, and he never used it. So I ended up going to school. But I just have to say that I can tell you. Those things transpired and it wasn't a decision here or there. Somehow I just, preacher had preached, I knew what I ought to do, somehow in my heart it was, I just did it. I think that there has to be a time when you decide. And for me that probably was the real deciding time, do I really believe this?

Anna Faith Fuller

Yes, I know in each of our journeys of faith there are those moments that really define who you are and your future. And it may be something very insignificant, but that story for you, obviously was something that you look back and it was the moment when your faith became action.

Barbara Zarris

Exactly what I had to do, take action.

Anna Faith Fuller

That's really neat. Thank you for sharing that. Now, I don't know if you've shared a little bit, or I don't think we've talked about your ministry yet. So how about you talk about the ministry that you're involved in today, just a short. just how God has brought you into that and then go ahead and just share the stories that you were burdened about sharing from your ministry. Well I think I ought to give a little bit of chronological history. So my husband and I graduated from Tennessee Temple and he got his masters and when we left in 72 if I'm correct, he knew God wanted him to start a church in the Chicagoland area. A man named Grant Rice was one who gave wisdom on starting churches. He had started many here in Wisconsin. So we talked with him and he suggested several areas. We visited those areas around Chicago and we ended up in Aurora, Illinois. So we were there 16 years. Now, again, we're both bus kids. His family wasn't saved. What do we know? I mean, I went to first Baptist at the age of 14 close to 15 and he came a year later. So we were only there a couple of years under the leadership of Jack Hiles. But we decided we went to college and then, okay, we're gonna start a church. So we moved to Aurora and got an apartment and the next thing we know, next day we went around the block and started witnessing to people and we won a lady to the Lord. And then, you know, so on Sunday they came to our house and we had church and we did that for a month and then we rented a school and then we. We started a church. Nobody gave us any money. Nobody told us what to do. Nobody said go out and raise support. The thought never occurred to us. We just started a church and we just, God just did. We ended up after a few years, we were the fastest growing church in the state of Illinois, one of the 10 fastest growing in the country. And there's a book written about my husband, it's of these 10 churches. He was one chapter. It's a long name, but it's how to start a church in the face of insurmountable odds, da da, written by a forgot now. Elmer Towns, that's right. And so we happen to be in a book. But the point is we were there 16 years. We did have a high day of just under 2000. At the time that we did leave Aurora, we had 16 acres of land, we had a Christian school, we had buses, of course. We had a church building we had built basically by hand and a gymnasium and bus garage and a couple other things on the property of 16 acres. But there came a day when my husband came to me and he said, shock you, you know, Monday, looks at me and says, out of the clear blue, if I step into the pulpit on Sunday, I know I'm out of the will of the Lord. I looked at this guy and thought, okay, we've got, five children at that point. And you know, he's 39, are you going through a midlife crisis? Because if you've got a problem, I got these kids to care for, take care of your problem yourself. And I mean, I'm not very, so I just sat there and said, okay, and what does that mean? What are we supposed to be doing now? And I told him. Don't take me out of the will of the Lord. I don't care where you go in the world. Just don't take me and the kids out of the will of the Lord. If you want to go traipse off and, you know, figure out what life's all about, because you haven't figured it out yet, that's your business, but don't bother us with it. And literally, it sounds a little harsh, but the truth of the matter is, I thought it was crazy. But the next Sunday when he got up, our church people were so shocked they couldn't. They couldn't understand it and I said, look, last Sunday I sat here and I thought we were here forever because our preacher taught us put down roots and stay forever and we weren't going anywhere. But clearly somehow he felt differently. Somehow God had done something in his heart. We ended up, he said, God wants me to go into Christian radio. What does that mean? So. We ended up turning the church over to our assistant, and we were started looking, what does it mean? What does God want us to do? And we ended up after four years, four years, buying a little tiny AM station in Louisville, Kentucky. And we were there 16 years. We built that little station up into five stations. And by the time we were there at the end, we were the largest Christian station network. in Louisville out of nine Christian stations. Okay, that basically was we learned radio. We didn't know anything. We thought if you could turn the radio on, you could run a radio station, right? What we didn't know, the amount of money we lost, the expenses it was, we knew nothing. So that would have been our education, 16 years doing radio in Louisville. And when we finally, one day, out of the clear blue, God just dropped the bomb in our lap. And in two weeks time, we basically lost everything financially that we had. That'll get your attention. And so my husband said, okay, God, now what are we supposed to do? And God said, take it to the world. Well, if that helps you, it didn't help me because I didn't know what that meant. And so I said, okay, what does that mean? Not very nice. And we didn't know, but it was a short time after that when Edgar Fugali talked with George Zarris, first time we met and talked with George, and the United States government had gone into Iraq, and the government, our US government and our military were running the country at that time. Well, Edgar Fugali went in with some other men and they started a Baptist church. with a man called Meher Do'ed, who is the Iraqi pastor. When we heard this, we said, well, go to the government and ask him if we can have a radio station. We're so dumb, we don't know any different. Go ask him. I mean, we know it's a Muslim country, so what? And Edgar said, oh, no, Brother George, you don't understand. It's all Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Christian, Shia Muslim. Kurdish Muslim, no Christian in the government. And George said, so go ask him if you can have a station. Now, this is how ridiculous it is that somebody makes a suggestion and you act on it when you know it's never gonna happen. Two years later, we were granted the license. Just to let you know how important that is, never in the history of the world has there ever been an all Muslim country. that has allowed a legally licensed Christian radio station. We're the first. How do you do that? By asking, can you imagine it could be that simple? So that's how we are in, we have now five stations in Iraq. Our work is called Christian Radio International and we've gone all over the world, but that's an introduction to how we got started in it.

Anna Faith Fuller

Wow. That's really amazing. It's a miracle.

Barbara Zarris

Yeah, it is. So just moving along, I don't know how much time we have here, but I know you were burdened to share some of those stories with the little girl and the ladies. I want to share some stories because, of course, we have built. Personally, we don't build these stations, you understand. We mostly raise the funds for them. We decide which projects and find good people. But more than 50 stations, and another man that we've helped has built another 12, so there's quite a few. So we get these fabulous stories, and that's what I get to write about. I send out a monthly paper called The Broadcaster. It's just one page, and I try to make the feature about something that will really. surprise the listeners that this is what life is like, this is what's happened, this is the history. So I'll tell you first about a 16-year-old girl. She's in Monrovia, Liberia. Now, we've had that station, Monrovia, it was the second one we built right after Baghdad, Iraq. And so it's been on about 17 or 18 years. The pastor, Dan Demme, got a long story, could tell you, but I won't at this time. But this young girl, Her father died five years ago. She's 16 years old. Her name is Jerrilyn Topka. And she's African. And when I interviewed her, called her from the US, she's so quiet and so unpretentious that I couldn't get a sentence out of her. She would just say, yes, ma'am, no. And I could hardly get any information to write her story. But her father died five years ago, and her mother is just she and her mother, and her mother sells clothing in a little, like you've seen these little stalls in the marketplace in these foreign countries, and maybe makes, if she's lucky, about $100 a year. It happens to be that Jerrilyn is really an intelligent girl. And so she's in classes six hours a day. She loves school. And her mother has just… struggled to keep the girl in school. It's $15 a month for school and about $15 a month for her to ride the transportation, which is motorcycle, to get to school. But Jerrilyn is a senior now. And she dreams of being able to study. She said she studies at night with a flashlight because they don't have any electricity or running water, and they live in one room. and they cook outside on a little metal grate. I ask her questions. It's very interesting in any event. I ask her what she likes to eat, and she says, it's this rice mixed with vegetables, and they cook it on their kitchen stove, which is this little metal grate outside. It was a lot of fun to talk to her. She loves to read. She said she'll go to her friend's house, and she would watch maybe a movie, an African movie. And then she rides her bike 10 kilometers, which is six miles, to the Harvest Baptist Church. I don't remember now when she started going to church, but she's got saved somewhere in the last five years. And she is a choir member. She's a good girl, but she would like to go to college. Well, the interesting thing is, $500 a year to go to college. To her, it has to be a scholarship. They don't have scholarships like schools offer it. Some way, God would have to provide this money. Well, in any way, I wrote this little story because what she did, on our radio station, they have a program called Make Much of the Bible. It's on Sunday. And they asked people to come in and just quote scripture that they had memorized. So people would start coming in and quote five, 10, 15, 20. Some people would quote 100 verses. Well, Jere Lynn heard this and she decided, she knew what she was gonna do. She wrote 100 verses down on little cards and then she just read them over every day, every day. And at the end of the month, she had 100 verses memorized. So she went in and quoted them. The next month, she does the same thing. The third month, she memorizes 500 verses and goes in and quotes them all. In order, I'm sorry. I've lost it by this time. In the space of a year's time, she had memorized more than a thousand verses. And when I interviewed her, she said, "'Would you like me to tell you some of the Bible verses?' And she started in giving me, and it's the verse, they're not even six verses in order. They're a verse here, a verse there, and everyone with its proper place it is in the Bible. So in any event. So I wrote this little article about her because… I asked her, whatever made you start to do this if you want to be convicted? She said, well, I started memorizing the Bible because I love God. Well, how convicting is that, right? So she's been chosen to give the valedictory address at her school. Now, she's already chosen, even though it won't be till May. And I asked her, well, what would you like to say? And she said, well, I want to appreciate all the people who have helped me. She lives in one room with her mother, have no running water, no electricity. I can't even put this in my mind. Well, I wrote this paper and I sent out, it goes to all the people on our list. And I've already had one man who's gonna pay for the rest of her schooling for this year. And I've had two different groups that said, we wanna pay for her schooling for college, for her to go to college. So I thought, Did she know when she started memorizing those verses so she could just give them on the radio? Did she know? No, she didn't. She didn't have any idea, but God knew.

Anna Faith Fuller

That's definitely convicting to us with so much Bible knowledge over here that you take for granted so much. Wow. And yeah, just your daily things that you take for granted, your house and things, so that's- And even if you know the Bible verses, could you quote a hundred in a row right now?

Anna Faith Fuller

No, I know I could. I'm sorry and she's got a thousand down like a thousand. Like she just says them to you and they just keep going and going. Yeah, and that's encouraging. Definitely neat to see her just like, let me tell you that I love this. You know, just so excited about that. That's really, really neat. Thank you for sharing that. Now, maybe if you have the other story, I know you wanted to share that as well with us. I wanna remember.

Barbara Zarris

Jerrilyn Topka is in Liberia and this just happened last week and I learned this and so There's another city in Liberia on the other side of the country. That's out in what we would call in boonies It's in the interior and it is called Tapita there happens to be a very excellent pastor their name Cordeaux Forgot his last name. It'll come to me in a minute. Duan Yen curdo Duan Yen and We don't normally build radio stations in small areas because the expense is about $100,000. It could be more. And then the ongoing is at least $1,500, $2,000 a month to keep them running and pay all the electricity and whatever. So we'd like to put them in a million or more, or at least a capital city or somewhere large. But Edgar Fugali kept saying, you know, if you have money for Africa, why don't you consider TAPADA? Okay, so we decided after several years, we would take some funds we have and we'll build TAPITA. And the man who's the pastor, his story is astounding. I don't have time to tell it, but once you hear it, I mean through 14 years of civil war, he lived by himself out in the jungle as a kid, starting with age nine, I think, and had to make his way, find his own food. I said, how did you eat? He said, I found a wire. and a string and I made it into a little trap and I would try to trap animals and that's what we would eat. 14 years of civil war. Every time the war would end, the war would have a ceasefire for a few weeks. He would go back to school and try to get another whole year's worth of work done. Every year in their school, you have to take a test at the end of the year to pass that form that year. And so he'd been stopped from going to school. He was an excellent student, very intelligent. but he couldn't go. And his mother was gone and his dad had been dead and his uncle had been killed who was caring for him. He was by himself. It ended up after 14 years of civil war, he was 25 years old before he finally finished high school. So in any event, I wanna tell you a story because I was researching to raise funds for this. I wanna tell people about TAPA and why we should put funds in this. Frankly, I'm wondering myself, why are we putting such amount of money into a so small a place? So, I said to him, I called him the other day, a week ago, I said, okay, tell me again, how did your church start? How many churches do you have in your area? He said, well, a missionary named Gordon Mellish came to our area and he started this Tapa Baptist Church, said I'm now the third pastor in 90 years. Well, that is a surprise. Right there alone, right? Okay, so then I talked to him some more, he gave me information. I hung up the phone and I typed his name, Gordon Mellish. I know I'm not gonna find this missionary. It's 90 years ago. It ends up the guy went to Liberia in 1930. He came from the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, Canada, which is a very well-known church in that era, very missionary-minded. And he finished college in 1926 and went in 1930, so he's probably 26 years old, he and his wife. They head off to Liberia, but he doesn't stay on the coast where Monrovia, the capital, is. He's there a couple of years and he goes into the interior. Now it's 1930, and the world is in the middle of the, excuse me, 35, he's in the middle of the Depression. And I want to read to you what I found on the internet. This is the only thing I can find about Gordon Mellish, and it's a letter. It's totally astounding to me, and then I'll tell you why this is important. The mission board had decided that they couldn't support the missionaries anymore. No money was coming in to the mission board. A very good mission board, but they couldn't keep going. And they told all their missionaries to come home. He'd been in Liberia, it was 1935, now this is 1937. And here's the letter that he sent back in June of 37, and it said, not for one moment would either Mrs. Melish or myself even suggest that we are indispensable to the work in Liberia. But at the same time, we desire to reaffirm to the board and the constituency who have supported us for the past six and one half years, that more and more we know that the Lord has called us to serve him in Liberia and not aboard. The joy of the Lord has been our strength continually. For this reason, if we left Liberia now, left these people without any witness of the truth and without the expectation that the people of the interior should hear the Gospel as well as those on the coast, it would be on our conscience for life. So long as the Lord wants us in Liberia, we could not serve the Lord happily any other place. We therefore are willing to trust the Lord completely for the supply of all our needs and that of the work. He will not fail us." I was so shocked. I told the man who's the pastor now, I called and said, did you know this? He said, we knew nothing about this. I sent him this information and he is going to tell his people because this is their history. This very church is the very church Gordon Mellish started. He was there for 20 some years, turned it over to a man named John Demme, who was there for more than 50 years, and John Demme's son is the man that runs our radio station in Monrovia, Liberia, on the coast. That's amazing. Now, when John Demme died, Pastor Curdough, who is there now, took over that work and has been there for 17 years. three pastors in 90 years, but based on a phenomenal missionary. But here's the story you wanna know. They had help, and one of the people that they had help in this area was a lady, a single lady named Minnie Lane. Now, I don't know her age, I have found a picture on the internet, but I don't know anything more about her except she came after the Gordon, Gordon Mellish family came. So she came sometime. 1935, I don't know. She was from America? She is, no, Canadian, from Hamilton. A good church there. And so she was also told, we can't support you anymore, there's no money coming in, you have to come back to the States. Well, she sounds a little bit more like me, she was probably a little more intense, and her letter says, I have also received your personal letter telling of the closing of the work. What can I say about it? Nothing except that we pray that God has so dealt with his children that he has laid a greater burden for Africa on their hearts than ever, so that they no longer consider quitting. We are not in the least discouraged. You folks at home are not here and never have been, and so you will never know the great need of this work. I do not know how to tell you how I feel, but to speak plainly. God will have to speak very, very loudly before I can go home and leave these people without help. Yes, I know it costs money, but the God who owns the universe is no poorer than he was, and I'm willing to let him look after me. May 19, 1937. in the middle of the depression with no money coming from Canada and therefore they don't run home and start raising deputation. These people stayed in Liberia. When I told this to the pastor today, his name is Curdo, he said, well I do know one thing. They said the work moved very slowly from 1935 and 1936 but something happened in 1937 and he said it just took off. And now there are 31 Baptist churches in our county called Nimbah County, all directly related to Gordon Mellish. But I said, well, how many others? He said, I don't know how many more all over Liberia. All over Liberia. I only know the ones in our county because we have a conference. I tell you, that moved me. That man prayed for the interior and the reason why we're putting a Christian station in Tapita, it's a town of maybe 20,000, is because Gordon Mellish and Minnie Lane said we're not leaving. God will provide. If he doesn't, who's gonna take care of the interior?

Anna Faith Fuller

Wow. That's an amazing… amazing story on so many levels really but just the step of faith that they were willing to take and truly trust the Lord that he can provide. That's really thank you so much for sharing. Now just in conclusion are there any just last things you want to leave with our listeners with young girls that are looking to serve the Lord in the future but maybe don't know what steps ahead that need to be taken?

Barbara Zarris

You don't have to worry God will bring the next step to Do what's in front of you right now. If you're in school, do your schoolwork. Make very good grades, the best that you can. Learn everything you can when you are. When it's time to go to college, if you're in college, learn everything. Because I never expected to do radio. I was a speech major, so I had one class in college. And then they asked my husband and I to run the Saturday afternoon requests. for three hours and that means spinning records, that's the old days, right? And we learned how to talk in front of an audience, but honestly, we never knew that would lead to what we're doing now. So do what's in front of you. God will open that next step. You can be sure he will. When his time is ready, you're gonna be knocked in the head. You're gonna look and say, you gotta be kidding, God. I'm supposed to take it to the world? But you can't do that if you didn't have the 16 years of training beforehand.