Not Spiritual Enough?

By Al Shannon

I’ll never forget that missions conference in our home church in 1959 when I first heard about Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) and JAARS. I had thought missionaries were super-spiritual Christians who went around the world preaching the gospel. Since I wasn’t super-spiritual and couldn’t preach, I figured that left me out. I was an electronics technician, servicing computers with IBM in Philadelphia. I could never be a missionary!

The speaker that night was Cecil Hawkins, a WBT administrator from Peru. He told us about millions of people in that small country who still had no written language. They didn’t even have one verse of God’s Word to read! He explained how translators lived among these people, learned their language, reduced it to writing, and then translated the Bible into that language.

Then he said, “And the only communication those missionaries have with the outside world is by two-way radio.”

Radio? Electronics? On the mission field? I wonder who repairs their equipment? There I was, sitting in the first row getting more and more interested, when this guy leans over the pulpit, points his finger down at me and says, “What we need in Peru right now is an electronics technician to repair those radios.”

Oh, no, I said to myself as I slid down in my seat and trembled. Who told him I was here?

It was like the finger of God pointing at me and saying, “OK, Shannon, now what’s your excuse? You could at least go down there and fix those radios!” Now, I knew that I was going to be in serious trouble with the Lord if I didn’t check this out. So, after the meeting, I walked up to the speaker and said, “I’m an electronics technician. Do you think I could help?”

He looked surprised, but said, “Can you repair communications equipment?”

“Sure!” I said.

“Well, here’s an application blank. I want you to fill it out and send it to our office in California.”

“You, you mean I could be a missionary?” I stammered.

I was ecstatic as I rushed home to tell Barbara. Get this scene! Barb had just come home from the hospital that day with our second child and was sitting there on the sofa with the baby in her arms. I rushed in and said, “Honey, how would you like to go to the Amazon jungle of Peru as a missionary?”

She looked me square in the eye and said, “Are you crazy? You’ve come home with some wild ideas before, but this takes the cake!”

“But the man said they need an electronics technician to maintain the translators’ radio equipment and that we could be missionaries!”

“You’ve got to be kidding! We’re not spiritual enough!”

“Yeh, you’re right! But how do you know when you’ve become spiritual enough to be a missionary?”

I had no peace for days, so I took the application and filled it out. Now, to show you my ignorance, I put at the bottom, “By the way, what do you pay your electronic technicians?” You got to live, right?

Three weeks later, I received a reply from the home office in California. I tore open the envelope and read, “Dear Mr. Shannon, Thank you so much for your application. You seem to have all the qualifications we need. But we regret to inform you, we pay no salaries. Wycliffe is a faith mission. All members must come with their own support. Also, ten percent of all donations you receive goes to the mission overhead.”

What! What kind of an organization is this? You not only have to work for nothing, but you have to pay for the privilege of working for them! Where in the world are they going to get trained, competent people with a crazy financial policy like that?

From that time on, all kinds of Wycliffe people started coming through the Philadelphia area. They even opened a Wycliffe office there. When I visited the new office, a lady there asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was an electronics technician and worked for IBM, servicing electronic computers. She eyed me with a funny look and said, “Are you a Christian?”

I said yes. Then she said, “Well, what are you doing here? We need people like you in Peru!” I just stood there dumbfounded, muttering something under my breath like, “I’m working on it lady, back off!”

We then met Bernie May, a pilot from Peru. He talked to a group of us and asked us to form the Philadelphia JAARS Committee. He gave us slides and information on Peru, and we went out and showed them in churches and raised money for the work in Peru. By that time I was ready to go to Peru at the drop of a hat. I remember the first meeting where I spoke. I was so wound up about JAARS that I stated confidently: “JAARS pilots are so good that they have flown thousands of miles without a single accident or fertility!”

One night Bernie came for dinner, and after dessert he leaned across the table, looked Barb in the eyes and said, “Would you be willing to go to Peru?”

She looked at him and answered frankly, “No, but I’ll pray about it.” Days before that, I had asked our pastor about our situation. He said, “No problem. God made you two one, and He won’t call you and not your wife. Just be patient and pray.”

A few months later we both felt we had to find out if all of this was from the Lord or not. Before we could be accepted as members of WBT, we would have to go through a year of training, three months at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), based in Norman, Oklahoma, six months at JAARS, in Waxhaw, North Carolina, and three months in Jungle Camp in Mexico. Then they would tell us if we made it. So we decided to go for it.

First I tried to get a one-year leave of absence from IBM, but they said no, so I had to quit. To go to SIL that summer, we had to have $1,000 in hand. We prayed and starting moving out in faith, selling a lot of stuff and renting our house. About mid-week, before we were to leave, we totaled up all we had and found that we had a cash value of only $600. I cried, “Lord, what now, where are we going to get $400 in 2 days?”

The next day I went to the mailbox and found a check from IBM, saying my stock had just doubled and split. There was a check for $412. I shouted, “Praise the Lord!” We packed our bags and climbed into our little VW and, with the two kids, were on our way to Oklahoma. Somehow we got through three months of linguistics in the hottest summer we’d ever experienced, chiggers and all. We were approved to go to Waxhaw for JAARS orientation. So we took off for Waxhaw, arriving at 10 p.m. one night, hot and tired from all the driving.

Finally finding the address, we walked up to a white house, dragging two tired kids, and knocked on the door. After some wait, the Bancrofts opened the door and said, “Yes?”

We said, “We are the Shannons and we’re here for the JAARS orientation course.

They replied, “You must be mistaken; we have no training course, we just arrived ourselves.”

Undaunted, we said, “But they sent us here from Norman, Oklahoma, for the course.”

“Well,” they said, “come on in and get some sleep and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

The next morning they explained the situation, saying, “We have no orientation course, but we do have a lot of work to do. And there’s no housing. We had a hard time finding this house. But there is an old run-down house that was given to us by a local businessman out in the woods off Steel Road. Let’s go see it.”

The house looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years, but when we opened the door, it was beautiful inside—real knotty pine and a fireplace. We said, “We’ll take it, how much?”

The Bancrofts said, “$25.00 a month. Is that OK?” To us, the house was a dream, surrounded by fields, woods and a large pond loaded with bass and brim. With the little resources we had, we made do by trapping rabbits and squirrels and catching fresh fish every day. Gracious neighbors at a nearby church gave us fresh vegetables, eggs and other items. So we learned how to live by faith, one day at a time, for the next six months—like Elijah the prophet.

Jim Baptista had just designed a new transistorized two-way radio—the Pioneer 530—and I was asked to build the first 50 models. As an electronics technician, it was right down my line. JAARS had recently rented an old storefront building for an office across the railroad tracks from the Waxhaw hardware store. We set up a shop in the back of the office and went to work.

When our six months of “orientation” were up, we went on to Jungle Camp in Chiapas, Mexico, for three months. But we did not have the needed $1,200 in hand. A week before we were to leave, our home church, which usually did not support missionaries in training, sent us a $1,200 check with this note: “We just discovered that you have actually been working for the mission so here is some retroactive support.” Once again we piled all our stuff and the two kids into the old VW and headed off to Mexico. God is good!

When we came back to Waxhaw, Wycliffe said we had passed all the requirements and were up for assignment. We really wanted to go to Peru, but desiring the Lord to make His will clear to us, we accepted to go to “any pioneer field.” In the end, we were assigned to Peru in 1962. I was asked to design and build two 100-watt transmitters and take them there and install them. We took this assignment as from the Lord himself and left for Peru in February 1963.

We have never felt “spiritual enough” to be called to serve God in Bible translation support ministries. But through His grace and His leading for over 44 years now, we have discovered how He Himself is more than enough to meet every need and every challenge we could ever face. To God be the glory!

Al and Barb Shannon 1963

Al is the Nonprint Media Manager for SIL Peru.

Rev. 7, Every Nation People Language, Spring 2008, vol. 3, issue 2 http://jaars.org/publications/Rev7/

—February 2008