Visitng the prosepctive city of Gisors during our 2008 Vision Trip to France Today I am posting the first letter in our four-part letter series to give you more information about our specific call to France. Many of you got this letter in the mail, but in case you were not on our list of contacts, we wanted to make it available on here. If you did not receive a letter and would like to, please feel free to email me at chelle374@aol.com and give me your address and we will be more than happy to add you to the list to recieve the letters. Brandon wrote these letters, so they will be from his perspective... "Dear Reader, God has been so good to us! We want each of you to know that we are so thankful for the many ways that you have blessed our family. You have played an integral role in shaping us into who we are todayand we hope that you will continue to play an influential role both in our lives and in whatever ministry God chooses for our family. We would like to take a moment to share with you what God has been doing in our family over the past few years. Most of you know about our time in France and how God placed a burden on our hearts that He wanted to use us to impact the lives of French men and women with the good news of Jesus Christ. That was approximately 5 years ago and this story has been slowly unfolding ever since. This is the first of four letters you will receive over the next few weeks explaining this development in our lives. Keep watching for the next three. It is our prayer that you will read each one to better understand God's work in us and will consider how you can partner with us in our journey. God's Call As Michelle and I were drawing near to marriage, having finished our undergrads, Michelle was presented with the opportunity to spend a school year in France teaching English. Sensing God's timing, we joined hands in marriage in September 2004 and left for France one week later. We had no clue what God had in store through this experience but we committed to be open to God's leading. It turned out that Michelle was placed in the least churched region in France. Nevertheless, somehow we located an evangelical church in our town and on our first Sunday to visit the church a guest preacher was in the pullpit, an American missionary named David Lohnes. David and his wife, Kathryn, had been serving as church planters in France for over 20 years with an organization called World Team. As our friendship with the Lohnes's grew, we had the opportunity to see firsthand what being a foreign missionary looked like and we began to imagine ourselves in that role. Finally, with much fear and trembling, Michelle and I acknowledged to each other that we felt this was the very thing God had been preparing for us to do all along. The Preparation Stage We returned home committed to take the necessary steps to return to France as church planters with World Team. I, Brandon, enrolled at Mid American Baptist Theological Seminary located in Memphis to pursue a degree in Missions. We went to World Team's candidcay school in the summer of 2007, where we were furthre acquainted with the inner workings of World Team and who they are as a sending agency. The feedback we received was formative and challenging, and we left reaffirmed that World Team was the organization that God had in store for us. From there we were invited by World Team to become appointees and an invitiation to join the team in France soon followed. It has been 5 years since we have returned home from France and the process has been even harder than we imagined in a lot of ways, but God has been faithful and we simply have not been able to shake the fact that God called us and prepared us to go and make disciples in the nation of France. And here we are, planning and preparing to move to France in 2012. A Story in the Making There is so much more we want to share with you! We hope that the next three letters you receive will shed even more light on this ongoing adventure, but we'd also love to meet you or your small group in person. Please let us know if there is an opportunity for us to share our story with you face to face. And if not, please feel free to give us a call. For now, we thank you for your interest and hope to talk to you soon. Until next time! Brandon and Michelle Burch"
