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Jack Slater Armstrong | desert wanderer
Let me begin by thanking you for coming to my site. It means a lot to the people of Sudan that you are here. Second, let me say how humbled I am to be the one sharing these precious treasures, songs that worship our Lord in the midst of the most unimaginable suffering. I would like to briefly describe who I am, and how it is that I was elected to do this. As the son of an Episcopal priest, I grew up in the church and have been actively involved my whole life. I also grew up in a small Cajun Catholic town in south Louisiana. In our small congregation, we didn’t have a choir. So after our morning service I sang in the Catholic Church choir - until the year I graduated from the public high school, Poydras High, where Poydras himself is buried in the front yard. Julian Poydras is the father of public education in Louisiana, and if you’ve been to New Orleans, you’ve at least heard or seen the name. The school is now a museum. I began my college education in Theater at St. Edward’s University, a Catholic University in Austin, TX. I studied music at LSU, SLU, and Southern University, and graduated in Music Therapy at Loyola in New Orleans. (King David is documented as the first ‘music therapist’). In 1986, after working for two years in River Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in New Orleans, the Lord called me into missions, and for 8 years I served with an organization called, Youth With A Mission. For five of those years I led music evangelism teams overseas in the summer – to Japan, Vancouver, Alaska, Scotland, N. Ireland, Belgium and France. I also did two tours as a “troubadour” all the way from Montana to Louisiana and back – tracing the Louisiana Purchase – challenging Episcopal and Catholic churches to missions. |
Further studies in YWAM included:
I was discipled for eight years to be a missionary, to go all over the world and share the Gospel. In Youth With A Mission, our motto is “To Know God, and to Make Him Known.” You can’t do one without the other. For eight years I was trained to hear the voice of God, to walk in faith through obedience, trusting Him and discerning His voice above all others. I watched Him turn off rain in Scotland that we might do a concert in an impoverished neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland, and as we packed our gear watched the rain return. By faith, I learned to watch Him take our bands through customs and gates without paying excess and overweight baggage fees, (we usually didn’t have much money). This lesson served me well on my first trip as I traveled alone to Sudan with not a little excess luggage. (There’s an amazing story about this that I won’t go into at this point. Suffice it to say that upon my arrival at Gatwick, the Lord had British Airways on the spot effectively pay me $5000 dollars for the honor of providing me safe passage with my equipment to and from Africa!) In 1997, I attended the New Wineskins for Global Mission Conference, a networking conference for Episcopalians involved in missions, which meets in April every three years. There I heard the Rev. Marc Nikkel, missionary priest to Sudan from 1981 until 2000 when he died; The Rt. Rev. Nathaniel Garang, bishop of Bor Diocese in Sudan, and Bartholomeyo Bol Deng, a song leader of the Lost Boys of Sudan (The Rev. Bartholomeyo is now a priest). When I heard their testimony, I wept with sobs. I asked the Father, “how can this be, and why don’t you do something about this?” His reply to me was, “why don’t you do something about it?” I said “Lord, I don’t have power, money, or influence; I don’t even have a job.” He said to me, “but what have I given you?” I said, “Music and a heart that worships You.” He said, “Go, record their songs that proclaim My Name, in the midst of their suffering, and make it accessible for the western Church, they need to hear this!” I said, “Here am I, send me!” Isaiah 6:8 |
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