by Junia*, an SEAPC Missionary Partner
Table of Contents
Literally every single Friends Around the Table (FATT) I have been to has come with massive travel obstacles. Everything from getting sick just before, to bank accounts being hacked… crazy things. On the way to Jerusalem in 2019, I got stuck in an Indian airport for 36 hours, so that trip was no exception. Prior to that trip, some of my friends at SEAPC had told me, “There’s a person we really want you to meet…” So they put us in a room together in Jerusalem; that’s how I met Janet,* who is now a key ministry partner, for the first time.
*Names changed for security reasons in a sensitive mission context.
Holistic Connections in the Holy City
(FATT Jerusalem, 2019)
The first night we were there, we went out to dinner together, got talking, and realized that, as missionaries operating with the same professional background (through our ‘tent-making’), we were very much on the same page in our approach to sharing the Gospel. It turned out that a long-time program Janet had created was very similar to the one I was teaching in the country I had been sent to. That’s not a normal thing in our profession (seeing the specific kind of work we do as a global mission, and as a unique way to reach people).
At the time, Janet had done a lot of her work through a major global missions NGO; she basically started an entirely new way to serve and reach people through her program. She had also founded a small non-profit of her own, and was wondering: what does it look like to start training up the next generation, after several decades working in this field? She realized that one of the people she was working with at the time would not be that person, even though she had initially thought they would be. And then we met in Israel…
During one of the workshops at Friends Around the Table, we identified what our God-given life purpose was in the form of two catch-all words. Mine were: “pioneering freedom.” Independently, Janet picked the exact same words. Throughout the rest of our time in Israel, we saw how similarly we were wired, and how much our callings overlapped. Now, God had spoken these two words to me years before, so to find someone else in the same space — someone who had been doing this for years — was such a huge encouragement. I’ve even said multiple times since Israel: Janet is who I want to be when I’m older!
Before we parted ways, we started talking about a plan: it was obvious I was the person she was looking for. That’s why I went back to the country I was stationed in that year and started telling people — my parents, my friends — “I’m going to start working with Janet and running her program all over the place…” One of those places could even be the country I was in, which happened to be a place Janet had felt called to for a while. We started what would be a complicated visa process for her and made a plan for 2020, including next steps for other countries. Obviously, all of that fell apart…
Health Challenges & Confusing Promises
(FATT Asia, Nong Khai, 2022)
2020 to 2022 were really hard years for me both because of the health issues I started struggling with and the global pandemic, which severely limited my access to medical support. During that time, Janet and I corresponded every once in a while, but to be honest we didn’t stay in super close contact. It was also clear that I was supposed to stay in the country I had been called to until my work there was finished: it was a unique, rare opening for the Gospel and I couldn’t just up and leave for something else.
I did make one trip out to Thailand in November 2022, for FATT Asia that year. One night during that gathering, I sat down with a table of people from Mongolia. We had a great dinner. The conversation I remember the most was with a Taiwanese man working in that country, who shared my conviction that the people you work with professionally are your mission field; you could be the best person to reach them. We connected on Facebook, but not much happened after that.
Fast forward to January 2023, when I finally left where I was stationed for a year of medical leave in Thailand. I was broken, sick, and at the end of my rope. And yet, just before, God started speaking to me about Mongolia. I wasn’t ready to hear any of that. I told God, “If this is you, and this is something I need to hold in my heart, I need some really specific confirmation because I just don’t have the capacity right now.” Within 24 hours, the Taiwanese man I had met in Nong Khai sent me a message to say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking… can we talk a bit about what it would be like for some of my Mongolian friends to get to the country you’ve been sent to?” Could that really be a coincidence?
Fast forward again to September 2023, when I visited Mongolia for two weeks, through that local connection. I went there to figure out: what am I being called to here? Several things seemed to be coming together through prayer walking, local connections, and a potential tent-making opportunity that fit perfectly with my experience. The issue was: in 2019, God clearly asked me to work with Janet — how could that fit with Mongolia? They felt like two very separate paths. There was an urgency, too, with Janet’s age. When the two of us finally got on the phone, I could feel the tension around this unresolved question.
I came back to the US straight after that trip to Mongolia, and I had a tentative path laid out: I would stay in the US until August 2024, and then return to Mongolia to study the local language while I prepared for the new business-as-mission opportunity there. The exact role was still being figured out by my potential employers, so they wouldn’t need me to work full-time for the first year, which meant I could study and get used to the country.
A couple of months later, in November 2023, Janet and I reconnected. I happened to be driving by Virginia, and she was in the US for once, so we planned to meet in person for the first time since Israel in 2019. Janet doesn’t have a house: she gave it up for her international work. When she’s in the US, she usually stays with family or people from her church community, which is spread out across the entire country, so you never know exactly where she’s going to be. Thankfully, this time, she was in Virginia, and she got permission for me to stay with her in her friend’s home.
The first night I was there, we had a conversation with another friend her host had invited over, someone who was interested in missions. We got talking about how we met, and Janet recounted some of the crazy things that happened in Israel, which I had forgotten. It stirred something in me: “Remember! This is really important!” It had been so long since I felt that, but I knew God was in it. I still didn’t know how to make sense of it with everything that could be happening in Mongolia.
I left Virginia thinking: “What if it’s both/and instead of either/or?” Before I left, I asked Janet, “Can we still move forward somehow?” And she said, “Of course! I have a big trip coming up that I would love you to join me on.” She was leaving the US in the middle of February 2024, and wouldn’t be back until mid-April. She asked me to join her in the Comoros* for the first part of her trip…
*Details changed for security reasons in a sensitive mission context.
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
(FATT Asia, Singapore, 2024)
The beginning of this year was a whirlwind in a good but also tough way. The week before Christmas, in 2023, I reached out to supporters to help with two trips scheduled for the start of 2024: first to FATT Singapore, in January, and then to the Comoros, at the beginning of February. Everything came together, but I got very sick while traveling to Singapore via Bangkok, and this delayed my arrival at FATT. I didn’t feel better until a few days before I was due to leave for the Comoros.
Still, I was excited for the first trip Janet and I would embark on together. We landed in the Comoros on a Saturday night, joining Oscar* and Lydia,* who rounded out the team. Lydia is South African, and Oscar lives in South Africa, but is a missionary from another African country. Oscar attended FATT South Africa in 2022, and that’s how he met Joshua,* our local contact in the Comoros. Oscar introduced Joshua to Janet in 2023, at the next FATT Africa. Joshua is a community leader in the Comoros; he was our big local connection. It was so cool to see how all of these people came together because of FATT. We sent Matt Geppert a group selfie to commemorate the moment.
Heading into this first training workshop with Janet and the team, I thought I was just going to be a participant, but it turns out I got to run with some of the material as a teaching consultant too. Janet prepped me by talking about the importance of keeping things very simple for the audience we were presenting to, which was a little different from the highly technical level I had been functioning at as a licensed professional in other countries.
Thirty-five participants showed up for the 40-hour training program, which was spread out over five days. Throughout the week, we found out that many of them were part of Joshua’s wider family. Even more strikingly, we found out that Joshua wanted this to be a completely open workshop, i.e. not just for those who were ‘born again’. This was not historically common in the Comoros: when resources come in, people tend to keep them for their ethnic and religious group only. Given that 98% of the Comoros is Muslim, this was a big deal. The only requirement was that participants needed to speak English because we weren’t using a translator.
On the first morning, as people casually trickled in on “African time,” four or five Muslim women showed up, as well as three Catholic nuns. The differences could not have been more obvious, and the resulting tension in the room was palpable; we couldn’t even get people to engage in small talk. At the end of the day, somebody commented, “These groups of people won’t typically share a room. It’s astonishing that they stayed together for a whole day.”
By the end of the week, you could see new, miraculous friendships had been born. On the final day, Simon,* Joshua’s brother, who owns a travel company, stood up in front of the group to say, “This marks the day of something different for our island country. Give us five years, and we will not be the same. This will not be a space of separation any longer, like it has been in the past. Now that we have the same skills, we need to work together to help our community, regardless of our individual beliefs.” It was crazy to see people talking like that after just five days of training — to hear them talk about a different direction for their community because they understood a few key things differently, and because of the unity that came out of that room.
*Names changed for security reasons in a sensitive mission context.
Hope for Each Day
Apparently, in Janet’s experience, that level of community change after a training workshop wasn’t unique to this location. I found that shocking enough, but I was even more blown away by some of the individual stories. I hadn’t come into the workshop with loads of expectations, partly because it was so new: I hadn’t even read through the whole workshop training booklet yet (I mainly looked at the sessions I was going to be consulting on).
My favorite individual story — the one I was most intertwined with — was with a woman called Hope.* Hope is a mother of two: she has a toddler and a nine-month old. She consistently arrived early, every day of the workshop. I think it was the third morning that I asked her, “Hey, what do you think of all this so far?” She told me that, the day before (a Tuesday evening), she decided to take some of the skills from her homework assignment and apply them to her family; specifically, to her toddler. The assignment was about the power of intentionality and focusing on others and, because Hope had been struggling with postpartum depression, this was a unique challenge for her to overcome with her kids.
Strangely enough, that Wednesday, I was scheduled to facilitate a session on different “blockers” that can stop us from being fully present in our work, with our colleagues, and in our lives more generally. In that session, Hope shared her personal situation with the group as learning example: after they were first married, Hope’s husband started drinking, smoking, and sleeping around, and even moved off the island, to the mainland, for work. As a result, their marriage was a mess, and all of these factors became huge blockers in Hope’s professional life. She sought help from her parents, who moved in to help take care of her kids. Hope’s kids connected really well with her mom, which bothered her, but because she had so many other things to deal with, she didn’t feel like she could do anything — until she spontaneously applied the workshop assignment to her family situation, and to her toddler in particular.
She recounted to the group how, the night of the assignment, she stopped what she was doing to give him all her attention; she played with him for hours. She was surprised and touched to see just how well he responded to her when she did. He was so excited to spend time with his mom singing, laughing and generally hanging out. She realized: “If I keep giving him this kind of intentional attention, he’s going to respond differently to me more of the time, and I might feel different in other parts of my life too.” All of this came from one small activity.
On Thursday morning, I caught up with Hope again. It turns out her husband had reached out to her on Wednesday night, after the training for that day had finished. Creatively applying some of the things she had learned, she realized there were some crossover problems in her marriage that she needed to own. So when her husband contacted her that evening, she chose to apply the training and respond differently… and that conversation led to him asking if he could come meet her in person the next day, on the island. For the first time since their marriage had broken down, she said yes.
One of my jobs for the training workshop was to videotape some of the participants’ testimonials, and I had asked Hope if she would be willing to go on camera the day before. So, when we were about to film on Thursday, she had an opportunity to share one-on-one that she was feeling anxious about meeting her husband later that day. I listened and then prayed with her.
The next time I saw her, just before the workshop started on Friday morning, she told me how she had worked up the courage to lay out specific agreements with her husband about what it would take to reconcile and, amazingly, he acquiesced to all of them. They both knew that it wasn’t time for him to move back in as if everything was normal, but it was the first time they were able to have a conversation like that. She was very encouraged.
There were other surprising stories of individual change too — more than I am able to share here. Just thinking about the ripple effect on their lives, their work, and on the people around them: all of that allows me to step back and believe that the Comoros really will be a different place in five years. Especially when you consider there were four or five community and business leaders in the room: how would this impact the people they were responsible for? Whole communities could look different because one person came away with a different understanding.
*Name changed for security reasons in a sensitive mission context.
Changing the World through the Church
(FATT Africa, Kampala, 2024)
The space I’ve been in since that trip to the Comoros is figuring out how everything God has opened up since Israel fits together. It’s been clear to me that there is a unique opening for the kind of tent-making mission work I am part of, and the way the pandemic has opened up unique opportunities to teach and consult on it in unreached and closed-access countries. I’ve also always known that my calling goes beyond any one country…
In April, I started a PhD — something I have been thinking and praying about for a long time. It’s a global online program where 60% of the students live outside of the US. Through my first class, on ‘organizational innovation’, and the books I picked to review, I’ve been able to read some of the most cutting-edge research in my tent-making field, especially around technology and ‘systemic process’.
For instance, there’s an innovative AI model where one licensed professional can remotely oversee a larger group of coaches who are not licensed professionals. These coaches are trained to use an AI interface with their clients to provide on-the-ground support. This model could greatly broaden the scope of what is possible in our profession, with far fewer licensed professionals needed in a given locale.
Although I can’t go into great detail about it due to the sensitive nature of my work, I can tell you about my conviction the Church can and should play a major role in solving the main global problems in my field of study. This is based on all the research about what is effective in low- and middle-income countries: the literature has repeatedly shown that things like community-based initiatives and lay involvement are really effective solutions in these contexts. If that’s true, then who could be better to take that on than the Church, empowered by the kind of technology I mentioned above?
This June, I was blessed to be able to go to Uganda for another FATT, where I got to talk with a South African pastor, Gerhard, about an app he was involved with developing, and how that could play a role in some of the stuff I’m researching. He started sharing a vision similar to mine before I even said anything. As we got talking further, it was so easy to see how we could take the content of Janet’s training progam and reorganize it for an app platform, and then implement it in the kind of settings I’ve been reading about.
Instead of leaving the Church out of these kinds of discussions — which doesn’t make any sense to me, given the research — why don’t we merge the technology available with the heart the Church has to see people healed and living in freedom? That’s what has captivated me in this time, and it is the reason I have closed the door to going to Mongolia full-time in August. I’m planning to stay in the US, where I can work with leading programs to see this kind of project come to life: to gather a multidisciplinary team of people who have the same heart for this field, and who are working in AI.
As for me and Janet, we’re still planning to run a bunch of live training workshops together: first in southern Africa in November, then in East Africa next February, and finally in a closed country in southeast Asia in May/June of next year. And, of course, we’ll be sowing back in where it all began, with another workshop that will be integrated into FATT Asia 2025 in… Mongolia. I guess God has a way of putting the puzzle pieces together, after all.
His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
