It was a secret Ishaq* held close for 13 years – one that caught journeyman missionary Craig Evans* by surprise when the young man revealed it.
In 2007, Evans began visiting a Central Asian village where he befriended Ishaq. One day while Ishaq’s family answered the local mosque’s call to prayer, Evans was able to talk with his Muslim friend alone for the first time. Glancing around nervously, Ishaq leaned closer and whispered, “My one desire in life is to be near to God.”
Newly elected IMB president Tom Elliff prays for greater missions involvement during an altar call at IMB’s March 16 missionary appointment service hosted by First Church in Dallas. “Going 14,000 miles [from home] will not make you a missionary,” Elliff said. “You’ll not be anything overseas that you’re not here, right now. And that’s true for every one of us.”He explained that he had happened upon a Bible 13 days earlier and began reading it. But when the Bible was discovered by Ishaq’s parents, both devout Muslims, they took it and harshly discouraged any further interest in Christianity. What his parents couldn’t take, though, was the seed that already had been planted in Ishaq’s heart. And so, without any other gospel witness, Ishaq waited for the day when God would send someone who could tell him about Jesus.
Ishaq’s story was one of dozens of testimonies at an International Mission Board missionary appointment service March 16 hosted by First Church in Dallas. Evans and his wife Katie* were among 67 new missionaries sent forth on Tom Elliff’s first day as IMB president.
“I immediately recognized [Ishaq’s words] as something divine, something God had orchestrated,” Evans said. “This is an area that is very much unreached by the gospel, to the point that an average guy, from the time he’s born to the time he dies, without God’s grace will probably never even rub shoulders with someone who understands the gospel.”
Indeed, Evans was the first Christian Ishaq had encountered, and the pair soon began meeting discreetly to talk about the Bible. But after months of conversations, Ishaq wasn’t yet ready to make a commitment to Jesus, and Evans’ two-year term as a missionary journeyman was ending.
“I left the country without him having professed faith,” Evans said. “I don’t know where God has led him. I would love it if we could run into each other someday and I could see how God’s been working in him since.”
Evans just might get that chance. Energized by short-term mission trips and divinely appointed encounters like his meeting with Ishaq, Evans is returning with his family to minister full-time in the same area where he formerly served.
“Ishaq’s story encourages you in a way an appetizer prepares you for a buffet,” Evans said. “Knowing that we serve a God who is drawing people like Ishaq – people who have not humanly had any chance to hear, but have been given by God that hunger and longing to know him – that is the kind of stuff that encourages you to go back.”
Breaking the mold
Like Evans, more than half of the new missionaries share similar stories of calling through short-term missions experiences. For Matt Hartwell*, who pastors a Southern Baptist church in Texas, affirmation of God’s call came on a short-term mission trip to Ecuador with his wife Lilly*. A year later, on another short-term trip, God revealed where they would be serving. As the Hartwells prayerwalked an unreached mountain village in North Africa and the Middle East, God’s direction was clear.
“We really felt God speak to both of us, saying, ‘This will be home,’?” Hartwell remembered. The couple is preparing to return to that same mountain area where they will pioneer Southern Baptists’ efforts to spread the gospel.
But missionary calling isn’t reserved for pastors and those with careers in ministry. Many of the new appointees came from secular careers with little or no professional ministry experience. Their work won’t necessarily fit the stereotypical missionary mold, either.
Before following God’s call overseas, Ryan Williams was a general contractor. His wife Melinda was a math teacher. After an evangelism-focused Sunday school series sparked their interest in sharing their faith, the Williamses couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“We were your typical American family – two kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs,” Ryan said. The Williamses are trading their “comfortable Christian life” in McKinney, Texas, to share Jesus and plant churches in Romania, where they will serve as logistics coordinators for a small IMB team.
The appointment service brings IMB’s global missionary force to 5,014. The next IMB appointment service will be Sunday, May 22, at Mandarin Baptist Church in Los Angeles.
– *Names changed. Graham is a writer for the International Mission Board.