Sign up for our free newsletter:

Photo by John W. Kennedy

Lillie Carraway is a 71-year-old missionary to Nigeria who teaches sexual purity to teenagers. She's proof that it's never too late to gather up your life lessons and use them to serve God and others.

Lillie's story is all about second chances. After years of resisting Christian evangelism, Lillie—or "Grandma Lillie" to those who know her well—went on to become a ministry powerhouse in inner-city Cincinnati and beyond.

Amica Johnson was one of the first teens to be won over by Lillie's message on the benefits of sexual abstinence. "I'm eternally grateful for what Grandma Lillie did for me," says Johnson, 30, who now works as a professional makeup and hair stylist in Atlanta. "She was a godsend. She changed the course of my life."

Johnson, the oldest of three children in a single-parent home, says Grandma Lillie kept her focused on living virtuously during her early teen years. "I cannot express how monumental she was in my life," adds Johnson.

A praying daughter
Early on, Lillie seemed an unlikely champion of sexual purity. Her parents divorced when she was 13. She looked to her peer group for solace. By 15, a boyfriend had gotten her pregnant. It was 1948, and some relatives suggested she obtain an illegal abortion, but her mother arranged for her to move to a home for unwed pregnant girls.

The young teenage girl agreed to give the baby up for adoption, but a night nurse on duty during Lillie's first night in the hospital maternity ward didn't read the chart that said Lillie shouldn't see the infant, standard protocol at the time for birth mothers relinquishing their babies for adoption. The nurse brought the newborn baby girl to Lillie for a feeding, and the young teenage mom changed her mind. Lillie named her baby Phyllis, after a comic-strip character.

	"It turned out I had carried my salvation in my womb… "My only child—who I thought was a mistake—was a gift from God." -Grandma Lillie

Lillie dropped out of the 10th grade to care for her baby, but during her last semester her mother, Anna, insisted that her daughter be allowed to take business courses, classes normally reserved for white students.

At 21, Lillie and her daughter moved to New York, where she found work as a clerk for Reader's Digest and later for Consumer Reports. Drinking and partying occupied much of her non-working time.

Meanwhile, Phyllis, at 13, accepted Jesus as her Savior at a Pentecostal church. Every night, Lillie heard her daughter in the bedroom next to hers praying for her mama's salvation. Lillie repeatedly told Phyllis to shut up. But Phyllis kept evangelizing her mother.

A few years later, Lillie still spent too many nights carousing, arguing, and drinking with her live-in boyfriend. She was miserable, but felt trapped.

As 20-year-old Phyllis made arrangements to marry her beau, Ostell Shippy, Lillie bought sleeping pills and planned to end her alcoholic life on her daughter's wedding night.

Just before the wedding day, she became so emotionally disturbed that she had to be hospitalized. Even sedatives did nothing to stop her shaking and crying. Phyllis approached her mother one last time to talk about the Lord.

"She said, 'Mom, you've tried drinking, men, and everything else; why not try Jesus?'" Lillie recalls today. "Then she walked out."

Phyllis had given her mother the prescription to solve life's problems, and this time Lillie fell to her knees and confessed her sins. She felt burdens lifting and God's forgiveness washing over her. That night marked the first time in eight years that she didn't down her nightly six-pack of beer and half pint of scotch.

She's never had a drink since.

"It turned out I had carried my salvation in my womb," Lillie says. "My only child—who I thought was a mistake—was a gift from God."

The next morning Lillie went to church and promptly began a life of Christian service.

Telling her story
Moving back to Cincinnati, she attended Bible school and became active in children's and youth ministry at a local Assemblies of God church. She joined a Cincinnati ministry, Christians United Reaching Everyone (CURE), and sponsored neighborhood Bible clubs at her home. She fed poor people in the inner city, and helped young mothers learn about nutrition and childrearing.

Meanwhile, Phyllis and Ostell Shippy began ministering to high-risk kids at a 12-bedroom Cincinnati foster home. They had three teenage daughters of their own, Rachel, Deborah, and Leah.

Lillie's ministry focus changed when she found a note that Deborah, her 15-year-old granddaughter, had written to a girlfriend referring to her sexual experiences. When confronted, Deborah told her grandmother the truth.

"I can't tell people I'm a virgin, because nobody will be my friend," she told Lillie. "I had to lie to be accepted."

Lillie decided it was time to gather those friends for a heart-to-heart talk. In all, 21 girls, including Amica Johnson, came for that first meeting in 1986 in the Shippy living room to learn how to say no to boys. The girls asked to meet again the next week, and then the next week.

Lillie eventually expanded the agenda beyond sexual advice. As had been her own experience two generations earlier, she understood that a primary reason girls engage in sexual intercourse is peer pressure.

Using her own life story, Grandma Lillie encouraged pregnant unwed teens never to abort the baby that might one day turn their lives around. Soon, Lillie and her daughter turned those informal meetings into a full-blown youth ministry, which the kids dubbed Teens Against Premarital Sex (TAPS). Teenage boys in the neighborhood lobbied Lillie to teach them how to remain sexually pure, so the group became co-educational. Motivational speakers came in to talk about self-esteem, and the group later expanded to elementary school students because Lillie discovered too many girls already had engaged in intercourse by the time they started junior high.

Within a decade, TAPS had expanded to 80 Cincinnati schools and reached 27,000 young people. The group is now aligned with the Abstinence Educators' Network, a national organization.

But that's just the beginning of Grandma Lillie's remarkable journey. In her ministry work, Lillie had attended several missions conferences, which sparked a desire in her to be a foreign missionary. She went on a two-week trip to Nigeria in 1999 and worked with youth abstinence advocates to develop programs in Gboko, a city of 170,000. The Africans asked why no black U.S. missionaries had come to the region before.

"I wept because I felt a kindred spirit with them," Lillie says.

The success of the programs brought requests for her to return the next year to train other leaders.

In 2001, Lillie Carraway, at age 69, became a full-time missionary to Nigeria. In preparation for her move to Africa, she gave away all her possessions: her car, furniture, silverware, even salt and pepper shakers.

Today, in a seven-room mission house, she trains Nigerians to make abstinence presentations in schools and after-school clubs. Sometimes as many as 500 youth gather to hear her message.

John W. Kennedy is news editor of Today's Pentecostal Evangel.

	What did you think of this story?
	Please to give us your feedback.

Read more from 'People of Faith'

Home  |  People of Faith  |  Stories of Hope  |  Today's Culture
Build Your Faith  |  Laughing Matters  |  Archives  |  Contact Us

				Try Today's Christian Woman Free! Name Street Address City/State/Zip E-mail Address No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. If you decide you want to keep Today's Christian Woman coming, honor your invoice for just $17.95 and receive five more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is yours to keep, regardless. Give Today's Christian Woman as a gift Order a gift subscription!

FREE Newsletter Subscribe to the Today's Christian Newsletter    RSS Feed   RSS Help