Eliza Davis George

Eliza Davis George

When God Says Go: The Amazing Journey of a Slave’s Daughter by Lorry Lutz

Today we’re celebrating one of God’s Generals. A great woman who has left forever left her foot prints on the sands of time.

Eliza Davis-George (1879–1980)

Eliza Davis George is one of the greatest female missionaries that our world was blessed to have had. Born in Texas in 1879 to former-slave parents and raised in the Baptist church. Eliza made the decision to accept Jesus at 16, during a revival meeting.

After bagging a teacher’s diploma at Central Texas College in 1911, she also joined the College faculty. In February 1911, Eliza participated in a college prayer meeting interceding for different regions and nations. As the preacher prayed, Eliza was filled with an overwhelming desire to take the gospel of Jesus to Africa . At that same moment, she had a vision of Africans in front of God’s judgment seat. In the vision, many were weeping and saying, “No one ever told us You died for us.” Eliza knew Jesus was asking her to go and serve Him on that continent.

Eliza faced a great deal of opposition to the idea of her going to Africa to serve as a missionary. The then president of Central Texas College and the board president of the Texas Baptist Missions Convention tried all they could to dissuade her. However very determined, but unable to raise the needed fund for her mission immediately, Eliza remained at Central Texas College for two more years.

During these two years, Eliza cultivated a deepening life of prayer, often interceding all night for the unsaved in Africa. In December 1913, Eliza left Waco, Texas, for New York where she boarded a ship bound for Africa along with six other missionaries, arriving Monrovia, Liberia, on January 20, 1914.

Eliza, with the help of another missionary opened a school for children at the central part of Liberia, where there were few missionaries and churches. The school was named Bible Industrial Academy, and their objective was to teach children how to read the Bible and to show them helpful life skills. Within the first two years of their stay, they had fifty children attending the academy and saw more than 1,000 people accept the Lord in the nearby villages.

Eliza served as an evangelist, teacher, and church planter throughout Sinoe County, Liberia. In every place she established ministries, she trained young Liberians and sent them as missionaries to take the Gospel to their own people and to provide education for their children.

Five years after arriving in Liberia, Eliza’s mission board disbanded due to inadequate funding. Notwithstanding, this did not deter her as she forged on in her mission. In 1919, Eliza who was still single, got married to Charles George, a British missionary doctor. Together they adopted three children: Maude, Cecelia, and Cerella.

Even while married, Eliza kept living meagerly, trusting in the Lord’s provision and going extra miles to source for support for the ministry Jesus had called her to.

In 1939, Charles died. Eliza, nonetheless, continued the work Jesus had committed into her hands for another thirty-three years—discipling hundreds of young people, and sending many to America for further education. By the 1960s, the Eliza Davis George Baptist Association had twenty-seven churches in Liberia.

Also Read: Lessons from Evangelists Reinhard Bonnkke and Richard Ngidi

While traveling in West Africa in 1971, Dr. Joseph Jeter was introduced to Eliza Davis George, whose ministry, despite her advanced age and declining health, was still going strong.

“I met Mother George at the Evangelical Negro Industrial Mission deep in the bush at the age of 91. Her ministry was vast. She was almost blind. She walked with a walking stick. She had a larger tropical cancer on her leg, and she was still pressing the claims of Christ.”

Due to her fragile health, Eliza returned to the United States a year after Dr. Jeter’s visit. She died in Tyler, Texas, in March 1980, at the age of 100. Her entire life stands as a witness to a believer’s steadfast determination to count the cost and wholeheartedly follow Christ in order to reach the lost.