“You do stutter, you know.” That was my high school guidance counselor’s response when I told him I wanted to go to college to prepare for Church ministry. He stated the obvious: I did stutter. I was aware!

 

It was 1958 when my parents responded to an invitation to attend the Wesleyan Church in Malone, NY. It was through the ministry of that church that I came to know the Lord and received my call into the ministry.

 

It happened one evening during my junior year in high school. Before climbing into bed, I knelt to pray about my future. I told the Lord, “If I become a history teacher, please make me a good one because I love history. But if You desire that I enter the ministry, I need help because I stutter!”

 

That calling was confirmed with the promise from John 15:16. Jesus said, “You did not choose me, I chose you and ordained you that you should go and bear fruit, fruit that will remain, and whatsoever you ask in my name the Father will give you.”

 

There were times, particularly in college, when intellectual and academic questions shook my confidence in the Scriptures and/or in God Himself. But I could not doubt or forget that meeting with the Lord on that cold January evening when He called me into Christian Ministry: “You did not choose me, I chose you….”

 

When I was growing up on a Dairy farm in northern New York State, my parents and five younger siblings never mentioned that I stuttered. I attended a one-room schoolhouse where 22 students never mentioned that I stuttered. And neither did Mrs. Hastings, my teacher.

 

I must have started stuttering as a toddler. I was a severe stutterer. I could not say my name because the hard “G” in my first name was impossible to get around using a substitute word or some other trick I learned. As I got older, I practiced speaking all the time—especially when I was old enough to work in the fields, harrowing or raking hay. I sang and preached long sermons I made up in my head. I repeated the difficult sounds over and over. No one ever heard those practice sessions due to the tractor’s roar.

 

When I attended the Brushton-Moira centralized Middle/High School, my teachers and fellow students never mentioned my stuttering. Mr. Hennessy, a guidance counselor, and my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Potter, were the only adults in my life who raised the “stutter problem.” It was on the last day of school, as we waited for our bus, that my teacher announced to the homeroom students: “Gary stutters less now as a senior than he did as a freshman.”

 

When I entered Houghton College in 1965, none of the professors or the students mentioned my stutter. The only person who mentioned my stuttering was Connie Mangham. We met at Houghton College, and she eventually became my wife.

 

She says I stuttered severely when we met but it gradually began to subside. We both believe that true love and acceptance was the cure. Connie’s parents were missionaries in Vietnam where she was born.

 

Beginning in first grade, she left home for months at a time to attend boarding school. Upon graduation, like me, she applied and was accepted to attend Houghton College. Connie introduced me to the global ministry of the Christian & Missionary Alliance. We married after graduation and in the fall of 1969, I enrolled in the Jaffray School of Missions (its name was eventually changed to the Alliance Theological Seminary). This year-long graduate program was a prerequisite to missionary service with the C&MA.

 

In June of 1975, before we left for Indonesia, the C&MA sent us to the Toronto Institute of Linguistics (TIL) to introduce skills for language-learning. The first evening at TIL we attended a faculty/student reception. The director of the program, Dr. Donald Larson, made the rounds, introducing himself to each student. When he met me, he said, “Oh, you are the guy who stutters; it will be interesting to see if you can learn to speak a foreign language!” To be fair, I do not think that any of the people mentioned above were intentionally hurtful.

 

I have been a minister of the Christian & Missionary Alliance since 1970. Our service has been three-fold: 12 years in Pastoral ministry, 13 years of Missionary service, and 15 years of Humanitarian work. Connie and I went to Indonesia and were the first missionaries to be assigned to work among the Javanese in Surabaya in East Java and in Jogyakarta, Central Java. (I never never stuttered while speaking Indonesian.)

The Lord worked in amazing ways to open congregations in these major cities and in the surrounding regions. I also taught part-time at the Jakarta Theological College, initiated by Dr. Yakob Tomatala. In 1988, God led our family back to Wheaton, Illinois.

 

I joined Wheaton Youth Outreach’s team and Connie joined World Relief’s staff. We eventually moved to pastor churches in Connecticut and the suburbs of Washington DC. The D.C. church, an international congregation, included 22 language groups representing the diverse business and government offices there.

 

In 2005, World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals asked if I would return to Indonesia for six months to assist in responding to the tsunami disaster that occurred in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. I spoke the language and had maintained contact with my former Indonesian colleagues. My primary task was to help World Relief connect with local denominations and local churches willing to enter Ache, a strictly Moslem enclave, in order to help restore homes, schools and businesses impacted by the Tsunami.

 

World Relief asked me to organize a meeting of all the major Christian evangelical denominations in the country to rally support for the disaster response. I reached out to my friend and former church planting colleague, Dr. Yokob Tomatala.

 

In the 15 years since I had left Indonesia, Dr. Tomatala had become a professor-leader, teacher, and mentor to many of the evangelical ministers in the country. When he sent an invitation to church leaders, asking them to join a “tsunami response strategy meeting,” they all came. It was a defining moment for humanitarian ministries led by Evangelical churches in Indonesia.

 

While we were not successful in the sense that all of those denominations assisted in the World Relief’s response to the tsunami. It did, however, inspire many of those denominations to make humanitarian assistance and disaster response a core outreach in their church ministry portfolios. Indonesia sits on the “ring of fire,” vulnerable to earthquakes, volcano eruptions, floods, and landslides.

 

Over the next 10 years I represented World Relief’s outreach and ministries to Evangelical Churches in Europe and Asia supporting WR in its disaster response, while Connie led the fundraising team focused on inspiring interest and giving (through visits, proposals and reports) from evangelical foundations and major donors. We also accompanied donors on site visits to review the ministry projects throughout Africa and Asia.

 

Today, looking back on 40 years of ministry, I can only say that it is indeed a miracle that God would call a stuttering farm boy to serve him as a missionary, pastor, and international humanitarian worker. I am humbled and grateful.

 

He chose me! Amazing.

Rev. Gary Fairchild