Joining the Mission

Several weeks after their wedding Charles and Hannah applied with International Mission Board – a mission board under the Southern Baptist Church – that sponsored several of Charles’ family members. Shortly after, they found out that it wouldn’t be possible to go through IMB seeing as Hannah was not a member of a Southern Baptist Church. One of the following weeks they visited a friend’s church in Birmingham where the bulletin listed the church’s missionaries and their mission organizations. Charles and Hannah used that list to launch a search for the mission agency they would apply to. In October 2003 Charles and Hannah went to the Dominican Republic together for another short-term mission trip. This trip definitely confirmed their joint call to go overseas. After several conversations and meetings with Recruiting Director Kirk Ogden of South America Mission, Charles and Hannah decided to follow through with the application process and eventually their commissioning with South America Mission (2004. In the meantime, Charles took a job in the Washington, DC, area where they would live until their departure for Costa Rica in August 2005. Charles and Hannah spent 8 months in San José, Costa Rica, studying Spanish and preparing for their time in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. They arrived in Bolivia in April 2006 and work with Ayoré Indians.