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March 30, 2007
Next stop: Indonesia
‘Preacher’s kid’ Rebecca Young embraces her missional heritage
Rebecca Young.
LOUISVILLE — Although a rich tradition of missionary and pastoral service runs deep in her blood, Rebecca Young will not hesitate to say that ministry was the last thing in the world that she ever thought of doing.
“The first call to which I really responded grew out of my desire to do my part to relieve world hunger,” Young said. “I knew from the time that I started my master’s degree in public health nutrition that I would use it to go overseas to work in a developing country to help hungry people.”
Because the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was in the process of relocating to Louisville in the year Young completed her degree and was ready to explore a mission position as a nutritionist, she went instead through Church World Service on assignment to Indonesia.
For three years, she worked on the island of New Guinea as a nutrition consultant, learning the language and serving at an indigenous Christian health agency.
“Since it was the church that sent me to Indonesia in the first place, I was already expected to be able to lead public prayers,” Young recalled. “Then when the people there started asking me to preach, too, I was too polite to say no. Eventually, much to my surprise, I discovered that I felt very comfortable in that role.”
When her Indonesian visa expired in 1993, the Asheville, NC, native decided to return to the U.S. to enter Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. For this daughter of two Presbyterian pastors, admission into seminary was a kind of homecoming. Young thrived in the academic environment of Columbia, where she was encouraged by the faculty there to pursue a course of doctoral study at Fordham University, from which she received her Ph.D. in contemporary systematic theology. In the meantime, she was ordained to the ministry.
Upon completing her dissertation, Young found herself newly unemployed and on the job market when the Asian Tsunami hit in 2004. Because she was a Presbyterian minister with a public health background who spoke the Indonesian language, Young decided to offer her services to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, which hired and deployed her immediately to do relief work in the tsunami area.
It was during that time that she met the president of Jakarta Theological Seminary, who informed her that the seminary’s systematic theology professor was leaving. Young sensed God at work in their encounter.
“I am the perfect case study that trust in God puts it all together,” she observed. “After years of feeling that I couldn’t connect the dots of my own life experience, I saw that God was instead connecting them for me into this beautiful picture.”
That “beautiful picture” is now a call to the seminary teaching position under the auspices of the Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands (MIJHH), the five year campaign of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to raise $40 million for new international mission personnel and for church development in the U.S., particularly racial ethnic and immigrant congregations.
The projected cost of Young’s three year term is estimated at $159,000, for which she and the MIJHH national staff team are currently fundraising. Congregations in Young’s home Presbytery of Western North Carolina have already committed a total of $14,750 toward her new ministry.
“When I left Indonesia after more than three years of mission work in the health field, I felt called to return to the U.S. to get a theological education with the goal of becoming a seminary professor,” Young said. “I wanted to help pastors in training to understand the international aspects of Christianity and our worldwide mission under God. That was 14 years ago. To see that dream finally come to fruition after all this time is truly a sign of the miraculous leading of the Holy Spirit in my life.”
After accepting her new call to ministry in Jakarta, Young was engaged in a favorite hobby, family genealogical research. She was surprised to discover an ancestor who had been a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland to the New World in the early 1700s, and another who went to China in the 1870s. While she had known that her grandfather was a PCUS medical missionary to South Korea in the 1920s, and that her parents served in Appalachia in the 1950s, Young became newly aware that mission work had an even longer tradition in her family.
“Even though being a missionary appears to be in my DNA,” Young said, “I’m not unique — being a missionary is part of our shared Presbyterian DNA. It’s what we do together as a family. As the connectional church, we’re all missionaries, and we are in mission together. When I’m in Indonesia, the whole church will be there alongside me in spirit through their support and prayers.”
To make a gift or pledge to Joining Hearts & Hands on behalf of Rebecca Young, visit the Joining Hearts & Hands Web site or call (888) 728 7228 x5611. Contributions for Rebecca Young, account number MI910076, can also be sent by mail to: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Individual Remittance Processing, PO Box 643700, Pittsburgh, PA 15264 3700.
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