By Lindsey Williams
Writing Specialist
Down a winding country road on the border of the national forest in Wayne County, sits little Strengthford Church. Every Sunday, the brothers and sisters in Christ pour generously into their missional offering, set aside to aid those in the community. They give toward MS Baptist Relief, their local food pantry, and the nearby Baptist Children’s Village home.
“We’re just a very small church,” said Robert Boutwell, lead pastor, “and we don’t have a lot of people. But David was just a small boy against a big giant.”
Little Strengthford also reaches around 150 countries for Christ.
On Oct. 19, the church not only celebrated 155 years with an exciting homecoming, but they also remembered a modest yet remarkable ministry started nine years ago: folding Gospel tracts.
When Ken Walters, associate pastor, and Martin Busby approached Boutwell with this idea nearly a decade ago, the church had no folding machine, no people to fold, no plan for the road ahead — but they knew if they stepped out in faith, the Lord would lead.
Strengthford began partnering with Publish or Perish Printing Ministry, whose print shop operates out of Biloxi River Church in Gulfport. “The printing team works very diligently in getting these tracts out,” said Boutwell. “It’s something we felt led by the Lord to be a part of.”
Publish or Perish Printing Ministry
The ministry began with just one missionary to Mexico and Central America, Bill Vaughn. When Vaughn and his wife resigned for health reasons and moved to Brooksville, he felt the Lord call him to print Gospel tracts in English as well as Spanish, in which he was fluent. Vaughn wrote the tracts and began printing and folding them himself.
Friends from Biloxi River Church would drive six hours to Brooksville and back to help Vaughn on weekends, until one day, when someone thought: “Why not print the tracts here at our church?” In 1997, Biloxi River refurbished an old pavilion into a print shop and started out with printing between 100,000 – 200,000 tracts a year.
This year alone, Publish or Perish has printed 16 million Gospel tracts so far.
“Our tracts have gone all over the world,” said Jim Mitchell, director of Publish or Perish. “The Lord has just opened doors for us to partner with global missionaries. We print multiple languages, now including three different dialects of the Philippines.”
The tracts are not sold; they are free. The ministry raises their own support and finds creative ways to ship the Gospel overseas as cost-effectively as possible, including partnering with BEAMS Bible Ministry, which supplies hardback Bibles to missionaries and national pastors around the world without charge. Instead of expensive packing peanuts, the Bibles are secured with 40,000 Publish or Perish tracts.
Mitchell recalled receiving a phone call from a missionary in Poland who received the English tracts through the Bible shipment. Knowing many students were interested in learning English, he passed them around a university in Warsaw. The missionary then worked with Mitchell in translating and proofing tracts into Polish, which the ministry published and sent a million tracts his way.
But the work could not be complete without the five local churches who prayerfully fold each printed tract that makes it to their door. “We couldn’t do what we do without these churches who help us,” Mitchell affirmed. “There’s no telling how many hands touch these before they get sent out.”
Strengthford Folding Team
Nine years ago, the folding team at Strengthford started with seven members. Since then, one member has moved out of state, while another has passed away. With five members remaining, and one being on sick leave, the team continues to rise early four days a week to dutifully fold tens of thousands of tracts, all before the workday begins at 8:00 a.m.
The team consists of team leader, Martin Busby, as well as Ken Walters, Wayne Hollifield, Mark May, and Andy Karnes. Working out of a renovated garage in the back of the church, one man feeds the machine, another catches the folded tracts, and others box up and place the tracts on a pallet, ready to send back to headquarters.
The men don’t just show up to pass the time. They each come with a mission-driven purpose to pray over the tracts before they make their journey around the world.
Busby, the team leader and a country farmer, felt this calling on his life decades ago. In 1975, he had a terrifying vision of a portal to hell. As he described it, “I was on my knees cleaning up a paint spill, and I sensed a shadow in the room with me and heard something like thunder. Then just like that, I was on a rope. I never left the building, but I was a mile high. I had never felt such hot heat. I looked at my arms and thought my skin would fall right off me. I saw artesian water I had seen in a river years before, a rock formation coming up out of the ground, and in it I saw this portal to hell. Little fireflies that looked like sparks of fire were going down into that portal. For a long time after, I couldn’t figure out what it meant or even talk about what I had seen. The Lord put it on my heart and wanted me to do something with tracts.”
The vision motivated Busby to be a part of God’s mission — to offer redemption to every soul on its way to an excruciating eternity without Him. For years, he asked around at churches and revivals for connections to a tract ministry. But it was not until Walters began serving at Strengthford a decade ago that he and Busby began to work together. Walters had come from a church which folded tracts and could help Busby learn more about the process.
When Walters’ previous church prepared to close their doors, arrangements were made for Strengthford to receive their folding machine, but the plans fell through, and Busby was heartbroken. Busby remembers how his friend and a director at Publish or Perish, Bob Tapper, encouraged him to keep going.
“I really love that old dude. He was something else,” said Busby as he thought about Tapper, who passed away due to COVID. “He wanted to load up an RV with these tracts and go up the east coast as far as he could, handing out tracts, but he didn’t get the chance to do that. Right after things fell through for that machine,” Busby recalled, “he called me one day and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. The Lord’s got one set up for you.’”
Tapper called another day with the news that they not only had a machine, but one that was functional and cost only $101, where most would have been over $1,500. Busby’s next hurdle was to build a team of reliable folders. Tapper counseled him to pray for laborers.
“I came in here one day,” said Busby, “running 18,000 tracts by myself, and I sat right here and I cried a bunch. And it wasn’t very long after that that the Lord brought people in here with me every day. The Lord hears a cry, and He will hear you cry.”
Soon, the team began to hear testimony after testimony about how these tracts came to people all around the world — how one person read, believed, and brought the news to their entire family. Busby began to specifically pray that these “paper missionaries” would open hearts to let the Lord reign in their whole family, because “one by himself might not make it, but the whole family would help one another.”
“Now I know I’m a pot calling the kettle black, but all of the folding teams we work with are made up of old people,” laughed Mitchell. “Most of them are retired. Most of them are not in good health. But God uses broken vessels, doesn’t He?”
“We work 2 or 3 hours per day for four days a week,” Walters shared, “so we’re not overworked, yet we have 61 million tracts with our fingerprints on them. We joke and have fun while we work. We let the lost people do the arguing.
“I myself have gained boldness in handing someone a Gospel tract. It’s a great way to witness for the Lord. I have known people that carried a Gospel tract in their billfold for years. One was an escaped prisoner walking down a highway where he found a folded tract stuck on a road sign.
“Even a small church can be used in some way. Even one person can be used.”
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