by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
One of the longtime values of our congregation is our deep responsiveness. When we see a need we move to meet it. We don’t make “the way things have always been” into an idol. We know we must change to stay faithful.
For example, every few years this congregation has helped start a new community of faith. In the mid-90s it was our own contemporary service–risky for the time. In the late 90s it was our move out to New Market. In the early 2000s it was the launch of FaithBridge UMC in Blowing Rock and of La Esmirna Metodista in Patzibal, Guatemala. In the late 2000s it was our own Crossroads service and our merger with Blackburn’s Chapel in Todd. We have muscle memory around innovation. In fact, we’re about due to throw off a new faith community or two again.
The thing is, we don’t often talk about this gift of innovation. We don’t speak of ourselves as a launching, founding, innovative congregation. But we are. When it comes to launching churches, we are all action and no talk.
A new opportunity for us to respond to God is in Amy and Blake Justice’s call to the mission field. The Justices are uprooting their family from Boone, selling their house, leaving a community where they have extended family, and moving to a new place, all because God has called them. They are using their gifts as educators and in health care provision and in building excitement for Jesus to lead in a foreign place.
Amy has a deep patience and joyful attentiveness about her. Blake has a frenetic energy that comes from a live wire to the Holy Spirit (he’s the kind of sermon listener who is nodding even before Vern or I get to our point). Their girls, Gracie, Heather, and Molly, have a fierce and tender openness about them. You may remember Molly giving witness in church to the fact that she had asked Jesus into her heart. Praying that prayer wasn’t enough. She wanted the microphone so she could tell the world about her new step in faith.
Blake and Amy will be going with TeachBeyond, an innovative missionary sending institution for educators. They will be teaching at the Black Forest Academy in Kandern, Germany (near Freiburg), a school whose purpose is to teach missionary children. Parents of these 280 missionary kids are serving in over fifty countries all over the world. In other words, without the Justices and BFA, hundreds of missionary endeavors around the world would come to an end, since missionaries, like the rest of us, prize the education of their children.
One difficulty of the Justice’s specific call is where they are going. Germany! A place where the church is 1000 years old and declining fast. If they were going to help starving children in the emerging world they would have tapped into a well of support already. If they were going to a risky place where Christianity is forbidden they would tap into another kind of support. But Germany?!
This is where we need to think more carefully. Missionaries helping the most vulnerable of the world’s poor have their kids in school in Germany. Others preaching the gospel at risk of life and limb have their kids in school in Germany. To support the Justices means we can support many kinds of missionaries at the same time.
As if that were not enough . . . Amy will be leading teacher workshops in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in her spare time. These are terribly fragile countries, filled with gifted people dragged down by institutions and leaders who have failed catastrophically. The CAR and DRC need countless hours of patient rebuilding from servants like the Justices.
This is the first time in memory our congregation has sent a missionary into the field. We support countless others through our support of the general church’s various boards and through Faith Promise. But the Justices have come from among us, responded to our preaching and served and led us and our neighbors and kids. Now they go forth in our name. We’re not used to digging deep to support a missionary from our own zip code.
Now is our chance to be responsive again. We’ve done it before. Let’s do it again.