By Bonita Wilborn
John Mathieu (pronounced Matthew) grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, graduated from White Station High School, and then the University of Virginia. His original plan was to become a diplomat; so he studied Russian history. Another goal was to go into the peace core.
John graduated in 1969. “I was headed to Libya, but that was the year Muammar Gaddafi pulled his coup in Libya, so they couldn’t send me there. So I joined the Marine Corps Reserves and spent six years with that unit, which operated out of Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Georgia. I never went overseas with the Marines, but I owe them a lot because I came out of college a little soft and weak, and after Parris Island I got a little tougher,” John recalled.
John taught English at Baylor, a school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then spent time programming computers at Trust Company of Georgia. During those years he became interested in white water kayaking and ended up helping to open a backpacking/kayaking store in Atlanta, Georgia.
“I had grown up in church, but wasn’t a Christian,” John continued. “After I went away to University I never went to church and couldn’t have cared less, but during those years of kayaking and taking people on trips to kayak, three things happened in my life. One was that I just about drowned a couple of times and I decided, ‘Boy, you could die.’ Second, I spent a lot of time outdoors, and I said to myself, ‘This can’t just happen. It’s just too complex and interrelated to just happen.’ And the third thing was, I realized something was missing. I had part-ownership in the business, I had a girlfriend, I rented a house with a fraternity brother from school, and I had life kinda the way you’d like it, but something was missing. I didn’t know what, but something was missing.”
In 1975 John sold his part of the business and went home to Memphis. Shortly after his return home, a former Sunday school teacher invited John to attend a Bible study.
John said, “I told him, ‘Mr. Montgomery, I know about Daniel and the Lions and I know about Moses in the reeds, what do I need a Bible Study for?’ and he said, ‘Just come.’ So to make a long story short, the second week of the Bible Study I was sitting in a pew there in a church in Memphis waiting for the thing to start and I have no other way to say it, but God came in the room. At that moment I knew I was a sinner. I knew Christ had died for me. I knew that the Bible was true and it was God’s word. I knew if I asked him to forgive me, he would, and I did that night. That was in October 1975. I had one of those conversion experiences where everything changed from one day to the next. I had fantastic parents, but I loved my parents with a new love, and I wanted to tell everybody about Jesus whether they wanted to hear it or not.”
John spent the next six years in Memphis working mostly in public relations type work first at Rhodes College as the Director of Annual Giving, and then at the Evangelical Christian School as Director of Development.
John explained, “In the summer of 1981, actually through a girl I was dating, I was introduced to a group called Operation Mobilization, which was an international mission movement headquartered in London, England. They were having their American Conference in Memphis that year. I met the founder, George Verwer, who actually stayed in my home, and within a month I was on a plane headed for Europe. I spent the next ten years overseas. I did a summer campaign in France, and then in December of 1981 I joined their ship ministry and flew to Singapore and was in about 70 different countries during those years.”
In the fall of 1981, before flying out to Singapore, Operation Mobilization asked for recruits to take gospel portions into Poland because the Russian army was assembled along the Polish border due to the solidarity movement under Lech Wa??sa. They asked for 4 volunteers, willing to take a van with a false floor and 10,000 gospel portions of Luke and smuggle them into the country to designated drop-off areas so that believers in Poland would have those in case the Russians did invade. John Mathieu was one of the four volunteers.
“I had studied Russian history in school, but I was not prepared for what I found,” John admitted. “Just going through the border from Vienna to Bratislava, which was in Czechoslovakia at the time, and then into Poland, the things that struck me as incredible was that the borders were formidable with anti tank traps, guard dogs, and machine guns. I just thought, ‘Lord, I’m not sure I want to go in there, but if I do, please get me out.’ Poland was under siege, so it was worse than normal.
To get petrol we might have to wait in a line a kilometer long just to be able to fuel up the van. There were roads that had not been repaired since World War II. I remember going in to buy bread. There was just one kind of bread. It was in something that looked like a big wire animal cage in the middle of the bakery, it was stacked to the top with big round pieces of bread. It was pretty good, but you could only get 2 per family. There was a long line there too. Everything was gray, nobody smiled. Nobody would even acknowledge one another on the street. It was like they were robots.
We dropped bundles of the gospel portions at designated places for them to pick up later, but we did have some left over and we went into some of the apartment blocks which were gray concrete. We would slid them underneath the mat and it was just gray monotony, except every once in a while you would see a little painting or something beside a door and you could smell something really good coming out of the door, but that was the only evidence of personality that you saw.
That was a life changing experience for me, just in terms of seeing what communism and oppression does to people. It absolutely snuffs out their life, at least visibly. I also spent a year in India and Sri Lanka and saw some of the beauty and some of the poverty there. Those things were very memorable to me, even to this day.”
On the ship with Operation Mobilization, there were 150 people of about 35 various nationalities who worked in educational and Christian book ministries, in the local languages, plus a discipleship training onboard, where thousands of people were hosted and there were numerous conferences onboard (ladies conferences, pastors conferences, youth conferences, and etc). There were also onshore ministries (jails, hospitals, door-to-door, and on the street) whatever the local committee of people wanted and whatever the advanced team did to prepare for the ship. John spent two years on board, and then the next five years as one of the advanced team.
In July of 1986, John was in Canada lining up the ship’s visit to Montreal. John continued, “While there I met a girl named Kathy and fell in love. Although it took her a little while to fall in love with me, we were married in May of 1987, in Reynolda Presbyterian Church in Winston Salem, North Carolina, which was her home church. The next year we didn’t go back to the ships, but went to the ship’s headquarters in Mosbach, Germany. We spent our first year of marriage there, taking one step back from ministry to get to know each other. We spent that year praying about what the Lord wanted us to do, and at the end of that year our first son, David, was born. Even though there were people involved in the ship ministry that had families, we just didn’t think we wanted to do that. My background, on my father’s side is Bask French, so we went to Seminary in France, and I got a Masters in Theology, from the Reformed Seminary in Aix-en-Provence, thinking we would be working in France, but we never actually did.”
In March of 1991 John and Kathy’s second son, John, was born. They came back to the United States to Memphis in the fall of 1991, and John got a job in Public Relations with Burger King while they were looking for a church. But their churches didn’t want to send them back to France as Missionaries.
After about a year John and Kathy were finally sent to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama were they worked for ten years, after that they worked for ten years at First Presbyterian Church in Brewton, Alabama, and then six years ago they were sent to Grace Presbyterian Church in Fort Payne. On Sunday, March 17, Grace Presbyterian held a retirement party honoring John Mathieu. His last Sunday, as Senior Pastor at Grace will be March 31, 2019. After that, Grace’s new Senior Pastor will be David Latham.
John added, “We fell in love with the community and they pretty much fell in love with us. We’ve had a wonderful ministry at Grace. There was some healing that needed to take place and I feel like God has used us to help bring that about. Now they’re ready for a younger version and a higher octane model than I am, but we plan to stay here because of a jail ministry I’ve been doing for the past two and a half years. I still go to the Ukraine once a year and do ESL and I’m on the board of a Ukrainian Church Planning Ministry called International Partnerships. We will continue to do that some, but other than that I’m not sure what the Lord has in store for us.”
John concluded by saying, “Christian life is a life of adventure; whether you stay in one place your whole life, or whether God sends you around the world, you just have no idea what God is going to do in your life. It may be hard, but you know it will be good, because he is good.”
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