Transformed to go. Teaching globaly.

I was comfortably entrenched in my thirty-fourth year of preaching/leadership ministry. I was serving at First Christian Church of Anaheim, CA (AFCC) and the church was showing signs of progress. I had completed my doctoral studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and was teaching night classes at Hope International University (HIIU). Peggy had a job she loved in the Registrar's office at HIU. It was in this time of comfort that a convergence of events changed our lives.

The Anaheim church had an active missions program and we had traveled overseas on six short-term projects. During these trips we were constantly asked, “When will you come/return to teach our people?” We saw a great hunger for learning and how rare learning opportunities were for the average church leader. People who traveled with us began saying, “You have a heart for this; you need to be doing this full-time.” In early 1998 we began to lead a study group at AFCC working through Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God, where the author says, “Discover what God is doing in the world and join Him there.”

It was in the middle of this study that we traveled to Cambodia and Myanmar with Ralph Brune, President of New Mission Systems International. In Cambodia, twenty-two people walked three days during a civil war, through gunfire we could hear, to get to two days of training. In Myanmar, thirty-five people traveled three to five days to get to a week-long seminar. During this trip Ralph challenged us to “do this” full-time.

We could never shake those words and what we saw God doing in these countries and the challenge to “do this full-time.” I resigned from the church in November 1998 and we joined NMSI in January 1999. Since then God has been so faithful in guidance, provision and health. In the past fifteen years we have worked in thirty different countries and led nearly 200 teaching events. Since our original fund-raising God has provided in such a way that we have not had to revisit this task in the past thirteen years. We have never missed a project and every project has been fully funded by the time of its completion.

We continue to be humbled by people's hunger for learning how to serve in God's Kingdom. People who travel for thirty days to come out of restricted countries and then return to teach while facing government threats. People who ride a train ninety minutes each way, morning and evening to get to a seminar. People willing to sell their water buffalo to raise funds to come. They sleep on the floor and sit around small campfires in the church yard and eat what food they carried with them.

One of the greatest joys of our ministry is the privilege to see what God is doing all around the world. It is easy for us to become myopic about the area we live. We love giving reports in Chile about what God is doing in Malawi and Myanmar. We love telling the people of Thailand what God is doing in Poland. And the sharing goes on. We get to tell the people, “God is at work all over the world and we bring you greetings from brothers and sister you will meet in heaven and they are excited about what God is doing in your country.”

We have never regretted God pushing us out of our comfort zone. It has been an amazing fifteen years.