Hi to my YouTube subscribers. My guest today on
Facing the Canon is Robert Glover, a remarkable man with a remarkable story putting
one million orphaned children into homes. Robert Glover welcome to Facing the Canon. Thank
you, yes it's a pleasure to be here with you. Well a delight to have you on the programme Robert.
I've read your story. I've read the story in this amazing book: As Many As The Stars.
Well, so I was thinking this morning actually, soccer, submarines, social work! So, you grew up in
Norfolk and wanted to be a soccer player. Start there. Yeah well, I think as a young boy, many
young boys, you have that aspiration and our school team got to the finals, the local city
finals, and then having this amazing opportunity to go and train with the real team and
going up there during the week and playing on the weekends, it was, it was my life as a young
lad. So as a boy, I'd been to see Norwich City. In those days, it was all standing and there were
big crowds and it was, yeah fascinating so, that was, that was my dream to, you know, run out at
Carrow Road in the yellow of the Canaries. And then... but then you went into the navy and ended
up working on submarines. I finished my training in the Royal Navy and you put in a draft preference
card where you, you know, what you want to do, and I thought, well a nice guided missile
destroyer sailing from Plymouth out to the Far East. And of course, my draft came through:
Dear Glover, welcome to the Submarine Command, the Elite Branch of the Royal Navy as a volunteer.
I thought, I didn't volunteer for submarines, and I don't want to go in them you know, so I wrote
back and said, 'No, I'm not a volunteer and you know, I don't wish to serve in submarines!' And
of course, the letter came back: Dear Glover, welcome to the Submarine Command Elite Branch The Royal
Navy as a non-volunteer. So, instead of going out to the far shores of the South China Seas, I
was in the Baltic in a diesel electric submarine. But then back, and so tell us how the
whole social work thing opened up. Well, when I came out of the Royal Navy, I came back to
Norwich and I'd got a job as an accountant and I really felt, sitting in an office with, I
don't know, those flickering lights, that I needed to get out. And so, I applied for a job up in
Sheringham, and it was a rather unusual name in those days, it was called Sheringham Court
School for maladjusted boys, and these were all the lads that had caused great troubles in London
and Birmingham and Manchester and sent out to the wilds of Norfolk, so that was the start,
but then they moved and by that time I'd met Elizabeth you see, so I didn't really want
to move to Lincolnshire, so I decided to apply to Norfolk County Council and I got a
job as residential social worker there. Now there's a fascinating story
that when your first child was born soon after, you were diagnosed with a particular
disease and you were lying in a hospital and you had a divine experience. Tell us about that?
Yeah I think so. By this time, I don't think Liz was a Christian and I'd become a Christian as
a young man but, as many young people through adolescence and during the navy time,
religion can wait you know, God can wait, and I think this is my brick wall. We... Rachel
was about six months old, and I was at university doing social work and
one day came home. My legs were tingling, my hands were tingling, and interesting,
Elizabeth was training to be a nurse and she actually diagnosed my condition to the
doctors which is called Guillain-Barré syndrome and I was taken to hospital and I was
in intensive care for a long time, and that was an awful place because it was
a place where people were seriously ill. And so you know, I just made friends with
a chap next to me and the next morning he wasn't there, and you know, where's he gone? And
'Oh he passed away in the night'. And then the chap next to me on the other side you know,
had sort of got into all... he was throwing an orange, just thinking he was in the war and it was... And I
remember feeling, oh I've got to get out of here. And it was a struggle and it got to the point, I
think where, with Guillain-Barré syndrome, what it is, it's a virus attacks the myelin sheath
around the nervous system, so the signals are not getting to your muscles and you gradually
get wastage, and I think it had quite a high percentage in those days of death if not
disability. So, I remember, I almost lost my mind and my mother was quite concerned with my wife,
and so they decided to call, my mother was a Christian, so she decided to call a prayer meeting,
and so because my wife went along with it and, and I, that morning, they decided they were going
to take an X-ray, and so I went down to the X-ray department, sat on the bed in the corridor waiting
to go in. And I don't know, you know in these hospitals, they had these flappy doors and the doors opened
and this wind came through. I remember just breathing it in and thinking, wow I feel so good. I sat
up and I didn't have a headache anymore and I was feeling really good and that evening, my mother
and Elizabeth came in the hospital and they said, 'You look so good.' I said, 'Yeah, I feel great. I went
down for an X-ray and the wind came in, I got some fresh air and I felt really good.' And they said,
'What time was that?' I said, 'Well I know exactly because the clock was at eleven o'clock, it was
right on the wall.' And they smiled, and I said, 'Why are you smiling?' And they said, 'Eleven o'clock,
we gathered everybody to pray for you.' And I went back three months later, then went
into recovery and recuperation and the doctor, I remember him saying, 'Can I write your case in
medical history? It's the quickest recovery on record, we've never seen anybody.' He said, 'Can you hop
on one leg and hop on..?' I thought, why is he asking me these things? And so he said,
'Can you run?' I said, 'Well, I played football on Saturday.' He said, 'I can't believe it!' And so yeah,
it went down as quite remarkable, and I think that was God saying, 'Well you're not going
to run away from me anymore, this is the time. Stop, listen, we've got some things to do.' So,
soccer, submarines, social work and then you end up in China, okay. There are lots of little divine
appointments aren't there? There are. You know, you arrive at the airport and then somebody comes
up to you and gives you two tickets to meet an olympic meeting. Yes. And then at that you go. Yes. A
bit reluctantly, but you go, out of curiosity, sit next to a very influential man. There's lots of little
appointments like that all the way along that you can see God's hand, almost saying, 'Look trust me, I'm
gonna connect you, I'm gonna make things happen.' I often describe it as bit like a..., if you go into a
big mansion and there's someone smoking a cigar, and you go into the room and you can smell the
cigar but the windows open or the doors open and it moved on. And as you go, you follow this person
around the mansion and it was like that in China with God I mean really was. We..., before we left, our
church prayed for us and a little tiny girl had a picture. She had a picture that we would take
an olympic torch to China. So yeah, I didn't forget that, although my friend had and
of course, when we got to Shanghai, this lady comes out and said 'I've got two tickets to the
special olympic games.' And my friend was going 'No.' I just go, 'Well yes, I think we should
go. Remember that little girl, she had that...' And so, that led us into the stadium and I was
introduced to a senior member of the communist party. And I thought, well I'm in trouble
here you know. I've got to really watch..., I'm 007 Christian you know. Yes. And he was asking
me all sorts of questions, which I was avoiding. And then he said something really rather strange.
He said, 'You know all the work I do for the children is for my Father,' looking up. I'm thinking, he's
trying to catch me out here. So I carried on for a bit longer, and then he talked about how he was
raised in Yunnan Province in a mission school and then during the communist time, he had to, you know,
fascinating hearing all about The Cultural Revolution. And, I don't know if you've ever had this,
but suddenly my heart started to flutter. Yes. And before I knew it, my mouth had said the
words that I was trying not to, and I just said, 'I'm a Christian and I come with a heart to serve.' And
he said, 'Oh right, which hotel are you staying in?' I told him. He said, 'We'll pick you up tomorrow
morning - eight o'clock.' And I'm still, by this time, I'm thinking, have I done the right thing? And
we're walking out of the tunnel of this stadium, and my friend had a great time, yes, and
he turns to me and he said, 'What's up Rob you look worried?' And I said, 'Well I'm not sure, we've done
the right thing.' I said, 'You know that man who's a senior member of the communist party, I've told him
we're Christians and he's picking us up at eight o'clock tomorrow morning!' And, but of course, he
took us to lunch and we had this amazing time and what I hadn't realized about China, I didn't know
anything really about Chinese culture, but there were some other Westerners, and they were wagging
their fingers at them and telling them off, and I was just loving the food, the food was superb. I was
just turning to my friends, the Chinese friends, I was just thinking, why they criticising? We're guests in
their country. 'Your food is wonderful, and I didn't even know you could make beer. I mean
Tsingtao Beer is absolutely lovely. And of course I didn't realise, all this went on and
they were loving it, they were taking it all in. And what I hadn't realised I was doing guanxi,
which in Chinese means building relationship, right, you don't go and criticise, you don't get into the
business, you enjoy the food, you enjoy the beer, you enjoy each other before you even talk about it. So,
by the end of this first meal, the others were sent away and I was invited back for dinner,
and we had more chinese food - lovely, really nice food, and more talk and more discussions. And
then they started to open up about children and, 'What do you think we should do?' and you know, I just
said, 'Well look, the family is really important for children. God made the family for children,
and children need mothers and fathers, and I see in your country, your family structure
is so strong.You know the detail that is in family, and the way you support each other,
and the way you take care of your parents and their grandparents is phenomenal, and I think
children living in institutions, you know, there's a positive alternative, we can, we can place
them in families.' And at that time Robert how many children were in orphanages in China? Oh
well, they, they're very different discussions. No one ever knows the figures, but of course,
later, I get to meet the minister and he told me they say there's 500 000
but I think it's more closer to 2 million Yes, and a significant percentage of those
children with a disability of some kind? Well in the early days many of them were girls of course ,
because, there was a one-child policy and what I think the Western culture doesn't
understand about the Chinese culture, is it is as important for parents to take care of their
children as children taking care of their parents. Now when you have a daughter, it's a blessing,
yes, but the daughter, when she marries, takes care of her husband's parents. Yes. So if
you have a daughter, when you get old, you've got no one to take care of you. Yeah. If you have a son,
then it's your son's wife that takes care of you in old age. So that's why we saw huge numbers
of abandonment of girls, and I mean, I would..., it must have been dreadful for those
mothers and fathers having to get to that point. But, that was the early days and then later
it was very much your own disabled children. And then you obviously, through all these divine
connections, you were given the opportunity to help these orphans by putting them into families.
So tell us about that, how, what happened there? Many years before, I'll just connect this, a guy
called David Devonish who'd come to our church, and there was something mystical for me because
I wasn't fully aware of all the spiritual things at that time, but he was, he was a man who
had a prophetic gifting, yes, so I was a bit nervous, I thought I'll sit at the back. Anyway, he came
through and he prayed with me and he said, 'I really sense Robert, that you're going to be fathered to
as many children as there are stars in the sky!' And I thought to myself, well that's
rather strange you know, at the time I had six children. I was doing youth work, so
you tend to kind of, put it in your subconscious. By the time we had got through this final dinner,
they invited me back, would I come to help them? And I thought, well yes I know I'd
go home, talk to Liz and we could take some books and some videos. And then by the second trip,
it became very evident, they wanted us to go and live there and work with them to develop
family placement. So it was December 1997, and we're having a dinner again, because everyone's
always having dinner, we always have food. Yes, hospitality So the first half an hour, you don't even
talk, it's all keeping those friendships and catching up, and then they said, 'So we
want you to come and be our consultant, we think it's quite funny, because we've got
a one-child policy, and you've got six children. But however, we want to give you a Chinese name.'
So they spent a bit of time talking, hadn't got clue, didn't understand anything that they were
saying. And then one chap stood up and he said, 'Look, in China, it's really important to tell you what
your name means in Chinese because that's the way we do it in our culture.' And he said, 'Your
Chinese name means, as many stars there are in the sky you'll be fathered to children in China.'
Wow! Subconscious comes to the fore; I remembered that man that came to Guernsey. This is where I've got to be
and so they were wanting us to move. We did as a family; we moved, eight of us to
Shanghai from Guernsey, 58 000 to Shanghai, 18 million at the time, to be a consultant
to the Shanghai government, to help them initially, place 500 children from the institution
into local Shanghai. Oh, initially only 500? Initially, only 500, that was the pilot project, funded
by the British government. That all came, that was very strange because I'd been
on one trip to China, we talked about this. I think it was the December trip. Went back, phone
call rings, 'We want you in the foreign office.' They sat down and said, 'The Chinese want you.'
They've asked for you? 'As their consultant, so if you go, we'll fund it, we'll fund it through the
department in National Development.' And so suddenly, all these pieces start to come into
place. But it wasn't for just 500 children? No. I mean you have been doing this for how many years
now? So twenty years, we had the 20th anniversary in 2008. And how many children have
you been able to put into families? So what happened, the pilot project went, we had
to move to Beijing because the pilot project was successful. The Beijing government asked
if we'd move up; we rolled it out nationally, 2014, the law changed, that families were priority.
2018, there we had a conference in Shanghai, and they said, 85 percent of children now
living in families, over a million children. Over a million? Over a million children
now living in families. In families, called fostering? Fostering, adoption yeah.
Long term? Long term, these are forever homes. Many of the children with disabilities?And
there's a lovely story about one village with a number, tell us about that? So
a few years back Francis Chan, some people may know him, contacted me and said, 'I'd
love to go to China, I want to hear and feel what's going on with the Chinese Church.' And by this time,
I got lots of friends in various different cities. Interestingly, we went first to Beijing,
and word had got out, there was a famous American pastor in the service, and there were
lots of young people, maybe I don't know, there were lots of people in this service. We sat at
the back, that was Francis, he wanted to just listen; he didn't want to make any
waves, and at the end of the service all these young people come running to the back and
they ran past Francis Chan, they came to me, and they said, 'Will you sign your book?'
I said. 'Well I haven't written a book!' They said, 'Yes you have: Purpose-Driven Life.'
Yeah, they thought, they thought the famous Christian pastor was Rick Warren and I was
Rick Warren and Francis was giving me a bit of the look! So for the rest of the trip, yeah come
on, come on Rick,' you know, and we went then to many cities; Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan and ended
up in this village in Yunnan Province. I wanted him to see a little bit of what we do. We've done a
lot of that, and then when he got into this village, it's a Christian village, ethnic minority.
Farmers, that had read their Bible and discovered they should take care of widows and orphans.
And seventy families, had taken 120 disabled children into their family. That's incredible, absolutely
incredible, CBN called it: City On A Hill. Francis said, 'You know what, I think this is
probably the most beautiful group of people I've ever seen in my life.' And he said,
'Every morning, we wake up and we think about you know, oh I've got to clean my teeth or you
know, I've got to get dressed, so I've got to have a wash or got to answer my phone,' he said, 'They
immediately get up and attend to these children,' He said, 'I've never seen anything like it.'
He said, 'This is why I came to China. This is why God told me to come to China.' And they are an
amazing group of people and really the sort of tip of the iceberg of what's happened right across
China. And you've expanded Robert, like you've gone into some other countries as well? Yes again,
I mean very extraordinary, we, after the Tsunami, and we were invited down by the Thai Government
and I met with the minister. It became heavy, really heavy water, lots of negotiation and then
we were having a conference in Bangkok and a friend of mine, who was the PA for Prince Michael,
who brought Prince Michael over, he did a speech, and we got a message that we'd been
given an audience with the King of Thailand. That is pretty major in Thailand anyway. And so,
I remember the week before, I was in a smelly orphanage; jeans and flip-flops and here
I was in Bangkok and we were going to inspect all the generals of the Thai Army, walking
behind Prince Michael. And then, I knew the King's palace was down in Hua Hin, it was about
five hour road journey. It was getting dark, I was thinking, you know, I was saying to one of the
generals, 'We need to get going.' They said, 'Oh, no, no, no, you're going in that over there.' And there
was a Black Hawk helicopter. And so we fly down over the jungle, you know, with two commandos
on the outside. Land into a gold Rolls Royce and into the King's palace. And we spent a short time
with The King. Prince Michael told him about what we were doing. He came in and he said, 'Robert,
I want this to happen in Thailand.' And the next day, the minister rang and we signed the contract.
Amazing! It was just... Again, more divine appointments. Absolutely. I mean, we'd been in six months
of negotiation, lots of bureaucracy and it literally happened the next day, and so
we've been able to work right the way through Thailand in all their institutions, all their shelters
and so now we're seeing children growing up in families where they should be. So, as you look
back Robert and you know, tried to do soccer, went to submarines, did a little bit of
social work. Guernsey to China, and you you've already helped over a million children,
expanding to some other countries in Asia, and you've seen God's miraculous hand
all the way through that. As you look back, how does it make you feel about what
God is trying to do? I think, you know, the glory goes to God. There's no way anyone
knows Robert Glover or my family know that there's huge limitation wouldn't happen.
So the glory goes to God, and I think the only thing we can say is that we had faith. So we
were in that place where we wanted to go and do something. We were ready and we
were obedient when God showed us where to go. It wouldn't have been perhaps arch the
rest of the family's choice you know, to go to Shanghai, but very clearly God called us there
and so I think it was about faith and obedience of getting to that place. And the important thing
for children, I think, I'll always recall one story: A little boy in Gwadar in Southern China,
and we were halfway through this journey and they were starting to rebuild some of the
orphanages, and I went to this orphanage. It was beautiful. And it got, you know, great food. They all
wore nice uniforms and they were, they were, you know, I was thinking, are we doing the right thing?
These kids are going into these very poor villages. Anyway, we took the minibus into the village.
The minibus obviously had its orphanage name on the side, and when I got out the minibus, it was
this tiny little chinese boy in a little pair of shorts, shoes that didn't fit him and a t-shirt,
and he got a bamboo stick, and he was going to fight me. He was so angry, he was really
trying to hit me with his stick! And I was saying, 'Why is he so angry?' And someone translated his
words. He said, 'You see that tree there,' he said, 'Yesterday, I climbed to the top of the tree and all
the village came out. They all know my name. They called me down. Everybody thinks about me and cares
for me, and they try to get me down out the tree.' And he said, 'You see this dog here? It's my dog,
it belongs to me, and over there when I go across those fields, that's my school, and my dog waits for
me, and when I come out of school, my dog follows me home. And auntie there, she gives me biscuits
every day. Uncle, he always gives me an apple. I'm not going back to that orphanage.' He thought
they had brought me in the minibus to grab him and take him back to the orphanage, but he
had everything in that village, he had his identity. Everybody knew his name. Nobody knows children's
names and institutions. Everybody took care of him. he had his own dog, he went to school like other
children he had mother and father, brothers and sisters and that identity was far more important
than going to any orphanage or institution. You know, that just, I thought that's it, that's the
story, that's God's story. That is so heartwarming. Robert Glover, thank you so much for joining us on
Facing the Canon. Pleasure. Wow, isn't that inspiring? I just, I just love the simplicity of
Robert's story. He and his wife and his six children living quite comfortably in Guernsey
and being called to go to China to help like a whole generation of children to be taken
into families and loved and cared for, and I'm sure that's warmed your heart; it definitely has
warmed my heart. 'As Many As The Stars'. This is the detailed story, it's
gripping, I couldn't put it down, so pick up a copy and read the detailed story.
Hope you've had a faith lift today with Robert Glover on Facing the Canon. Thank you
so much for joining us. Please join us again.
