A B C

A B C

We are now a bit over five months into our Partnership Development.  It has been joyful and frustrating, but we have, on the whole, really enjoyed it.  To get a better understanding of who we are, what our ministry will be, where we'll be at various phases, and when it will all take place, we want to walk through the alphabet and highlight the answers to all of your burning questions.

Our ABC idea is not original.  There are plenty of storybooks that use the alphabet to give a complete view of a topic.  As far as blogging about our missionary endeavors, we have stolen the ABC idea from a fellow Wycliffe member and friend, Jamie Brewer.  But original or not, please join us by praying over these topics as we make our way through.

A: Arts and Ethnomusicology

Why arts and music? And what does this have to do with me? 

As Chris and I began to explore the idea of going into full time missions work, we looked at many things such as teaching English and church planting teams.  We would be able to do them, but nothing we talked about or looked at felt like it was a good use of our gifts and abilities.  The calling was not there until...

...Chris found the area of Wycliffe's website about the Arts.  When he showed it to me, my heart leapt, and the more we explored the more excited we became.  We watched this video, not knowing we would find a friend and mentor in the narrator from it.  We began to look at art and music as a part of worship in a new way.  We came to see Chris’s background and experiences as a good fit for this job.

But work in our field is not going to be confined to music.  Yes, that will be a specialty area for Chris, but the training that we will get will equip us to be versed in dance, drama and other art forms.  We look to bring indigenous arts into the fray so that the Gospel is not seen as foreign to anyone.  We want to demonstrate that the Gospel is so powerful that it can cut across cultural lines.  We want to provide the spark for local artists to use their own art forms and to produce worship expressions that are authentic and heartfelt rather than borrowed from another continent/country/language/culture.