Twenty Years with Team 2000 By Karen Huebert-Sanchez | Thailand
It was autumn in Fresno, California, and the leaves outside were red like fire. I was teaching ninth grade English at Roosevelt High School, sitting at my desk enjoying the quiet during silent reading time. All of a sudden, God downloaded a one-page proposal into my mind’s eye, and I frantically began to type it out. I addressed it to Harold Ens, who was the General Director of MBMSI (now Multiply). In the document, I boldly proposed that he bless me and my husband Ricky to form a team to go plant churches somewhere among the least reached. I asked if we could hand pick the team from our existing friends and design the scope of our ministry. We would all commit to a minimum ten-year term. I signed the proposal and, after work that day, I personally delivered it to Harold’s desk. The year was 1996. When I was fifteen years old, God called me to serve overseas during a Keith Green Memorial Concert in Seattle, Washington. For Ricky, the call came during his college years when he was on a summer mission trip to the Panari Tribe in Venezuela. There in the jungle, God called him to be a missionary. After we were married, we did some discipleship-inmission training with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) before we took an assignment as teachers and basketball coaches at an international school in Bangkok, Thailand. We thought we’d teach during the day, study Thai in the evenings, and plant churches on the weekends. It was an ambitious vision. We were young and full of love for the unreached. But two things made this dream too much for us: first, learning Thai was much harder than we anticipated, and second, we needed a team—we were lonely and desperate for co-laborers to pray with, worship with, and plant churches together. 4 | witness
Eventually, we moved back to Fresno where we attended Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (now Fresno Pacific University). We started recruiting friends to return with us to Asia where we would make at least a ten-year commitment to planting churches. Many said they would pray for us and come visit us, but no one sensed the same call. Carmen Ens was a close friend of ours in Fresno, with whom we had served as youth sponsors at Butler MB Church and co-led a Youth Mission International team to Venezuela. She was dating a guy from Kansas named Andy Owen. After they were married, we invited them to consider forming a team with us. We saw their love for Jesus and their passion to use their gifts. We started fasting and praying that they would join us.
We needed a team—we were lonely and desperate for co-laborers to pray with, worship with, and plant churches together. Soon after, while Ricky and I were praying in our apartment one night, we sensed that God was prompting us to call Dave and Louise Sinclair-Peters in Canada. We had enjoyed their friendship and ministry partnership during the years that they had lived in Fresno. We thought they might be crazy enough to join us. On the phone, Ricky asked boldly, “Do you want to start a churchplanting movement in Thailand with us for ten years?” Dave and Louise laughed. We asked them to pray about it. Later we found out that, after the call, they had said to
