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Lloyd and Elaine Cooke

Missionaries to Jamaica

Lloyd Aloysius George Cooke grew up in the Anglican Church in Jamaica. After his conversion in 1959, Lloyd had become active in Cambridge in St. James, where he then resided, in winning and leading other young people in his local church to serve Christ by literature distribution and personal witnessing in the surrounding communities. Feeling a call to Christian service he first applied to join the evangelistic ministry of his church, known as the Church Army.

But this was not to be as Lloyd, through a series of circumstances, felt led of God to leave his denomination to join the Plymouth Brethren at Bethany Gospel Hall. He also became a member of the Ambassadors for Christ, a group who were then active in Open-air evangelism on the streets of the capital city of Kingston. Lloyd learned aggressive personal witnessing, and went on his first ‘Missionary Journey’ to the eastern Caribbean islands by ship in the summer of 1964. Other trips would follow during the next two summers that would last most of the summer holidays.

Lloyd was educated at Jamaica Bible College and completed an intense missionary training program with International Missionary Fellowship (IMF). He briefly served in Dominica with the British based World Evangelization Crusade (WEC). During his time there he helped plant a thriving church which still stands today. Then he returned to take over leadership of the IMF Training Center in Jamaica. He served there for six years.

Lloyd then moved his family to the US and studied for two years at Wheaton College. In 1981 Lloyd left Wheaton for Miami, FL. On leaving Wheaton College Lloyd’s faculty advisor, Dr. Dean Arnold had suggested that, because of Miami’s strategic location as the crossroad of Latin America and the Caribbean, Lloyd could continue his involvement in missions by assisting missionaries passing to and from the field. He faithfully served the Lord in this capacity for the next fifteen years.

Elaine Huie is also a Jamaican.  Like Lloyd she had a strong Christian upbringing. As a child, Elaine decided that she would be a missionary nurse to Africa. To fulfill this vision Elaine sought nursing training at the government Kingston Public Hospital School of Nursing, graduating in 1967, and midwifery at the University of the West Indies Hospital in Kingston (1969-70).

After a few years of nursing at Spanish Town Hospital she entered Jamaica Bible College in Mandeville to prepare for what she was sure was to be her life’s work, missionary service. She did a two year Christian Education course and traveled to Luampa, in the Kaoma district of western Zambia, serving from 1973 to 1977 with the Africa Evangelical Fellowship (AEF).

After her first term of service Elaine planned to return to Zambia, but was prevented from doing so by the refusal of the U.S. embassy to grant her, a single person with no ties to Jamaica, a visa to visit the office of AEF. She decided to continue her nursing in Jamaica and did so for the next four years. then followed a stint as school nurse at the government Sam Sharpe Teacher Training College near Montego Bay from 1989 to ’92 until her leaving for New York to join her family who had migrated there. In 1996 she married Lloyd.

Lloyd and Elaine returned to Jamaica in November of 1999 as missionaries with Ministries In Action to work with local churches to assist, by Evangelism seminars, in sparking Church Growth and missions involvement. Lloyd also joined his alma mater Jamaica Bible College as an adjunct professor of Church History, Comparative Religions and Missions and Evangelism. He currently speaks at many missionary meetings, and does what he can to foster Caribbean missions at every opportunity he gets. Elaine serves the Manchester circuit of Methodist churches as Youth Coordinator.

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