By: Kelvin Oliver
T4JYM: When and how did you accept Christ into your heart?
MVC: My father was a Quaker minister, who pastored small evangelical Quaker churches scattered across the farmland of Western Indiana. When my parents went to church, I went to church, so I heard a lot of preaching. One summer evening, during a midweek prayer meeting, I suddenly realized that I had heard about “accepting Christ into my heart,” but I had never done it. I remember being afraid to take such a big step, but I shut my eyes tightly and quickly said, “Jesus save me!” I had heard that when you “got saved” you would hear joy bells and have great peace. That did not happen to me. It seemed as if God struck a match in my heart. I guess that God thought that a sense of a little burning fire would impress me, a five-year-old, more than any other witness of His Spirit. That sense of God as a fire burning in my heart has been the comforting, guiding, and motivating force of my life. CS: What is the main focus in your ministry? My childhood dreams were of being a dedicated missionary who penetrated spiritual darkness in primitive cultures. I imagined myself sitting under a shade tree in some remote village and explaining the Word of God to attentive listeners. Instead, of ministering to eager listeners of other cultures, I spent many years serving English-speaking short-term (five to fourteen days) missionaries who went out to minister.
T4JYM: Have you always felt fulfilled in your ministry?
MVC: To be honest, when I agreed to follow God wherever he led, serving mission teams was not what I had in mind. While up late one night in Haiti, making sandwiches for a mission team I expressed my dissatisfaction to God. “And to think,” I said, while slapping peanut butter on a slab of bread, “I took three years of Greek for this!” It seemed to me that God was wasting my life. In spite of my whining, God used my experiences with mission teams for a purpose beyond my dreams. While working closely with the teams, I witnessed the difference between prepared teams and unprepared teams. Prepared team members advanced global ministry; although loving and sincere, unprepared team members often created long-term problems. Through personal experience, observation, and interviews with missionaries all over the world, I gathered material and wrote the book Successful Mission Teams in order to increase the effectiveness of mission teams.
T4JYM: What kind of relationship do you maintain with your audiences? Do you fellowship with them? Or do you remain distant as the performer?
MVC: As an author, I don’t see many members of my audience. I do though, check the Internet and send a communication to those who refer to the book on their website. I also train mission teams (3-4 sessions for a trip).
T4JYM: Who, or what, are your biggest influences?
MVC: I never realized until recently, how much my father influenced my life. Although I graduated from a Bible college, my Bible education came through having to attend church with my parents and listen to my father preach and teach the Bible. Dad provided a solid foundation for my life. During my teens, obscure but deeply-spiritual Midwestern evangelists and missionaries fueled the desire to dedicate my life to God’s work. Streams in the Desert, The Pilgrim’s Progress and books by G.D. Gordon,and A.W. Tozer also contributed to my spiritual growth.
T4JYM: Have you written anything other than Successful Mission Teams? What future projects are you planning?
MVC: I have over a 100 published articles in about 30 different publications. I even co-wrote, with my husband, a book titled Construction Guide to OSHA Safety Standards. Real exciting project!! I often do people profiles for various publications. Through interviews (face-to-face, phone, e-mail, letter, cassette tapes, etc.), I help people tell their stories. As for the future, I want to preserve more personal stories of how God has worked in the lives of ordinary people. Years ago, the stories were preserved through letters, and diaries. Today, we photograph extensively, but write very little. A picture is worth a 1000 words to the present generation, but in family memorabilia, photos are often tossed by the next generation. A photo of Uncle Joe holding a goose will be discarded by a grandson. The story of how Uncle Joe was out of work, his family had no food, they prayed for food, and he found a goose caught in a fence, will not only be preserved but it will give hope to future generations. I want to help people put some of these great stories in a readable form for their posterity.
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