If you missed yesterday’s livestream featuring WorldVenture Alumni, Alice Statler and Pastor of Sierra Vista Baptist Church, Matt Statler (her son) on their family legacy in ministry, here is the recording and related links.
Links mentioned in this livestream:
Quotes from the livestream:
- Alice: “And we would get the packets of missionary letters. And I would find my mother almost every morning reading those missionary letters. And then she started sharing them with me. And it usually was our family that had the missionaries come to eat dinner with us after they spoke. So, it was a kind of a lifelong connection with missions.”
- Alice: “And in fact, our missionaries had come there (Senegal) in 1962, and they had worked for 20 years, and then they finally started their first church with seven believers. And after 20 years and seeing a lot of heartbreak, but persevering through it all. And by the time I got there in 1975, there was a little tiny fledgling church that our church had started. Our missionaries had started in. And it was just an amazing thing to watch. How excited the missionaries were.”
- Alice: “But I’d have to say, looking back, the thing that I love was when I had students, like in my spiritual growth class and I got to hear their testimony, my understanding of the Lord grew because I saw how he had worked in their lives, you know. And I had students from Ivory Coast and different places, but a lot from Senegal as well. And many of them had been Muslim. But to see how God drew these people to himself was amazing.”
- Alice: “But I don’t want to diminish the fact that they have a deep spiritual need. And they live a lot in fear as well. Jesus is the answer.”
- Alice: “So, you know, just presenting Christ. And it is amazing to see who God is drawing to himself. The church has really taken off. I mean, you know, we would have Easter Sunrise service with 20 people and now but there’s churches everywhere now in Senegal. And I mean, among the Wolof, it is still pretty small, but it has grown, too.”
- Matt: “Sierra Vista is southeastern Arizona. It’s near the border of Mexico. Fort Huachuca is right here. It’s about 50K population, 55K population. And I think it’s mixed spiritually. A lot of cults – Jehovah’s Witness, Mormons, Catholics. And then, I would say there’s a lot of transient younger families, military families, then there’s retirees, and then there’s those who work either on post or more in the rural area. So, the cowboys and farmers. And then a lot of homesteading is happening at least around where we’re at. So, there’s also been an increase in Wiccan activity, a lot of satanic rituals as well. And I don’t know where it’s coming from besides just lostness. But yeah, that’s the spiritual landscape. There’s lots of churches in Sierra Vista, some healthy, some very unhealthy, and then some outright heretical.”
- Matt: “I read the Bible many times, but I opened up the Psalms and it was like a whole new vista has opened up to me, right? Because I’m seeing David struggling with the exact same things that I’ve been struggling with. Right? He’s crying on his bed in bitter tears sounds like he’s having night terrors. It sounds like he’s got anxiety or fear or whatever you want to call it. And so, all that stuff…God convicted my heart. And I started repenting, turning away from things, apologizing to my wife, just really Lord, just utterly crushed me, humbled me at school.”
- Alice: “We had relatives that were basically founding members of this church like 60 years ago or 70 years now. And then my husband’s parents, mother, and stepdad, went here for a number of years. When they retired, they lived here and went to this church. And so, yeah, they were just such faithful givers. They’ve always had a super missionary focus and that’s one of the things I loved about this church.”
- Matt: “The people that were trying help me, they loved people. They knew hurting people. They wanted to help hurting people like that. That’s what made them tick. And so, I’m forever grateful that’s what they were about. They weren’t trying to use me as some kind of prop for them. But the problem is, in the secular world, there’s an undergirding philosophy that undergirds mental health just the name of itself and is counter really to a lot of what the Bible teaches. So, you know, you have these caring people, but they’re approaching and trying to help people from a purely secular worldview.”
- Matt: “And so I just started having fun with my doctors and I would just ask them questions like, ‘Well, what are you trying to change me into?’ And they would be like, ‘What do you mean? I’m like, ‘Well, we’re here because you want me to change, right? Because what I’m doing isn’t working.’ They’re like, ‘Well, we want you to get back to the way you were before.’ And I said, ‘I was a selfish jerk before. I don’t want to go back that way.’ They were like, ‘Okay, okay, well, we want to help you cope, right?’ And I was probably the most annoying patient, but they’re like, ‘We want to help you cope.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that sounds hopeless, right? Just coping.’ I would respond, you know, ‘I just I want to grow in Christ likeness. I need the newness and this new hope, you know.’ So, they mark it down. They say that I have some kind of psychosis. And, you know, some kind of religious psychosis as Freud would say. And all the goals are presented to me really are the best the VA had to offer. And, you know, as I said, it’s Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound.”
- Alice: “But that’s why he started the biblical training center here. And he’s on the fourth group.”
- Matt: “So we offer the fundamentals and that’s the first phase in in certification with the Biblical Counseling Association.”
- Matt: “One example…I have had several people come to me diagnosed with bipolar, and we were able to look at Ecclesiastes 2 and we walk through Ecclesiastes 2, and they’re like, ‘This is me. This is what my life looks like. I have these ups and these downs. I have, you know, my high points and my low points, my high points. You know, I get sad. And so, I have to get out of being sad. I find all these high points to do. I get up, I spiral up into like a mania phase, and then I crash. Because it’s worthless. It’s nothing.’ And that’s what’s Solomon says, Vanity of vanities. Until you use the Word to break that cycle. And so how do we deal with our sadness, right? How do we deal with being sad? Do we lament? Do we take the Psalms and pray the same things that David did? I mean, that’s the songbook that the Lord gave his people, right?”
Watch the whole livestream for context.