Tell us a little bit about yourself!
Hello! I’m Evan and I graduated from Jazz Performance in Drums at UofT! I dabble in music and film production on the side, and love teaching piano and drums to the kids in the music schools I’m a part of. I have been attending and serving Christ the King (ANiC) for two years now and looking forward to starting seminary at Tyndale this upcoming Fall!
Who/what led you to consider Missions?
I grew up in the church but even so, I saw “doing missions” to be a very specific calling to very specific people in the church. Therefore, I came to the conclusion at a very young age that doing missions wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t until I attended URBANA 2018, an Intervarsity-led missions conference held in St. Louis at the end of the year, where I saw the importance of missions in the gospel. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I went because I thought it was just a Christian conference - I didn’t know it was about missions - but I guess you could say that it was God’s way of introducing missions to me in a peculiar way. So really, I wasn’t the one who led me to consider Missions, it was God who led me to consider Missions for me.
On the last day of the conference, I had a one on one praying session with a prayer guide, and this was when I saw multiple visions where, long story short, God was personally calling me to serve and be involved in missions. I felt a sense of peace and joy throughout the rest of the conference and I returned to Toronto refreshed and filled with the Holy Spirit with this new determination to find a community of other missional believers.
How did this experience impact you?
If URBANA was the birthplace of discovering missions, then everything afterwards was shaped around and impacted by that one God-calling experience. When school resumed in January, a good brother in Christ (and roommate) Eugene Lu, introduced me to Chez right before our fellowship gathering. She shared her story of how she found missions, and she prayed for me, encouraging me to continue in my missional faith journey.
A week later, I joined the weekly Friday morning Missions Hub prayer gatherings where I met many other UofT students from other campus fellowships. At the end of that first prayer gathering, Chez mentioned that there was this 15-week mission course called Perspectives happening this summer, and still being new to missions, I joined it. I started to talk to staff in the other missions organizations like SIM and OMF and joined the Luke 10:2 gatherings at Missions Hub.
However, all of this being said, my personal spiritual life was also being shaped. I started to read the Bible with more curiosity, frequency, and intentionality, immersing myself in more books, podcasts, and discussions with others about faith and missions - life became more lively the more I learned about God’s Mission (Missio Dei). Perspectives taught me to see the urgency, stereotypes, stories, practices, wisdom, and truth of Missions. And then, I finally came to the conclusion that I wanted to be a missionary.
What is the greatest frustration in your Missional journey? How do you find hope in the midst of this?
When the pandemic hit during March last year, I left Toronto and flew back to my family in Vancouver. I was there for a couple weeks when I started to miss attending Missions Hub, going in person to church, and on top of that, I felt like my plans of having a music career were starting to fade away. Even though I was still keeping in touch with my OMF missions mentor through bi-weekly calls, it still felt like I was disconnected from the world - from missions.
However, I started to cope and combat this misery by reading. I started to read books like The Masterplan of Evangelism, The Marketspace, Honest Evangelism and many other other books on spiritual formation. I would sit outside in my backyard, lay a picnic mat on the ground, and just read. I then started to join this virtual prayer gathering initiated by another good friend Andre, called Praying for the Nations, joining several calls until I yet again went back into a season of withdrawal, misery, and confusion of where God was calling me to be or to do.
At this point, I didn’t know if having a music career was the path I wanted. I started wrestling with my thoughts, and living in the basement of my house (instead of my room because it was way too hot) wasn’t doing me any good either. Though the more I prayed, pondered and read, the more I found the space and time to learn about myself. I stepped away from thinking about missions and started to talk to God, discern, and wait for what God was showing me. In my misery, He met me.
What does it mean for you to live missionally right now? How do you practically practice this?
Fast forward to now, I am continuing to learn more about myself through introspection, contemplation and meditation (Lectio Divina). God made me realize the importance of the self in relation to others. In other words, I see myself being called to more than just being a missionary, but to be a discipler. I no longer see myself as someone who is going to go on missions, but as a discipler, who will be called by God to do his mission (Missio Dei) through whatever means he calls me to be, with others.
In this season now, as I am back in Toronto, I am called to practice living this missional life now by making disciples in the UofT P2C Global community. I have felt a deep sense of urgency to invest, connect, live life together, love, and disciple international students who are coming in from many different places throughout the world. In the upcoming Fall semester, Tyndale will be a place where I will engage in various different conversations with others about missions and find opportunities to study, learn, and grow in the knowledge of missions through seminars, classes, and future internships.