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September 22 Today in OPC History

R. Heber Mcllwaine

 

On this date in 1936, the Rev. R. Heber McIlwaine was received as a ministerial member of the Presbytery of Philadelphia. A year later, he was one of the first missionaries appointed by the Committee on Foreign Missions to serve in Harbin, Manchoukuo. However, having been born in Japan to Southern Presbyterian missionaries and being fluent in the Japanese language, the Committee assigned him to labor in Japan in 1938.

The outbreak of WWII forced him to leave Japan in 1940. During the war years, he would serve as an OPC church planter in Baltimore, a U.S. Army chaplain, and temporary pastor in Aurora, Nebraska. After the war's conclusion, he returned to Asia, serving in the mountain area of Taiwan among Japanese-speaking aborigines.

It was also during his return that he married Eugenia (Genie) Cochran, whom he had met ten years earlier on the mission field. In 1951, Heber and Genie were able to return to Japan for full-time service until their retirement in 1976.

Writing in New Horizons after Mr. McIlwaine had died in 1998, the Rev. John P. Galbraith said of his friend:

The memory of Reginald Heber McIlwaine should never be lost to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. To know him was to know one who went to a distant part of the world with the gospel on behalf of our Church even before it was born. To know him was to know one in whom the Spirit of God dwelt richly. He was at once the gentlest and strongest of Christian men, kind but fearless in presenting Christ to both lost and saved sinners.

Picture: Heber and Genie McIlwaine in 1976.

 

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