We are the Rathbuns, living and working where God calls us to be. We are currently serving overseas in the Philippines as missionaries from Solid Rock Church in Fort Worth, Texas under the Family On A Mission program.SRC has been led by God to plant a family overseas, pushing and taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They have been working in the Philippines since about 2011, sending summer teams to help with discipleship and building projects for local churches.
Hollie and I have been married since 2010 and have been eager to serve God in foreign missions since we met in college in 2007. I (Jeff) have known that I have been called to international missions since I was in high school, when I met Hollie I had the opportunity to spend the summer in East Asia serving with her parents who lived and worked there. During that summer God really solidified in my life that (at least for the foreseeable future) I needed to be doing international mission work, whatever and wherever that looked like. Hollie had a similar experience in college while on a summer trip to India. Seeing the communication barriers that she had with the people that she was there with to share the only hope they could ever have was a heartbreaking experience that God used to push her farther into missions.
Since we have been together we knew that God wanted us both to pursue the mission field and so we pursued opportunities through missions organizations that we both felt was at the top of the field (and in most ways, still is), but through God's providence, doors were closed to those opportunities and through a season at seminary we had a reorientation to focus on what the local church (specifically ours) was doing and where they were working. This led us back to our church, who was interested in putting a family overseas where they were already working, in the Philippines, and fully funding them. We have been blessed to be the guinea pigs for our church, being put through the training process and a pastoral residency that God has used to stretch us and make us more flexible and more dependent on Him and His grace for every single thing we do in ministry.
We have three (!) little girls, and these kids, well, most days they just can't be stopped, no matter how hard we try.
 |
| Sophia, Aaryn, and Rosie |