NASHVILLE, TN (ANS) -- Mercy Ships is a global charity that has operated hospital ships in developing nations since 1978. It brings hope and healing to the forgotten poor by mobilizing people and resources worldwide, and serving all people without regard for race, gender, or religion.

Dan Wooding interviews Don Stephens at NRB 2009 (photo: Michael Ireland)

Mercy Ships’ American founder and president, Don Stephens, is a gentle man whose demeanor belies a will of steel that has seen this ministry grow into a huge operation that is pioneering seaborne medical missions to some of the most needy countries on earth.

In a recent interview at NRB 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee, Stephens first talked about how Mercy Ships began.

“There are, of course, probably a thousand things that the Lord uses to bring things together in your life to start something,” he began. “Let me mention four that are really important -- four principle ones.

“Number one, in the Bahamas in 1964, I was a nineteen year old teenager. I've got almost solid white hair now, so that we won't guess how long that was, and one of these huge storms like Hurricane Katrina came through, devastated the Bahamas, and a girl prayed a prayer that went something like this: ‘Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a ship with doctors and nurses, professionals, carpenters and plumbers that could come in after a disaster and show the love of God.’

“Now, I was not in the group where that prayer was prayed. I only heard about it. But it's like the Lord took the laser of the Holy Spirit and embedded that deep with within my psyche, so that's the first -- was a storm.

“There are four Ss in this and the second is a ship. For Americans that are fifty-five and older they'll remember ‘The Good Ship Hope.’ At one time, US foreign policy had the concept of the Great White Fleet. We were going to send a university ship, a hospital ship, and an agriculture ship and, of course, a couple of battle ships to protect them, to the developing world to build education infrastructure, care for the health care needs. That never happened, but there was one ship. Now ‘The Good Ship Hope’ has not been in existence for over thirty years, but that was a real inspirational model for me -- a hospital ship.”

Don went on to talk about how he and his wife Deyon have four children.

“We have a daughter and three sons so we have so far a ‘storm,’ a ‘ship,’ and if you’re following the Ss, the third is our special needs ‘son’ -- John Paul, and when my wife gets to go with me, we have a friend for thirty years who moves into the house and cares for him,” said Stephens. “He still doesn't speak and doesn't feed himself. He’s not toilet trained, but when you look into his eyes … he has four signs, you know, he's created in the image of God. He’s my son, he's loving, and I can't call him a little guy now because he's thirty-three.

“Loving someone comes naturally, but learning to care for them is a skill. So this started Deyon and me on a road in how do we care for this one? What it did was to open our eyes to a world much greater than ours, that had similar problems, that has no health care, no hope, no support structure. So that was a big part of the beginning of what is now the world's largest non-navy hospital ship: The African Mercy, our new one.

“And the fourth S is a saint. I spent ten days in Calcutta in 1977 and, like anyone, I wanted to meet Mother Teresa. I had all these questions I wanted to ask her and she didn't answer any of them. She wanted to focus on me. And I'd read that this lady had an amazing ability to focus on the person in front of her like they were the last person in the world. And I found myself trusting her.

“Now, little John Paul was then less than two years old at the time, but we were already aware he was well behind. He wasn't speaking. I wanted to hear him say ‘papa’ or ‘daddy.’ And Mother Teresa, when I met her, also drew this dream out of me, my dream was a hospital ship. She arranged for me to go to one of their centers for the handicapped. But this is what she said to me: ‘God is in your little boy. John Paul may never speak, but you pursue this dream that God's put in your heart and he will have a voice that's heard by thousands around the world. Well, that put it all together.”

So with that encouragement from the “Saint of the Gutters,” Don Stephens began pursuing his dream to launch a hospital ship and he says one of his first supporters was Billy Graham’s late wife, Ruth.

“In fact, we have kept a check from Ruth Graham because she believed in this ministry,” he said.

Stephens said that their first ship was called the M/V Anastasis.

“A lot of people loved that old ship,” he said “She had classic Italian lines and we used her around the world. I don't know the number exactly, but it's well over a million people that were served through that ship. But we scrapped her; we did the unthinkable; the unmentionable. We sold that ship a year and a half ago in the summer and it happened to have been the time when steel prices were at their all time high.
“We paid a million dollars for the ship after negotiating with the Italian government officials because she was a state-owned ship. We used her for thirty years and sold her for four point three million dollars I don't know where she is now, but she may come back in another life as razor blades. But it's interesting how, if we're not careful and this is true for me and all of us, we can worship an object and that ship had become almost an idol for some, but she'd outlived her day. We're so glad she's gone because the new ship allows us to double the number of people we serve than all of the other ships we have had including the Anastasis.

“So we touch twice as many people per year and for the businessmen who control our costs, that's an important thing too. So when you see that big white ship sail into a port in the developing world where the average income is less than a dollar per person per day per family, in some instances, it is the greatest symbol of hope. Now we've refined our message and if you meet anyone in Mercy Ships today they'll talk about we follow the two-thousand year old model of Jesus. Well what does that mean? What did Jesus do? The blind receive sight -- we give sight to the blind fifty people a day on this ship. The mute speak -- now those who are Biblical literates will go to the Gospel of Luke and Matthew … they'll say that's not in there, but it's in other passages all right. If you're born with a clef lip and pallet you can't speak. So we give the ability to communicate like Jesus did. The lame leapt for joy. We help with pediatric orthopedics, clubbed feet, broken bones, and then in the passage in Luke it talks about the lepers are cleansed. Well who are the twenty-first century lepers? Probably most people go immediately to HIV/AIDS and I agree.

“But there's another group of ‘lepers’ that you don't hear much about. There are three-million women in sub-Saharan Africa that, because of complications of giving birth to their first child, are incontinent. So their husbands divorce them. They try to go home but the family can't accept them because of the sanitation, the odor, the constant leakage of urine. And we're providing surgeries for these ‘lepers’ on our hospital ship.

“And then how did Jesus finish? The Bible says, ‘And the good news is proclaimed to the poor.’ Well, what is the good news? It is that that at the heart of the universe is a God of love who loves us all regardless of the ailment, the station in life that we're struggling with and He has a plan for our lives. So if you're in Mercy Ships or you know anything about us you'll know that following the model of Jesus is not a marketing slogan; that's who we are. That’s the warp and woof.”

Don Stephens then recalled the time his world nearly collapsed when he and Alan Williams, a British missionary born in New Zealand, and Costas Macris, a distinguished Greek evangelical leader and former missionary to New Guinea, who then ran the Hellenic Missionary Center in Athens, were arrested in Athens, Greece and charged with proselytism.

The M/V Anastasis

It began in 1979, when the M/V Anastasis arrived in the Bay of Eleusis, near Athens, for major refurbishing. The vessel was a nine story tall ship, built in 1953, with a gross tonnage of 11,695. The Christians who ran the ship had a twofold mission: the first was to bring food, clothing and medical aid to needy people around the world. With living quarters for 600 crew members and a cargo capacity of 3,000 tons for food, clothing, medical supplies and other basic necessities, the M/V Anastasis was potentially suited to assist in any port city of the world. Secondly, they all shared the common goal of presenting the Gospel to all who would listen.

“The trouble began for us when we did something we thought all of us should be doing -- we distributed New Testaments to people in Greece,” he said. “It happened that we were distributing a modern translation that all of the young people could enjoy and appreciate. In fact it became a runaway bestseller in Greece.”

Whilst in the middle of a three-year refurbishing project, a major earthquake hit the Athens area on February 24, 1981. The Anastasis crew responded to the disaster by distributing clothing and food to the many homeless victims, as well as providing spiritual counsel and relief. It was at this time that Costas Kotopoulos, a sixteen-year-old Greek whose parents were divorced, made contact with members of M/V Anastasis and was given a New Testament to read.

“The problem was that at that time, Greece had a Marxist government and it didn't want young people reading this New Testament,” said Stephens. “So after his mother, who was a member of the Marxist party in Greece, found out about this she brought the charges against us.”

The “Athens 3” Case, as it was called, became a worldwide cause célèbre that really hotted up when they were sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.

Along with my dear friend, Thomas “Ed” Steele, I joined in a movement to gather signatures to protest their sentence.

“I think we had four-million signatures from all over the world and they were all boxed up and delivered to Greek Embassies in different parts of the world and we also took some of them back to Athens for the appeal process,” he said. “One of the people who spoke on our behalf was the widow of a former Greek Prime Minister and she said to the panel of three judges, ‘I've studied in the United States in a Presbyterian school and … these people on that ship were not trying to change a person's religion but were instead trying to introduce them into a personal relationship with Jesus.’”

The appeal was scheduled for May 21, 1986. If the defendants lost, they would go to prison immediately. The trial lasted for four days -- with extensive international press and television coverage (e.g., Reuters News Agency, London, the European edition of Time magazine). The International Commission of Jurists sent an observer to ensure that the human rights of the defendants were upheld. International lawyer John Warwick Montgomery was on the stand for almost an hour, and his theological and legal arguments were surprisingly echoed by the Greek public prosecutor, who told the judges that, in his opinion, the state had made a mistake in prosecuting the case. Finally, the three-judge panel adjourned to deliberate. After conferring for 2 1/2 hours, they found the defendants innocent of all charges.

I wondered if this experience had put him off his work with Mercy Ships,

Founders of Mercy Ships, Don and Deyon Stephens, greet Benin President Yayi Boni as he arrives at the Africa Mercy, docked in Cotonou, Benin

and Stephens replied, “No, I mean Greece is the land of the Apostle Paul and we hadn't come close to what he went through. He was beaten outside the city, stoned, left for dead, found himself in prison and then the earthquake happened. I read Hebrews 11 several times during that -- we're surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses. No, it didn't put me off. It furthered the conviction that what God had put in my heart of a hospital ship, a mercy ship, was of Him and we needed to press on.”

And this is what Don Stephens has continued to do over the years. He is truly a man with a mission -- of mercy.

For more information, go to: www.mercyships.org.

Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.

Dan Wooding, 68, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma of 45 years. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS); and US Bureau Chief for the Missionaries News Service (www.missionariesnews.tv) and Safe Worlds IPTV’s Faith, Hope and Charity channel. He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC., and now hosts the weekly "Front Page Radio" show on KWVE in Southern California and which is also carried on the Calvary Radio Network throughout the United States. The program is also aired in Great Britain on UCB UK and Calvary Chapel Radio UK. Wooding is the author of some 42 books, the latest of which is his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com. E-mail: danjuma1@aol.com.