By Adrienne Kennedy 

Anthony and Adrienne Kennedy are interns with Larry Barker and Heidi Sorrels and disciple-makers at Faith Baptist in Mena, Arkansas. They have been working with Pastor Zack Johnson in the last year to build a relational discipleship culture at their church. Their vision has greatly impacted the church and, with prayer, the community around them. 

Missions itself was an idol in my life, and I didn’t realize that until I went to college. During a student-led service, I went through this list of diagnostic questions to assess my heart:

Would I give up my family and never see them again in order to obey my call to missions? Would I be able to do it? Would I still respond to the call? The answer was that it’d be difficult, but yes, I would do it. 

If I had no guarantee of ever getting married or having children, would I still respond? It’d be hard, but yes.

Would I still be willing to go if there was the possibility of being tortured? Yes, I would still be willing.

Then I asked myself this question: If I never set foot on foreign soil again, would I still be content in the Lord? And my answer was, “No.”

That’s when I realized missions was an idol in my life, because my call became more about missions than it was about the God of mission. I had lost sight of why the mission even exists in the first place: to bring Him glory. 

So I had to repent of that idolatry in my heart. As John Calvin once said, “The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We tend to make idols not just out of money or power, but also ministry and mission. Just because something is a “good thing” does not mean it’s off-limits to the idol factories that are our hearts.

 I still have to continually search my heart and make sure that I’m not seeking the mission itself more than I am seeking the God of mission. I had to hand my call back over to Him, and say, “Praise You, God, that You held me by my coattails and did not let me enter the mission field before showing me my sinful heart. Praise You for lovingly restraining me so that You might release me to go do ministry alongside my husband as someone who has a heart more fully focused on You.”

Think of the analogy in the Psalms where the silver is being melted down and the dross is coming up to the top. The silversmith skillfully wipes away the dross and throws it away, refining and refining the silver as all those impurities come to the surface. Anthony and I have experienced trials in our first three years of marriage that people without the Lord would not have made it through. We’ve faced unexpected loss, deaths, and suffering in great proportion. Through those trials, God brought out the ugliness lurking deep down inside us and showed us that we need to discard it and be filled with Him instead. If we had rushed to the foreign mission field before God brought us through these refining fires, we would have attempted to serve him while still harboring that “dross” deep within ourselves. Not only that, but we would have also sacrificed so much intimacy with Christ and closeness with one another. Therefore we rejoice greatly in these hard times and in this season of waiting to enter the foreign field, as God has used it to build a more solid foundation in our marriage for future ministry.

So as much as my heart longs to be “on the ground” yesterday, to be on the field doing whatever ministry we’re called to, we long much more to let the Lord continue doing what He’s doing. Our ministry, as a result of the Lord doing it his way and not my way, is going to be so much more beautiful, so much more fruitful, so much more exciting and adventurous. It will be so much more than I could have ever even imagined or dreamed.

God is the God beyond our wildest dreams. My dream was to graduate college and make a beeline for some remote jungle somewhere. But God, in His great mercy, saw my heart then and sees my current need to continue to mature. Though I know we Christians never “arrive” in the sense that we are always growing and maturing our whole lives, I know that God’s timing is perfect. If we’re not on the field yet, it’s for good reason. God is using everything we’re involved in right now for His Kingdom and for our sanctification. What we’re doing now is exactly what we’d be doing overseas, just in our own cultural context, and I truly believe it’s the training and preparation we desperately need. 

Presently at Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Mena, we are trying to develop a culture of reproducible discipleship. God has given all Christians a place in His ministry and that is through discipleship. We have set our focus on being present where God has us instead of fighting to get on the field before we’re ready. As a result of this, God has graciously done work for His Kingdom through us, though we don’t even have a right in and of ourselves to be in the kingdom of God to begin with! He not only has mercifully given us a place in His kingdom through the work of Christ, but God has also lovingly given us a place in His ministry of growing His Kingdom, and that is through making disciples. Though this is not the path my past self would have originally chosen in my immaturity and limited perspective, we are joyfully and willingly looking to God to teach and guide us however and wherever He chooses. I know for a fact that because I serve the God that is beyond my wildest dreams, my current reality is—and my future in Him will be—beyond my wildest dreams.