By: Abby Perry 

Originally published in Engage Magazine, Fall 2022

Liz Stinard was used to being the resilient one. 

Having served overseas in the mission field with Wycliffe Bible Translators since 2000, Stinard had developed strong adaptability and coping skills that she’d called upon throughout her work and personal life. Not everything required those skills, of course. As an educator of missionary kids in Cameroon, Stinard adored her work. She taught, mentored, and coached, spending years in love with what she got to do on a daily basis. 

But then, everything started to change. Stinard, who saw herself as able to roll with the punches, began to realize that repressed grief was interfering with her love for her work. Since 2016, she’d felt disconnected from God, from her passion for her work, and from her desire to call Cameroon home. As the dissonance and confusion raged inside her, Stinard pressed on. In 2019, a friend noticed Stinard’s change, observing that she hadn’t seemed like herself for three years. Only then did Stinard realize she hadn’t been able to keep her discomfort inside herself. 

Stinard needed to start looking at her pain—to dig down to the roots of why she no longer liked the country she used to love, why the tasks that used to bring her joy and energy now reeked of burnout. One pain point she identified was that her workplace had instituted major changes that affected Stinard’s role without consulting her, despite her expertise and experience teaching the class for ten years. She felt undervalued, which was compounded by feelings of inadequacy and failure as Stinard struggled to implement the mandated changes. 

Reflecting on that experience was not easy. 

“I was not in a good place,” Stinard recalls. “I felt like I was bad at my job for three years. . . I think the Lord really used it to undercut my false self and things I didn’t realize I had my identity so deeply sunk into. When they were taken away, I kind of fell apart.” 

At the bottom of it all, Stinard found herself left with a question: Who am I? 

Stinard felt that she had reached the end of her rope. For her first twelve years on the mission field, there hadn’t been counselors available. Add to that the generational stigma she’d grown up around—where you only get therapy if you were “really messed up”—and it took a lot for Stinard to make her first counseling appointment. 

“I felt like the whole meeting was the counselor saying, ‘Wow, that’s really a lot,’” Stinard recalls. The counselor gave her a checklist that could help her determine if she was facing burnout. “It was so weird how many of those things I found in myself. I wondered what I would have to do to fix this.” 

Stinard requested permission from her mission agency to attend a retreat specifically designed to care for missionaries. As Stinard researched where to go, the Lord impressed upon her that not only was receiving missionary care for herself a valuable step to take, but that offering that same care to others was going to be the next chapter of her ministry. Suddenly, her life seemed to have a bit more clarity. 

A CLEAR PATH FORWARD BEGINS TO TAKE SHAPE 

For example, it seemed to Stinard like God kept bringing people to her who were struggling so that she could walk through their issues with them. She had no training as a counselor, and shepherding these people was not her job. But the Lord continued sending them to her. 

“So, it made sense when the Lord told me that [missionary care] was what I’m supposed to do,” Stinard says. A friend asked Stinard to reflect on what she loved to do outside of teaching, and the concept of missionary care as a ministry path for her was reinforced again. “I love organizing and hosting retreats and creating spaces for people to meet God,” Stinard realized. “I love walking with people to help them be more free.” 

It was clear to Stinard that member care for Wycliffe would be the next chapter of her ministry, and she wanted to prepare for it. She’d become a Christian at the age of twenty-five and was on the mission field less than three years later, never having attended Bible college or seminary. But she always loved learning and had said for years that if she were ever going to earn a master’s degree, it would be in spiritual formation. And now, the time had come. 

Stinard began researching spiritual formation programs and was drawn to Denver Seminary. She had planned to attend a retreat in Beaver Creek, Colorado, so she went a day early to tour the campus. At the retreat, Stinard says God confirmed that attending Denver Seminary was the right choice.  

At the first table she approached, two women struck up a conversation with her. She told them about Cameroon and that she was leaving, and possibly starting a program at Denver Seminary. The women looked at each other and started laughing. “I’m on the board at Denver Seminary,” one of them explained. “And we have a woman here, a volunteer, who just graduated from your program. We’ll connect you with her.” 

That alumna was Yvonne Biel, now the Formations Pastor at South Fellowship Church in Littleton, Colorado, having completed her MA in Christian Formation and Soul Care at Denver Seminary. But the board member and Biel wouldn’t be Stinard’s only connection to Denver Seminary at the retreat. The counselor she met with as part of the retreat programming was also a graduate of Denver Seminary. And not only had she received her Counseling degree there, but she had stayed enrolled for an extra year to take spiritual formation courses—a year she described as the best year of her life. 

After a season of confusion and turmoil, the path for Stinard became clear. She enrolled in the Denver Seminary Christian Formation Master’s and Spiritual Direction Certificate programs.

A FUTURE OF INTEGRATION AND FORMATION UNFOLDS AT THE SEMINARY 

Stinard learned that what she experienced during those three years when she felt separated from herself was the result of too strong of a focus on the cognitive and a divorce of that from what was going on in her heart and body. The formation program, she says, helped her integrate her head and heart, and grow in self-awareness, which can be elusive in the rigorous pace of ministry. 

Stinard has found contemplative practices that integrate the head and the heart to be vital to her for slowing down. She found the homework process of practice and then reflection to be particularly helpful, as she normally goes straight from one thing to the next. Stinard said that this process has helped her find a level of depth of inner life that she didn’t used to have the space, time, or tools to reach. 

Stinard also pursued other practices that she’d felt were lacking, such as how to read the Bible and pray, silence and solitude, and learning to lament, practices that have been woven throughout Church history that will benefit the missionaries she serves. 

If there is one word that describes Stinard’s experience and what she’s learning that she hopes to bring into the lives of the missionaries she will serve when she relocates to Senegal, it’s integration. 

Stinard believes that engaging those practices is essential to living as a whole person, and it’s that integration and wholeness that she hopes to help others find as she cares for them in West Africa. Rather than approaching member care as crisis care, Stinard is discovering through her Denver Seminary courses how to build Christian practices and spiritual direction into everyday life so that the support system is in place before someone reaches their lowest point. She envisions instituting soul care retreats where missionaries are given the time and space to engage spiritual formation practices alone, and where they can also participate in group settings that engage topics like belovedness, the true and false selves, and what the Sabbath can look like in their daily lives. 

As much as she’s excited about these ideas and possibilities, the thing that sticks out to Stinard most of all is the thing she has been learning to do for herself—paying attention. She wants to observe the people in her care and discern what types of support could be most beneficial and meaningful for them given their unique circumstances on the mission field. 

Rather than prescribing a permanent plan going in, she’ll watch, develop, and invite missionaries into moments specifically suited for them— whether those moments are shaped by a practice like prayer or simply walking through a flower garden. The goal is not to work everyone through a list of spiritual behaviors. It’s to help them live as the whole people God created them to be. Stinard knows what it feels like to be fragmented, and she knows she’s not the only missionary to have felt that way. And now, she gets to be part of guiding others.