Jesus — Others — You
JOY Ministries exists to walk alongside our Basque friends with incarnational patience — forming culturally-rooted catalysts and Kingdom communities of practice rooted in the culture’s own forms — until the Word becomes genuinely flesh in this language, this people, and this history.
Who We Are
We take our name from the order that Jesus himself modeled: Jesus first, whose life and mission define everything we do; Others before ourselves, which is the posture of every faithful catalyst we seek to form; and You — the specific person, in their specific cultural world, with their specific history of wound and longing and stubborn sacred imagination, for whom this work exists. Read More…
Why This Publication, and Why Now
In 1992 a student, from the Basque region of Spain, with a Spanish passport came to live with the Robinson family for a school year as an exchanged student. This site records the story of the relationship that began a long Journey that is still being travelled today.
In summer of 2000 an English immersion program was launched, which grew out of the Robinson’s Basque son’s story, has now been running for decades. We have seen what happens when Basque young people — some of the most secularized youth in Europe, from a region where the institutional Church is regarded by many with something between suspicion and contempt — encounter the Gospel not through an institution but through a family. We have seen the curiosity that emerges when they discover a Jesus who looks nothing like the one their history has taught them to distrust.
That discovery requires a long introduction. Read about it here.