1979 - Gairdner Trust Ministries founded

Researching Central Asia and educating the church in the West

People International was established in 1979 in the UK under the name "Gairdner Trust Ministries". The organisation was named after Temple Gairdner, a Scottish missionary who laboured among the Muslims of Egypt in the early part of the twentieth century.

On one of the first trips into Central Asia, one of our UK workers met an Uzbek Christian who was desperate for scriptures in his own language. The following year when our worker returned to deliver the scriptures, he learned that the Uzbek Christian had been arrested and placed in a psychiatric hospital. We later heard that an overdose of drugs was administered to him and he died in the hospital.

The first years of the mission were devoted to spreading information about the needs of Central Asian Muslims to the church in the West. Muslim Awareness Seminars were held, prayer fellowships started, literature published, and inquiries about Central Asian Muslims were answered. Pioneer researchers were sent to the then little-known areas of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang. Wherever our researchers went they found millions of Central Asian Muslims who desperately needed the Saviour. They also found that churches in the West had little or no information about these people.

With this informational vacuum in mind, the mission began to publish more and more literature. People Group Profiles and research reports called Society of Central Asian News (SCANs) began to be published on a regular basis. Regular newsletters (Muslim Peoples News) started to be distributed. The more that was published, the more that was taught, and the more travelling that was done, the more the work grew. Soon others wanted to know how they could also get involved.

Specific people groups were adopted for research and ministry. They were generally those of either Turkic or Persian origin who were living geographically between Albania in the West and China in the East. These Central Asian peoples have a population of over 300 million, and live in one of the most unreached areas of the world today.

The mission continued to challenge churches in the West and to raise their awareness of these neglected people groups of Central Asia. Some growth in the mission occurred; prayer groups met regularly; workers came and helped out in the mission office; a six-week annual Islamic Course was started in England; and the publications continued to make thousands aware of the unreached Muslim peoples. To this point, most of the work was centred in the UK and Europe, although some efforts to raise awareness of the needs of these peoples were also being directed toward North America.