Meet Beate Schlecht, Missionary to Chad
Posted by Terry White on July 29, 2009
One of the delights experienced by many participants at Equip09, the national Grace Brethren conference occurring this week in Columbus, Ohio, was meeting a soft-spoken, charming former kindergarten teacher from Germany who now serves as a career missionary in Chad, Africa.
Beate Schlecht, 45, was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and grew up in a village and home where families were members of the state church but generally had no personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Beate and her two sisters went to Sunday School at church and heard stories from the Bible. A childhood friend was a believer, and when they were age 11, the girl asked Beate whether she had asked Jesus into her heart.
That question made no sense to the gentle German youngster until, at age 14, she heard evangelist Luis Palau preach and give an open invitation for people to accept Christ. “That was the first time I ever heard that Jesus died on the cross for me,” Beate reflects. “I accepted Christ at the invitation and that was the beginning of my spiritual life.”
Later she attended a Pietism group, but her spiritual life went up and down because, she says, she didn’t know the scriptures well and didn’t have a systematic program of learning from them.
When she was 19, Beate encountered a group of young Christians who really had a desire to live for Christ, study the scriptures, and be involved in missions. After studying the Bible on Saturday mornings, the young people often went onto the streets of their city to witness to people and to engage unbelievers in conversation at coffeehouses and cafes.
Now trained and working as a kindergarten educator, Beate felt called to Bible school and so, at age 22, she began serious study of God’s Word. In her third year of Bible school she was baptized and began a lasting relationship with the Grace Brethren Church in Stuttgart, where one of the pastors was Rainer Ehmann.
Over the next decade she worked in the Stuttgart church while teaching kindergarten and learned much from Ehmann and the believers there. She also was involved for a time in a church plant effort. Reflecting positively on her relationship with the Ehmanns, she recalls, “Rainer and Susanne just shared their lives and their love with me.”
In 1999 Beate attended a retreat at the Chateau St. Albain in France where she met Frank and Karin Puhl, Germans who were serving as missionaries to Chad, Africa. The Puhls invited Beate to come to Chad to help educate their children and, at age 35, she took a two-year leave of absence from her job to join the Puhls in Africa.
A great concern to her was how her parents would react, but eventually they came to say, “If you feel called by your God, then go.” After two wonderful years in Moundou, she was again searching for direction and listened to a tape of a woman speaker that Karin Puhl gave her. The speaker said “God can only guide a ship that is moving—not one that is in the harbor.”
After going back to Germany and seeking guidance from Rainer and the elders at her home church, she felt God leading her back to Africa as a career missionary and she entered candidate school. After six months of language study in France, and after raising her support, she returned to Chad in March of 2006 to a ministry that included working with young girls (Lumiere), leading girls’ camps for young ladies coming from the eight districts in Chad, and also taking over helping with True Love Waits and True Love Stays AIDS/HIV ministry which had been pioneered in Chad by Tina Walker and Bob Steiger.
Beate left Columbus this morning, July 29, for five months in Germany and anticipates returning to the Chad in January of 2010. As a prayer request, she seeks wisdom on how to best organize her ministry among girls, and she asks prayer that God will work in the hearts of Chadian young people to learn to live a deeper life in Christ.
Her primary support is from her home church in Germany, but American churches and individuals may contribute to her field budget. Gifts should be channeled through Grace Brethren International Missions.
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