Jason and Jaylynn Byassee: Missing Boone While Embracing God’s Call in Vancouver, BC

Jason and Jaylynn Byassee

As I write this I, Jason, am at home in Vancouver, but my wife Jaylynn is home in Boone. She’s visiting for a weekend—taking in Watauga High and App football games, eating at Proper and Pepper’s, getting weepy at the beauty of the Blue Ridge. I’m back in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia where it is raining. Again. It won’t stop till April.

Boone is our heart’s home. We served Methodist churches in Watauga County from 2011 to 2015 and lived in the pearl of Appalachia. We loved it, and yet didn’t realize how bad we’d miss it when we left. British Columbia is glorious, too. They don’t award the Olympics to crummy cities. Everywhere you look here there is glass and sky and steel and water. It’s a city of dreams—a friend asked, in response to a Facebook pic, if we’d moved to Narnia. No, we thought, we’ve left it.

There are surprising similarities between Boone and Vancouver. Both are in temperate rain forests. There is a reason the trees grow so tall and beautiful—they’re well-watered, all the time. They’re both mountain towns with skiing within city limits. They’re both ambitious towns: Vancouver was a sleepy middle-class beach village within my lifetime; Boone has had to work hard to resist excessive growth for just as long. The secret’s out on Vancouver—it’s the second-most expensive city to live in in the world and a million more people are coming by 2040. Boone’s secret still has a bit of a lid on it. I hope it stays that way, selfish as that is to say. We need a place to retire, after all.

There are also vast differences. Vancouver is a west coast city. It is Canada’s SoCal, San Fran, and Seattle wrapped into one: it has the best weather in the country (millionaires and homeless people want to live here for that same reason); it is the place’s movie hub, its lefty progressive headquarters, and its techand coffee-roasting capital. Vancouver has been a magnet for Asian capital for 30 years now and doesn’t know how to shut it off. I regularly see Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked curbside—folks can afford cars that cost more than any house I’ve ever owned but not a garage to put them in (the average detached home price is $1.6 million US).

We laugh at small differences. We miss the food in Boone, in the South, generally: barbeque and Bojangles’ and pecan pie. I sometimes describe Canada as a beautiful country full of amazing people who can’t make a proper biscuit. Every meal we’re served the waiter asks if we want hot sauce (including, once, for pancakes!). We always want to say the same thing: if you make the food good to start with, it doesn’t need extra sauce. That’s what happens when Brits colonize a place.

Canada is a place highly attentive at the moment to its history with “First Nations” peoples which Americans would call Native Americans. British Columbia has more indigenous languages than anywhere else in North America—people groups were funneled up this way as Europeans moved west. In my lifetime there were residential schools in Canada, funded by the government and often run by churches, that took native children from their homes against their parents’ will and tried to Canadianize them—forbade their native language and dress and names. The goal was to “civilize,” actually a progressive policy at the time, but a disaster rife with sexual and physical abuse, amounting to what Canada has officially recognized as “cultural genocide.” I know the history of the Cherokee and the Lumbee and other tribes in North Carolina, but the flash points of their interaction with European settlers was so much longer ago it rarely entered my consciousness. Here, it’s a daily presence. Canadians are nothing if not good at saying “sorry”, accented appropriately. Here, a whole nation is trying to say sorry, with massive governmental and ecclesial payouts. Every civic gathering in Vancouver opens with a little invocation like this, “We acknowledge that we meet on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Coast Salish people.” It’s nearly a prayer.

A colleague of mine at the seminary where I teach is named Ray Aldred, a Cree pastor and theologian from Treaty 8, Northern Alberta. He is a gifted preacher and thinker from whom I learn daily. He also supplied a surprising point of connection with Boone, of all places. He spoke of how when his family gathers back home they always turn on “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show and turn it up. I nearly shouted out loud. OCMS is from Boone, North Carolina! We crank it up, too. It’s not just a good song; it’s a connector between a family First Nation and another European, between coasts, between countries, between us. Amazing what God can do through music.

For me, Jaylynn, I can truly say that the move to Vancouver from Boone was the hardest thing our family has ever done. Boone is a unique place and a rare find and only those who have lived in it can understand the depths and character and charm of Boone. After four years and no intention of leaving, God called us out of not only Boone, but out of our country, too. Even though Boone was deep in our family’s roots and our kids still call it their ‘hometown,’ we moved because we felt called to do so. How could we leave a place as beautiful and unique as Boone? You don’t. There’s a part of Boone that stays with you. Mind you, I didn’t know a soul when we moved to the High Country. Everyone was new to me. I remember the week we moved away, I took a picture of my son with his friends and said, “That picture took four years.” They weren’t instant friendships; it was time together in a small town, with a vibrant university, incredible scenery, a spectacular outdoor playground, and a church we loved.

It was my husband’s job that moved us to Canada, but it was God pulling on all of us that taught us that we will be affected in ways we never expected. For me, God used one question I asked in an interview for a job I didn’t get: Who helps the refugees that come to this city? Before long, I was serving alongside agencies who equip Vancouverites to welcome the refugee; I became friends with refugees from Kurdistan and ordered Bibles in Kurdish with the particular Sorani dialect; and I ate in the homes of Muslim families from Syria, learned their traditions, and listened to their stories. Often we have to travel around the world to engage with others of a different land, culture, or language. Here in Vancouver, the world is coming to us!

Our kids have experienced things in the city they had not been prepared for. One mentioned, as he was learning the names of cars he’d never seen before in his life, “How come I see a McLaren on one corner and then a homeless person on the next?” The city is a new way of life for them, but it has given them a chance to find their own way and wrestle with the questions that are right before our eyes.

With me working in a church and my husband working in a seminary, we realized quickly that our children were bumping up against non-Christians on a daily basis—much more than us! And the most wonderful thing is how they recognized the beauty in each of the friends they met. Not only were they learning about friendships with those who don’t believe in Jesus or have a faith, they were also engaging children of other faiths. There was a Jewish child in my youngest son’s class who mentioned Israel and my son responded with understanding. The child was astonished! “YOU know about Israel? No one ever knows about Israel—they keep saying you mean Italy,

or something, but they never seem to know Israel. This is amazing!” This was a difference we didn’t plan or expect—unexpected friendships in unforeseen circumstances.

And now, Jason explains what we had been told and how we prepared our three sons to transition to Vancouver life:

The church ecology here is different. When we moved, Jaylynn and I told our sons they shouldn’t ask new friends on the playground, What church do you go to? as their first get-to-know question. One of our boys came home saying he’d disobeyed. “I asked a kid if he went to church.” Uh oh. What’d he say? “He said no, so I asked him if he believed in God.” The boy responded, “This is a lot of pressure, kid! I dunno if I believe.” Contrast this with Boone where the church I served, Boone United Methodist Church, was the third largest in town with 1500 members in a town of 20,000 permanent residents. This floors Canadians. A large church in British Columbia might be a couple hundred in a metro region of 2.5 million. In terms of congregational vitality and size, Vancouver is more like Seattle than SoCal. Folks first moved here for money in gold or timber or fishing or now real estate, not for faith, and that origin story sticks.

Quite a change from Boone, where there are more Baptists than people.

Our spiritual lives and leadership are quite different now. Jaylynn directs pastoral care for First Baptist downtown, a gray stone tall steeple place. I teach future preachers mostly for liberal denominations in Canada—Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Church of Canada (a 1925 amalgamation of Methodists, Congregationalists, and 2/3rds of Presbyterians). The lines between mainline (where I teach) and evangelical (where Jaylynn pastors) are farther apart here than in the U.S., but we’re bridgebuilding people, so we’ll keep trying to mend together what should have never been torn. Because the Lord Jesus is knitting all creation back together, starting with the church. Sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of evidence that this is so. We often had it at Boone Methodist.

It’s amazing how you learn what you had only when it’s gone. We miss Boone Methodist daily—a place with the energy of evangelical worship and Bible study, the academic inquiry that befits a university town, the entrepreneurial energy of a small business community, and the social justice grit of those who love and live among the poor. We don’t worry about it—it’s in stellar hands with David Hockett and a bevy of gifted lay leaders; we worry about us. Selfish, we know, but we can’t help it. We miss the place so.

Vancouver is stellar—let no one tell you otherwise. Come visit us if you can. But something about Boone gets up under your skin, won’t leave you alone, and calls you home. We hope one day to answer.