You don’t become a missionary by raising money and flying to a foreign country. You do it by being obedient to God. Tell people about Jesus where you live. Get out of your comfort zone. Sell something precious and apply it to your debts. Make a sacrifice. Develop better friendships. There is an old saying: “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” While this is not to be taken literally in this sense, (please, don’t start wearing the national garb of the country you want to go to just yet). However, somewhere in the process, we have to make a conscious decision that there is no going back.
Dan and Joy West have had a rich missionary career, yet at a time in their career when they might be tempted to stay in their comfort zone, Dan and Joy are starting over.
More than 30 years ago, the last evangelical church in the municipality of Bergen, Netherlands, closed its doors, leaving no evangelical witness for two generations. But a small yet passionate group of Christians believed God for a miracle in their community.
For most of his life, one of missionary Rich McLane’s passions has been hunting. His wife Lori enjoys playing the trumpet. When they became missionary church planters in Poland years ago, who would have guessed these passions would converge to reach more than 120,000 hunters throughout the country?
Missionaries Steve and Tece Entsminger recently took a group of students to a children’s ministry conference. These students are training to be pastors and church leaders at Facultad de Teología, an Assemblies of God seminary in Córdoba, Spain. During the Bible lessons at the conference, one of the students was captivated by the way the content was being presented to the point of forgetting her responsibilities as a counselor. When Tece asked later why she was so intrigued, she replied, “I had no idea you could actually minister to children!”
In 1992 missionary Rick Cunningham awoke from a dream in which he was teaching in a language he had never heard. God used that dream to call him and his wife Jan from Spain to Romania. In their first exploratory trip to Romania, the Cunninghams discovered the shocking reality that book translations had been outlawed under Communist rule, resulting in few available resources in the Romanian language. As developers of training materials in Spain, Rick and Jan felt the Holy Spirit impress them—“What you have done in Spain is tremendously needed here.” That felt need confirmed their call to move to Romania, but neither of them could have anticipated what would happen there.
Continental Theological Seminary (CTS), Europe’s regional seminary located in a historic chateau near Brussels, Belgium, is a premier Assemblies of God institution of higher learning. In its rich 60-year history, CTS has trained thousands of students who have gone on to lead national and international ministries throughout Europe. With a dedicated faculty sharing decades of ministry experience, the vibrant academic culture at CTS should come as no surprise. But just as exciting as the training happening inside the academy is the depth of ministry happening outside the classroom, led by Assemblies of God missionaries.
