Home Away From Home: Beach Church's Myrtle Beach Missionaries on JustGospel Radio

Four people from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, walked into our studio at the Delta Community Church community centre on Monday morning, three days into the first mission trip their church has ever taken to another continent. Brenda, Summer, Tammy and twelve-year-old Lola sat down with me for Faith at Work, and the hours went so fast that Tammy looked up near the end and said it was almost twelve.

The rest of their team from Beach Church was out that morning with Care4U on a medical mission, so this was the ladies' shift. Between the four of them they gave us a very honest picture of what it looks like when an American church says yes to Africa without knowing the whole plan.

A kitchen conversation that ended up on a plane

Summer's version of how this started is my favourite part of the whole morning. Her husband said to her in their kitchen that God kept telling him he was being called to Africa. She said that would be amazing, and she admitted on air that for a moment she wondered whether he was serious. Less than two weeks later she was leading worship at a retreat, where she was introduced to a pastor and his wife who were originally from here and now live in America. She told them what her husband had said. They told her to bring him along the next day.

From there it was a Zoom call with Pastor Gerhard at Delta, and Brenda, who handles outreach at Beach Church, simply said: let's do this as a team. Summer calls it a God incident rather than a coincidence. I think she's right, and I'm borrowing the word.

Tammy's road was funnier. She had been to Greece in January and decided she was finished with mission trips for the year. Then an information meeting for this trip was announced after church, her husband grabbed her arm and told her to get in there. She is now on the other side of the world.

What a Monday looks like for a missionary at home

I wanted to know what their ordinary Mondays are, because people imagine missionaries as a separate species and they are not. Brenda is on the leadership team at Beach Church, and on a normal Monday she sits in a meeting of three and a half hours with the pastors, hearing from every ministry leader. In the afternoon she looks after life groups, which were in week eight of ten, and meets whoever walks into her office wanting to partner with the church. Her team also runs a food distribution every Friday, with Lowcountry Food Bank, and has done for four years. She was a little sad to miss it this week, and then she told us the team will manage fine without her. They will, because everyone there knows their job, and she described it as an ant colony.

Summer is a full-time mum first. After the school run she goes to LaBella MD, the medical spa she co-owns, where the motto is that the heart is your prettiest feature. Tammy is retired, plays on the worship team and delivers Meals on Wheels on Wednesdays, which she mostly uses as an excuse to sit and pray with elderly people. And Lola's Monday: breakfast sandwich, skincare, thirty minutes of chilling, a look at her binder. She hates Mondays. I respect the honesty.

"We came here to serve, but we have been served."

That was Tammy, speaking about Delta, and everybody at the table nodded.

Why Beach Church, and why it matters to them

All four of them circled back to the same thing: it felt like home the moment they walked through the doors. Tammy found the church online from Pennsylvania before she moved. She loved the teaching and the worship, and when she and her husband arrived in person, the people sealed it.

Brenda gave us the church's mission statement, which is leading people to a life-changing relationship with Jesus, and its five guiding values: transparent living, life-changing truth, selfless service, uncomfortable grace and captivating celebration. Every decision in those long Monday meetings gets measured against them. I would put "uncomfortable grace" on a few walls.

And then there are the baptisms. Beach Church baptises people in the ocean, and the ladies had stories: a double rainbow once, dolphins behind the pastors another time, a shark sighting, a baptism in a tropical storm where the pastors time the waves so nobody gets knocked over. Summer told of a teenager whose whole family followed her to church and was baptised together this summer. Lola told us she was baptised at nine, after she asked whether she could do it at Beach Church instead of waiting until November. Her mum called Brenda.

The hard part nobody posts about

Asked what was hardest about organising the trip, Brenda said it was the very beginning. Beach Church had never served on a different continent, and in the early days they knew they were called but not what they were doing. The practical side was smaller and funnier: she tried to pay a lodge balance by phone at one in the afternoon Myrtle Beach time and the front desk had already closed for the day.

Summer's answer is the one I keep thinking about. God, she said, will often give you step one and two, and we get excited and decide he must have meant steps three to nine as well. Her team had to hold the plan loosely, keep gathering information, keep praying, and stay flexible when the details shifted. They are still doing it now that they are here.

Three days in, with an honest caveat

I asked them what South Africa has taught them, and I asked them to be real. They were. Brenda called their first days "the bubble" and said so more than once: they had been with Delta, they had been looked after beautifully, and they could not speak for the country. Tammy said that if everybody in South Africa is like the people at Delta, this must be the friendliest place on earth.

Still, they listened, and what they heard was a lot. Brenda said that the poverty here, and the things people do just to survive, has already changed how she prays. Summer spoke about unity. In a conversation with Delta's youth pastor, she learned that getting teenagers involved is not only the usual teenage reluctance. Different communities, with their own leaders and their own divides, add barriers to bringing young people together. Her read, after three days, was that the diversity is here just as it is in America, but it is less blended, and that the body of Christ has a particular job to do about that. She also said that if the students could be unified it would ripple outward. A visitor's view after three days needs to be held with some humility, and she said as much herself. But she is not wrong that unity is the question, and I'd rather hear it from a guest who cares than not hear it at all.

Four words for your week

At the end I asked each of them to bless our listeners, and here is what they left with us.

Tammy went through cancer four years ago and said what carried her was surrender, prayer warriors around her, a list of verses that reminded her who God is, and filling her head with good music. She listens to nothing but Christian music at home, and she was kind enough to say that includes this station.

Brenda gave us Philippians 4:13 and asked everyone to spend time in the Word every day, because we can do plenty in our own strength but the blessing comes through God's. Lola said do not try to be like anyone else, because God made you you, and you are not too young to serve the Lord. Summer said that when she hits a hard patch she prays, leaves it at the foot of the cross, and then goes and does something for someone else in Jesus' name. Find somebody within arm's length, she said, and the solutions that come back are better than anything you could have worked out yourself.

We also got them to record station IDs, twice, the second time with extra zest. If you hear four American voices telling you that you are listening to JustGospel, that's why.

If you want to find Beach Church, their website is BeachChurch.org, and their services are on Facebook at beachchurch-myrtlebeachsc.