Born Into Missions

GLOBAL VOICES

Born Into Missions

Faith De Le Cour

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. —Ephesians 3:20-21

As of the end of March 2022, I am retired from holding executive positions focused on missionary/member care in two mission organizations, first in Japan with Asian Access and then with SIM USA. For the past six years, I have had oversight for the departments providing selection, training, personnel administration, care and development of over seven hundred global workers sent from SIM USA.

I was born into missions. My parents were married for five months before going to Brazil as missionaries at ages 20 and 22. We left the mission field six years later. They never returned to full-time overseas ministry, yet world mission was always central in our family life.

I graduated from Wheaton College in 1977 with a BS in mathematics. I received my master’s in management (MBA) from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Business while working in Chicago. In my final year of that degree, I sensed the Lord preparing me to serve him overseas and so I determined that I would not seriously consider a marriage partner who was not interested in missions.

I met Stan at an event for single adults at College Church. I did not realize he was accepted to be a career missionary to Japan until two weeks after our introduction.

We discovered our mutual missions call along with a growing attraction to one another, and in September 1983, we were married at College Church.

I was called to missions, God called me to Stan, but truthfully, I did not feel called to Japan. Yet obedient to God’s call, I went with great hopes and expectations. First, we had to go to fulltime language school for two years. Stan had previously been in Japan on two short-term trips. He had a good grasp of culture, but language acquisition was hard, so the mission placed us at a missionary language school with an individualized curriculum that worked well for him. I was placed in a more advanced, but disappointingly, not very demanding class. The language school was in a summer resort town, and in the winter, there were few people around with whom I could practice speaking Japanese. Even our local Japanese church wanted us to do a youth ministry using English.

Our daughter Bethany was born days after I finished my basic language course. Six months later we moved to Tokorozawa, on the edge of Tokyo, an area where we lived for the remainder of our 30 years in Japan. Disappointments began to mount for me. Stan was teaching at an English-for-evangelism center, and I was home with a baby. I wanted to be involved in ministry, yet the only opportunities available for me at that time were to teach English classes in our home. While I was not trained to teach English, God enabled me to get some guidance from others, and I taught children’s classes, a private class for a teenage girl and a class for “housewives.” Many years later, we met one of the women on a train and were blessed to discover that she and her husband had become baptized believers.

Summers were hard. We did not have an air conditioner in our home because other missionaries felt it was a luxury. It was extremely hot and humid, and our home would not cool down in the evenings. Even today, I am not a happy camper when I become overheated. It did not help that Stan was working in air-conditioning all day, enjoying the interaction with people. My increasing frustration led to despair, and I went through a dark season of questioning why I was even in Japan. Gratefully, God blessed me with another new missionary mom, whom I would meet at the McDonald’s playland for mutual support and encouragement while our toddlers played. (As an aside, we made sure we had air conditioning when we returned for our second term!)

Six months before leaving on our first home assignment, we discovered I was pregnant with twins. We were excited and looked forward to returning to the U.S. in time for their birth. However, two weeks before we were to leave Japan, I went into labor. Our identical twin sons were born at 27 weeks gestation, in the car, on the way to the maternity hospital. We made a choice as we left our home that whatever happened, we wanted to give God glory. They died hours later. We returned to the U.S. grieving, and emotionally exhausted yet held up by the Lord and his people. What a hard way to end our first term!

There is now significant focus in mission circles to figure out how to support first-term missionaries, many who leave prematurely. SIM USA has set up regular coaching through the term, offers preventative counseling and encourages on-field mentoring. I advise sending churches and mission organizations to care well for their firstterm missionaries.

That was not in place back in the mid-80s. Our mission supervisors had to return for family reasons in our first year in Japan. The next supervisors were peers with a little more experience than we had, but they lived a distance away. No counseling resources were available in Japan at that time, and this was before the internet (shocking, I know) when phone calls were expensive to make.

We extended that first home assignment so I could go through a pregnancy under the care of doctors in the U.S. Our daughter Anna was born in October, and we were back in Japan two months later. Starting with our second term, Stan planted an international church and served as its pastor for the next 23 years. I led English Bible studies for ladies of the church, which included several foreign wives of Japanese.

Early in that second term, I began noticing that many of our language school classmates had not returned to Japan for multiple reasons, some of them preventable. I was introduced to Jill Briscoe at a conference, and she inspired me with her ministry of encouragement through visiting missionaries. My concern for missionary care, retention and resilience began to grow from that time. Along with several other more experienced missionary women from multiple missions, I helped to develop a Women in Ministry focus for the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association (JEMA). Through those relationships, I was being mentored as a missionary, loved for my contributions and valued as a coworker.

To add to our family, we decided to pursue adoption rather than risk another pregnancy. After a lengthy process, in January of 1995 we adopted Joseph and John, twin boys from Russia, who joined our family at 15 months old. We saw God at work in bringing them to us and hung on to that when the adjustments to two active young boys challenged our family dynamics.

Not long after, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and died two days before Stan’s father’s death. The realities of personally navigating complex challenges, family dynamics in a cross-cultural setting, loss and grief furthered my passion to provide excellent care for others serving Christ overseas.

In 2000, I took on a formal role at Asian Access in the developing field of missionary care. It was the first time the mission had a woman in a leadership position, and there were some awkward and rocky times. I remember one of our Japanese leaders encouraging me to be faithful with what was in front of me and to trust that God in his time would bring growth opportunities.

I ran across a paper by Dr. Laura Mae Gardner (Wycliffe/ SIL) entitled “A Proposal for Member Care within Organizations” written in 1998. It listed numerous opportunities for training and growth in member care. I began systematically attending them. Over the next thirteen years, I took on a role of member care “cheerleader” for the foreign missions community in Japan. I served as the Member Care Committee Chair for JEMA for three years and contributed to a member care column in the Japan Harvest magazine. Twice I facilitated a one-stop counseling center at a national church planters institute and coordinated seminars for visiting member care professionals. I offered introductory talks on member care to multi-mission gatherings and informally consulted with missionaries and organizations on member care in Japan.

One of my greatest joys was bringing a Japanese Wycliffe missionary to the World Evangelical Alliance Global Mission Commission consultation in Pattaya, Thailand. At that conference, the Global Member Care Network leadership team invited her to join them. She brought a wealth of personal experience of being an Asian minority on a mission team. Most Japanese sending churches and organizations did not understand the needs of their missionaries, and she began the process of educating them on ways to care for their sent ones.

Asian Access developed a partnership with SIM USA in 2011. I was on the partnership search and transition team. Through that relationship, the president of SIM USA asked me to become the director of member care. Meanwhile, Stan and I were realizing we needed to relocate to the U.S. when our sons graduated from high school. God confirmed that this was his direction through our leaders from mission agencies and sending churches. We moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 2013 and live near the SIM USA office.

Stan has worked relentlessly to develop the partnership between the missionary, his or her sending church and SIM USA. He spent three years on the member care team and became a facilitator in the Healing the Wounds of Trauma program. We expanded the number of member care facilitators. I led a restructure of the entire SIM USA home assignment debriefing process. It was a joy to hear how missionaries enjoyed their campus visits after experiencing the new structure.

It became clear to the SIM USA president that my strengths in leadership and the ability to connect people to resources were the best way for me to care for missionaries. In 2016, I was appointed as the vice president of people/chief people officer. I had oversight for member care, personnel/HR, and other functions related to our onboarding processes. It has been a privilege and great responsibility to bring the care and services provided to our SIM USA missionaries to a higher professional standard over the last eight years.

I look back to that young missionary wife who was wondering where she could serve given who God had created her to be. I see again that God can do so much more than what we ask or imagine. God has been faithful and gentle with me through the early years of questioning, feeling left out, grieving losses. God has occasionally allowed me to glimpse how those “small ministries” in which I faithfully served brought encouragement to other missionaries. As I retire, God has given me a role of being a respected voice in the organizational care of missionaries and a mentor to younger leaders.

All glory goes to God!