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Why Should I Support a Third-Class Missionary?

On July 10, 2020

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Here are some answers to some commonly asked questions about raising support.

Why do you need to raise support for this job? Why can’t Reach Global just pay you?

Missions is not exactly an income-generating industry. Though there are a couple of denominations that require their churches to donate to a mission organization, most don’t. So that means that even for stateside positions like mine, employees need to raise support. The alternative would be that other missionaries raise additional funds that would pay for my salary. That’s not unheard of, since some administrative employees in Reach Global’s national office are paid this way. But as you can imagine, we would rather not put the burden of those salaries onto other missionaries.

Where does the money go when someone donates?

Each mission agency does this a little differently, but with Reach Global, donated money goes into a ministry account for that particular missionary. Salaries, insurance, pension, etc. are all taken out of that account. If there is extra money in it, missionaries can also use that account to pay for things that would normally be considered a business expense, like travel or conferences.

The amount missionaries have to raise is a lot higher than what they receive as a monthly salary. This is because they also need to raise funds for health insurance, retirement, flights and visa expenses, as well as a service allocation that goes to the mission.

How is your salary set?

For Reach Global, the standard missionary salary is based on the average salary of associate pastors at EFCA churches. Other factors influence salary, including the number of children and the cost of living in a particular country. If the funds in a missionary’s ministry account go too low, then their salary is also lowered.

Gil and I have only ever received one salary from Reach Global, even when both of us were working full-time. That’s because it’s considered more of a stipend than a salary; it’s based on how much we need to live on. There aren’t raises connected to work performance or level of education. (As a side note, Reach Global has other measures in place to ensure work performance and accountability, since salary is not linked to that.)

So how will this work with you now being the Reach Global employee instead of Gil?

To put it simply, the ministry account will be changed over from Gil’s name into mine and I will be the official employee. For those who have already been donating to that account, nothing will change on the donor’s end.

Why are you looking for more donors if you already had enough during your time in Tanzania? Since Gil has a job as well, don’t you need less support?

Yes, I will need less financial support for this position than what we were receiving for our ministry in Tanzania. Our kids’ insurance will be covered by Gil’s new job and there are other cuts that will lower the amount I need to raise. I anticipate the amount I will need in my ministry account will be about 30% less than what we needed to raise for Tanzania.

However, after contacting our current supporters, it looks like I will be losing about 50% of my support base. This is not surprising, nor am I hurt by this! Some of our supporters have passed away, some have retired, some want to stick with overseas missionaries, some have changed churches and want to support missionaries at their new church. The stipend we received from HOPAC towards our housing is also no longer part of our support. I anticipate needing to raise an additional $1000-$2000 per month in order to be able to meet my funding goal.

If we could survive in Southern California on Gil’s teacher’s salary, I would happily volunteer for this position with Reach Global. But even though we are frugal and have no debt, I need to receive a salary. Since God has made it clear that this is the position I need to take, then I am trusting He will provide the support I need.

So why should I consider supporting you as a stateside missionary? Aren’t overseas missionaries more urgent and important?

I’m not going to give an easy yes/no answer to this question. This is the thing: As an advocate for missions, I want you to support overseas missionaries or ministries who are doing strategic, front line work. If you are a Christian and have never financially supported an overseas missionary, you need to find one! Partnering with these folks is urgent and important, and if you tell me that you are prioritizing overseas missionaries, I will never once question you on it. How could I? I was one myself for 16 years, and my next job will be to advocate for them.

However, overseas missionaries have a symbiotic relationship with people in positions like the one I am taking. Rarely can a missionary successfully live overseas long-term without being coached and trained. So yes, I want you to support overseas missionaries. But is a position like mine also important? Well, I wouldn’t have said yes if it wasn’t!

What about COVID? How is that impacting the future of missions? Are there even going to be any missionaries to send anymore?

I have thought long and hard about this question and discussed it extensively with mission leadership. COVID absolutely is impacting missions now and will be for the foreseeable future. This is definitely an opportunity for the Global Church to re-evaluate how we do evangelism and missions worldwide. But is the Great Commission finished? Absolutely not. And the American Church is still the most well-resourced church in the world. That doesn’t mean we get to call the shots (quite the contrary), but it does mean we continue to have a responsibility to do our part to build God’s kingdom around the world. In fact, I would argue that COVID has increased the urgency and opportunity of overseas missions.

Interestingly, Reach Global has seen an uptick in missionary applications during this last quarter. COVID has not slowed down the call of God on people’s lives to serve overseas. I look forward to working with the next generation of missionaries to creatively spread the gospel.

What do I need to do if I want to partner with you, pray for you, or support you financially?

If you would like to be on my mailing list (if you are not already), please email me at everyoneneedsalittlegrace(at)gmail.com and I would be happy to add you! No more cool Africa stories, but I will be sharing about how God is using me to send new missionaries around the world.

If you are interested in supporting me financially, you can go here to donate. Designate to Amy Medina, #1929. However, a better way to donate is by automatic bank transfer because there are no fees and it doesn’t expire like credit cards do. If you want to set that up, you can click here. Checks can be sent to EFCA Donor Services, 901 East 78th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55420-1300. Include a note designating to Amy Medina, #1929. All donations are tax deductible.

If you choose to do this, please send me an email letting me know you are doing so and if it’s a one-time donation or monthly, as this helps me to plan ahead.

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading! Please know that I would be very happy to answer any other questions, so don’t hesitate to email me.

You Can’t Really Call This Moving

By Amy Medina

On July 7, 2020

In Other

During the last three months, I owned practically no possessions. I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced that. The boxes we brought from Tanzania consisted of wall decorations, photo albums, and Christmas ornaments. Important, but not exactly essentials for starting a new life.

When it came to actual useful things, the only things I brought with me were my Cutco knives, my cheese grater (because it’s awesome), and some clothes and shoes. Josiah would include his Xbox in that category, which he carried over the ocean in his backpack.

Aaaand….that was pretty much the sum total of our possessions. The things we had left in storage in our parents’ garages consisted of plenty more non-useful things like books of stories I wrote in the third grade. Amusing, but not particularly practical.

So when I say that we moved into our apartment last week, I don’t think moved is the correct verb. More like, we opened our Rubbermaid totes full of colorful African-styled picture frames to hang on the empty walls and I put my Cutco knives into the otherwise empty drawers and we stacked up our clothes in our empty closets and spread out sleeping bags on the floor. But there isn’t a verb for that.

So this was my first time needing to buy, well, everything. When we got married we had a wedding registry as well as the bits and pieces Gil and I had collected from single life. When we moved to Tanzania, we borrowed furniture at first, and then bought an entire household of furniture/appliances/kitchen stuff/car from a leaving missionary. We still needed to fill in some gaps, but generally, we had most of what we needed, all at once.

So you could say that our moving day this time was a bit anti-climactic. Pretty much everything fit into our van, which we had just purchased two weeks prior, financially benefiting from the fleets of vehicles dumped by car-rental companies. Thanks, COVID, for a great van. We’ll call it a consolation prize for everything else you stole from us. The last two weeks it’s been our collecting van, as we have been driving all over a 40 mile radius, picking up furniture from people selling online. It’s like the Great Medina Scavenger Hunt of 2020, and that van managed to squeeze in (not all at once, of course) a sectional couch, two bunk bed sets, a desk, a coffee table, and three trips to IKEA. (IKEA is one of the happiest places on earth, and now it’s even more like Disneyland because you have to wait in line for 45 minutes just to get in.)

Hey, did you know that IKEA sells mattresses wrapped up like a burrito, like one of those magic grow capsules? Except, instead of putting it into water, you just cut the plastic off and watch it magically grow into a mattress instead of a sponge dinosaur. Now you know. You’re welcome.

Lily and I went to Walmart the day we moved in, and I should have just told a worker, “Give me one of everything you’ve got, please.” We walked down every aisle and filled two carts to overflowing before we called it a day. I needed to buy a stapler, because we didn’t have a stapler. How many times in a life do you need to buy a stapler? Not very often. Only when you own no possessions.

We now have visited every thrift store in the city and can speak with authority about our favorites. We made a garage seller’s day when we showed up and bought out all of their furniture, lickity-split, in 5 seconds flat. I’ve discovered that the words “estate sale” are especially thrilling. Josiah and Johnny even found a $20 like-new Foosball table.

Thankfully by now everyone is sleeping on a bed and almost all of the clothes have somewhere to go and my knives have friends in the kitchen drawers and I even found a large set of used Fiestaware dishes, which make me happy every time I see them. The Tanzanian decorations are on the walls and finally, finally, finally we are starting to settle. Johnny has asked at least three times, “So we are living here now?” and I don’t think he really believes me since we’ve been changing locations so often these months.

But we have keys. We have an address. It’ll do for home.

The Last Day: March 13 and June 18

By Amy Medina

On June 18, 2020

In Other

Today, June 18, 2020 is the last day of school at Haven of Peace Academy. It’s still morning here in California but it’s night in Tanzania, so the day is done. We just finished our Last Day Assembly as a Zoom call, live streamed on Facebook for the whole community. After so many years of saying goodbye to others at the Last Day Assembly, for the first time, my children and I were listed as “leavers.” My HOPAC family loved me well today, having flowers delivered and enfolding me in their love, even across all of the distance between us.

About a week ago, our HR gal sent me the “Leaving Staff Exit Interview” form to fill out. And I sat there and stared at this form that I personally have given to many staff members, and wondered what on earth I would write. What are the highlights of your time at HOPAC? How would you rate your HOPAC experience? How could I possibly answer those questions? I arrived at HOPAC at age 24; now I’m 43. HOPAC has not been an experience. HOPAC has been my life.

My dad prayed by the baobab tree on the HOPAC campus before it was built. I was the first teacher to step into the fifth grade classroom on the Mbezi Beach campus in 2001. The cement dust hadn’t been swept away yet and the chalkboards hadn’t been nailed to the walls. I was there to see more and more of the coconut trees from the original plantation be cut down and replaced with the the science building, pool, admin building, library, performing arts building, kitchen, cafeteria, and playground–a rustic, rural patch of land transformed into our Haven of Peace.

I grew up along with HOPAC. I poured my soul and tears and sweat (so much sweat, this is the tropics, after all) into this school and in return its people and experiences twisted and turned me inside out, stripped me down and built me back up again. We are inextricably linked, HOPAC and me.

Friday, March 13, was the last day I saw my students. We thought that we were kicking off Service Emphasis Week (SEW), so at the end of that day, everybody put their SEW shirts on and squished into the performing arts building. The speaker had the kids make paper airplanes that said “SEW Go For It!” and at the end of her talk, everybody threw them in the air, hundreds of them.

Two days later, Service Emphasis Week was cancelled and the campus shut down. And just a few days after that, I was on a literal airplane, wrenched away from my home, my country, my Haven.

None of us knew that would be our last day together. But at least those last minutes of that last day were spent together, all 500 of us scrunched together, sharing the same space. We belly laughed over the group of teachers who did their rendition of “I Will Follow You.” The air crackled with expectancy and excitement. And because it was a special event, we got lots of pictures, including a group picture of all of us. Who would have known how important those pictures would turn out to be?

I am thankful the SEW assembly was our last time together, full of joy and anticipation, because it’s a sweet memory in contrast to following 3 months of sorrow upon sorrow. The frantic evacuation of many of our staff, many of us not knowing what was going on or why we were even in this position, far more fearful of our rapidly changing world than we were of the virus. The devastation of those left behind or who chose to stay behind. The heartbreak of the first COVID death in Tanzania being a HOPAC parent. Discovering that our beloved pastor and chaplain has brain cancer. Trying to keep a school and a community together while spread out across the globe.

There has been very little joy in my life the last three months. Just trauma, uncertainty, stress, guilt, regret, and sorrow. Sitting in front of a computer day after day, living out of suitcases for months, not knowing what the next week would hold, I had a dogged determination to finish my job as well as I could, but there was very little light in that fog.

So finishing today, like this, is not what I wanted or planned, but it is what it is. And despite it all, there is sweetness in the sorrow. Relief and gratitude and the seedlings of joy. Because nothing–not distance, nor time, nor COVID-19, can ever take away what Haven of Peace Academy is to me.

America Doesn’t Know What To Do With Us

By Amy Medina

On June 11, 2020

In Other

America, apparently, doesn’t really know what to do with people who have spent 20 years in Africa.

Several weeks ago, we started the process to buy a house. We’ve never owned a house, but we had spent the last few months Googling, “how to buy a house” and “what is escrow.” We had some savings and no debt. We had done the math; we knew what we could afford. We had researched the neighborhoods that were in our price range. We were ready!

That is, we thought we were ready. Then we got on the phone with a loan officer. After answering questions about Gil’s employment history, he asked me about mine. “We’ll need W-2s and evidence of your work history for the past two years,” he told me.

That’s when things got awkward. “Oh, so, um, I actually haven’t received a salary in fifteen years,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been working and all. I’m a qualified educator. I’m actually an elementary school principal. I just don’t get paid for it. I’m a missionary, a volunteer….”

Silence.

That should have been my first indication that things weren’t going to go well. But we plowed on, and I managed to gather the evidence he needed to prove that I was actually employable.

Then he called with more bad news. “You don’t have a credit score,” he said. “You don’t have a bad credit score, you just don’t have any credit score. We can’t get you a loan without a credit score.”

I guess that would be because the last time we had credit cards was 2014. Oh. So just having no debt and some savings isn’t good enough in America. You need credit.

Never fear. A friend told us about another mortgage company connected to Dave Ramsey which doesn’t require a credit score. So I called them up. “Yes!” the agent told me confidently. “We do not require a credit score. No problem! So all I need is proof of utility payments at your home address from the last twelve months.”

Uh oh, I thought. I cleared my throat. “So, you see, we didn’t actually have a physical address, only a P.O. Box. And [ahem] we didn’t have any utility bills.”

Realizing how strange that sounded, I rushed to explain. “See, electricity was prepaid in Tanzania. There was this little box in our bedroom, called a Luku box, and we would use our phones to buy electricity units which came as a code in a text message that we punched into the box….” My voice trailed off. I was babbling. Better stop now before he thinks I lived in a mud hut.

“Okay,” he said, less confidently. “How about phone bills? Internet?”

“Also, prepaid,” I said miserably, knowing what was coming.

“Water?”

“Oh, that was a bill!” I said. “Except….the bill came as a text message to my phone. And I paid it using this system called M-Pesa and the receipt also came as a text message and the receipts are all in Swahili…..”

Silence again.

“I think you need to call me back after you’ve lived in America for a few months,” he said.

Seriously though. Wouldn’t Dave Ramsey himself approve of Tanzania’s prepaid system? Much less debt, obviously. But apparently not good enough for America.

So the end of the story is ….(drumroll)…..we’re renting. Which is fine. We found an apartment just a half mile from school, so that’s happy. After being turned down for a loan (and even having trouble getting credit cards–apparently you need credit to get credit cards), we were thankful to just get a lease. And after three months of living out of suitcases, I really don’t care anymore where we live. I’m just thankful we’ll have a home again. We move in in two weeks.

This does feel like some kind of time warp, though. I may be all grown up now, but coming back to California, I feel like that inexperienced 23-year-old newlywed moving into her first apartment. Sure, now I have 20 more years of life experience, but it’s with paying Luku using M-Pesa. I can speak with authority on the various pros and cons of Tanzanian internet providers, but haven’t a clue which one to choose in America. I am familiar with the various ways to send money around the world, but I haven’t had a credit card in seven years. I’m 43, but I still had to Google the word escrow.

So I guess it’s fitting that I’ll be moving into an empty apartment that we’ll be filling with used furniture and random finds from thrift stores, just like Gil and I did 20 years ago when we moved into our first place. After all, I still have some growing up to do in America.

My kids and their cousins being super-cool Americans.

The Next Chapter

By Amy Medina

On June 2, 2020

In Other

If you had told me this time last year that Gil and I would get to the third week of May without job contracts, that there would be a global pandemic and we would have to leave Tanzania three months early, on top of all the other stressful things that happened this year, I probably would have spent the year hiding under the bed.

I guess it’s a good thing that God gives us strength to handle just today. Not knowing the future is a mercy.

But here I am, on June 2, 2020, and we finally know what’s next. Gil has accepted a teaching job at a school in Southern California, and we will be moving to our new city in about three weeks.

Back in October, I asked you, “Anybody out there looking for people like us?” You were amazing! We got emails from all over the United States, some with suggestions of places and ministries we should consider, and others that were practically job offers. It was really exciting to think about all of the possibilities that were out there for us.

But as Gil and I really started to consider what were going to be our priorities for this next chapter, we kept coming back to one thing: Our Kids. Our kids were the primary reason we had decided to move to the States at this particular time. With their unique backgrounds, we wanted them to adjust to American life while they were still young. So while there was a part of us that really wanted to jump into something crazy and amazing like moving to Houston to work with refugees, we realized that wasn’t what would be best for our family at this time.

Gil and I began to prioritize two things: We wanted to live as close as possible to extended family (which narrowed locations down to California or Arizona), and one of us would need to teach at a Christian school. When we considered the educational options out there, we decided that a small Christian school would be the best way for our particular kids to transition to American life. In order to afford it, that meant one of us needed to teach at one.

So Gil and I started researching Christian schools all throughout California and Arizona. We eliminated all of the ones that were in areas we couldn’t afford to live in, which for California, was most of them. We sent out dozens of resumes and a number of applications. We had some good leads. Surely we would have job offers by March or April….right?

Wrong. As you all know, the world stood still in March and April. Schools in particular became paralyzed by the unknowns. No one was hiring. In fact, most of us wondered if education in general would ever be the same again. So all the days ticked by in March….April….and into May. Along with dealing with my own roller coaster of emotions due to our early and sudden departure from Tanzania came increasing concern about our future. I started envisioning my life as a never-ending vagabond, jumping from one hospitable relative to another.

Then the miracle happened: A position opened up for a Bible and History teacher at a Christian school in Southern California. A fantastic school and the perfect location–half a day’s driving distance from all of our family, and affordable enough that we could manage to, you know, feed our children after paying rent. Gil went through several interviews with several people. He was offered the job just over a week ago.

And the miraculous part? This is the school where one of our very best friends from Tanzania, Ben Snyder, is the principal. You might remember that I wrote about the Snyder family in The Happiest Kind of Sadness: Portrait of a Friendship and The Adoption Story of Zawadi, the Parents Who Waited for Her, and the God of Miracles. When the Snyders moved to California a year ago, we were thrilled that meant we might be able to occasionally see them. We talked about how cool it would be if that meant our lives might cross again, but we didn’t dare to hope that would actually happen. I mean, what would be the odds?

But God doesn’t work by odds. There was one position available at their high school for next year, and it was a position that Gil just happened to be uniquely qualified for.

Right around the same time Gil got this offer, another one came in as well, which threw us for a loop for about a week. But really, it was an obvious choice. God had answered our prayers and orchestrated a seemingly impossible set of requests: Living in California, a job at a Christian school, and incredibly, doing life again with some of our best friends.

There’s another question, of course, that you might be asking: What are you going to be doing, Amy? Well, that’s another story. I too have accepted a job, but I’m not ready to write about it yet. Partly because the journey to my new job is a story that will take a while to tell. But mainly because I still have several more weeks left as elementary principal at Haven of Peace Academy. My mind and heart still belong there at the moment, so I will write about the new job when this one is finished.

In the meantime, yesterday we found a place to live and we will move in in about three weeks. We’ve lived with uncertainty for so long that my emotions haven’t quite caught up yet. Am I really allowed to be excited? I can’t write out this story without seeing for myself the hand of God in working this all together for us. I am so very thankful.

The Medinas and Snyders back together again, this time in California.