The Road to Senegal

If you have made it this far, you are probably already aware we will be going to Thies, Senegal.  I will begin with a little history.  Since before Holly and I were married, we felt God's leading toward international mission work.  Through prayer we discovered that the time was not right early on in our marriage.  Our intent was always to get involved in mission work more actively after retirement.  That was OUR goal and OUR plan.

In the fall of 2010 God brought to me the opportunity to go to Sudan on a short term mission trip with Wycliffe.  As I went through the process of praying for the trip and preparing, I felt as though God was telling me that a short term commitment was not what he was looking for.  This came to a head in March of 2011 when God made it clear that he wanted us to change our timeframe.  Holly and I then began to look at various mission organizations and contacted three, for further information.  Two of them never followed up with us.  SIM www.sim.org responded immediately and followed up with us continually.  It became obvious that God was making the choice easy.

SIM's Statement of Faith

We spent the month of April finishing all of the application paperwork, getting physicals, getting a bunch of personal recommendations (Thank you to all who helped with that), and completing a Bible test.  We also sat in the church library for three hours taking a psychological test.  Thank you to Mitzi Brown for sitting and supervising that.  (So we didn't cheat off each other).  Then things were on hold for several months.

In the beginning of September Holly and I went down to SIM USA's headquarters in Charlotte NC.  We spent 4 days down there going through several sets of interviews, a psychological evaluation, and several seminars.  At the end of the weekend we were relieved to find that we were accepted as appointees.

The last few months since September have been spent in a lot of prayer as we have worked with SIM to discover where God is leading us.  Which leads us up to the present.  We had a nice long talk via Skype with the director of SIM Senegal and have confirmed that is the direction we are going.

So what are the next steps you ask.  Well, we are in a little bit of a holding pattern once again.  The next step for us is to attend candidate orientation in the beginning of March.  We will spend 2 1/2 weeks in Charlotte as a family for training on a variety of issues.  Then in May we will be attending a weekend seminar on raising our children in a cross cultural setting.  Holly will then sometime next year be taking a two week course in North Carolina on language learning by the LAMP method.  She just completed a course at Asbury University in Intercultural Communication.  We will also both be taking several online courses through Gordon Conwell Seminary.

Once we have completed all our training requirements and raised all of our prayer and financial support, we will be off to language school.  The plan right now is for us to attend Parole De Vie http://www.pdvb.org/french/language-school in Quebec Canada.  We will likely be spending a year there, in the French immersion program.  To be able to function in Senegal, we need to be able to speak French.  To be able to be involved in ministry in Senegal we will have to speak Wolof.  After arriving in Senegal our main task will be learning the Wolof language.  This will likely take up to two years to achieve some level of fluency.

As it stands now, once we are focused on ministry full time, our primary role will be as the Short Term Associate Coordinators.  This will involve taking care of all of the needs of anyone who comes to the field for less than two years.  We will arrange housing, travel, finances, language learning, serve as mentors, and anything else that needs done.  Our second ministry will be getting involved with the church planting teams in the area.  The ministry will really evolve once we are there based on the needs which we are able to meet.

More to follow later.