Editor’s Note: The following appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Nurturing Faith Journal (NFJ). In 2025, NFJ will become Good Faith Magazine and free to all Good Faith Advocates.
When people hear I am field personnel for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), they often respond, “It must be so scary to be a missionary!” This is usually followed up with questions about how I felt called to missions.
I felt called to missions at a very young age. In response to that call, I walked down the aisle during an invitation at GA camp at Alto Frio Baptist Encampment in Texas. After a lesson about missionaries, I remember trying a seaweed snack that a missionary brought and hoping I would not end up eating that for the rest of my life.
Ironically, seaweed is now one of my favorite ingredients in Sichuan hot pot!
The subject of “calling” is something I have thought about, written about, and wrestled with throughout my journey of faith. When I think back on what led me to step into the aisle and say “yes” as an eleven-year-old girl, I trust that it wasn’t the excitement of eating seaweed but rather the nudging of the Spirit. I don’t exactly remember what I felt, and I doubt many people expected that call to “stick.”
However, throughout my journey of calling over the past 30 years, my heart and love for missions, different cultures and languages, and especially for the Chinese community stuck with me and guided my life in a way I could never have imagined.
So, what is a calling? What does it mean to be called? Are we called to a place? To a people? To a way of living? Is everyone called, or are only a certain few graced with some special privilege? Can callings change? How do you nurture a calling for a lifetime? I cannot speak for others, but for me, these are questions that I continue to contend with.
As an adult, my first step to answering my call to missions was when I chose my undergraduate degree. I attended the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor in Belton, Texas, where I pursued a degree in Christian Studies. During that time, I went on my first international mission trip to Germany for two weeks.
I think my mother was relieved when I came home from that trip and loved Germany. She was glad I chose a place that wasn’t so “scary” or different in her mind. However, I packed my bags two years later and left for a different place: a two-month summer mission trip to China.
Those two months transformed my life. I immediately fell in love with this new place and culture. During our time there, we focused on university outreach, connecting with Chinese students. It felt so natural for me. I loved getting to know and sharing with the students. Holding Bible studies in dormitories, their excitement about the Scripture ideas that were so normal to me but new to them had an incredible impact on my own faith.
It was this first experience in China that began to form my missiology. I realized I have something to bring, but there is also so much that I can learn from the culture and people I am encountering.
After that summer, much to my mother’s disappointment, I knew China would be a big part of my life. I returned the following summer and then again my senior year of college. I planned to return to China through CBF’s two-year Global Service Corp (GSC) program.
In September 2008, as a 23-year-old single adult, I began serving alongside long-term CBF field personnel in China. While I knew this was what I felt called to do, that didn’t mean it wasn’t scary. After arriving that first night, staying alone in my first apartment without a roommate for the first time in a foreign country, I thought, “What have I gotten myself into?!”
However, my colleagues quickly helped me find a community in this foreign place. With their guidance, mentorship, and a wonderful connection with a local registered Chinese church, this China became a home that would forever have a place in my heart and life.
I served the registered church there, investing in college student ministry, singing in the choir each Sunday, and learning to love the culture, language, and especially the food in that beautiful country.
When my two years were up, leaving the place that felt more like home to me than the United States was gut-wrenching. We had a huge celebration and send-off on my last Sunday at the church. I cried through a goodbye speech, and my college students cried through their singing of my favorite Chinese worship songs.
I was heading back to Texas to begin my Master of Divinity degree at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary with a focus on Missions and World Christianity. I thought I would give this a try. While excited about all I had to learn at seminary, I hoped my time away from China would be short. Little did I know God’s call to China was expanding beyond my own life.
I began seminary in the fall of 2010. If you ask anyone at Truett during those years, they would confirm my love (maybe obsession) with China. One of my CBF Asia team colleagues who attended Truett at that time even remembers me as “that China girl.”
During my time in China, I delved deep into the culture and language. All my friends were Chinese, and my church was Chinese. I loved the food, and I loved learning the local dialect. My Chinese friends would even say, “Oh Brittany, you are SO Chinese!” I took that as a compliment and felt it was true. I loved it so much. My heart and mind were set on China. I went back and visited that summer after my first year at seminary.
When I returned to the US, I experienced what is referred to as reverse culture shock. I began to ask some difficult questions surrounding calling. I started to have a “crisis of call.” Was I really called to China, or did I just like it there?
I had grown up hearing stories of missionaries “suffering for the Lord” in faraway places, but what I had experienced didn’t feel like suffering. I loved being there more than I loved being in the US. I loved my friends and community there. I felt guilty that my calling seemed to be so easy. But aren’t I supposed to suffer for my calling? I had to unpack all that during my time at Truett.
Just as I was doing this unpacking, I met Casey. I never planned on finding a spouse. My calling was to China, and I never expected to meet anyone who would have that same calling. When he and I met, many (okay, most) of our conversations were about China. I was processing my reverse culture shock and my love for China, and Casey was hearing all about China through my processing.
When people ask us about our calling, some initially assume that Casey followed me to China, as if it was my call and not his. But Casey fell in love with me and China at the same time. He had also felt a calling to missions from a young age and, like me, did not know fully what that meant or what that would look like. He explains that his calling has been a journey of discernment, not a burning bush telling him what to do.
So, as our relationship grew, his heart for missions and ministry and my heart for China grew alongside the other.
The following summer, I spent the summer serving as a CBF Student.Go intern in China. At the end of that time, Casey flew to spend the last two weeks with me. It was his first time in a place that would eventually become our home.
There, we began our lives together as Casey proposed to me on a rainy hike through the mountains of Yangshuo. It would take us a little longer than we expected, but after getting married in 2013 and the birth of our first child in 2015, we were commissioned and moved to China as CBF field personnel in 2017.
For us, it was coming home.
We were not only returning to a location, but to friends and a community that were like family. I had stayed in close contact with many of the university students and church leaders since 2008. We returned to China and reconnected with them just as they launched a new church fellowship. On our second Sunday in China, we went to the first service of the Thanksgiving Fellowship. We were so thankful for the privilege to be a part of this community from the beginning.
Serving in China from 2017-2020 felt like being exactly where we were meant to be.
After questioning calling through my seminary years, I realized that being called to a place and loving a place were not mutually exclusive. In fact, I was called to this place because I loved it so much. One of my CBF teammates, Hunter, once explained that living and ministering in Southeast Asia felt easy, and he knew that wasn’t true for everyone. That’s how he knew it was his calling.
That has helped me so much in my own journey of calling. It wasn’t a bad thing that life and ministry felt so easy. It was at the heart of my calling. It is beautiful to be called to something you love so much. I couldn’t imagine living and ministering anywhere else. I did not realize how difficult our journey of calling was about to become.
In the spring of 2019, the CBF Asia team was tasked with writing a service assignment for possible future field personnel called to serve in Asia. After prayer and discerning the needs of our ministry contexts, we all decided that the most significant growing need in Asia was for someone to work with the ever-increasing Chinese population moving outside of mainland China to other parts of Asia. Casey and I, along with two others who served in Macau, were tasked with putting together the specifics of the service assignment.
Over the years, we had seen changes taking place in the country. Religious activity was becoming more closely watched, and many foreign ministry personnel from other organizations were being kicked out or unable to renew their visas. We were not too worried because the kind of ministry we were doing was not as sensitive, and the Chinese church we worked with was small and seemingly off the radar.
As we sat down to work and discuss the service assignment, I turned to Casey and joked, “We better make this a good one in case we need to fill it.” It truly was a joke, but one I did not know would be so prophetic for the trajectory of our life and calling.
On January 1, 2020, after the birth of our second child, we boarded a plane from the US headed back to China. We arrived and began to ease back into life, learning how to navigate our city with a newborn and reconnecting with our friends and church family.
We had about two weeks of normalcy before things began to shut down due to a new, unknown virus that had started spreading in the provinces nearby. We had planned a big Lunar New Year party at our house but decided to call it off to be safe.
Within a few days, the US State Department changed their travel advisories for China to a category 4 “do not travel.”
Even though we were not concerned about getting the virus, we did have a 3-month-old baby, and we were worried about the medical infrastructure if the virus continued to spread across the country. Through conversations with CBF and our supervisors, we made the difficult decision to evacuate.
We packed our bags, expecting to be gone for only a few weeks until the virus was under control. We left everything behind, not knowing that we would never return to our home and community.
Writing these words four years later still brings tears to my eyes. This is not the direction I expected our calling to take.
On February 1, 2020, along with millions of others over the coming days, we frantically boarded planes to evacuate China. Our flight was headed to Malaysia. This was a good option because we had teammates there, and there is a large ethnic Chinese population, and Mandarin is widely spoken.
After arriving, we quickly realized this virus was getting worse, and we needed to find a place to stay while we were stranded. We found a furnished apartment and buckled down as Malaysia implemented a strict lockdown. Fortunately, foreigners were allowed to overstay our 90-day tourist visas to ride out the rapidly expanding pandemic.
While I do not usually use the phrase “It was a God thing,” I do not have any other vocabulary to describe how providential it was that we happened to move into an apartment with a significant overseas Chinese population. Our next-door neighbors were from the same city in China and the same neighborhood in our city of 14 million people. Our kids were about the same age as theirs.
When we met, we were extremely excited to learn of others who were missing home. We did not know it at the time, but God would use this experience of being stranded in Malaysia to open our hearts to a broader calling. As we met more overseas Chinese families, we discovered that we were uniquely equipped with the needed language skills and experience from China to connect with other Chinese families outside of their homeland.
We loved life and ministry in China, but we were the outsiders. While connecting with Chinese people in the US is also wonderful, they are also outsiders. In Malaysia, we found that we and the other families were all outsiders in a foreign place. We were able to form a special bond and community through that shared experience.
Our time in Malaysia was challenging as I struggled with anxiety and depression and dearly missing our community in China. Still, we see how God used this time to nurture our call through the overseas Chinese community we were surrounded by. We look back at that time and are grateful for how God provided for and sustained us.
At the same time, I was filled with questions about my calling that had felt so secure before. What did this mean for our lives, calling, and the ministry we longed to be a part of?
After two years of being stranded in multiple countries in Southeast Asia and attempting to return to China during a global pandemic, we finally had to accept that the doors to China were closed for us.
Fortunately, we were able to move to Atlanta and work as staff in the CBF office for a few years. My entire life was focused on my calling and identity to ministry in China. I was still “that China girl” I had been called in seminary. What did it mean that I was no longer a field personnel in China?
Who am I without this core part of myself?
Nurturing a call during the past four years has been challenging. It has been a painful road that sometimes seemed like we were in a dark tunnel with no light at the end. It meant leaning into and being okay with the hard questions of our faith, like where God is in the midst of grief and pain, and God would call us to this only to have it torn away.
Nurturing call has meant questioning my call, and being open to the answer no matter how scary.
Nurturing call has also meant doing this surrounded by communities of people who love us and were not put off by our questions and pain. Our Asia teammates surrounded us with love and prayer. They worked and advocated for us as we navigated new possibilities in ministry among the overseas Chinese community in Asia. They cried with us, hugged us, and kept us connected and involved in our team, even from afar.
Our family supported us in so many ways through so many moves and physical needs as we started life over time and time again. Our church family and CBF Encourager Churches surrounded us as we navigated life back in the US. They prayed for us and let us share our hearts.
They also helped me answer a new, surprising call to ordination and helped me find a passion for preaching that I, as a young Southern Baptist girl, could never have imagined was possible.
Because of what I learned from my faith community in China, I began to listen to the Spirit’s nudging to preach. I knew from the overseas Chinese community when we were stranded in Malaysia that my calling could be much more than my idea of what ministry can look like.
Five years ago, we started writing a service assignment for someone to minister among the overseas Chinese community in Asia. Five years ago, God began preparing Casey and me to fulfill that service assignment.
God’s call may look different in everyone’s life, but nurturing that call is done through and alongside beloved community. Nurturing call means being open to the hard questions and the unknowns.
While difficult, these can be beautiful testaments of what God can do with your life when you don’t hold on too tightly. When you open yourself up to change, to learning from your community, and even to being changed by the place and people you are called to serve.
Nurturing my call meant allowing those I felt called to minister alongside in Malaysia, China, and the US to come alongside and minister to me. It was through communities of faith near and far that our call was not only nurtured, but broadened and sustained.
Our family has answered the call to return to ministry among the Chinese community in a new place. On July 4, we moved to Baguio, Philippines, in partnership with the Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary to serve alongside the overseas Chinese community.
I cannot wait to see how God continues to call us into new spaces and new ways of seeing God’s expansive work in communities of faith around the world.
For more information and ways to connect with Brittany and Casey, please visit https://cbf.net/ramirez.
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Field Personnel serving the overseas Chinese community in Baguio, Phillipines.