Anne Carman: No Temas, Tened Fe en Dios
“All around us are hearts of fear,” BCM missionary Anne Carman wrote home from Spain during Franco’s decades-long military dictatorship. Her response then and now remains, “No temas, pero tened fe en Dios,” or translated from the Spanish, “Do not fear, but have faith in God.”
For fifty-three years, Anne has faithfully shared the gospel, successfully negotiating religious persecution, economic turmoil, and the twists and turns of Spain’s uncertain political landscape to introduce children to Jesus Christ. While most of her ministry years were spent in Spain, Anne’s legacy also entails establishing Bible Clubs and camps, teaching, training, speaking, and translating BCM curriculum wherever Spanish is spoken in the world.
Anne’s grandfather was the catalyst Christ used to get her mother, a non-practicing Catholic, and her father, who had no religious affiliation, only an affinity for alcohol, to come to know Him. While not enthusiastic about his invitation to church, Anne’s parents went and responded to an altar call. That same day, at age thirteen, Anne Carman, along with her brother and sister, gave her heart to Christ. The next day her father visited all their neighbors and told them what had happened. As the light of Jesus replaced the darkness of their home, Anne remembers, “It was like lifting the shade in our whole house.”
The change in her father affected Anne profoundly, generating in her a strong desire to bring light into a dark world, even as two differing points of view shaped her outlook on missions. Attending what is now Philadelphia Biblical University, Anne listened as BCM missionary Maria Bolet proclaimed the need for helpers in Spain while another speaker decried that need and called instead for financially supporting national missionaries. Anne chose the latter and worked five years to support a pastor’s wife in Barcelona.
Anne Carman
Praying for guidance, Anne asked God what would happen to her Barcelona missionary and the Bible Clubs she taught in a Connecticut low-income housing project if she joined Maria in Spain. In response, Anne received a letter from her missionary’s organization telling her that the pastor’s wife was now being helped by nationals and that her funds were no longer needed. Meanwhile, a Bible Club volunteer had asked Anne for a more responsible role. Turning her clubs over to the woman, Anne prepared to head to Spain.
The Franco regime now controlled Spain. A triumvirate of military rule, a Roman Catholic state church, and right-wing aristocracy denied Spaniards most individual rights, including religious freedom. By the time Anne had raised her support, Maria Bolet was expelled from Spain for sharing the gospel. Determined to pick up where Maria had left off, Anne said adios to family and friends in September 1955, sailing out of New York harbor on a passenger ship to Spain. Within a year of her arrival, authorities had closed the church where BCM ministered in Zaragoza, Spain. Anne joined Maria in Tangier, a Moroccan city an eight-mile jaunt across the Strait of Gibraltar where many Spaniards had fled as refugees of the Spanish Civil War. Evangelical missionaries working among the Arab, African, and Berber people had founded a hospital and school in Tangier. Anne helped teach in the school, training Spanish nationals to carry the gospel back to their homeland.
By 1961, Franco’s signing of the Pacts of Madrid treaty with the United States produced a gradual reconciliation with the international community. Spain joined the anti-Communist bloc, became a member of the United Nations, and was moving in a more democratic direction, permitting Anne and other BCM missionaries to return to Spain. But integration into the European free-market system had resulted in sharply rising prices and falling wages. Tensions mounted as opposition groups to Franco’s authoritarian system grew bolder in voicing their distress.
“If our hearts are not established or settled in Him, then we will be filled with fear as we think of the future and of what could happen in these uncertain times,” Anne wrote from Zaragoza in 1961. “All around us here are hearts of fear, and rightly so, because they know not the Prince of Peace, who has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Words as true today, as they were forty-seven years ago. When the Spanish government refused to reopen the church in Zaragoza, Anne and Spanish believers worshiped in their homes. “Franco had made a rule that we couldn’t have more than twenty in a room,” Anne explains. “He closed the church because people were being saved.”
Was Anne discouraged by not having a church to worship in?
“We had a great time,” she shares. “We multiplied, and this was really the beginning of the Bible Clubs.” Many kids came to the Bible Clubs, even though parents were afraid of being persecuted for being Protestant.
Were the children afraid? No. They were taught faith instead of fear. Anne adds, “We taught them that it was a privilege to be a Christian.”
Within eighteen months of its closing, authorities permitted the Zaragoza church to reopen. Encouraged, Fernando, a church elder, pointed out to the Spanish authorities a law stating that Catholic and evangelical churches were allowed to teach in the public schools. Permission was secured for BCM missionaries to teach Bible in the schools. Their outreach expanded to ten public schools, then daily Bible Clubs, adult Bible Clubs, a Spanish translation of New Testament Footsteps of Faith lessons, and vacation Bible schools.
In 1991, Anne left Spain to spend the next years teaching and training children’s ministry leaders in Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Canary Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, as well as the USA and Canada.
Over the years, Anne Carman has signed all her letters, “In His Faithfulness.” The reason, she would tell you, is that without her shield of faith to protect her, this BCM veteran could not have withstood the Franco era of persecution against evangelical Christians or the hardships she’s encountered establishing Bible Clubs, teacher training, and Bible studies in lands shadowed by darkness and rooted in fear.
Anne knows the fearless peace found in God’s presence. It was there that He forged her strength of character and iron determination to do God’s will in making a difference in the lives of His children across the Spanish-speaking world. In 1998, at the age of seventy-one, Anne returned to the United States, where she has spent the past ten years as an active recycled BCM missionary, faithfully serving the Hispanic population in Florida—and wherever God leads her, as she continues to teach children that there is no need to fear when you belong to the Prince of Peace.
