Sara Collins

Meet Sara 

Sara Collins is a Philadelphia-native who is church planting in a refugee community in the Middle East with her husband and baby daughter. 

“I moved to the Middle East when I was 25. Initially I was a CrossFit coach trying to share the gospel through my job. After getting married, I was able to do full time ministry work. That’s life right now. My parents still live in the U.S. My husband’s family is from New Zealand, so home is kind of split into three, four countries for us.”

Becoming A Missionary

“When I was 16, I fell in love with the Lord. When I saw the contrast between a life lived for myself versus a life lived for the Lord, I didn’t want anything else. I started walking with Jesus, and I never regretted it. I never found Him to not give me the joy I need when I really seek Him. I’ve never found Him to not be with me through hard days. He’s been so good.”

After graduating high school, and getting into every school she applied to except the one she wanted, Sara decided to go to Calvary Chapel Bible College “to study the Bible and pray about it.”

“I went to the Calvary Chapel Bible College in Hungary for a year. Then I went to the campus in York for a year. It was a great experience. I started interning for a church in the north of England, and I fell in love with cross cultural ministry there.  

“The idea that our church is a place where many cultures can become one culture, the church — I fell in love with that. No matter where people are from, however they grew up, there’s a culture in the church we can all be a part of.  

“I started trying to share the gospel in a city that was primarily Muslim. That season stirred my heart up for reaching women from a Muslim background. 

Sara wanted to stay but was denied a visa.

“That was heartbreaking. I remember thinking, ‘But, God, this is what You told me to do with my life. This is the place You told me to serve. I moved here. I made these commitments, and then You didn’t provide this visa for me.’ 

“I moved back to Philadelphia when I was 20. I had no idea what to do, so I went to community college. It was neat because there was this new program: Arabic Middle Eastern Studies. 

“When I got to the class, every student was a Muslim from an Arabic background. I was the only one taking the class who didn’t know Arabic. But it was so cool because they adopted me into their community. I was able to share the gospel with children of immigrant families. I was able to go to a mosque with them and share the gospel with different people. Four girls accepted Christ in that season.  

“As that was happening, I was offered a job at Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia to serve with their women’s ministry. I didn’t want to, but I strongly felt the Lord tell me it was going to be a Red Sea experience where He was going to walk me through it — a season where my faith would grow, and there would be an exit.  

“I went into it knowing God told me to do it, so I’m going to do it.  

“God gives us long term vision, but He also gives us daily guidance.

Sometimes they might be conflicting, and we have to really trust His sovereignty. We have to trust Him that if this long-term dream or vision was from Him but He tells me to do something different today, I have to trust Him to bring that about. It’s not me who’s going to make all of God’s promises come about. it’s Him. I need to obey Him today and trust Him with the long-term passions and vision. 

“I ended up working there five years. It was a great experience. I got to start a girls’ Bible study for young adults, serve in the high school youth group, lead and serve in different women’s bible studies, plan women’s conferences. I learned a lot about money management and being a diligent person who works hard.

“Singleness was really hard in that season. A lot of my friends got married, and I didn’t. It was a daily battle of, ‘Am I going to wallow?’ I was never super pumped that I was single. It was something I was like, ‘Okay. This is what God has for me, and it might be for a long time. What am I going to do with that? Am I going to be upset and constantly looking for a new guy? Am I going to let my daily decisions be made by, “Will I meet a guy there?” Am I going to live my life well? Is this the best way I can serve the Lord in my singleness?’

“Having that decision every day made my decisions different. If my thinking was, ‘Will this event help me pursue marriage?’ there’s so many things I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have served in the youth group with just girls. I was told before I moved to the Middle East only two percent of single missionaries get married. If my goal in life is to get married then I’m not going to move to the Middle East because only two percent of women get married. I really had to learn how much more joy there is in living for the Lord than living for what I think I want. 

“When I was 25, I had an opportunity to work with a group opening a CrossFit gym and wanting to church plant. I moved to the Middle East. I started learning Arabic, and don’t you know it, I met my husband who was also learning Arabic. I ended up married when I was 26. We started to live a life where our hope was to plant a church, but the first country we lived in, we saw pretty much no fruit.  

“We would get involved in our community as much as we could, invite our neighbors over, be at the local church. No one was interested in the gospel. At the end of those two years, my husband was needing a new job, and was having a really hard time finding one. 

“We started thinking it’s the time to leave. Just as we’re thinking our missionary career is over, my husband was offered a job in a different country at a university. At that moment, a war was breaking out in that country. 

“We had to take a bus because the airport was closed. It took about 35 hours. We had evacuation bags ready because that was a reality. It was safe today, but it might not be safe tomorrow. It was by far the biggest step of faith we ever took.

“It was insane by a lot of people’s standards. But we get there, and two days later this guy knocks on our door. He’s like, ‘I heard about you at the church. You speak Arabic. Come with me.’ 

“He led 15 families to Christ, but he didn’t speak their language. He said, ‘You need to teach these people the Bible because they accepted Christ but they don’t have anyone to teach them.’ 

“So, we instantly had this Bible study where people from Muslim background wanted to know Jesus and study the Bible. Soon after, we met a local guy who wanted to church plant but had no training. He’s from a Muslim background. He’d been a believer for seven years. He had no idea how to give a sermon or run a Bible study. Allan’s been training him, and we’re planting a church with him now, which is a huge blessing because when you’re planting a church, not having a local with you is one of the hardest things. It helps us avoid cultural mistakes, and it sets the church up to be more long-term, having somebody we’re going to pass it onto when we leave. 

“We now have a little church plant of about 30 people, by God’s grace. I love how God was very much working in the natural. There were no dreams. It was just all very natural, can’t find a job here. Oh, there’s a job over here. Maybe God has us here.”

Her Dreams, His Plans: A Full Circle

“I always had this keen interest in the Middle East, but there was this season where God wasn’t opening up doors to do that.

I had desires I really thought were from Him, but He wasn’t prospering them. I had to give them over to the Lord and trust that if all of that was from Him, He would bring it about, and it wasn’t for me to figure out.

“When I was 18, I met a missionary from the country I live in now. I felt this strong burden that that’s what I want to do, where I want to live. But I totally forgot. Ten years later, it wasn’t even on my radar, and my husband got a job there. It’s this full circle of God gave me a promise, for ten years it looked like it wasn’t going to happen and then He made it happen. 

“I’ve learned a lot about holding God’s promises in my back pocket. Sometimes I think God’s spoken to me, and I’m wrong.

I have learned when God speaks, He also does. His actions and His word are one thing. In Genesis, in creation when God spoke, it came to be. He’s going to make this happen if it’s from Him. That doesn’t mean I’m inactive. It means I serve faithfully where I am, trusting He’s going to change seasons, bring things about, add things to my life and take them away.

That’s His sovereignty not mine. You cannot make God’s promises come about the way He can. 

Living Purposefully

“That, at the end of my life, I will have spent my days well versus spending my days to just enjoy them, feel good or gain happiness.   

“That’s where real joy is, in being made in the image of Christ. The joy that’s found in the pursuit of happiness is temporary, and it’s not as good.”

Why Living Purposefully? 

“Because when I wake up in the morning, I don’t really want to study Arabic. It’s difficult, but everything I’m doing revolves around me having studied Arabic. But if I wake up and just think, ‘What do I want to do today?’ I’m never going to want to sit down and study. I have to study every day for a very long period of time to do what I’m doing well, and so if I wake up and I just think, ‘What do I want to do today?’ I’m never going to do the things that give my life the most purpose. If I wake up every day and think, ‘How can I live with the most purpose?’ I’m going to make different decisions, one of them being to study a different language.”

“If you say, ‘You don’t have to do anything today,’ I would probably go for a nice long walk, and I’d exercise so I can order a pizza and watch Netflix. I would drive through Starbucks. That would be my day. There’s not a lot of purpose in it.

We have more opportunity to live without purpose than ever because there are so many things we can fill our time with that are enjoyable but don’t lead to anything. The decisions I would make if I don’t have a purposeful outlook are really different on a daily basis.  

“I don’t have a nine to five job. I have a lot of freedom in how I spend my day. I have a lot of freedom, and with a lot of freedom comes a lot of potential to do nothing. I mean, it’s such a blessing. I can wake up every day and ask, ‘How can I serve the Lord today?’ and do that. But that also comes with the potential to wake up and put everything off for another day. 

“It’s really important that I have goals and something I’m living for.

How to Live Purposefully

“There is no large or small scale. We only have what God gives us. We’re not supposed to have more than that. I’m not supposed to be some famous speaker influencer. That’s not what God gave me. I don’t have to have the pressure of doing that.  

“I’ve got my group of women, and that’s who I’m purposefully living to influence.

I don’t have to do more than that, but to do less than that would be sin.

It’s important to be content with what God’s given us and not have false pressure of, ‘I need to be more. I need to do more.’

Be faithful with the lot God gives us. Know that what I’m doing isn’t less than what she’s doing.

“We go through seasons where what He gives us is little, but it doesn’t mean it’s less valuable in His kingdom. It’s just as valuable in His kingdom whether it’s small in the eyes of man or large in the eyes of man. A lot of us don’t live purposefully because we think we don’t have anything worth doing, but God has given all of us purpose. He’s given all of us things that glorify Him. We can live to give Him glory every day, whether that’s in a season of being a janitor or being a church planter. They both give glory to God. 

“I had seasons where I had no idea where my life was going. I’m working at Starbucks or I’m a janitor at my church, and that’s how I can glorify God today. Those things were part of a purpose God had.

“Don’t not live purposefully because you don’t see what the purpose is. God has a purpose, and if you live to serve Him, you’ll see what it is, in time. You don’t need to know the big picture to live purposefully.”