Missions Textbook 1
Fly to Europe

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

The Best Laid Plans . . ., Spring 1979

Dear Friends,

It hardly seems possible that six years have gone by since we drove into Portland on a summer evening and found motels full because of a teacher’s convention.

Having ministered in and around the Portland area, especially at Eastgate Bible Chapel, for the past six years, the Lord is now moving us out to the mission field. We were commended to full-time Christian service in September 1977 with the understanding that we felt God wanted us overseas in the future. The future has arrived. We are preparing to take the gospel of our Lord Jesus to the people in Austria.

Before leaving, we are excited to announce that Erich, our five-year-old, prayed to receive the Lord as his Savior in January! Please pray for him that it was real and for us as we seek to grow him in the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

As God allows, on October 1st, we will be leaving the Northwest and flying to Colorado, Texas, and New York to visit many of our relatives. From New York we will land in Munich, West Germany and study the German language for approximately one year in the little town of Prien. Our ultimate goal is to live in or near Innsbruck. We long to become trustworthy friends to the Austrians, thus enabling us to share the plan of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Probably one of the best ways of reaching European people is to have a reason for being there that seems legitimate to them. I plan to take a few classes at the University of Innsbruck in order to make direct contact with young adults and the professors. We will be as involved in the small local Christian church there as possible and learn from them how to establish new and strengthen existing churches. Please pray for their understanding and patience with us enthusiastic foreigners!

We desire to reach Austrians through their own culture. This means doing things the Austrian way and not trying to Americanize them. The apostle Paul said he wanted to become all things to all people in order that he might win some to Christ (1 Corinthians 9:22).

In preparation for our move, I have been praying about turning over all of our ministries to others in the church. This is being done under the prayerful guidance of our elders. Also, I am taking German grammar and conversation at Portland State. We have our passports and will receive our residence visas in Germany and Austria.

This summer we have scheduled some trips to other churches in the Northwest to show our slides and to share our burden for Austrians. I will also be preaching some at Eastgate and supervising an adult Sunday School class on 1 & 2 Thessalonians. In September, the area-wide missionary study class has asked us to present our vision for the mission field and our up-coming plans, as well as answer any questions about our venture that still remain unanswered.

We are very excited about going, and we long for your prayer support as we take care of all the practical details. We must put our house up for sale, pack, sell, or give away all of our belongings, and try to purchase those elusive plane tickets.

Above all, our new life in Austria must be a family endeavor. Please pray that our preparation and our first year overseas in language school will result in our family growing very close together and close to God.

Thank you for caring about us,

Floyd and Christine, Erich and Michael Schneider

November 1979 – Amsterdam

I hadn’t expected jetlag to make the floor wobble. I felt as if my feet weren’t mine. As we staggered off the airplane, everything was too loud, too bright, and too much trouble. Airline travel was easy in those days – only we didn’t know it then. All we felt was jetlag.

Besides which: they were speaking a foreign language – and not German, the language we intended to learn. Floyd and I stumbled from the jetway, hauling too many carry-on bags. We were also hauling our two young sons. Erich was five-and-a-half; Michael, two-and-a-half. We had named them to fit in with both cultures – Austrian and American. Erich Sauer was a European theologian, although we actually saw the name as we had watched an Austrian skier in the Olympics a few years earlier. Michael’s name was pronounced Mee-kai-el in German, but with so many Michaels in his class, he would be called Mike.

The boys were exhausted. It was early morning in Amsterdam; that meant midnight in our heads, East Coast time. Floyd found us a place to sit in the airport and then he fetched our luggage. Back in those days, each passenger was allowed two bags, maximum weight 70 pounds each, and two carry-ons. With that much space we were able to bring all we needed for a year of language school.

Oh. Did I forget to tell you that language school was first on our agenda? We had done so much planning for our life in Austria, that I didn’t want to bore you with all the details – at least not all at once. It took us six years in Portland to make all the plans. Briefly, the final plan looked something like this:

  • Fly to Europe - check!
  • Drive to southern Germany for language school.
  • Learn German
  • Move to Austria
  • Evangelize and learn from missionary experts
  • Plant churches

Floyd had folders and folders full of letters and papers, which we hoped would make all of this possible. We were in Europe. Check. Step 2: Drive to Germany.

Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. Floyd piled the luggage around our seating area and then went to pick up the car we had already purchased with some of the money from the sale of our house. My, that sounds easy. I have no idea what Floyd had to do or where he went. I had two sleepy boys, they had to be entertained, we were hungry and thirsty, and I couldn’t leave our luggage while Floyd was gone. He was gone a long time. A lonnnng time. (And we had no cell phones back then. I’ll have to keep reminding you of this because we went to Austria right at the edge of the technology era, but we weren’t there yet.)

Well, we were in Europe, where everything moves more slowly. Not necessarily a bad thing, but frustrating to jetlagged travelers. I suppose patience was our first lesson (besides being nice to each other when we were extremely overtired). I can’t even remember why, but the car was not ready, or it was the wrong car, or some of the papers hadn’t been properly prepared, or all of the above. Floyd returned to us without the car. He spent the whole day trying to get us a car.

We ate at the airport, and we spent the day at the airport, and we slept that night in the airport.

A Soft Bed

I am Dutch. I should have been happy to see the Netherlands. I was, in a way, but life was more serious, and there was no money or time for sightseeing. We woke up in the airport still, and Floyd spent that whole day working on securing our car. He went back and forth from us to the auto showrooms, where you could buy a car tax-free, if you took it to another country (which we were going to do). Finally, everything was arranged. We could leave the next day.

The next day? Discouraged, Floyd flung caution to the winds, piled all our stuff into a taxi, and asked to be taken to a bed-and-breakfast.

Amsterdam is a wonderfully quaint city with narrow streets and canals running through the middle of every block like alleys in the town in which I grew up. We were dropped off at a picturesque building at the edge of a canal. Mind you, we had 16 pieces of luggage. Maybe we had two taxis; I can’t remember. I do remember talking about our finances. Floyd and I came from poor homes, and we had never aspired to be rich. Yet missionary living would test that in us. Putting the bed-and-breakfast on a credit card was painful.

Our room was on the second floor, and the stairs were so narrow and steep that it was like going up a ladder. How did we get our two-year-old up the ladder? I don’t know. We left most of our luggage at the front desk. All I remember is that we slept in a soft bed. After two days of no sleep, we slept long and hard and woke up at all sorts of strange hours and didn’t wake up when we wanted to. That’s jetlag.

We did feel better the next morning after a beautiful and bountiful breakfast in a cheerful Dutch breakfast room. Boiled eggs, fresh crusty bread, sweet butter, fragrant cheeses, colorful jams, and plenty of good tea for us and cocoa for the boys: European breakfasts became one of the cultural aspects we loved the most.

With hopes high and bodies strengthened, we manhandled all our luggage back into the taxi/s and returned to the airport to pick up our car.

It wasn’t ready.

We had done a lot of planning, yet there was so much to learn. Back then, before left-luggage was considered a danger, there were lockers at the airport where a person could store his belongings and go sightseeing, while waiting for a flight. We had so much luggage, that the man who tended the lockers said we could just leave everything behind the desk, and come back tomorrow to get it. Then Floyd found a hotel that had a shuttle to and from the airport.

Another swipe of the credit card, and the boys and I spent the day in peace and comfort. Floyd didn’t. He spent the day ironing out all the details for our car. How thankful I am for him! He worked so hard and took such good care of us. Finally, early the following morning, we were able to pack our luggage into our tiny hatchback Fiat. It was so small that we felt as if we were in the cockpit of an airplane, but it was all ours!

I don’t intend to take you hour by hour through all fifteen years of life in Europe! First impressions, however, are indelible. Those first three days in Amsterdam were the realization of our dream. As nightmarish as they seemed, we were where we believed God wanted us to be, and that was an exhilarating feeling. It probably gave us strength. Some of our philosophies of ministry would be tested sorely. The first was to view the other culture with: “It’s not stupid; it’s just different.” We had drilled that into ourselves, and Floyd still drills that into all his missions’ students. It’s not stupid; it’s just different. Every culture has reasons for doing what they do, and we need to discover why. We were beginning learners.

Sometimes We Need Help; Sometimes We Don’t

One of the difficulties of writing a memoir while many of the people you know are still alive is that not all the stories are pretty. If I include stories of difficult relationships, people could be further hurt or angered that I would bring things up again. If, however, I leave out the accounts of how we handled sticky relationships, you, the Reader, might get the impression that we got along with everyone just fine and never had any difficulties. I have tried to be gentle with disagreements we had with various people. We are humans, and we think we are right. The people we disagreed with are also humans, and they also think they are right. The disagreements were not usually gentle; they were harsh, heartbreaking, and sometimes downright ugly. But my letters did not usually drag Sue into the melee with us. The fact that the accounts were usually written within weeks of events, however, tells us that they really happened. We can all learn from successes and failures, from good times and bad. Sometimes we learn more from the bad.

We drove south through the Netherlands and into Germany. We actually crossed that border in a torrential rainstorm. Our tiny Fiat was packed to the gills with all that you can fit into eight large suitcases and eight carry-ons. The boys didn’t have car seats back then, but everything we had was tumbled around them like packing peanuts. Three of our suitcases were on the roof, standing up, doubling the height of our tiny car. We were afraid that we would have to unpack everything at the border, but it was such a miserable evening, and I suspect that we didn’t look very dangerous to the border guards.

Two American families who were missionaries in Germany had offered us places to stay on our trip to southern Germany. My account of our time with them, as written in our first prayer letter to friends back home reads:

We stayed with two missionary families who helped us immensely with advice on things like shopping for food and furniture. Also, God gave us a ministry of encouragement to them as they provided hospitality for us.

All true, but definitely not the whole story.

I forgot to mention that I had caught a cold before we flew to Amsterdam. If you have ever flown with a cold, you know it does painful things to your sinuses and/or ears. Well, four days after we landed in Europe, both my ears were still plugged, and everyone who spoke to me sounded as if they were down a tunnel. I also forgot to mention that Floyd had sprained his ankle in Gettysburg, PA, just a few days before we got on the plane. Now that I think of it, it must have been hard on him with all that running around at the airport and taking care of us. He’s a wonderful man!

The first couple we stayed with took us in and mothered us with such loving care. I was put to bed with hot tea, and our boys played with their slightly older children. I slept a lot, and I really only remember being coddled. Floyd remembers their happiness that we were in Europe, and they even begged us to come back after language school and help them in their work. Nope; we were going to Austria.

The second couple needed our encouragement. They were struggling with inadequate finances, and their ministry was not going well. They kept telling us that they were only telling us their difficult stories so we would be prepared for all the negative things that always happen to missionaries. They didn’t like the German people, nor did they have much positive to say about the ethnic group they were working with. The problem for us was that we did not need to hear about how awful life was for them in Germany – and by extension, in Austria. We were still jet-lagged, and reeling with new sights and language and food and money system.

We went to bed that night, rudely awakened to the fact that some people wouldn’t help us love the people we came to minister to. If we listened to their advice, we would dislike the Austrians before we ever set foot in the country. Our attitude would make or break our endeavors.

As we left this last family and drove toward our language school, we were saddened by their unhappiness, but we also had plenty of new thoughts about our upcoming ministry. We determined to spend our time with the nationals. We wanted to learn their language well enough that the Austrians would not be ashamed to call us friends. And if we ever got the chance to mentor a new missionary, we would not burden them with our sad stories. We realized that our spirits had not been too dampened. The sun was shining, and the gray and white Alps rose up to the south. We would – finally – be taking the first step toward telling Austrians about Jesus Christ: Learning German.

We just prayed that the language school would have our apartment ready three weeks early.

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

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