Chuck and Diane Phippen gave up an idyllic American life to serve God on the mission field.
Christians make sacrifices. But most don’t leave behind 10 children, 16 grandchildren (with another on the way), 65 cows and a 250-acre dairy farm to become missionaries in Malawi.
But that’s just what Chuck and Diane Phippen did in 2023.
Before that, some might say the Phippens lived an idyllic life on an organic, grass-fed dairy farm; they homeschooled their 12 kids and were deeply embedded in their community and church. Two of their kids had even married two of their pastor’s kids.
So why do it? Instead of slowing down, why did Chuck, Diane and their two youngest kids pack their belongings into 12 suitcases and leave behind a comfortable, rewarding life that they all loved? Why board a plane on a beautiful spring day in New York and enter a rainy, muggy city in one of the poorest countries in the world?
How one EFCA church redefined community outreach––And yours can, too.
In June I attended the EFCA One conference in West Des Moines, Iowa at Valley Church. The conference was great, but I was absolutely inspired by this church. I have never before encountered a church that loves their community so much.
So I interviewed the pastor and a couple of others who have been impacted by Valley and wrote an article about it. It was posted today on the EFCA blog. I hope you are inspired too!
“I’m a Jesus-loving car guy,” says Scott Longstreet. One Sunday, after attending Valley Church (EFCA) in West Des Moines, Iowa, for a few months, Scott was walking out to the parking lot and had an inspiration: this would be a great place for a car show. “I could just see the whole place filled with cars,” he says.
He took the idea to Pastor Quintin Stieff, who immediately agreed. Scott was taken aback. “In my previous church, nothing happened without going through a lot of channels. Nobody moved a chair without getting permission from someone else.”
Scott soon realized his request was commonplace at Valley Church––in fact, it is its heart. When Valley says their purpose is to “Mobilize everyone’s God-given potential to deeply love Christ and their neighbors,” they mean it. They see their facility and their work as an expression of the Church’s highest calling. If you check out Valley’s events calendar, you’ll see it includes a breathtaking plethora of choices: coffee and connect for foster and adoptive moms, Movie Mondays, knitting club, card-playing group, support groups for special needs families, and a 8.5-acre farm for refugee families (and a Sunday farmers’ market to sell their produce).
In 2013, Valley built a 29,000-square-foot community center as a gift to Des Moines. But that was just a natural extension of their DNA: Valley Church was already operating as a community center.
I have devoted my life to Christian missions. Am I guilty of cultural assault?
My job is to hire, onboard, coach, and train new missionaries. Sometimes it’s a bit disconcerting to work in a profession that so many people hate.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article from The Guardian: “Missionaries using secret audio devices to evangelise Brazil’s isolated peoples.”
The headline is clickbait for an article that is mostly speculative. Considering that a companion article claims that the same tribe’s longhouses “glow with screens” and are asking for Starlink, I’m not sure they’re as isolated as we imagine.
But it was the comments that got my attention.
Over a thousand negative comments with over 700 shares.
Some are valid accusations. History has shown us plenty of ignorant, arrogant, or destructive missionaries. I met some. Sometimes I was one. In fact, the whole reason I am passionate about my job of preparing and equipping missionaries is because I want to prevent them from making these mistakes. From making mistakes that I made. Anyone who has sat through one of my trainings knows that the thing I say over and over again is to enter another culture with humility.
But I also understand that many people believe that a missionary should never go in the first place. Or that if he does, his work should only be humanitarian. He should never dare to try to persuade someone to change their beliefs.
How an innovative internship changed a missionary’s trajectory—and a church’s heart for missions.
It was a shot in the dark, but that was all Angela had left.
In May 2022, Angela showed up at First Free in St. Louis, Missouri, on a Sunday morning straight from the airport, luggage in tow. She wasn’t expecting much to come from it. Visiting a church cold turkey usually doesn’t.
But desperation makes you willing to try anything.
In 2019, Angela had returned home to Ohio after spending two fruitful, energizing years with ReachGlobal in Athens, Greece. Less than half a percent of Greece’s population is evangelical Christian, and God gave Angela a deep love for Greek people and culture. She knew God was calling her to return for long-term ministry, helping to revitalize and strengthen the local church. So, she went through the long-term application process with ReachGlobal and made the transition to become a career missionary. With it, the budget she needed to raise nearly doubled.
Angela was just starting to raise additional support when the pandemic hit. Months of lockdowns, personal illness, and turmoil in her home church brought her support-raising process to a grinding halt. And she just couldn’t get it going again. After almost three years, she was defeated and demoralized and questioned whether she would ever get back to Greece.
During that time, Angela tried just about everything. She had contacted everyone she knew. She had offered to speak at any possible venue that would host her. Once, she even set up a table outside of a car show! She reached out to hundreds of EFCA churches. Yet she’d hardly received any response at all.
I had the joy of walking with Angela on this journey. Go here on the EFCA blog to read the rest of the story!
I loved telling this story–one of my favorites from our years in Tanzania.
One of the first things that stood out to Peter and Eunice when they visited Reach Tanzania Bible School was that the teachers drank out of the same plastic cups as the students. In their denomination, the leadership would remain distant from those under them. Visiting guest pastors would choose the best hotels and restaurants. And certainly, they wouldn’t socialize with their students.
But they knew they had found a unique Bible school in Tanzania when they heard the philosophy of the director, Mark Dunker, a ReachGlobal missionary. “If you are looking for a paper to hang on your wall, this is not the right place for you,” Mark told them. “Here we teach for life change.”
Peter and Eunice were instantly hooked—this was the place they had been looking for. They didn’t realize their lives were about to change far more than they could have ever imagined.
By the time Peter and Eunice stepped into Reach Tanzania Bible School in early 2017, they had already been full-time pastors and missionaries for 20 years. Originally from Kenya, they had joined their denomination (founded by American missionaries) as young adults with a sincere desire to serve God wholeheartedly. They received some mentoring and then were sent to locations all over East Africa, evangelizing, pastoring churches and discipling others.
They were shining stars in their large international denomination, faithful to teach the truth about how to be born again from Acts 2:36-38: Repent and be baptized. Peter explained that repentance meant regularly making lists of your sins, publicly confessing, and often being publicly rebuked and humiliated in front of the church. Once you’d cleaned up your life enough, you were ready to be baptized—and you weren’t saved until that moment. And even once you had been baptized, you lived in daily fear that you might mess up too much to keep your salvation.
Like Cornelius or Apollos, Peter and Eunice feared God, earnest in their pursuit of Him. Before being assigned to his denomination’s church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Peter took classes at a Pentecostal seminary. He agreed to go to Tanzania in 2013 with permission from his leadership that he continue to pursue Bible education, but theological education is sparse in Tanzania. So in 2017, when Eunice saw a Facebook ad for Reach Tanzania pop up in her feed and noticed it was not far from their home, they decided to check it out.
They quickly signed up and started classes shortly after, but Eunice was disappointed to see that the first required course was on Bible study methods. “I have already been studying the Bible for 20 years,” she thought. “What else are they going to teach me?”
She was about to get the shock of her life. The first of many.
