MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “When I was 6 years old, I would cry after school for my friends who didn’t know Jesus.” So began the testimony of a young woman who is preparing to engage the world for Christ among a people group yet unreached. She and her husband are among several dozen young sets of parents who are headed to places where the labor will be hard and the fruit uncertain but where the God is certainly sending them.
They are going as a part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) World Outreach (WO) effort.
She said, “I feel homesick, and we’ve never lived there. We’ve never met the people and yet we love them.”
The image she shared was that of an orange tree that was growing fruitfully out of a broken sidewalk in a parched and weary land. That tree and its fruit has become for them an image of God’s promise for a people yet unknown.
God has given these people a heart for the lost. The Lord’s calling upon them is extraordinary. Each has a story and each has a verse.
Retread for mission at the age of ‘retirement’
Another couple rose with grey hair and visible joy.
She shared how empty and angry their lives had been before God had healed their hearts, their marriage, their family and their church. “How do I say thank you to this incredible God who has done incredible things?” she asked.
This is a couple who have arrived at the cultural age of retirement, but God has different plans. When the culture is telling you “you’re done,” the Lord is saying “go for Me.”
He is a physician and teacher of physicians. He shared his experiences on the urban and cross-cultural mission fields of America and beyond.
He said, “God sent me to Memphis and I know the inner-city. I was sure that’s where I was going to go someday. But God is sending us to a war-torn country in central Asia.”
How do they know that’s their place? Their daughter had occasion to visit and came home saying, “Daddy, they need you.” Then, another church in Memphis was sending a team and they needed one more doctor. No one else answered the call. “It was clear that it was God’s call to me,” the doctor said.
He added that it was not an invitation from a church, but from God. He noted that “When God invites you to something it’s either obedience or disobedience, and we know where the second leads. What we don’t know is where the first leads.”
Adding, “He always wins. I had the time of my life and found a job suited for me uniquely. They need someone to train family physicians and that’s what I do. It’s my work and it’s Kingdom work. God showed me this one unique job and then said, ‘This is how you get there.’”
“Getting there” includes application, evaluation, preparation and raising support or establishing for-profit businesses that will support them. All those aspects of answering God’s call were part of the EPC World Outreach Encounter event in Memphis last week.
‘We cannot not go’
A young woman with a baby bound to her chest shared that she and her husband “are in the application process,” adding, “this is not my plan. I did not see any of this coming.”
The church she and her husband are members of left the PCUSA in the last year and when they joined the EPC, part of what they experienced was an introduction to Engage 2025, an EPC ministry whose goal is to plant self-replicating Protestant Reformed churches in 10 unreached Muslim communities by 2025. The couple also experienced the passion of the EPC to reach unreached people of the world.
Her husband is a youth coach and so he naturally served in the youth ministry of the church. “But,” she said, “God transitioned him off the church youth committee and onto the mission committee. The opportunity for him to go on a vision trip with our new EPC presbytery arose. I was expecting our son at the time, and we have three little girls at home. He came home from that experience, and we talked about it and agreed we were called to be senders and advocates.”
But God had set the hook in their hearts, and they began praying for their people group.
The young mother of four declared with deep conviction, “God has done a work in our hearts and although I’ve never been to northern Asia, these are now our people.”
She said that they started asking, “What’s keeping us here?” And then answered, “We’re running out of reasons, and we’re now at a point of obedience where we cannot not go.”
From pastoral post to mission outpost
Next up was a young EPC pastor who said that “the question for our family has not been whether but when.”
He shared how over the course of years God has been filling their tool box that now includes his wife’s nursing degree and living cross-culturally in the inner city.
He said, “God is moving all over the world and large Muslim-populated countries are no exception to that.”
He concluded that “our m.o. is not to mess up what God is doing.”
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My heart has been so broken and I have been so downtrodden. This story was exactly what I needed to read to know that His work is being done and the Church is alive and well. Praise the Lord and thank you for sharing this wonderful testimony of faithfulness. I’m so grateful to see what I so loved as a Southern Baptist is also the focus of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church – The Great Commission. Women are great leaders in missionary work and these women remind me of Lottie Moon, the Southern Baptist missionary to China from 1873-1912. Thank you, Lord, for these faithful servants who are sharing the Gospel around the world at all costs.