JONESBORO, Ga. (BP)–Monkeys, rope swings and alligators were all part of Adam Huser’s life growing up as a missionary kid in the jungles of Peru.
Adam sensed many years ago that being a missionary may be his calling as well. That was affirmed the first time he and his father made the three-day trek to a remote village in the Andes mountains. “None of the people had ever seen a white person before,” he recalled.
The villagers were desperate for truth. “My dad baptized an entire village in an ice-cold mountain stream because they were so hungry to know God. That image has stuck with me all my life.”
Adam and his wife Jessica were among 83 new International Mission Board missionaries appointed Sept. 10 at First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Ga. They join more than 5,300 other missionaries serving around the world.
Adam said his experiences in Peru prepared him to serve in an extreme way. His wife also experienced her share of extreme living conditions while serving as a journeyman. Rats, rickshaws and traffic jams were common experiences for Jessica during her two years in Asia.
“Adam’s heart for Peru and the urgencies of the vast lostness there [have] been contagious,” Jessica said. The couple will soon join the IMB’s Xtreme Team in sharing the Good News in the most remote places of the Peruvian jungles.
Andy and Michelle Milam may not have had extreme living conditions like the Husers, but they share their call to missions.
Andy, a music graduate from Union University in Jackson, Tenn., remembers as a boy reading missionary birthdays in the Open Windows devotional and praying for each one by name.
After the couple married in 1991, Andy said they had the privilege of living next to Ramona Mercer, Union’s first missionary-in-residence. He once asked her how he’d know his calling to the mission field. “God will show you,” she told him.
Ten years later, at Alpha Baptist Church in Morristown, Tenn., Andy began sensing God leading him to give his life completely to missions. “I was searching for God’s perfect will in my quiet times,” he said. “I … began to pour my heart out to God, asking Him to show me His direction for my life.”
It was then he spotted a copy of Open Windows. It had been years since he last turned the pages of the devotional. Immediately he flipped to the missionary birthdays. Next to the day’s date was a familiar name — Ramona Mercer.
“The question I had asked her in college came directly to my mind…. Was this coincidence? No. [God] had made it very clear to me what His will was for my life.”
Andy and his family will be taking the Gospel to the people of Portugal.
BE GOERS AND TELLERS
Tom Elliff, senior vice president of spiritual nurture at the IMB, challenged the congregation to be goers and tellers of the Gospel.
There are three types of believers, Elliff said — sitters, getters and the goers and tellers.
Speaking from 2 Kings 7, he compared the types of believers with the story of the four lepers sitting at the city gate of Samaria. A sitter is a person who is conscious of the world’s need for the Gospel but doesn’t do much about it, Elliff said, adding that this is probably the largest category of believers.
The second category of believers — getters — are sitters with common sense, he said. The lepers in 2 Kings 7 were getters. “Why sit we here until we die?” they asked one another in verses 3 and 4. “If we go out there [to the Aramean camp], they might kill us, but if we sit here we will die also.”
“You can’t be too hard on getters,” Elliff said. “Getters are people who say, ‘There is bound to be more, and I want it.’
“In a society that commends greed … many believers have become pretty greedy spiritually,” Elliff said. “There’s a problem when we have an appetite for things of God but no activity [for] the things of God.”
Elliff challenged the crowd to be — like the missionaries appointed that evening — goers and tellers. “With so many places to go, people forget to tell. The Great Commission is … going and telling.”
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Emilee Brandon is a writer for the International Mission Board.
