I’m CSPC English Language Learners (ELL) Director Buzzy Harvey. Here’s how I’m living deeply. 

“I was five years old the first time a seed for China was planted in my heart. We were at a Christian family camp in upstate New York, and one evening during the weeklong camp, a missionary (John Bechtel) shared about his life and ministry. With a few slides, he told stories about his life in Hong Kong. People were flooding into the city. The streets were alive. And something about it just stayed with me. A five-year-old has no business remembering a slideshow 50 years later, but I can still recall specific images to this day. I think that this was God’s way of tucking it away for later- the same way you fold something carefully and put it somewhere safe. Fast forward to college, where I studied to become an aerospace engineer. During that time, I heard a couple of Christian English teachers talk about what they were doing in China -sharing their faith through the simple act of teaching the language- and I thought, ‘That’s really interesting, I wonder if I could do something in China with engineering.’ So, I filed it away again. Then I graduated in 1990. Right after the Berlin Wall fell. The U.S. defense budget was slashed, people with five years of experience were taking all the entry-level aerospace engineering jobs I applied for. Out of my graduating class of about 100, maybe five of us had secured work. A door I’d hoped for had simply closed. So I thought, ‘What about those organizations that send teachers to China? Maybe that’s where God is leading? Teaching English for a year would at least allow me to get a taste of China.’ I got training that summer and was in a classroom teaching English in Wuhan by September. Then signed up for a second year in Shanghai. As I ended my second year, I thought: ‘God seems to be confirming that He has me here. If I’m going to stay long term, I really need to tackle learning Mandarin.’ I was never good at learning languages. Other people around me seemed to pick up the language by osmosis from just living in China. Not me. I had friends that were studying at a full-time language school, so I joined them the next year.

Learning the language turned out to be the right call, as God blessed that time. The language stuck like it had never done previously. By this point, after two years teaching English and a year of language study, I knew I wanted to stay in China. But I was an engineer, not an English teacher, so when my father’s friend introduced me to a small Canadian company making trainer aircraft -a company that just so happened to need an engineer for a possible joint venture in China- I thought, ‘This is it. This is exactly what I came to China to do.’ I traveled to London, Ontario to meet with the company. They were excited; I was excited. We stayed in touch. A couple of weeks later, they called back. Their possible Chinese joint venture partner had heard I had experience teaching English and wanted to know if I could teach their workers while the joint venture got sorted out. An open door, so I said yes. It was a steel factory with a workers’ college that was training the company’s brightest new hires for management, and I was helping to teach those new hires English conversation.  However, after about six months of teaching, the joint venture fell through. Just me, in China, praying, ‘God, I thought this was it. The job you had for me. This was perfect. What are you doing?’ There is a particular confusion and loneliness to that kind of disappointment- when you’ve genuinely tried to follow God’s leading, and the thing you were sure He was building just… collapses. I wasn’t angry. Just bewildered. Standing in the rubble of a plan, wondering if I misread the blueprints. A couple months later, a good friend at church in Shanghai who knew I was searching for what to do next asked, ‘You’re an engineer, right? I need your troubleshooting skills. Come work for my company. It’s an IT startup. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.’ That was not what I imagined, but I said yes.

Saying yes to my friend’s offer became 25 years of IT work -mostly in Beijing, then Hong Kong- that turned out to be exactly the platform God had planned all along. One that not only fit my training but, over the years, allowed me to share the gospel with people in China. Sometimes a winding road is God’s tool. The view gets clearer in the rearview mirror. Every closed door was Him redirecting me toward the one he wanted me to walk through. And that brings me to Raquel. I’d met Raquel through a matchmaker- a good friend of mine who’d become the director of the same English-teaching organization I’d worked for when I first went to China. This friend took it upon herself to try and recommend to me any of the new teachers coming over to China. No sparks with anyone; until Raquel, who after teaching a year in Shanghai moved to Beijing to teach. As I got to know her, I wanted to start officially dating, but she wasn’t interested, wasn’t ready for a relationship. She was heading home to Minnesota after her second year ended. Her dad’s health was declining, and she felt she needed to be with her family. So she left. That was confusing. I’d thought that she might be ‘the one.’ I kept thinking, ‘I guess I was wrong.’ Then, a year later, Raquel decided she was coming back. I asked if I could pursue her when she did. This time she said yes. We married in the summer of 2004. Two of our children were born in Beijing. The third was born in Hong Kong, where we spent our last 11 years overseas.

Living in the Far East has shaped us in more ways than I could ever explain. For starters, our church in China (Beijing International Christian Fellowship) required us to show our passports to get in due to Chinese governmental restrictions! The church was like a little taste of heaven, though, with internationals from more than 60 countries worshiping together. I was never part of a Chinese house church because I did not want to put any Chinese Christians at risk. (I’d seen firsthand what could happen when non-Chinese friends called too much attention to Chinese believers.) God was at work. The relationships we built -the Bible study group in Shanghai, the international family group in Beijing, the church community in Hong Kong that took longer to crack open but turned out to be full of genuinely dear, sweet people- those were our family away from family. When you’re raising children thousands of miles from your parents and siblings, that community becomes everything. Some of those friendships are still the closest ones we have. We left Hong Kong in 2022 in the middle of COVID. Because of that, our goodbyes were too rushed. So, you’re probably asking, why did we ever leave? In a word, family. Let me explain. In 2021, Raquel’s father died, and she made the agonizing decision not to go to the funeral. Because of Hong Kong’s COVID quarantine rules, attending would’ve meant three weeks in a hotel by herself and a total of about five weeks away from our children. That just wasn’t something she thought that she could realistically do as she’s such an active, outdoors person. I don’t think she’s ever fully stopped grieving that choice, even knowing it was the right one. Then, around the same time, my mother died, too. Neither death was caused by COVID, but in our grief, we felt the complications of the pandemic. Two losses, one pandemic, and an ocean between us and the extended family that we loved. That was when we felt it was time to come home.

We’d already been thinking about leaving- we didn’t want to parachute our kids into American colleges without them having lived here first. Our oldest was a sophomore when we moved; our youngest was in sixth grade. But it was those losses -and the inability to be there for extended family- that made the decision feel urgent in a way it hadn’t before. Neither of us wanted to go back to our hometowns. Raquel had grown up in Minnesota and had no interest in doing six months of winter anymore. My family had moved to Memphis, and that didn’t feel like us either. We wanted four seasons. We wanted mountains. We wanted water. We’d done so much hiking in Hong Kong. (People don’t picture it as a hiking destination, but when you take a few steps back away from the concrete jungle, you’re on mountain trails wandering through subtropical forests!) We wanted something like that. So we looked around North Carolina and East Tennessee, and we landed on Knoxville (and CSPC for church). I figured I’d find IT work. After all, I’d done it for 25 years. But that’s not what God had in mind. And honestly by this point in my life, I probably should have known better than to assume I knew what came next. What God had in mind was a conversation with a man named Bob Mackey at CSPC.  Bob’s youngest brother and I had been co-counselors at a boys’ Christian wilderness camp in upstate New York back when I was 18. That’s how small God’s world is. Bob needed help with the church’s ELL (English Language Learners) ministry. He asked if I’d come alongside him. I had time in my schedule. I said yes. By the way, you should know I’m an introvert. Left to myself, I would be perfectly content to be alone. But that’s not healthy. And that’s one good thing about ELL- the program doesn’t let me get away with it! I’ve been leading ELL since January, when Bob handed me the reins. I’m here in Knoxville doing what I never planned to do- and loving it. More proof to trust God in life’s surprise detours- He and His ways are good!

ELL serves a little over 100 students between our Thursday morning and Thursday evening classes. Some have immigrated here. Some are here because of work or study. Some have walked in not knowing their ABCs. What they all have in common is that they’re trying to build a life in a country where they don’t yet speak the language well- and that means they can be taken advantage of. They don’t know the laws. They don’t know their rights. They need a friend network that can help them figure out how things work here. That’s what ELL is, and it’s a powerful witness. We have students who are Muslim, Hindu, agnostic, from every kind of background imaginable. We don’t pressure anyone. If a teacher or conversation partner feels the door is open to share their faith, they walk through it gently. If a student says they’re not interested, we say no worries- and keep pouring into them. It is a joy and pleasure to serve in ELL, as I can remember times when a warm, welcoming hand of friendship was extended to my family in a new city where we were not able to speak the language very well. (We did, incidentally, go back to Hong Kong to visit in 2025. After the rushed goodbyes of a few years earlier, reconnecting with our friends and our kids’ friends was such good, rich relational time.) God is so gracious and has been providing the volunteers for 10+ years for CSPC’s ELL ministry. Every year we have need of lead teachers with ESL experience and assistant teachers who work with the lead teacher. We need people for hospitality- making nervous newcomers feel genuinely welcome the moment they walk into the building. And we need a few people willing to give rides on Thursday mornings or evenings, because getting to ELL can often be the hardest part for a student. So if this sounds interesting, prayerfully consider serving with ELL. You don’t have to have lived in the Far East for 30 years to help, just a love for people and a curiosity to ask questions. To experience what God is doing in the lives of these students -sometimes vicariously, sometimes personally- is nothing short of life-giving.” 

Interested in serving with ELL? Email Buzzy: henryhharveyjr@gmail.com