God would never call you to missions, you insist.
You’re too damaged. Or too average. Too inexperienced. Too tired. Too young. Too old. Too busy getting through the day-to-day. That’s your story — despite the still, small voice that keeps speaking to your heart.
Despite the many excuses — er, reasons — people have for not answering the call to missions, God doesn’t give up as easily as we give up on ourselves, according to some of the 77 new missionaries appointed by International Mission Board (IMB) trustees at Temple Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Miss., on Nov. 16.
“For many years I didn’t think God could really use me. I was just a normal small-town girl with normal passions: children and education,” said new missionary Naomi Singer, who is going to sub-Saharan Africa as an education consultant for children of missions workers.
“I love being wrong!” she told the crowd gathered at Temple Baptist. “God is using what I have to offer.”
By the age of 9, Vicky Kane was in her fifth foster home. “I had no future,” she said. “Little did I know that God would use this to burden my heart for the spiritually orphaned.”
After experiencing years of His healing and grace in the Christian family who adopted her, she’s going to East Asia with her husband Darrin and their 1-year-old daughter to tell people as hopeless as she once was that they have a loving Father.
Tyson Sellers was born with cataracts and has struggled with vision problems for years. “But my eyes now [have been] opened to the nations,” he said. His wife Sonya was born in a Christian home but was “determined to be ordinary, to lean on my own understanding.” Now they’re headed out to make disciples of Jesus among East Asians with “no excuses and no limitations.”
Richard Gannet is a pastor’s son who vowed he would never serve in ministry. His wife Sally didn’t even become a believer in Christ until college. “We never thought that we would be going to South Asia to work with Muslims through community development,” he admitted. “Through God’s amazing work, we go to share the love of Christ in word and deed.”
After 9/11, Taylor Bishop developed a hatred for Muslims. But as he looked out over one of the largest cities in the Middle East during a 2009 trip, “God captured my heart for Muslims. I asked myself, ‘How can I not go?’” So he’s going with his wife Chandra to live among a Muslim people group in West Africa.
The missionary appointment service was held in conjunction with William Carey University in Hattiesburg and its celebration marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Carey, the British shoemaker who became the “father of modern missions.” Carey himself struggled with resistance to his missions call from Baptists of his day — as well as his own family.
During the appointment service, the university’s Serampore Players, a student theater group named for the Bengali area of India where Carey served, dramatized the 1786 incident when a leading minister responded to Carey’s call for obeying the Great Commission by saying, “Sit down, young man. … When God wants to convert the heathen, He can do it without your help or mine.” Carey persevered — and changed history.
As the new missionaries stood across the front of Temple Baptist’s sanctuary at the end of the service, hundreds of people came forward to make their own personal commitments to missions service, support and engagement.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed. (BP)
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