Cassie Lomison
Reporter
Former Milligan student Isaac Jenson and senior Brad Parker, spent part of 2003 overseas in the mission field. Jenson spent 11 months in Pretoria, South Africa, and Parker took three trips to Romania, coming home between his visits.
Jenson went through Nieu Communities, a missions organization that sends individuals who are interested in missions spend ten months in another country. These people live with several others to try and figure out if missions is something they want to do.
In October of 2002, Jenson decided he wanted to go on this trip that was leaving in early January 2003. There was only one problem: Jenson needed to raise $8,000 in three months.
“It was crazy,” Jenson said. “I wrote letters and went and talked to my church. Even here on campus people would send random letters with money in it. God totally worked it out.”
While Jenson was in Africa, he worked with teenagers in a classroom three times a week, an after-school program and a coffeehouse.
“In class time, we talked about what it means to be a missional leader,” Jenson said. “We went through six different types of leadership, with each type being a month long. We talked about how it relates to church, culture and our own personal lives.”
The group was required to get involved in an established ministry, and Jenson chose to work with inner city teenagers. This involved leading a small group once a week and going on retreats and trips.
The last area in which Jenson worked was the coffeehouse, where he worked three times a week.
“The place we lived used to be a bed and breakfast,” Jenson said, “so we had our own room upstairs and ran the coffeehouse downstairs.”
Jenson said he was challenged to figure out what he believed, and he was able to talk through some of his questions with the ten people he lived with.
While Jenson wants to continue to do some sort of missions, his view of it has changed.
“I don’t see myself being a missionary--like a preacher--but I really liked going to another culture,” Jenson said. “Maybe I’ll live in an inner city doing social work because I like to get to know the culture and learn from them and them from me.”
Parker took three trips to Romania. The first trip was a week long in March with 24 other people from The Well, a worship organization that planned the short-term mission trip. While Parker was in Romania during his first visit, the preacher of the congregation he worked with asked him to come back.
By working with the Bible area at Milligan, Parker was able to get academic internship credit for his continued work in Romania.
For Parker’s second trip he spent three months during the summer living with a couple known as the “grandparents” of the church in Slatina, Timisoara. Parker returned to Tennessee in the late summer.
“I came home thinking I was going to come back to school,” Parker said. “I spent a month working at a bookstore in Bristol, and I decided to go back (to Romania) and work with the kids. I went to school each day and learned Romanian at a center for Contemporary Christian Thought.”
While in Romania, he taught and spent time with the youth and worked in an orphanage where he laid concrete, built a chicken pen and fixed bicycles. Parker even got the opportunity to preach when the church’s preacher was dealing with a knee injury.
He learned various other skills while in Romania including how to make honey and plum jelly and how to dig wells. Parker also taught English classes two days a week in villages with new churches.
Parker is currently enrolled as a student at Milligan. Jenson, however, left from his two-week visit at Milligan on Feb. 7, and headed home to Arizona where he plans on finishing his degree at Arizona State.