About

Hello, and welcome to our mission update page!

We have set it up this way so that you can follow us if you want to, and keep up to date with where, why and how we’re going. I hope it’s fun to follow along, and gives you the chance to think about how to pray for and support us. Thank you for even being here.
If you’d like to keep following this journey, please subscribe so you’ll get an email every time there’s a post.

We thought we’d start with a post on why we want to be missionaries in the first place. (It’s exciting, in a way, thinking about looking back on this page in a few years and seeing how far we’ve come.)

P: I’ve wanted to be a missionary since I did a gap year program called Year 13.

I already wanted to be a teacher, possibly stemming back from when I was a kid and I used to line my teddy bears up and try to teach them what I had learned at school. We had missionaries come in regularly and tell us what their every day looked like, and I was particularly struck by the teachers using education to do great things. There was an organisation in Bangladesh trying to free slaves from brick kilns, and they realised that if they bought them out, sometimes they would sell themselves back to their masters because they didn’t know how to support themselves. Through education, one child was able to free and support a family. Another couple had supported the underground church in China through teaching English. Having grown up with a mum from another country, who was actually given the opportunity to go to New Zealand and then Melbourne through some missionaries she met, I was impressed by the need for education and Jesus in other countries.

I’ve never had a ‘hearing from God moment’, but I do know that he calls us to go to the ends of the earth to make disciples of all nations. I know that I have gifts and talents which can be put to use for his glory, and there are plenty of people doing that already in Australia. I hope to use these gifts to reach the unreached and to show them that they are just as important to God, made in his image and worth going to.

T: One afternoon, while on a mission trip to Indonesia, I walked out past the mangrove trees off the shore of the village we were staying at. All you could see was the ocean and sky. Back on shore, I could hear three different mosques doing the call to prayer. I was then I felt a movement in myself but not of myself, a call of the Spirit that cross cultural mission (CCM) is where God is leading me. That was back in 2017.

Since then, my conviction for CCM has grown. At the end of 2019, I was blessed with being able to visit some missionary friends over in Russia. As part of my visit, I travelled out to some remote villages to share Christmas stories with the local kids. For some of them, this was the first time that they had ever heard of Jesus, the first time they had ever heard that God loves them and wants to be in a relationship with them. Once again, I felt the Spirit move and confirm my calling to CCM.

When Patty and I went to Orientation with Pioneers (our mission organisation), we heard heaps of stories of how God is at work in so many places in so many ways. Out of all of them, the story of a man named Solomon struck me the most. Towards the end of his testimony he said, “Why should people hear the gospel twice when some people haven’t even heard it once?” So, all that being said, why shouldn’t we go?