Please celebrate with Global Missions the appointment of Kay Watts as missionary apprentice to Côte d’Ivoire.

Kay grew up in a loving Christian home and was nurtured by the First Church of God congregation in Winchester, Kentucky, and extended family that included several ministers. The seeds of God’s Word quickly grew in the fertile soil of her heart and Kay began her Christian education ministry in the ninth grade as an assistant first-grade Sunday school teacher.

Educational missions is her calling and passion. She has always been drawn to focus on the education part of the Great Commission. Listening to guest missionaries at church, Kay felt a tug towards missions as a child and teenager. She went to Anderson University to prepare to be an educational missionary, but doors to foreign educational missions did not open to her after student teaching.

The definition and scope of educational missions broadened as Kay came to more intently view the world as a mission field that included our neighborhoods—wherever God has planted us. She has continually sought to bloom where planted in various Christian education venues: local church leadership (paid staff and lay leadership); teacher training seminars; publication of books, articles, and devotionals; service on Florida Board of Christian Nurture; and costumed theme programs with creative visualized teaching methods. Twice she has conducted a children’s crusade and teacher training in Grand Cayman. Her tentmaking has included nearly fourteen years as a public library youth services librarian and seven years as a public school media specialist.

The latent call to foreign missions was rekindled when Sherman and Kay Critser invited Kay Watts to prayerfully consider joining them in Côte d’Ivoire. She spent October 2007 there cataloging and preparing books for the IBAO (French acronym for West Africa Bible Institute) library, and she conducted a two-day Christian education seminar with Ivoirian pastors and church leaders.

She received a master of religious education degree from Anderson University School of Theology in 1980 and a master of library science from the University of South Florida in 1988. She was ordained in 2007 at First Church of God, Orlando, Florida, where she has served in children’s ministry leadership for nearly fourteen years.

Kay’s assignment will be to teach at IBAO and with the theological education by extension program, as well as coordinating the development of the IBAO library in Yamoussoukro.

For more information about how you can partner with Kay, contact Candy Power at 800-848-2464 or CPower@chog.org .

Project # 42.10092