Living at the Fountains: Seeing God's Heart for the Nations
- Posted by Editorial Staff
By Aaron Kuglin
Our family moved into the Fountains Apartments half-way through my time at Southwestern Seminary. My wife and I had 3 children at the time. We had participated in some of the many activities with refugees there and felt lead to become more involved. We also realized that many other things would keep us from ministering if we had to drive to get there, so living on-site was the most practical solution. The cost of the apartment was comparable to that of many other apartments.
Our plan was to live there for a year and then move on to the mission field with the IMB. Well, we added 2 more children to our family which delayed the application process and 1 year turned into 4. During this time our oldest children were attending school with families from a multitude of countries and languages. All the children would play with neighborhood kids who spoke little to no English but thought nothing of it. It was difficult to communicate fully with the parents but no problem with the children. We played pickup games of baseball, kickball or tag weekly. Our girls befriended 2 young girls from Somalia who were in our house daily. They spoke no English at first but were quite adept by the time we left. We shared meals with a few families and were able to sample foods from many different cultures. We would often have 6 different nationalities represented at any birthday celebration we had. And our family began to realize that if we intentionally moved our family devotional times outside, we could have 4-6 other kids join us and they could hear of the Gospel message too.
Though our arrival to the mission field was delayed, we did not just sit and wait; we found other ways to stay active in missions through local ministries. We stayed active in our local Church, Wedgwood Baptist. We volunteered at the Fountains for VBS in the summers and participated in quarterly ministries there with kids’ programs from our church. And we attended many of the seasonal programs offered at the Fountains side-by-side with families from 20 different nations. I preached once a month at an African church where some of our neighbors attended. My wife and I were also privileged to befriend several Fountains neighbors from Iran who had begun attending our weekly Sunday School class. Eventually they started a Farsi-speaking church that our family attended every Sunday evening. All 7 of our family ate Persian food, sang in Farsi and listened to God’s Word preached in a different language.
This time of broadening our family’s culture and language exposure became a great springboard for our transition to the mission field. We finally were assigned to go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with the IMB in 2017. By that time, we knew 3 Congolese families in our neighborhood and interacted with many Congolese children at our Good News Club weekly.
During our weeks of field training there were several things designed to stretch families that were not a great stretch for us. Our kids were introduced to an international food each week but only one of the 7 things were new to our kids. The kids were taught about the beliefs and practices of other religions and my kids could name people from the Fountains who followed each of them. We had cultural worship services where the language and songs were in many languages other than English. And we had times where we were challenged to interact with people from other cultures and languages. These were also not new to us.
We are now on the mission field in DRC. My 2 oldest children are attending a school in French where they are now the outsiders. My preschool children are at home during the day with a French-speaking nanny and play with children in our apartment who speak Lingala. I believe the time surrounded by so many cultures and languages at the Fountains has been a great help to them as their roles have now reversed. As for my wife and me, our appetites for language, food, and different cultural practices were sparked through our interaction with our international neighborhood. Having a face and a name to put with hurting nations around the world humanizes them and makes us much more sympathetic to their struggles. We will never stop being students of language and culture, but we are grateful for the initial exposure that our time at the Fountains gave us. It truly was a window to the world for us. Our time at the Fountains helped us to see God’s heart for the nations, and it became an integral stepping stone in our journey to incarnational living.
Aaron Kuglin serves with the International Mission Board as an Ethnomusicologist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He and his wife, Kristy reside in Kinshasa, DR Congo with their 5 children - Caleb, Esther, Joanna, Rachel, and Simeon. He has ministered in the local church in various ways for over 15 years. Minister of Music, Youth Minister, Cares Team Leader, Choir Member, Sunday School Teacher, and Volunteer with CEF and Good News Clubs in local elementary schools.