Where are you going? What will you do?
Hello, again! Thanks to so many of you who wrote back after our first email announcement about our missionary appointment by United World Mission.
As we take up our various UWM assignments, we’ll live for half of each year in a Latin American seminary we love and the other half of each year in Connecticut.
Now before I shovel up some details, remember this: It’s all about loving and growing emerging Christian leaders and their families.
Karen’s main work
Karen will dig deeply into the areas of Spiritual Formation and Member Care. People living lives of service need care. They grow weary. They give in to fears, both reasonable and unreasonable. They battle inner demons. They suffer conflict. They also blossom under loving care and become useful clay in God’s hands for long-term, resilient service.
Karen will serve with a UWM team to nurture the authentic spiritual life of seminary families and our UWM colleagues, and to provide the loving care that helps people to flourish and serve long-term.
We plan to live in an apartment on the seminary campus. Karen’s welcoming kitchen and our dinner table will be frequented by students, colleagues, and families, some of whom will linger and come to belong there.
Will David just eat bonbons and catch up on his soaps?
Mostly, yes.
But I will also teach Bible and mentor emerging Christian leaders and young faculty colleagues into what we hope will be lifetimes of fruitful service. I’ll help shape a doctoral program in biblical studies, the first of its kind in Latin America and a 25-year-old dream of mine. Together we’ll have a hand in shaping the heart and mind of a joyous, thoughtful, outward-looking, engaged Latin American church.
I also now direct UWM’s Theological Education Initiative. Leveraging my network of friendships across Majority World seminaries, I’ll help to match missionary-scholars with theological schools that will be strengthened by their service. I’ll do my best to mentor these colleagues into fruitful cross-cultural service in order to unleash the gifts of both the missionary-scholar and the seminary.
I’m also asking God for strength and grace to write five Spanish-language commentaries over the next fifteen years on Old Testament books for which no reliable resource exists. I’lll begin with Isaiah.
These sound like big changes.
Yup. But it feels to us as though all of life has been ‘school’ to get us ready for this next chapter.
After twelve years of invigorating skating across the surface of many of the Majority World’s seminary communities, we look forward to belongingto this one seminary community. Week in, week out. We will weep with its members when they weep, and laugh when they laugh. There will be funerals. And weddings. New babies. Hospitals and graduations. Hellos and goodbyes.
We will enjoy the deep privilege of molding the lives of God’s daughters and sons who will carry Jesus’ truth and love to people across the region and beyond.
And then the Theological Education Initiative gives me continuing possibilities for global impact in line with all that we invested during our years with Overseas Council. It all comes together so seamlessly. We’re a little bit amazed.
With this email we introduce you to our newly minted Baerly There... website. This forum will become our main space for keeping in touch with you regarding our life and work as missionaries. You’ll find these short emails parked on the website, and you’ll eventually discover more long-form writing on topics we think will interest you. So welcome to our main space for conversation with you. Visit the Baerly There …website and comment often!
We also want to introduce you to our new UWM missionary profile page There you’ll find opportunities for concrete partnership, a topic of a forthcoming Baerly There … email. |
Baerly There ... 
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