Five For Togo

Beth, Ryan, Aaron, Jonah,and Katie

Ryan, Beth, Katie, Jonah, and Aaron Richardson are planning to move as missionaries to Kara, Togo. You can keep up with their transition here. Call us at 901-486-6558.

Ryan was born and raised in Memphis, TN. His family hosted missionaries when he was growing up and often let them borrow their vehicles for long periods of time. At Harding University, he went on trips to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) and Kenya. He enjoyed these trips but was not totally convinced that mission work was for him at the time. Beth also went on mission trips during her time at Harding, traveling to Europe and Africa. She even visited Kara and hoped one day to return to do mission work.

While at Harding Graduate School of Religion, Ryan went on trips to Romania and Ukraine to help with missions and to study missions. Many of his electives in the Master of Divinity degree were in missions. Beth left Harding and began teaching (we weren’t together yet). She was offered the opportunity to teach school for a team of missionaries in Kenya, but did not have the courage to go alone at that time.

We married in 1999 while Ryan was working as a campus minister at Purdue University. After we were married, we moved to Maryland for a year to receive more training in evangelism and missions, while praying about moving to a French-speaking mission work. However, after having our first child missions left our minds for a while.

We have been back in Memphis for seven years. For part of that time, Mark and Nicole Kennell, former members of the Kabiye team, have been in Memphis as well. During their time in Memphis they decided that they wanted to return to the field. They began talking with us about the opportunities for our family to join the team in Kara along with them.

In these discussions, we have been prayerfully thinking about our family’s possible involvement with this work. Over several months, as we considered some different job possibilities, mission work came back to us, through a dream. Actually, Beth had several recurring dreams about our living in Africa. In each dream, she felt, with deep intensity, that we were FINALLY where God wanted us to be. After waking from each dream, she felt completely convicted that African mission work was what God was asking us to do, and that we must not overlook another call from God. Finally, we began to pray about it and realized that God had brought us to the point of giving up more control to him so that the beautiful people of Togo could hear the Good News.

We realized we both had become interested in moving to Togo, with some reservations. We decided to meet with Mark Berryman, who had organized our internships at Harding. He met and prayed with us and helped us see that we were ready to move forward with mission work.

In September of 2009, we spend a month in Kara, Togo with the team and fell in love with the Togolese people. Please pray for us as we raise funds and make preparations to join the team in their work there.