Missions Textbook
Who Are We?

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook) Who are the authors of this book?

Contents
Stories: Chapters 1-15
Textbook: Chapters 16-60
(16-60  are much shorter chapters)

Who are we? Bits of dust with the Spirit of God breathed into us. Sinners, through and through, incapable of pleasing God, yet saved by His boundless grace. Disciples, weak and filled with insecurities, yet desiring to do something – anything – that would express our love for our Savior Jesus Christ. How is it possible for us to be a part of something so grand and miraculous? We never saw it coming!

Yet no one ever sees the future coming. We simply start from where we are, and we go, following the path we have chosen, and hoping the path leads somewhere we want to go. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, we read, “. . . Man will not find out the work which God has done, even from the beginning to the end.” We just want to be a tiny part of it.

Floyd was born in dusty western Texas – through no fault of his own, he says – and spent most of his childhood moving from place to place in Colorado, as his father looked for work as a small-town cop. His mother, a waitress, sent him off to Sunday School in whatever town they were currently living, saying, “When you don’t live at home anymore, you don’t have to go to church anymore.” She was rewarded when, at twelve years of age, he ran home from Sunday School to tell her he’d given his life to the Lord Jesus. [Note: Never underestimate the value of giving up part of your free time to teach a Sunday School class!]

School was not fun. No one liked the cop’s kid. During his time in high school, his parents divorced, and his mother remarried a man who had a good job. Floyd graduated from high school on Friday evening and enlisted in the U.S. Army on Monday morning because he “wanted his freedom.” He spent his time in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division.

After being wounded, he returned home to heal. One evening, Floyd was watching a sunset behind the Rocky Mountains. His mother wandered out and asked him what he was thinking.

Without too much thought, he answered, “I’d like to be like Billy Graham.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll pray about it.”

He finished up his army career in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where there was a Christian Servicemen’s Center. The director talked Floyd into one year of Bible college before entering university to become a nuclear physicist. And Floyd didn’t let too many people talk him into anything!

Every year, the Bible college sponsored a conference in which they invited three or four missionaries to share the ministry in which they were involved. Floyd was intrigued by one of the speakers, and before the week was over, he had been talked into signing up for a summer in Germany.

For ten weeks, the team of young people demolished the inside of an old castle, beginning classroom renovations for the German Bible Institute. One free weekend, Floyd wandered around nearby Regensburg alone until he went into a bar for a cola. He decided to use his primitive German to tell some of the men about Jesus and His death on the cross for their sin. From an evangelism standpoint, it was not a very successful encounter. But Floyd walked out of that bar, convinced that there could be no better life than to tell German-speakers about the Lord Jesus.

He returned to Bible college, and physics went out the window. Didn’t see that coming!

My life began on a farm in upstate New York. I loved church, which we attended at Christmas and Easter, and I preached to my dolls and built a prayer shrine in the woods. When I was nine, my parents moved us to Colorado, and my father left us soon after. I was saved around Eastertime the next year, at a little church about eight blocks from our home. God became my father (Psalm 68:5).

School was not fun. I was the little girl who smelled bad and wore the old-fashioned clothes. My lunch was a peanut butter sandwich. Every summer, a childless couple in our church made it possible for my sisters and me to attend a Bible camp. The summer I turned thirteen, I heard my first missionary, Al Cole, a man who served in New Guinea. He thrilled the children with his stories of how he was taking the Gospel to people in the jungle. That week I could hardly wait to tell the missionary that this was what I wanted to do with my life: bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people who had never heard it before. [Note: Never underestimate the value of giving up part of your summer vacation to work at a Christian camp!]

Through various circumstances, I decided I wanted to go to either Iran or Europe. For me the path seemed to lead to Bible college, so I enrolled after high school, and that’s where I met Floyd. I didn’t like him much, and everyone warned me to “stay away from the soldier.”

Floyd worked in the school’s print shop, operating an ancient printing press and turning out the monthly news bulletin for the college. I did some of the artwork for the school, and gradually, we became friends. In 1972, I was actually able to spend the summer in Iran as a nanny to an American family, living in Teheran. Floyd and I missed each other that summer, and so, after three years of friendship, we were married a week after his graduation. No one saw that coming!

Bible college had given us both the opportunity to meet many people who were giving the Gospel to people in many different countries. We also had taken classes that were presumably planned to help us bridge cultural hurdles and learn how to give the gospel. Some of what we learned was very good; some was not that helpful. We needed to learn more; seminary made sense. A friend of Floyd’s talked him into Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

We drove to Portland, and the seminary found us an apartment to rent. We asked the students downstairs if they knew of a good church. We wanted to find a church where we could serve, but where they would also understand that we eventually wanted to be missionaries. The neighbors suggested Eastgate Bible Chapel. Our first Sunday, one of the elders invited us to lunch, and we stayed.

It was there that we met Dave and Sue Walt. Dave and Sue’s home was a hospitable home, and Floyd and I – newly-wed (and hungry!) seminary students – were often guests in their home. I would study her menu, how she set the table, and how she managed to get all of the delicious food on the table – hot – at the same time. It was a great cooking class!

It was probably four years – and two babies – later when I told Sue, “I want to be like you when I grow up.” I was 24; she was probably around 45.

She laughed and told me, “I’m just an ordinary person. You don’t know what I’m like.”

Sue took my wish to be like her, however, very seriously. She became my discipler, my mentor, although not in the official way that all the books tell you to do it. She was a friend, the age of my mother, who loved me and encouraged me. She never told me what to do but was always ready with suggestions when I needed them.

Dave and the other elders in the church made sure that any time a missionary was in the area, we got to have coffee or lunch or dessert with them and pick their brains. We learned so much about the mission field, about the sending church, and about the life of the missionary from those encounters with astoundingly ordinary, extraordinary people.

These missionaries told us that if we wanted to go to Europe and give the Gospel to people who had never heard it – and there were many! – we needed to forget the word “missionary.” We had never heard that before! Europeans, they told us, do not think that they need missionaries. The missionaries whom Europeans know go to African or South American tribes and destroy their beautiful cultures. They do this by changing their traditions and artwork and music and lifestyle. Europeans don’t want that. So, if we were going to effectively present the Gospel to people in Europe, we needed to find a way to get around their prejudice against “missionaries.” We erased the word from our vocabulary and hoped to find a better answer to “Why are you here?”

When we were young, longing to serve God, did we see these missionaries and elders and mentors in our future? How perfectly those dear friends prepared us to go to Europe! We didn’t see it coming, but our loving Savior was on the path before us, leading and directing. We just needed to follow and maybe we could be a small part of the work God would do.

This book came about because my dear friend, Sue, wrote me, on average, a letter a month, our entire fifteen years in Austria! That’s around 300 letters! Back in those days, we bought stationery, wrote with a ballpoint pen, addressed an envelope, stamped it and mailed it! She never missed any of our birthdays, anniversaries or holidays.

I also wrote to her – not nearly as often – and she kept all the letters we sent her and her husband, Dave. In 1998, about ten years before she passed away, she sent me all the letters, and she wrote:

My dear Christine,                                     

These letters have been a treasure, and a source of much encouragement. I relinquish them with reluctance, and yet hopefully, that they might be used in a book to hearten aspiring young missionaries. You and Floyd have a history of faith in God, the ability to be decisive, and wonderful writing skills that would be most helpful to young people. Don’t dismiss the possibility of a “living history” or biography coming about. I’d love to see it happen in my lifetime.

Take care of “my letters” and see how God uses them again in days ahead.

With love, my friend,

Sue

I think the time is right. I have reviewed some of the letters, and it is with gratefulness to Sue and hesitancy and awe that I begin this journey. Hesitancy: because I don’t want anyone to think that we are climbing up onto a pedestal. We were an ordinary young family, wanting to do something extraordinary for God. Awe: because God did so many extraordinary things while we were in Austria, and He allowed us to be a part of that. So, if you care to join me, I will take you to the Austria we remember, and we will go with the insight that 30 years has added to the memories.

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

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