LOVER OF LIFE: F W BOREHAM'S TRIBUTE TO HIS MENTOR

'Mr. Doke', as Boreham respectfully calls his friend and mentor, was by all accounts - or at least this one - a most amazing human being and pastor.

Here we have John Broadbanks Publishing's first effort at re-issuing out-of-print F W Boreham books. Congratulations to Geoff Pound and Michael Dalton for a beautifully put-together version of Boreham's 1948 book The Man Who Saved Gandhi: A Short Biography of Joseph John Doke.

F W Boreham is Australia's and New Zealand's only really collectable religious author. (Some of his rarer works have passed through my hands - to serious collectors like Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's wife, and Ravi Zacharias - for a 3-figure dollar sum, and sometimes more). So what was his special appeal? Well, he wrote about 50 very readable books (and over 2,000 newspaper articles), preached to large crowds in Hobart and Melbourne and around the world between the two World Wars, read thousands of books, but also had a pastoral 'common touch'.

And here we meet his mentor: an amazing man. Doke was - all in one person - a brilliant preacher, wise counsellor, gifted pastor, a passionate and holy Christian, lover of Scripture (he read the Bible through four times most years) and highly committed to 'foreign missions' (he died on a journey to encourage missionaries in the middle of 'darkest Africa').

And he may have been the most authentic Christian Gandhi ever met. Which makes a puzzle out of the Mahatma's often-quoted comment "Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." Well, if we take Boreham's word for it, Doke was the man most-like-Christ of any he knew. And Doke was amazingly Christlike to the then little-known Gandhi when they met in South Africa.

You can read these 34 pages in one sitting. Don't. Buy it for your pastor, but read it slowly first. Order some copies to give away here.

When I get more time I'll jot down here some of the wisdom I marked from this wonderful little book.

Shalom!/Salaam!

Rowland Croucher