Tim Scott answers questions from Facebook
1. Did you guys have any degrees or special training before you went out on the mission field, or did you just study the Bible daily with prayer and head out?
I had a four-year degree in Biblical studies, and William, as most people know, wasn’t a believer at the time. Most of the training, however, came when we were overseas. Before you go out into the field it’s very important to be rooted in the Word of God. You need to know who and what you are in Christ Jesus, but you’re going to grow more as you begin to minister on the field, because you’re going to be among the people and experience different cultures and places. A lot of the knowledge that came was through experience and allowing the Word of God to be implanted on the inside of us as we were traveling from country to country
2. I feel led to into full time missions. Do you have any suggestions on how to raise support?
One of the things we’ve noticed is that there’s never a lack of missionaries who have a heart to go out and serve overseas, but we often see a lot of shyness or lack of faith in raising support. One of the best ways to start to raise awareness and interest in your calling is to go to your church and speak to your pastor. Tell them about the passion that God has placed inside of you, and be very bold in expressing the needs that you have and what you’re going to accomplish with it. It’s very important to be just as bold in explaining the help that you’ll need as it is in expressing what you’re going to do on the mission field. That’s one of the main things that missionaries struggle with all the time. It’s never an issue of whether or not they have the heart to minister, but it’s more of an issue of finances. It’s one of the leading causes that, I think, holds most people back from accomplishing their call in life. A lot of people have the mentality that God must supply the money before they take action, but in order to hold true in living faith, you have to hold to the call that God has placed upon you, money or no money. We struggled with the same thing at the beginning of our journeys. We often hitchhiked from village to village in order to save as much money as we could, and we’d spend a total of $7,000 on a year-long journey around the world. It can be accomplished on a low budget. Start with what you have in your current budget, and God will bring more as you are faithful. “He who is faithful in little will be faithful in much.”
3. Which, of the many places you have traveled to on earth, do you feel most compelled to return to?
There are so many places we’d love to return to. I would say that the most blessed places for us are places like the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu (which we recently returned to on our last mission), but every place holds a different desire in our hearts based on what is going on in the region (wars, people dying without the gospel, etc). We also often feel a different desire to return to regions where we’ve seen people who have received the Lord and have seen great things go on there, from Southern Sudan to Papua New Guinea to China. There are so many places that we’d want to go back to, but for us, as highlighted in the most recent series, The Pacific, going back to the Pacific is a place that’s close to our hearts. It’s very refreshing for us. Going back there and seeing what God is doing and continuing to do always reminds us of where we first started. It will always be close in our hearts.
