Mark's Blog

Oklahoma Christian team 1982

The first three summers of Let’s Start Talking (1981-83) were the years when God continued to teach us how to do what we have done now for thirty years.  For instance, the second summer we wanted to give the OC students who went with us T-shirts to help advertise and attract Readers while they were in Germany. The LST sweatshirts/T-shirts now have an iconic place in our history with a few people who have whole closets full.

Well, the first shirts were a mustard yellow (YUK!) and said on the front, “Ask me, if I speak English!” Sherrylee and I blame each other, but it was probably my idea.  After a week or two in Germany, dutifully wearing their T-shirts whenever possible, some of the girls came to us and said that they didn’t want to wear the shirts any longer. I couldn’t understand why until they explained that the “ask me, if I speak English” sentence was written right across the front chest area, so it made all the men and boys stare at their chests!!  That was the end of our first marketing fiasco.

As I mentioned in the last post, we carried actual Bibles the first year, the New Easy-To-Read version published by World Bible Translation Center. It was a version originally prepared for deaf people, but perfect for what we were wanting to do because the syntax and vocabulary were approximately fourth grade level.  These were the Bibles that during the second summer, we literally cut passages out of Luke, pasted them onto sheets of paper, then photocopied the newly created pages in order to make the first “workbooks.” I don’t really think we had any questions or vocabulary with the texts those first summers, but I’m not sure.

We chose to use Luke as our text from the very beginning for some fairly obvious reasons, We were committed to starting with the story of Jesus , so first of all, Luke was more narrative—more of a complete story, from Jesus’ birth to his death.  Also,

• Matthew alludes to the Old Testament too often, and we didn’t want to have to continually drop back into Jewish history with our Readers.
• Mark was just too brief and left out some of the chronological story—like Jesus’ birth.
• And John was too abstract, too theological for people who had no faith.
• Luke had an obvious sequel (Acts), so we could already see the path for continuity.

For three summers (1981-83), we took 11-13 students from Oklahoma Christian. Divided into two, later three teams, they spent the summer in the northern German (then West German) cities of Braunschweig, Bremen, Hannover, and Cologne, working with the mission churches there that Sherrylee and I had been most familiar with.  Our family would usually stay in Hannover as our base, but visit each of the teams once each week to check on them and encourage them.

We were pretty content with this pattern and had no further grand design or vision, but God had more in mind.  In the fall of 1983, one of the OC students Amy Keesee (Gordon) who had gone with us each year, began graduate work at Oklahoma State University, fifty miles away from us.  She called one evening in the fall and asked if she could continue to go with us, and we agreed, of course. Then she asked if she could recruit a team from the great campus ministry program that the Stillwater church had had at OSU for many years. After a little conversation, we agreed—and the first embryonic division had occurred! In the summer of 1984, instead of 12 workers, we had 28. Instead of two sites, we had five! Instead of approximately 100 readers, we had 280.

Oklahoma State University team

With this one additional school sending workers, the potential for sharing the Story had more than doubled!  We began to get a sense of what could be . . . . In reality, God was just beginning to stretch our rubber bands.

Factoid: The first printed workbooks (white covers with the LST logo on the front) were designed and illustrated by OC professor Michael O’Keefe. He is personally responsible for the two little characters with spiky hair that are still LST icons—and still unnamed. (It has always been a fear of mine that someone would call them Mark and Sherrylee and it would stick forever!!)

In 1986, two former workers Kurt and Marilyn Siebold were living in California and wanted to go with us again, so we built our first church team around them with members of the Culver Palms Church of Christ.

Another first in 1986 was the first LST team outside of Germany. Kyle and Susan Bratcher had some history in Austria and wanted to go there, so we contacted our friends in Graz, Austria, and worked out the arrangements for the Bratcher’s team to work with the Graz church for the summer.

In the fall of 1986, Sherry and I were teaching a class on our new way of working in Germany at the World Mission Workshop at Columbia Christian in Portland, Oregon.  Two Pepperdine students walked through our classroom, looking for a session on Italy, but heard something about Germany, so they stopped, listened, and were hooked.  Ian Morgan and his future wife Lisa went back to Pepperdine and recruited the first team from Pepperdine—which has continued to be a great partnership.

With Pepperdine now fully on board, the fledgling LST program jumped from approximately 20 workers each summer to over 40 by the summer of 1988. Amy Keesee had moved from OSU to San Luis Obispo, CA, so now we had teams from there as well. Pete and Janine Brazle began to share responsibilities with Sherrylee and me for overseeing the summer teams. They took the southern four teams and we took the northern four—the birth of LST regional representatives.

First Church team from Culver Palms Church of Christ

By the summers of 1988 and 1989, LST was working in Italy and the Netherlands as well.  A Dutch family (Hans and Ans van Erp) had invited us to help them start a new church in Eindhoven, a church which is still growing and flourishing! And approximately 60 workers were going each summer.

People were beginning to ask us if we were trying to do too much. Sherrylee and I always responded that we were just trying to manage what God put in front of us. In fact, in 1986, we almost left OC to return to the European mission field with European Christian College. I had finished my doctorate and was invited to become the dean of that school—which we agreed to do if they could afford to bring on a family of five!  That door shut very firmly about the time all of these new doors were opening with LST, so we began to see God’s plan a little better—or so we thought!

We never dreamed what God would do in the next 24 months in the Soviet Union. No one suspected that the Iron Curtain was about to be torn down and what opportunities that would present for Let’s Start Talking.