The last year couple of years, the day after Thanksgiving has been tough for American retailers. Thanks to the lingering affects of a recession, “Black Friday” shoppers have been reluctant to spend as much as they did in years past.
But the stores’ troubles were nothing compared to Dr. Sophie Warren’s. The missionary-professor in Nigeria experienced a different sort of Black Friday: “[The blackness] was caused by smoke,” she said, “not numbers in a ledger.”
One day after contentious regional elections, violent riots broke out in the streets near her university campus. Hundreds of homes and churches were burned. Even worse, conservative estimates place the number of people killed by gun- and machete-wielding gangs at 300.
Meanwhile, the home Sophie shared with a missionary couple became a place of refuge for the community. “We cared for about 60 refugees in a house that has three bedrooms,” she said. “I took 60 more children to another house. Then we had 20 or 30 people sleeping in cars in our driveway. The violence was going on in [those people’s] neighborhoods, and they didn’t feel safe.”
Even Sophie’s “safe” residence was less than half a mile away from the violence. She never knew if the marauding gangs might decide to target her makeshift refugee camp. For three days, while the Nigerian army worked to restore order, she and other missionaries struggled to provide food and water for everyone who’d fled to them for protection.
Finally, after several days of martial law—”soldiers were shooting or arresting anyone who walked the streets,” Sophie recalled—order was restored. The refugees cautiously returned to their own homes. Meanwhile, Sophie could go back to the work she’d come to Nigeria to do: educating future teachers studying at the university.
The Trip to Romania
When Sophie began studying Elementary Education in 1998, she never expected her teaching career to be so adventurous. But through a series of short-term missions experiences, God made it clear that Sophie’s original plan of teaching in the United States was not his plan.
Sophiecame to the University of Iowa with a religious background. However, it wasn’t until her junior year that she accepted Christ. Then in 2002, she began graduate school to pursue her Ph.D. in Education. “[That’s when] I really started following Christ,” she said. She started striving to make an impact in her community and around the world.
Sophie traveled to Romania with her church in 2003, where the team conducted Vacation Bible School (VBS) for orphans. Abandoned children were a huge problem in Romania. “Ceausescu [the former Communist dictator] put policies in place so parents would have large families,” she explained. However, impoverished parents couldn’t care for their numerous offspring, so the “extra” children were sent to communist institutions. Almost fifteen years after the fall of Ceaucescu, his legacy—tens of thousands of abandoned children—remained.
“The first week of VBS, I was drawn to a twelve-year-old named Giani,” Sophie said. “He taught me a lot about love. He didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Romanian, but there was definitely a bond there.
“I don’t even know how we connected,” she admitted. “The first thing we did together was chase butterflies on a walk.” But from that point onward, Sophie and Giani were inseparable: six years later, she said, “I still pray for him every day.”
Sophie returned from her Romanian experience with a fresh passion to minister to hurting people. She remembered hearing horrific stories about the kids she tried to love for one week out of their lives. She noticed a bald patch on one child’s head, and asked his adult caretakers what had caused it. “That’s the spot where the mom tried to abort her baby with a clothes hanger, but it didn’t work,” she was told.
Sophie had never realized before just how blessed her life was in America. “Life is really hard in a lot of places,” she observed. “[I started to] understand the hardships that people overseas face.”
From Kenya to Iowa to Nigeria
Two years later, Sophie Warren traveled to Kenya to work with former street children. She spent several weeks substitute teaching and tutoring for the girls who now made a home at the mission.
She has no doubt God led her to Kenya. While a desire to work with African orphans was growing in her heart, she “just happened” to run into an old acquaintance at the mall who told her about the trip. Yet by time she returned to the U.S., she was convinced that something had been missing from the experience.
“I loved working with the girls, and I felt like my heart was being used by God,” she said. “But God had also given me this [intelligent] mind. That was when I decided I wanted to do something in Africa, and I wanted to use my degree to do that.”
By summer 2006, Sophie was on track to graduate just one year down the road. But she still had no idea where she would serve long-term—and no idea how to search for a place to use her gifts. “Most universities [in the United States] put their positions in The Chronicle of Higher Education,” she explained. “African universities? No.”
It wasn’t until she was praying through Operation World, a book detailing missions needs around the world, that Sophie found a promising lead. In a section describing specialized ministries, she stumbled across the International Institute of Christian Studies (IICS)—a small agency that sends Christian professors overseas to teach at secular universities.
“I immediately Googled it,” she recalled. She discovered they were hosting a conference in just a few months in Kansas City, her parents’ hometown. The conference was everything she’d hoped for: “For the first time, I felt like I’d found an organization where I could use both my heart and my mind in service to God,” she said. “They really focus on loving your students with Christ’s love. So at that point, I applied to join them.”
Only one year later—after some very intensive fundraising—she was on a plane to Nigeria, translating her short-term experiences into career missions work!
Legacy
Sophie doesn’t want anyone to think her experience overseas is a spiritual mountaintop. Most of her time in a country like Nigeria, where corruption is rampant and resources are always lacking, is spent in the mundane details of everyday life. Sometimes, the community only has electric power for about six hours a day, and they may go a week or more without water coming through the pipes. (The rest of the time, it’s delivered by truck.) Because essays are considered the best test of students’ knowledge in the Nigerian university system, Professor Warren grades hundreds of tests and papers by hand each semester.
Few people would consider grading hundreds of essays a spiritual experience. Yet believes that one of her primary ministries is simply showing her students—the future educators of their nation—what teaching can look like when it’s modeled on the servanthood of Christ.
“Africa is a more hierarchical society than the United States,” she said. “Because of that, it’s a teacher-centered educational system, and teachers don’t have to go out of their way to help their students.” Senior professors can keep their positions by doing nothing for their students but delivering lectures.
“My students, however, know they’re free to come to me with questions, and I will give them feedback promptly on their papers,” said Sophie. She strives to model excellence in education and servanthood in her work.
In Nigeria, she’s also able to integrate her faith directly with her teaching. For example, she uses Christ’s parable of the wise and foolish builders in her lectures. Since rampant cheating and other dubious shortcuts are a cultural norm, “I’ve used [the man who built his house on a rock] as an illustration of the need to study hard and be honest in education.”
Ultimately, Sophie hopes to leave behind a profound legacy for her students. “I hope they remember me as someone who was Jesus to them. And I hope they will go and do likewise,” she said, “because my students are going to be teachers in the future.”
That hope for a Godly legacy is enough to make her brave riots, cultural differences, and days without electricity. Yet she still remembers that her journey to Nigeria began with nothing more than a pair of short-term missions trips.
After summers in Romania and Kenya, Dr. Sophie Warren decided to dedicate her life to serving in an incarnational ministry. Today, she draws on those formative experiences as she models effective teaching—and the character of Christ—for her students every day.
George Halitzka is a former short-term missionary and freelance writer in Louisville. Visit him online at writingbygeorge.com.
