Why Haiti - Part I

As many of you know, Erika and I have been working for quite a while now with a Christian ministry called Northwest Haiti Christian Mission (NWHCM). Two weeks ago, we began working full-time with the organization. Our move to vocational ministry (I’ll use that term loosely for now and will unpack it later) is the result of a long and formative journey for us that began long before our marriage took shape.

Let me first state here, for any brides reading this, that we are still booking weddings on a limited basis. We would love to talk to you about your wedding date if you’re considering us as your photographers. We have always seen our wedding photography business as a partnership between documenting the beginning of new life (through marriage) in America, and giving someone in Haiti the hope of life itself. That has not changed.

If you are curious about this major (and exciting) vocation change for us, I’ll aim the rest of this at you. I’ll limit this post to the personal aspects of this transition, and will touch on the professional and photographic details in a later post.

FIRST, SOME BASICS
We will be based from our home office in Lexington, though we’ll travel to Haiti roughly four times a year for a few weeks each trip. My work at the mission will look much like is has for the past year, there will just be more hours of it – largely centered on documentary photography and multimedia storytelling. While in the States, I’ll direct marketing/public relations efforts for the mission to help it stay connected with its supporters/partners and reach out to new ones.

Erika will be the mission’s Community and Staff Development Coordinator. In a nutshell, she will be helping the mission invest more in the care and training of its American and national staff and missionaries. She’ll also be building the framework for a new community development pilot project the organization is launching this year – the idea being to create plans for making ministry as holistic and sustainable as possible over the long term.

With all that said, I’ll step back and explain a bit about how we got here and why. I will say that I fully believe God is with us and blessing our decision as we step into this new chapter, but I cannot write with certainty that this is His “calling” on our life. I only add that disclaimer because we in the evangelical church tend to ascribe absolute certainty and permanence to the concept of vocational calling, and I have never experienced either of those in any job I’ve ever had.

I’ll also give Erika the room to explain her own journey up to this point, if she chooses, on her own blog. For her part, Erika has an immensely genuine heart for empowering the powerless, marginalized and overlooked, and she is very gifted at it. That heart is at the core of just about everything on her resume, and I feel confident she will flourish in her role at NWHCM. Her Creole is also far better than mine, which is bound to come in handy (she’s kind to me in her help).

I am blessed and fortunate to have her at my side, to be able to lean on and be leaned on by her. I am one of the luckiest men on Earth.

MY STORY
Most of my formative years were spent in a small town whose raison d'être was vocational Christian ministry. A Christian college and seminary were the largest (almost the only) employers, and the very ebb and flow of daily life there seemed directed at sending eager young people out to win the world for Christ.

It was a highly educated and intellectual town, comfortably steeped in modern conservative evangelicalism (I don’t at all mean that pejoratively – I have a deep love for that place).

Only problem was, I never felt a leading into professional ministry. Try as I did – and I tried hard – I just could not make myself want to be a pastor, or a missionary, or an organist, or even the editor of a Christian magazine. To top it off, my father was a Christian chemist with a brilliant mind and a Ph.D. from a notoriously secular and “liberal” university. He taught me to listen thoughtfully, to welcome progressive thinking, and to allow my faith and reason to comfortably coexist.

I often felt I was swimming against the current, and over time this atmosphere led to a sense that I was not as valuable as those people who were moving with the current. I wondered if God was pleased with me or not, if I was missing something, if I was blind.

I went to school in that town, studied abroad in a few different countries, and had some prominent internships at newspapers across the United States. I wanted to become a journalist, and there was never much question about it. And not just any journalist, but a great one. I dreamed simply of doing excellent and meaningful work that would tell the story of the things of God’s heart to a world that wants little to do with God.

Unfortunately, the newspaper industry is tanking, and the jobs are fewer and fewer each day.

And unfortunately, the evangelical church is not renowned for its love of the mainstream media. As one of “them,” I believe this is largely a misguided and unhealthy disdain on the church’s part. Though I won’t waste much space on it here, I think Christianity’s scorn for the mainstream media and the church’s (unnecessary) disengagement from it has, unfortunately, been part of the current downfall of modern newspapers and – potentially – part of the demise of general excellence in journalism.

So what’s an aspiring young Christian journalist to do? I worked at a business magazine for a few years before moving into freelancing. I loved the independence that freelancing offered, but it only occasionally offered the chance to do the sort of “God’s heart” work that I still dreamed of.

Then I stumbled upon NWHCM while working on a story about a local couple adopting from Haiti. And it became clear that this was a place where every professional skill I’d ever honed – photojournalism, in particular – could be invested. Not just invested in a corporate media machine, as I’d only experienced before, but directly in kingdom work.

But NWHCM also offered me a new experience in my profession: validation. The mission’s leadership not only expressed a strong affirmation of my belief in documentary journalism, but they pursued me as an employee at a time when it was a risk for them to even consider it. Though I’d been encouraged by countless peers during my fledgling career, it was nearly five years before anyone in the church (outside my family and one beloved professor) offered a substantive and redemptive blessing on my choice of careers.

Though it is a sentimental cliché, this it was a dream come true. Ironically, even many of my secular photojournalist friends were jealous that I’d found such an outlet (amazing what happens when the church actually embraces people!).

To be sure, this is not about me – I would not be comfortable in this position if it were merely about finding a fulfilling job. Neither Erika nor I are pastors, but we have long wanted to participate in some way in “vocational ministry” without giving up the specific giftings we feel God has prospered in us. We want to be “poured out,” in the best sense of the phrase, for the blessing of others.

Finally, we feel we’ve found a place in the church where we’re able to do just that. And we couldn’t be happier.