1920s: Jim Schreiber Arrives

Visiting Evangelistic Team to Oak Hills, Summer 1928
Left to Right: Jim Schreiber, Jack Shufelt and Rufus Park.  (Mr. Park made his own cello!)

Group picture with visiting evangelistic team to Oak Hills- Summer 1928

Jim Schreiber (1928) on his way to Oak Hills.  He bought this Model T Ford for $15 and gave it to Oak Hills when he arrived.

The dedicated witness of W.S. Cummings and the missionaries awakened the Oak Hills area to the Gospel.  At this timely hour three men with their evangelistic message arrived at Oak Hills from Wheaton, Illinois.  Sounds of music filled the north woods as each night an enthusiastic group of people joined in spirited singing of Gospel hymns led by Jack Shufelt and James Schreiber, who played a folding organ.  They listened with rapt attention to the chalk-talks by Rufus Park, a school-teacher.  The audiences delighted in Mr. Park's drawings illustrating the Gospel messages which he presented and in special music by Schufelt and Schreiber.  God used these meetings not only to bless the folk in the north, but to impart a missionary vision to Jim Schreiber and to encourage Jack Shufelt to follow a rich and satisfying ministry of music.

Toward the close of that summer of 1928 Mr. Cummings invited Jim Schreiber to come back as a missionary helper for one year.  Jim arrived from Wheaton College in September riding "high and handsome" in a $15 Model T Ford, having taken three days to make the 650-mile trip to Camp Oak Hills.  Little did he realize that his "one year" of home-missionary service would stretch itself to more than forty years.

(from Mission to the Northwoods: The Story of Oak Hills Fellowship, by Ruth McKinney)