Mark's Blog

This is Let’s Start Talking’s 30th Anniversary, which we are celebrating September 25th at our Harvest Call Dinner in Fort Worth. I thought it might be fun to write a brief history of the ministry to this point. Look for a new installment each day until the 25th.

Mark Woodward with other German missionaries ca. 1976

I’m pretty sure someone has used the teaching of English in order to tell the Gospel story since St. Patrick returned to Ireland as a missionary in the second half of the fifth century. The first time I encountered this ancient idea, however,  was during the summer of 1966, when I was doing evangelistic work in New Jersey with Campaigns Northeast.  I remember distinctly talking to an older woman with Eastern European heritage who told us that she had converted to the Jehovah Witness faith after they taught her English using their version of the New Testament.

After graduating from Harding University in 1969 and already committed to leave for Germany with a mission team two years later, I accepted an interim employment offer from the Oxford Church of Christ to be what was called then a campus evangelist. They could not pay a full-time salary, so they offered to pay tuition for graduate school at Ole Miss. I started a program in Psychology, thinking that counseling skills would serve me best in our mission plans. After one semester, however, I realized that this program was all about rats and not people, so I switched to one of my college minors—English. My thinking at the time was that with this degree I would be able to teach English in a foreign country if I ever wanted to do vocational missions, so I finished my Masters degree in English there shortly after Sherrylee and I married in 1971. It’s amazing the way God moves us through life, isn’t it!

In 1971, Sherrylee and I left with a mission team to work in Germany as missionaries. We were always searching for some way to open new doors to faith for a people who had been inoculated so long with an impersonal form of Christianity that they were pretty immune to personal faith. I heard about a group of Christians in New York City who were offering to help foreign businessmen improve their English and were using biblical texts as conversation pieces.  I actually sent off for a sample of their material, but we never used it.  The time was not ripe—yet!

In our eighth year in Germany, we initiated an exciting project to start a Christian international school in Stuttgart. Almost a year had been spent in the scouting, planning, and searching for a facility. In February 1979, I even made a quick trip to the states to recruit teachers to begin in the fall. But in March, all of the start-up funding—including our salary—disappeared with one phone call.  Suddenly, we found ourselves in Germany with three children, no income at all—and no clear path as to what to do next.

We literally had to sell most all of our missionary family belongings to purchase plane tickets back to the states, where we moved in with relatives and sought God’s will. In pretty severe shock at having been torn from our home in Germany–a place and a work that we loved dearly–we looked for any kind of ministry position anywhere in the country. Slowly opportunities started appearing, but something just wasn’t right—but one day God blessed us with nothing short of an epiphany.

I don’t have a vision of the seventh heaven to tell you about, but what I do know is that on a very specific day, both of us came to the firm conclusion that we had been called to be missionaries—and that nothing had changed about the call—so we were only going to look for jobs that would allow us to continue being missionaries—and to Germany, if possible. Well, that vision shortened the list of potential employers considerably, which actually made all of our decisions much easier.

As Providence would direct, Oklahoma Christian University had a one-year, temporary job opening for an English instructor. We knew that teachers have summer’s free to do missions; we knew that Ralph Burcham, an OC professor had been bringing students to Germany for several years on campaigns, and we knew that the 12^th and Drexel  Church of Christ had supported the work in Germany heavily over the years, so we jumped at the opportunity, interviewed for the job, and was hired for the one-year position—one year that turned into twenty-four!

Honestly, I can hardly describe the emotions we had during that first year in Oklahoma. We were so happy for the job, but we could not imagine why God had put us in Oklahoma! We were missionaries. The churches were large and did not need us; the friends we made were wonderful, but did not understand us. And we did not understand what we were supposed to do.

But we knew we were missionaries, so we volunteered during the first semester there as sponsors to go with Project Germany the summer of 1980. These groups did traditional campaigns, passing out invitations to preaching services and some street singing. We did, however, try out one new idea:  we offered to help people practice their English, if they would come to the church building one hour before the preaching started.  Our idea was to get them in the building, hoping they would stay and hear the preaching in German.

But the response to even this very limited and ill-prepared offer of English was surprisingly strong, so strong that I came home that summer thinking that God is working here somehow. I promised myself to pray and search for a better understanding of what He was trying to show us.

Tomorrow:  1980/81 – The First Team and the Discovery of LST