IN A DEN OF LIONS, IN A RACE AGAINST HORSES

In a quiet hotel room in Asia, not three years ago, an American missionary sat surrounded by armed officers adorned in bright red berets. The five military police officers, wearing the colorful mark of the elite corps, had barged into his room after holding him in the country nearly a week on the charge of possessing a satellite phone. Certain he must be working with their enemy nation, who used the phones to communicate, they bombarded him with questions and tried to catch him in a lie. The Rev. Vial Fontenot, the missions pastor taking the verbal beating, said later that his wife could have caught him in one much faster, had he not been telling the truth.

Prior to their entrance, two of the guards stood armed outside his door at all times. With nothing to do and no one to speak with, Fontenot had been sketching lions, preparing for a painting he had held in his head for nearly five years before committing it to canvas. The painting, an image from the Bible story of Daniel in the lions’ den, now hangs in the walls of First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa’s international ministry wing.

Throughout the questioning, Fontenot noticed that one of the officers couldn’t keep his eyes off the lion sketch. Hoping to gain the man’s favor, Fontenot offered to let him keep the piece, saying to the men, “I bet you gentlemen have never heard the story from the Hebrew Bible of Daniel in the lions’ den.” They hadn’t. Fontenot spared no detail, spending 45 minutes recreating the scene with his words. After the story, he told the men that in their presence he felt like Daniel, trapped in a den surrounded by lions wearing red berets. Also like Daniel, he never felt afraid, certain that God would protect him.

After six days of questioning, he was released to find his way back to Tuscaloosa on a fine of approximately $1.30.

“In those points of stress,” Fontenot said, “in those points of pressure, I’m the most certain of my calling.”

Vial Fontenot has served as the minister of missions and ministry at First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa for 17 years. His position involves coordinating and participating in approximately 10 domestic and international mission trips annually with members of his church, in addition to heading up the church’s local international ministry.

On mission trips, Fontenot and his recruited teams travel in order to meet the physical needs of communities and individuals inside and outside of the U.S. by ministering to them in various ways, but more importantly with the intent of meeting their spiritual needs by sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The purpose of missions is “to fulfill the great commission: to proclaim the gospel to people of all nations, baptize them, teach them what it is and then equip them to keep doing it,” said Luke Ferguson, a church staff and mission leadership team member helping Fontenot plan for an upcoming mission trip to Canada.

Fontenot and his fellow church members also engage in mission work locally through the church’s international ministry. The entire basement section of the church is dedicated to this area of ministry, which caters to Tuscaloosa residents of foreign cultures, including Spanish and Chinese. Its classrooms and hallways are littered with cultural artifacts, maps and biblical paintings, including the lions’ den piece and others Fontenot painted himself.

Here the Spanish church, Iglesia Bíblica Bautista, meets in the largest room in the underground wing. The pulpit at the front of the room was crafted by Fontenot and his carpenter friend, who built the piece while Fontenot engraved the detailed grape vines and classic paneling in the richly colored wood. The church’s oldest stained glass window, an image of a man guided by an angel in the sky, was crafted in 1850 and now adorns the wall of the worship room, where Fontenot preaches every couple of months.

Members of this Spanish church and of the Chinese church, which meets for service in First Baptist’s chapel building, attend Sunday school classes in their native language or in English, one of which is led by Fontenot himself each Sunday. Conversational English classes are also available throughout the week for non-native speakers to learn and practice the English language. Part of Fontenot’s role as minister of missions is to serve as the liaison for both the Spanish and Chinese churches.

Fontenot has always been comfortable with internationals due to his father’s military involvement throughout his childhood. He was born in Okinawa, Japan, and moved approximately every two years until he went to college. His parents were Christians and raised him in the church, where he became a believer at the age of 6. His Sunday school teacher, Mrs. White, with hair the color of her name, used an older storytelling system called a flannelgraph to teach their class what it meant to follow Jesus. Little Vial decided he wanted to do just that. However, his parents wouldn’t let him become baptized until he was 6.

That first Sunday after his sixth birthday, when the pastor called the invitation, Fontenot looked up at his mother in hopes of being allowed to go to the front of the sanctuary to publicly profess his faith. Proud tears streamed down her face.

“She knew it was time,” Fontenot said. He was baptized that same day in Choctawhatchee Bay in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

Since that day, Fontenot has grown in his faith and gradually realized his passion for missions. This passion wasn’t realized in a moment, but grew gradually through the years.

“It’s kind of like the sharpening of a pencil,” Fontenot said. “You don’t get it all at one time.”

The clearest moment in this pencil-sharpening experience for Fontenot was during his first summer after beginning college at Louisiana Tech University, when he served for several months in domestic missions in Ironton, Ohio. After Fontenot asked him a batch of questions, John Smith, one of the pastors serving there told Fontenot he was asking the same questions Lack had been asking before he realized God was calling him to ministry work. Fontenot had never considered that calling so concretely before. He spent time in prayer over the next 24 hours, fasting even from sleep in order to hear from God whether he was being called to ministry work as well.

As the 24 hours came to an end, a still unsure Fontenot laid on a bench to rest his eyes. It was midday, in the center of a busy room full of a hundred children running around during their vacation bible school lunch break. Yet Fontenot felt completely alone.

He heard an audible voice say to his heart, “Viel, this is not that hard.”

Sure that someone must be playing a trick on him, Fontenot sat up and looked around, but no one was near him. He laid down, closed his eyes, and again heard the same voice from the Lord say, “This is not that hard.”

Recounting the story to his mentors during that summer missions experience and later at his college church back in Ruston, Louisiana, Fontenot was given the advice to surrender to whatever God’s will was. His pastors couldn’t tell him exactly where he was being called, but they were confident that he should follow God's guidance.

“You will surrender,” Smith said. “And you will surrender soon. Or you will not have peace.”

So he did. He finished his degree in wildlife conservation and management, which he hoped to use to provide agricultural ministry to people in Africa, and he then studied at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in order to be fully equipped to join the ministry. He worked at several churches, but most of his time in the ministry has been at his current church, First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa, where he has a total of 35 years on staff as some kind of minister.

Fontenot’s coworkers admire him for his passion for ministry, especially in the field of international missions. His administrative assistant, Kristy Myers, says he is “high energy” and “passionate about everything he does,” especially about the hearts of the internationals with whom he works.

However, Fontenot’s passion is for far more than just the hearts of the internationals, both in Tuscaloosa and abroad. He believes that when the members of the church participate in international missions experiences, they will return to the congregation changed, charged, and challenged to face the problems of our culture with a new perspective. Having seen how difficult life and faith can be in other countries, members of the church can live Christian lives with much greater passion and confidence here in the U.S.

He describes the phenomenon using the metaphor laid out in his favorite Bible verse, Jeremiah 12:5, which says “If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses?” People here are just racing against men, he explains. They don’t face challenges like those faced by Christians in other places. Yet they are wearied quickly. The church needs people who are willing to race against the horses, to hold fast to their faith despite opposition.

“This is my dream for the church, this is my prayer: that we can infiltrate the church enough with people who have this mission disease that they realize ‘we’re just playing with cookies here, there’s a banquet on the other side,’” Fontenot said. “If they can take on the horsemen of India, if they can take on the horsemen of South Sudan, if they can take on the horsemen of Cambodia, or Indonesia, that would be answering God’s calling.”

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Some names of pastors and missions locations have been changed from the original story in order to protect the safety of those ministering in dangerous circumstances.