One Couple's Story ...

Tom* and Sara* were both called by God into missions during their college years.  After completing Bible college, they began their work in the Far East and enjoyed a successful first term of service.  At the beginning of their second term, soon after they enrolled their oldest daughter in boarding school, Sara began to feel depressed.  While the ministry flourished, Sara sank deeper and deeper into depression.  She and Tom began to argue frequently, and by the midpoint of their term of service there were serious concerns for their marriage.  Desperate for help, they returned to the States.

When they arrived at their mission headquarters, they indicated that they did not know if they could stay together much longer, let alone return, to their mission field.  Sara was filled with anger, while Tom was filled with confusion. The mission requested that they come to ALONGSIDE for intensive counseling.

Searching for Answers ...

The counselor at ALONGSIDE discovered that Sara, who had grown up in the mission field and had attended a boarding school, had been sexually abused on several occasions by a teacher at her boarding school.  When the teacher’s sexual abuse of several girls was discovered, school officials had counseled the girls to remain quiet about the incident. They were told that the Christian thing to do was to forgive, forget, and remain silent so as not to jeopardize the ministry in any way.

Despite Sara's attempt to forget what had happened, the pain refused to go away; it just went underground.  In sending her own daughter off to boarding school, all of the old pain came back—and with a vengeance!  She tried squashing the pain; she tried forgiving; she even tried forgetting.  Nothing worked, and she became despondent on the inside and hostile on the outside. She took most of her hostility out on Tom, who didn’t have a clue where all the anger was coming from.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Sara and Tom spent only a few short weeks at ALONGSIDE, but in that time their counselor helped Sara come to terms with the pain in a way that brought genuine healing, while helping Tom learn how to be more supportive.   Sara learned how to manage her emotions in constructive ways, and in the course of working through these things together their love for one another was rekindled in a deep way.

Tom and Sara returned to the Far East and resumed their ministry.  Over the following six years, they planted one church, which became the mother church to four new churches. Many young men from the five churches felt called of God to evangelize neighboring people groups. The churches asked Tom to train these young men, and so Tom developed a three-month training course, with fifty-seven nationals attending the first course.

The Ripple Effect

Five churches were planted and fifty-seven men began to do evangelism and church-planting among people groups who had never heard the Name of Christ—All of this coming about over the course of six years after ALONGSIDE ministered to one couple who were restored to each other and then to ministry!  At ALONGSIDE we call this the "ripple effect"; we minister to pastors and missionaries who can then minister to others who minister to still others, thus creating a ripple effect for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.  In this way, Alongside is able to impact the lives of dozens or even hundreds of people by touching the lives of Christian leaders, helping them find the kind of personal wholeness that leads to ministry effectiveness.

*Names and a few details have been changed to protect the identity of these missionaries.