I contacted the community and am awaiting a reply. Last night, I was looking further at the main website and I think Erlo’s wife passed away last August and more recently an important pastor and brother.
Personally, my last remaining grandfather, Dwight Mattix, pasted away yesterday. I’m very thankful for him. He started married life by moving up to Alaska to help with an orphanage. When that didn’t work out, he continued to raise his growing family and helped found a Plymouth Brethren assembly that exists to this day. In subsequent years, he moved the family down to Seattle where he was asked to be part of the management of the Stewards Foundation which was a group of Christian owned hospitals around the US. As his children grew, they too were called into service around the world including Thailand and Laos, Ecuador, Bolivia and the Middle East. Many of my generation are also wholeheartedly serving the Lord whether as part of local bodies in the US and Canada or in South America, Africa and Asia. I am very thankful for the testimony of his life and its fruit in my own. Until very late in his life, he continued to help with local churches. Up until his health started to really decline, he regularly met with younger men to study the Word and counsil them. He died at 93 after four multi-bypass heart surgeries and untold numbers of stints. I believe that in all this the Lord sustained him so that he could finish the work God had planned for him.
Other dear person who passed away just the day before was the man who mentored and inspired my father to make the step to live abroad in the Middle East. Tom Griffith had a vision and burning passion to share Jesus Christ with the Muslim world and boldly encouraged others to step into harms way to proclaim Christ. His vision was to show Muslims the real Jesus Christ through what he wrote. In the 1970s he felt lead to go to Saudi Arabia and encouraged my father to do the same. Because Saudi is a closed country, they went in tentmaker roles and trusted the Lord to provide opportunities to share. They also served in the secret house church that flourished and grew quite large for the time. Eventually many of that generation of Christian were kicked out or lead to leave. In time this experience lead to my father’s work with the Midwest Center for World Mission in Oak Park, IL, which was a sister organization to the US Center for World Mission founded by the late Dave Winter. My "Uncle” Tom was provoking the church to righteousness at a time when the mission vogue was the tribal peoples of South America and South East Asia. Until his final days, he was faithfully working to send copies of the materials showing the real Jesus Christ to the Muslims God had put on his heart.
