SNEADS FERRY, N.C. — Brittany Brown will never forget the evening of Nov. 19, 2005. But her memories of that night — the night she gave birth to her second child — are anything but typical. 

“Being a military wife, you deal with things other women don’t deal with,” she says. “Here I was with a 1-year-old about to have another baby and my husband was in a combat zone in Iraq. And I think the hardest part was I couldn’t just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, we’re about to have a baby.’ That’s why community is so important in a military town. I ended up having six women in the delivery room with me. And it was amazing.”

Fast forward to today, Brittany Brown and her husband Joshua are church planting missionaries in Sneads Ferry, N.C., where several years ago, they started Pillar Church of Topsail to reach military families who are stationed at nearby Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. (See related story here.)

“This little town we’re in is pretty much all military,” says Joshua. “And the people who come to Camp Lejeune, they’re 18 to 26 years old, they’re away from mom and dad maybe for the very first time, and they don’t have a support system. They need community desperately, and so it’s a great opportunity to share the gospel with them.”

Twenty years of being married to an active-duty Marine taught Brittany important lessons she now uses to share the gospel with military wives. 

“When we first started the church, I knew I wanted to be reaching women,” she says, “because I don’t think people understand the emotional stress that there is on a military spouse. The deployments, the constant transition and moving from place to place — it really is a different way of life, and I get it. So, it’s not a shocker when I meet someone whose husband is leaving for nine months or when I hear, ‘Hey, I’m going to have a baby, and I need someone to take my two kids and someone to be in the delivery room with me.’”

Andrea Manias understands perfectly what Brittany is talking about. Andrea and her husband Adam have five children, ages 1 to 10. “I’m no superhero,” Andrea insists. And because Adam is a Marine serving in an Intel Battalion, he’s frequently gone for months at a time.

“Sometimes, I don’t know where he is,” Andrea says. “And other times I kind of wish I didn’t know where he was.”

When Andrea gave birth to their fifth child, Adam was preparing for a deployment. 

“Our son came a month early and he ended up having to be in the NICU,” Andrea says. “We don’t have family that lives nearby and we had four other children at home we couldn’t just abandon. And the people at Pillar Church dropped everything to help. They took care of our kids; they took care of our house; they did everything. And Adam and I, all we could say was, ‘Wow.’ We’d never seen the hands and feet of Jesus in that capacity before.”

This is what the work of evangelism and church planting look like in a military community. 

“We help women like Andrea whose husbands are gone,” Brittany says. “We watch their kids; we mow their lawns; if something breaks, we help fix it. We even have chainsaws and pressure washers and weed whackers that we help them use because when you’re moving from one base to another, you don’t own those things. I know that all might sound weird, but that’s what day-to-day ministry looks like for us. That’s how we create opportunities to share the gospel.”

Meeting needs, sharing Christ and building an extended family for military wives who might otherwise be on their own — that turned out to be Brittany’s role in the mission God called her and her husband to.

“I know when people think of church planting, they think of the pastor who plants but maybe not the wife,” Brittany says. “But this is not just Joshua’s job. For both of us, this is a way of life.  We’re doing everything we can for the cause of Christ in this area to reach not just members of the military but their families too.”

Now, even though all is not perfect or easy on the Manias’ homefront, life is as it should be.

“We don’t have it all together and we probably never will,” Andrea says. “A lot is asked not just of the military personnel but their family as well. That’s why it’s so important to have a church that understands military life. I’ve thought about that a lot, about how hard it’d be to not have someone who understands this lifestyle. Like, just our normal day-to-day stuff, how do you do it without a church community and not go crazy? Being surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, people you can link arms with and who will hold you up and love you like Jesus does — that’s huge.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering provides half of the North American Mission Board’s annual budget, and 100% of the proceeds go to the field. The offering is used for training, support and care for missionaries like Joshua and Brittany Brown and for evangelism resources. This article also appears in the March/April issue of the Biblical Recorder magazine.)