Dear Friends,
Joe and Austia Hickey, after serving with World Outreach for 11 years, have retired as of the end of October 2024. Their formal time of planting and watering seeds across the globe has come to an end, and their mission to share the Good News of Christ remains.
Joe and Austia first met while serving on short-term mission trips with the divorce recovery program at their home church, Ward, in Northville, MI. These mission trips both allowed them a unique opportunity to get to know each other and sense their call to missions. They married three years later with missions as a central component of their marriage.
Ward church exposed them to more than short-term mission trips. They took the 15-week Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course which further ignited a desire to reach the unreached. After Perspectives, they participated in a 10-month TAG (Training Apprentices to Go) program through Ward. This program is an intensive 43 weeks of living in community with other Jesus followers and reaching out to Muslims in their area. All this was preparation for their eventual call to the field in 2012 and their launch into Southeast Asia in 2013.
Joe and Austia, in their late 60s and early 70s, donated their home to Ward Church, moved across the world, and began ministering to those who had never heard the gospel. Their fruitful work overseas has now come to a close, and their labor will have an everlasting impact.
Life is as full of mission as ever, though, as they seek opportunities to love their neighbors. In a full-circle event, the Lord provided Joe and Austia to live in their own home that they donated to Ward years ago, now called the Lighthouse and used as Ward’s mission house. They live missionally in their community, sharing the love of Jesus with their neighbors. Sometimes it starts as simply as helping a flustered neighbor with her temperamental lawn mower and intentionally developing a relationship from there.
In saying, “Well done, good and faithful servants,” we know Joe and Austia’s service in the kingdom is not yet complete as they continue to minister in their own community. We, too, can and ought to live on mission in our own contexts. They encourage, “Get to know your neighbors by frequent prayer walks, looking for opportunities to serve them, expressing the fruit of the Spirit, and being willing to love them as yourself.”
Whether it is to our physical neighbors, coworkers, classmates, or family members, we are called to be a city on a hill whose light is not hidden. Old or young, new to the faith or seasoned, we are to proclaim the love of Jesus through both word and deed. How can you share the hope of the gospel with those around you in your own life?
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