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Your Covenant Pathway to a Preferred Future with Terry Hoggard (Ep 363)
Stop drifting and discover your covenant pathway to a preferred future. Veteran missionary Terry Hoggard reveals a transformative three-movement practice: foundation, strategic insight, and covenant with God. This isn't goal-setting—it's positioning yourself in the center of what God is doing. This calibration time gives God opportunity to download fresh vision for your next season.
----------
See the full episode transcript below.
👉 Support the podcast (use the Smart Edit BMAC page): buymeacoffee.com/SmartEdit
👉 Enhanced show notes: JesusSmart.com/363
👉 Explore more episodes: JesusSmart.com/podcast
If this episode gave you a fresh perspective on Kingdom Living, share it with someone who needs encouragement.
Be sure to follow the podcast—each episode is designed to help you think more clearly and pursue the kind of life only Jesus makes possible.
Stay current via The Smart Edit newsletter—Elevate your faith. Live smart. Make an impact. Free. Weekly. 5 minutes to grow. Sign up at JesusSmart.com.
----------
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Your Covenant Pathway to a Preferred Future with Terry Hoggard
Brian: Welcome to the podcast today, friends. I have a great family member and friend and a co-laborer. We work together on some projects, some kingdom projects. Terry Hoggard is with us, and we are discussing something today. We're at the outset of the new year. I think these dynamics could be applied anytime. I don't think we have to do a reboot just in January, right, Terry?
Terry: It's a great moment to capture in my heart, so I love it. I'm cleaning up everything I know to do with the old year going out, and I want to be there hands wide open saying, "Here I am, Lord. I've got some things to talk to You about, and I'm sure You have some things to say to me."
Brian: Amen. Yes, absolutely. And sometimes people will listen to an episode like six months later. I put out something recently encouraging people to think about 90-day years—the winter season, the spring season, summer, fall. You can continually start afresh, start anew. But definitely at the beginning of our year is a great time. People are of this mindset, aren't they, in January? It's just a natural tendency, it seems.
Meet Terry Hoggard
Terry Hoggard has served for 30 years as a missionary leader across Europe with the Assemblies of God. He's provided pastoral leadership in Rome, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Malmö, Sweden. He has also equipped international teams and built cross-cultural networks around the world, including Asia, throughout his ministry. And Terry and his wife Ruthanne, my cousin on my dad's side, continue to invest in leaders globally. Thank you for being here. And what else could you say about the Lord's workings in your life currently?
Terry: Well, at this moment I'm still highly engaged with the network of churches, so I still have intimate connection to the four churches that you mentioned. But in early 2004, I think, we built out what we called FEIC—Fellowship of European International Churches. It's an incredible network still going strong.
And then in 2011 we met for a summit. Every year we'd gather, and in 2011 we were praying on our way to say goodbye. A friend of mine, his name is Al Perna, was praying, and he just felt like the Lord was saying, "Now's the time to extend the tent. We've been here together for almost a decade, but there's all these other churches and the movement of the nations and the diaspora." Three times God spoke to us. We have to do something.
Well, at this moment, our leader of the Assemblies of God World Missions was brand new. His name was Greg Mundus. I said, "Greg, you know we have FEIC. How would you feel about us bringing all the regions—Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, Northern Asia—and begin to create a network that would allow each one of these regions to be intimately connected internally, but by expansion they have the whole world?" And Greg said, "That's a good idea."
Brian: So that came out of prayer both in your own life and in partnership with others. Pattern recognition—what the Lord is continuously saying and doing. How important is it for all of us to be people of prayer, to be connected with others in prayer, to live our best calling before God?
Terry: Absolutely. In fact, all those things—it's all about the capacity of the community. These guys were lined up behind me or around me, and I didn't even know that this was something that anyone was percolating. I think God spoke sovereignly in that moment. And from that initiative, God birthed something that was just so amazing.
Brian: Percolating. I like that. Percolating in the Holy Spirit. I had a friend who said, "Kingdom currency runs on kingdom connections." That's vital, isn't it, for all of us to have quality, authenticity, kingdom connectivity so that the Holy Spirit can run on that?
Terry: Absolutely.
Three Words: Clarity, Closure, Catalytic
Brian: This is a time, Terry. I was actually thinking this morning about three words that begin with C: clarity, closure, and catalytic. What could you say about just the need to get clarity from the Lord, to maybe bring closure looking back to some things that need to close, and turn to the future and be catalytic with new things that need to open up? What do you think about that? Clarity, closure, catalytic.
Terry: Well, I guess I would say this. I think in every situation, but specifically in these kinds of things that are strategic and they're emerging, I think it's the posture of your heart. If you have something you want to take to the Father and you want to talk about it, it's a wonderful thing. But if you just go saying, "Lord, I'm not sure what it is. Let clarity come. Let there be catalytic realities that would confirm that this is what You want me to do." I know there's a lot of things we can do—we can read books and we can hear other things—but I think the seed is born out of the heart. And the posture and the positioning of the heart would be absolutely critical.
Brian: Yeah. And the partnership with the Creator in the prayer and the positioning ourselves to receive new initiatives and to really begin to pray them into being, right?
Terry: Yeah.
The Three Movements Toward Your Preferred Future
Brian: Now, you recently shared something with me, at my request, something that you and your wife Ruthanne go through every holiday season approaching the new year. You pursue—you're really going after a pathway that leads to a preferred future. I appreciate you being willing to share this personal practice that you do with your wife, but I think it can apply to all of us. What is that approach? What are those three movements? I'd just love to hear about that again.
Terry: Here's what it really is. My first expression is that I want to openly open my heart and openly confess. I'm here at the end of 2025, and I have some notes here that I carried out of this same moment a year ago. And, Lord, I know there are things here that I was so eager to engage, and somehow along the way, as much as God did glorious things, I think I left this one not unattended, but I didn't bring it into fulfillment.
So I began something knowing that. And then I began to realize this time—there's always a way it works. The first thing that struck my heart was foundation. And what I knew was I needed a foundation that was solid and sure. Because to live out the mandate of God is something that really needs to be built around the most powerful platform that anyone could stand on. I don't want to have one foot up on a ledge. I don't want to be right to the center or right to the left. I want to be right in the center of what God is doing. So that was really important to me.
The second thing that I found would be important to me is not just foundation, but that I wanted to have the opportunity to have strategic insight. Because I know there are things here that I need to see to get beyond where I am. And I want that to be a reality.
And then the other thing was that I wanted to come to this place where I would sort of make it a covenant with God—that these things that I've written and spoken with my wife about, and one of my daughters came with us (she loves to do this thing as well), I want it to be not just a matter of words and not even commitment as much as—I do love commitment—but I said, "Lord, before I leave this time of prayer, we spent the whole hour, two hours actually, doing our work and writing and praying at the end. But I want this to be a locked-in covenant so that I am being provoked every single day when I just stop and pray." I've been doing it now. I'm doing a lot of Bible reading and looking into the whole foundation thing because I think that's important. I think if we don't get a foundation right, we can somehow be swept away unintentionally, but it can be very traumatic.
Brian: So the basics, the basic foundational elements—the Word of God, prayer, consecration. And so you prioritize that and build off of that. And you're tapping the power of covenant. Correct me if I'm wrong, Terry—I'm learning, trying to learn all the time—but I'm not sure that many modern-day Christ followers fully understand or understand as much as they should about covenant, how God is a covenant God.
→ See the show notes page at jesussmart.com/363
Commitment vs. Covenant
Terry: Oh yeah. I came to Christ in 1970. I was 16 years old. I was from a Christian family, but it was commitment that captured me. I'm there listening to this speaker, and he said, "I want to just tell you something. The bottom line is this: Jesus did not die 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, 99.5%. Jesus laid everything down. He committed His life for this possibility for us to be reconciled to Him."
And he says, "Here's the struggle that I have. Most of you here obviously have some sort of draw, but the bottom line is your threshold is this: 'I want to be able to make sure my life makes my mama happy and my pastor proud.'"
And then he went back. "So if you're going to walk with Jesus, you've got to lay everything down." He was a football player, and he said, "You know what really aggravates the heck out of me? You come into a game that you've lost, the guys get in, they start laughing and goofing around and snapping each other with their towels. And our coach or someone would say, 'Hey, if you had that much energy in you, why didn't you leave it on the field?'"
Brian: Yeah, yeah.
Terry: So commitment is the thing that fires us. Covenant is the thing that saves us.
Brian: And draws on that partnership with God to execute, right?
Terry: So you live close. You live in the threshold of His presence because that's where I promised to be.
Brian: The capacities of Christ via the Holy Spirit flowing through us. Sometimes I think we probably have a tendency—we don't want to do a spiritual inventory or do an audit on how our year was because we're afraid of what we might surface. We may feel bad about it, but we have to overcome that, don't we?
Terry: We sure do. And I remember back in the days, in the '70s, it was in our church and maybe many others—it was this watch night, and the pastor was actually calling us out. "There are some things that you need to leave behind in this year." I need to leave a lot of stuff behind in 1970, I can tell you that. But he just gets us to the altar. It was just this moment—just left refreshed. My heart has been unburdened. I just feel as if He's a God who loves me so much. I know He's ready to help me walk in a different way. And if I make my covenant out of this commitment, the bottom line is I believe God can craft things into our hearts in such a timely manner that had we not made that pivot, it might have gotten right over us.
The Power of First Fruits and Spiritual Inventory
Brian: There's a power in using the first fruits principle, isn't there, Terry? Like taking that first period of time in the new year or in a week or even on a daily basis, consecrating it to God, and it draws the rest of it under an increased blessing and influence. Do you look then for significant things that you feel God is speaking to you, revealing or fulfilling in your lives at that point in time?
Terry: Oh yeah. I was a pastor for many years, and about a decade ago, Convoy of Hope invited me to come and be their vice president. At the time, I was leading the international program. Now I'm leading global network support. But when I was a pastor, I would let people know. I'd say, "If you want to know what the theme is going to be for the next year, you need to be at the watch night service." When we finished, I'd say, "Here's where we're headed. Here's what God is saying." I would probably have half the year already mapped out in my head because I was trying to take the things that the Lord was telling me and not making them just my call—but I wanted to say these are priorities, these are principles, these are things. And I had so much fun being a pastor because I'm preaching all the stuff that's just been lit up inside me. And of course, when you're pretty enthusiastic and people are tracking with you, it's like, "Man, we are just in a good space"—not just me, the community.
Brian: So we have to be willing to engage this and look in the mirror and look at God and allow the Word and the Lord, the Spirit, to reflect back to us a real-time, realistic appraisal of where we're at. Let them judge us in that sense of a positive appraisal. And then the pivots that we need to make, the changes, the new things we need to lean into can come out of that. Can somebody do this? What if they missed the first of the year? Can they do it anytime?
Terry: Anytime, man. Anytime that your heart or your spirit is being pricked, or you feel this sense in your own spirit that maybe you're struggling with some things at this particular moment—and it may be March or it might be October—the bottom line is I'm going to step inside here and I'm going to be brave enough to do a personal spiritual inventory. And the more you call yourself out, the more you weaken whatever it is that's trying to invade space that has been consecrated to God.
Brian: Yes. Amen. You talk about embracing the spiritual position that the Lord is requiring of you to make these changes so that they can be actualized or evident, realized. What could you say about that? Just an honest appraisal of embracing the spiritual position required.
Terry: Well, I think for me most often when I make that covenant, when I say I'm going to do that, I change something. So there have been seasons when I would get up very early and I would pray in the morning and read my Bible. And that was good, and it worked for a while. And then I came to understand I don't need these 45 minutes at 6 in the morning that's going to last the whole day. So then I would go to doing things kind of in measure. I'm a coffee drinker, so most folks would pray at their meals, but I'm good enough to pray for my coffee. And every time I'm doing this with someone in front of me, I want to tell you what the Lord was kind of talking to me about this morning. And so I just want to integrate it into my personhood. And at the same time, I want to model it so consistently that if I'm mentoring or discipling someone, I can put something in their hands that may be where they would want to start.
→ See the show notes page at jesussmart.com/363
The Power of Community and Partnership
Brian: Yes. And be exhortational and motivating in that sense. And not everyone is married, but a lot of people are married. Could you talk about what it means to be a couple in this together, in mission together? But also for those who aren't married, maybe with their quality friends or their boyfriend or girlfriend or their fiancé.
Terry: You know, I married your cousin. I have a Del Turco, so I'm very blessed to do that. But the thing about Ruthanne is she had no idea as to what I was going to do because I didn't know. I went to Bible school simply because I could not get into the police academy and I did not want to stay in Wichita. We meet at CBC, Central Bible College in Springfield, and she said, "So what are you going to do?" I said, "Yeah, I really don't know. I wanted to be a cop or a coach, but I don't know." "You're not going to be a pastor?" "No, no. Me, a pastor? Come on."
And then in 1980—we got married in '74—I felt God literally just speaking. This was the day of Keith Green, so that could be a big influence. And I just felt the Lord speaking to me so profoundly in that moment. It was 1980. I was pastoring this new church. And then in 1984, our daughters were maybe 4 and 6, and Ruth and I had been married for a decade. In that moment, we were chosen to be commissioned as missionaries. So I am at this point in my 42nd year of being a commissioned missionary, living in those four cities you talked about and doing a whole lot of other things. When I came to Convoy of Hope, I went everywhere. That's just how it landed for me. When I felt the prompting of the Lord, I was out of the chute and ready to go.
Brian: So from just the passion to get out of Wichita, the iteration of your calling, the promptings, steerings along the way—we never really can foresee the whole plan at once, can we? It might be overwhelming, frankly. But the Lord, the grace comes. And if you're married or if you have quality relationships with others in the body of Christ, this is important. We don't want to be in a silo. We want to be able in partnership with others to hear God. It affects us, doesn't it? Relationships.
Terry: Yeah. Well, and the fact is it was Ruthanne—who knows even how much that brought to our marriage? She brings a great heritage of godly people. Her grandparents, her siblings, my father-in-law. There's just—like you, you're in that same tribe. Could well be that I needed to marry a Del Turco to make my way to be a missionary.
Brian: Well, I mean, it's not good for the man to be alone, and "he who finds a wife finds a good thing, obtains favor," right? And the wife completes a lot of what's missing. But if you're not married or if your marriage has broken up, there is still this capacity within relationships within the body of Christ—being connected to great spiritual leaders, great quality fellow believers in the Lord, prayer partners and friendships. That is a dynamic that we need. I think the Apostle Paul said, "I have a great desire to come to you and to complete what is lacking in your faith." We...
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By Brian Del Turco
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Stop drifting and discover your covenant pathway to a preferred future. Veteran missionary Terry Hoggard reveals a transformative three-movement practice: foundation, strategic insight, and covenant with God. This isn't goal-setting—it's positioning yourself in the center of what God is doing. This calibration time gives God opportunity to download fresh vision for your next season.
----------
See the full episode transcript below.
👉 Support the podcast (use the Smart Edit BMAC page): buymeacoffee.com/SmartEdit
👉 Enhanced show notes: JesusSmart.com/363
👉 Explore more episodes: JesusSmart.com/podcast
If this episode gave you a fresh perspective on Kingdom Living, share it with someone who needs encouragement.
Be sure to follow the podcast—each episode is designed to help you think more clearly and pursue the kind of life only Jesus makes possible.
Stay current via The Smart Edit newsletter—Elevate your faith. Live smart. Make an impact. Free. Weekly. 5 minutes to grow. Sign up at JesusSmart.com.
----------
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Your Covenant Pathway to a Preferred Future with Terry Hoggard
Brian: Welcome to the podcast today, friends. I have a great family member and friend and a co-laborer. We work together on some projects, some kingdom projects. Terry Hoggard is with us, and we are discussing something today. We're at the outset of the new year. I think these dynamics could be applied anytime. I don't think we have to do a reboot just in January, right, Terry?
Terry: It's a great moment to capture in my heart, so I love it. I'm cleaning up everything I know to do with the old year going out, and I want to be there hands wide open saying, "Here I am, Lord. I've got some things to talk to You about, and I'm sure You have some things to say to me."
Brian: Amen. Yes, absolutely. And sometimes people will listen to an episode like six months later. I put out something recently encouraging people to think about 90-day years—the winter season, the spring season, summer, fall. You can continually start afresh, start anew. But definitely at the beginning of our year is a great time. People are of this mindset, aren't they, in January? It's just a natural tendency, it seems.
Meet Terry Hoggard
Terry Hoggard has served for 30 years as a missionary leader across Europe with the Assemblies of God. He's provided pastoral leadership in Rome, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Malmö, Sweden. He has also equipped international teams and built cross-cultural networks around the world, including Asia, throughout his ministry. And Terry and his wife Ruthanne, my cousin on my dad's side, continue to invest in leaders globally. Thank you for being here. And what else could you say about the Lord's workings in your life currently?
Terry: Well, at this moment I'm still highly engaged with the network of churches, so I still have intimate connection to the four churches that you mentioned. But in early 2004, I think, we built out what we called FEIC—Fellowship of European International Churches. It's an incredible network still going strong.
And then in 2011 we met for a summit. Every year we'd gather, and in 2011 we were praying on our way to say goodbye. A friend of mine, his name is Al Perna, was praying, and he just felt like the Lord was saying, "Now's the time to extend the tent. We've been here together for almost a decade, but there's all these other churches and the movement of the nations and the diaspora." Three times God spoke to us. We have to do something.
Well, at this moment, our leader of the Assemblies of God World Missions was brand new. His name was Greg Mundus. I said, "Greg, you know we have FEIC. How would you feel about us bringing all the regions—Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, Northern Asia—and begin to create a network that would allow each one of these regions to be intimately connected internally, but by expansion they have the whole world?" And Greg said, "That's a good idea."
Brian: So that came out of prayer both in your own life and in partnership with others. Pattern recognition—what the Lord is continuously saying and doing. How important is it for all of us to be people of prayer, to be connected with others in prayer, to live our best calling before God?
Terry: Absolutely. In fact, all those things—it's all about the capacity of the community. These guys were lined up behind me or around me, and I didn't even know that this was something that anyone was percolating. I think God spoke sovereignly in that moment. And from that initiative, God birthed something that was just so amazing.
Brian: Percolating. I like that. Percolating in the Holy Spirit. I had a friend who said, "Kingdom currency runs on kingdom connections." That's vital, isn't it, for all of us to have quality, authenticity, kingdom connectivity so that the Holy Spirit can run on that?
Terry: Absolutely.
Three Words: Clarity, Closure, Catalytic
Brian: This is a time, Terry. I was actually thinking this morning about three words that begin with C: clarity, closure, and catalytic. What could you say about just the need to get clarity from the Lord, to maybe bring closure looking back to some things that need to close, and turn to the future and be catalytic with new things that need to open up? What do you think about that? Clarity, closure, catalytic.
Terry: Well, I guess I would say this. I think in every situation, but specifically in these kinds of things that are strategic and they're emerging, I think it's the posture of your heart. If you have something you want to take to the Father and you want to talk about it, it's a wonderful thing. But if you just go saying, "Lord, I'm not sure what it is. Let clarity come. Let there be catalytic realities that would confirm that this is what You want me to do." I know there's a lot of things we can do—we can read books and we can hear other things—but I think the seed is born out of the heart. And the posture and the positioning of the heart would be absolutely critical.
Brian: Yeah. And the partnership with the Creator in the prayer and the positioning ourselves to receive new initiatives and to really begin to pray them into being, right?
Terry: Yeah.
The Three Movements Toward Your Preferred Future
Brian: Now, you recently shared something with me, at my request, something that you and your wife Ruthanne go through every holiday season approaching the new year. You pursue—you're really going after a pathway that leads to a preferred future. I appreciate you being willing to share this personal practice that you do with your wife, but I think it can apply to all of us. What is that approach? What are those three movements? I'd just love to hear about that again.
Terry: Here's what it really is. My first expression is that I want to openly open my heart and openly confess. I'm here at the end of 2025, and I have some notes here that I carried out of this same moment a year ago. And, Lord, I know there are things here that I was so eager to engage, and somehow along the way, as much as God did glorious things, I think I left this one not unattended, but I didn't bring it into fulfillment.
So I began something knowing that. And then I began to realize this time—there's always a way it works. The first thing that struck my heart was foundation. And what I knew was I needed a foundation that was solid and sure. Because to live out the mandate of God is something that really needs to be built around the most powerful platform that anyone could stand on. I don't want to have one foot up on a ledge. I don't want to be right to the center or right to the left. I want to be right in the center of what God is doing. So that was really important to me.
The second thing that I found would be important to me is not just foundation, but that I wanted to have the opportunity to have strategic insight. Because I know there are things here that I need to see to get beyond where I am. And I want that to be a reality.
And then the other thing was that I wanted to come to this place where I would sort of make it a covenant with God—that these things that I've written and spoken with my wife about, and one of my daughters came with us (she loves to do this thing as well), I want it to be not just a matter of words and not even commitment as much as—I do love commitment—but I said, "Lord, before I leave this time of prayer, we spent the whole hour, two hours actually, doing our work and writing and praying at the end. But I want this to be a locked-in covenant so that I am being provoked every single day when I just stop and pray." I've been doing it now. I'm doing a lot of Bible reading and looking into the whole foundation thing because I think that's important. I think if we don't get a foundation right, we can somehow be swept away unintentionally, but it can be very traumatic.
Brian: So the basics, the basic foundational elements—the Word of God, prayer, consecration. And so you prioritize that and build off of that. And you're tapping the power of covenant. Correct me if I'm wrong, Terry—I'm learning, trying to learn all the time—but I'm not sure that many modern-day Christ followers fully understand or understand as much as they should about covenant, how God is a covenant God.
→ See the show notes page at jesussmart.com/363
Commitment vs. Covenant
Terry: Oh yeah. I came to Christ in 1970. I was 16 years old. I was from a Christian family, but it was commitment that captured me. I'm there listening to this speaker, and he said, "I want to just tell you something. The bottom line is this: Jesus did not die 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 95%, 99.5%. Jesus laid everything down. He committed His life for this possibility for us to be reconciled to Him."
And he says, "Here's the struggle that I have. Most of you here obviously have some sort of draw, but the bottom line is your threshold is this: 'I want to be able to make sure my life makes my mama happy and my pastor proud.'"
And then he went back. "So if you're going to walk with Jesus, you've got to lay everything down." He was a football player, and he said, "You know what really aggravates the heck out of me? You come into a game that you've lost, the guys get in, they start laughing and goofing around and snapping each other with their towels. And our coach or someone would say, 'Hey, if you had that much energy in you, why didn't you leave it on the field?'"
Brian: Yeah, yeah.
Terry: So commitment is the thing that fires us. Covenant is the thing that saves us.
Brian: And draws on that partnership with God to execute, right?
Terry: So you live close. You live in the threshold of His presence because that's where I promised to be.
Brian: The capacities of Christ via the Holy Spirit flowing through us. Sometimes I think we probably have a tendency—we don't want to do a spiritual inventory or do an audit on how our year was because we're afraid of what we might surface. We may feel bad about it, but we have to overcome that, don't we?
Terry: We sure do. And I remember back in the days, in the '70s, it was in our church and maybe many others—it was this watch night, and the pastor was actually calling us out. "There are some things that you need to leave behind in this year." I need to leave a lot of stuff behind in 1970, I can tell you that. But he just gets us to the altar. It was just this moment—just left refreshed. My heart has been unburdened. I just feel as if He's a God who loves me so much. I know He's ready to help me walk in a different way. And if I make my covenant out of this commitment, the bottom line is I believe God can craft things into our hearts in such a timely manner that had we not made that pivot, it might have gotten right over us.
The Power of First Fruits and Spiritual Inventory
Brian: There's a power in using the first fruits principle, isn't there, Terry? Like taking that first period of time in the new year or in a week or even on a daily basis, consecrating it to God, and it draws the rest of it under an increased blessing and influence. Do you look then for significant things that you feel God is speaking to you, revealing or fulfilling in your lives at that point in time?
Terry: Oh yeah. I was a pastor for many years, and about a decade ago, Convoy of Hope invited me to come and be their vice president. At the time, I was leading the international program. Now I'm leading global network support. But when I was a pastor, I would let people know. I'd say, "If you want to know what the theme is going to be for the next year, you need to be at the watch night service." When we finished, I'd say, "Here's where we're headed. Here's what God is saying." I would probably have half the year already mapped out in my head because I was trying to take the things that the Lord was telling me and not making them just my call—but I wanted to say these are priorities, these are principles, these are things. And I had so much fun being a pastor because I'm preaching all the stuff that's just been lit up inside me. And of course, when you're pretty enthusiastic and people are tracking with you, it's like, "Man, we are just in a good space"—not just me, the community.
Brian: So we have to be willing to engage this and look in the mirror and look at God and allow the Word and the Lord, the Spirit, to reflect back to us a real-time, realistic appraisal of where we're at. Let them judge us in that sense of a positive appraisal. And then the pivots that we need to make, the changes, the new things we need to lean into can come out of that. Can somebody do this? What if they missed the first of the year? Can they do it anytime?
Terry: Anytime, man. Anytime that your heart or your spirit is being pricked, or you feel this sense in your own spirit that maybe you're struggling with some things at this particular moment—and it may be March or it might be October—the bottom line is I'm going to step inside here and I'm going to be brave enough to do a personal spiritual inventory. And the more you call yourself out, the more you weaken whatever it is that's trying to invade space that has been consecrated to God.
Brian: Yes. Amen. You talk about embracing the spiritual position that the Lord is requiring of you to make these changes so that they can be actualized or evident, realized. What could you say about that? Just an honest appraisal of embracing the spiritual position required.
Terry: Well, I think for me most often when I make that covenant, when I say I'm going to do that, I change something. So there have been seasons when I would get up very early and I would pray in the morning and read my Bible. And that was good, and it worked for a while. And then I came to understand I don't need these 45 minutes at 6 in the morning that's going to last the whole day. So then I would go to doing things kind of in measure. I'm a coffee drinker, so most folks would pray at their meals, but I'm good enough to pray for my coffee. And every time I'm doing this with someone in front of me, I want to tell you what the Lord was kind of talking to me about this morning. And so I just want to integrate it into my personhood. And at the same time, I want to model it so consistently that if I'm mentoring or discipling someone, I can put something in their hands that may be where they would want to start.
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The Power of Community and Partnership
Brian: Yes. And be exhortational and motivating in that sense. And not everyone is married, but a lot of people are married. Could you talk about what it means to be a couple in this together, in mission together? But also for those who aren't married, maybe with their quality friends or their boyfriend or girlfriend or their fiancé.
Terry: You know, I married your cousin. I have a Del Turco, so I'm very blessed to do that. But the thing about Ruthanne is she had no idea as to what I was going to do because I didn't know. I went to Bible school simply because I could not get into the police academy and I did not want to stay in Wichita. We meet at CBC, Central Bible College in Springfield, and she said, "So what are you going to do?" I said, "Yeah, I really don't know. I wanted to be a cop or a coach, but I don't know." "You're not going to be a pastor?" "No, no. Me, a pastor? Come on."
And then in 1980—we got married in '74—I felt God literally just speaking. This was the day of Keith Green, so that could be a big influence. And I just felt the Lord speaking to me so profoundly in that moment. It was 1980. I was pastoring this new church. And then in 1984, our daughters were maybe 4 and 6, and Ruth and I had been married for a decade. In that moment, we were chosen to be commissioned as missionaries. So I am at this point in my 42nd year of being a commissioned missionary, living in those four cities you talked about and doing a whole lot of other things. When I came to Convoy of Hope, I went everywhere. That's just how it landed for me. When I felt the prompting of the Lord, I was out of the chute and ready to go.
Brian: So from just the passion to get out of Wichita, the iteration of your calling, the promptings, steerings along the way—we never really can foresee the whole plan at once, can we? It might be overwhelming, frankly. But the Lord, the grace comes. And if you're married or if you have quality relationships with others in the body of Christ, this is important. We don't want to be in a silo. We want to be able in partnership with others to hear God. It affects us, doesn't it? Relationships.
Terry: Yeah. Well, and the fact is it was Ruthanne—who knows even how much that brought to our marriage? She brings a great heritage of godly people. Her grandparents, her siblings, my father-in-law. There's just—like you, you're in that same tribe. Could well be that I needed to marry a Del Turco to make my way to be a missionary.
Brian: Well, I mean, it's not good for the man to be alone, and "he who finds a wife finds a good thing, obtains favor," right? And the wife completes a lot of what's missing. But if you're not married or if your marriage has broken up, there is still this capacity within relationships within the body of Christ—being connected to great spiritual leaders, great quality fellow believers in the Lord, prayer partners and friendships. That is a dynamic that we need. I think the Apostle Paul said, "I have a great desire to come to you and to complete what is lacking in your faith." We...