Lautenschlager, Roberta Smith
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Roberta Smith Lautenschlager
- b. 6/13/1944 Saint Louis, Missouri USA
Spouse/Family
- Husband: John Allen Lautenschlager, b. 6/15/1941 Saint Maries, Idaho USA m. 3/5/1966
- Children: David Christian (1968), Katrina Ann (Fine) (1969)
Service
| Dates of Service | Field | Call Assignment |
|---|---|---|
| 1970-85 | Nigeria | Missionary Nurse |
| 1985-89 | Sierra Leone | Missionary Nurse |
Biographical Summary
Roberta (Bobbie) Smith Lautenschlager received her R.N. degree from St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1965. In 1966, she married John Lautenschlager, who was studying to be a medical doctor and intended to do mission work. Bobbie worked in St. Louis as a nurse, first at St. Luke’s, then at Lutheran Hospital and finally at Jewish Hospital. Son David Lautenschlager was born at the time of John’s graduation from medical school at St. Louis University, May 1968. John’s residency took the family to New Orleans and then Lafayette, Louisiana in the Charity Hospital system. Their daughter Katrina (Katy) was born in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1969. As soon as John had finished his two-year residency, the Lautenschlagers were called to Nigeria as medical missionaries.
Upon arrival in Asaba, Nigeria in September 1970, Bobbie (along with John) was “seconded” by the LCMS to the Christian Council of Nigeria (CCN). Her role was to help with relief work in the aftermath of the Biafran War. Bobbie worked at malnutrition clinics, helping people, especially children, who had suffered from lack of nutrition as a result of the war. She also ran the Lautenschlagers’ household and served as hostess for the CCN compound, which was in a central area, hosting many guests and relief workers who came through. Besides making sure people were fed and housed, Bobbie managed a pharmacy in the compound, checking medications and filling orders. She also drove to another clinic once or twice a week to scrub in to assist a Nigerian surgeon when he performed surgery. Meanwhile, the Lautenschlagers’ own children were growing (and “becoming Nigerian” since all their playmates were Nigerian children!), and John and Bobbie also took into their home several malnourished children.
The Lautenschlagers were in Asaba for about 15 months, and then in March 1972 they moved to Kampala, Uganda, though it was very difficult for David and Katy to leave their friends and the Nigerian woman who took care of them when John and Bobbie were both away. In Kampala, Bobbie, along with John, visited health and nutrition programs and outpatient programs for children. The family also had a chance to experience British and Indian culture because so many of their neighbors were British or Indian. The good fellowship they had with these neighbors allowed them to rest and recover in some way from the trauma they had witnessed in Nigeria.
They returned to Nigeria in May 1972 and were assigned as medical missionaries to the Ukele area of Nigeria, in Ogoja Province. There they met the Fajens, Boettchers and Rupprechts, all LCMS missionaries who would become dear friends and colleagues over the years. The family settled in the village of Ukunde, which was about 5 miles from what was at that time the only stationary satellite clinic of Emmanuel Medical Center in Yahe, Yala. While John worked mostly at this clinic, Bobbie traveled and worked in many different places. She worked in mother-child health, performing the role of a doctor by diagnosing conditions and ordering treatments. In her travels, Bobbie teamed up with a man named Clement Ochim, who served as ambulance driver, and she often saw as many as eighty children in a day, along with educating mothers on how best to care for themselves and their children. She also walked many miles through the forest in order to do immunizations all over the area. As time went on, Bobbie and John helped develop other stationary clinics in the surrounding area. They also took into their home a young girl named Obbyem, who at 7 years old had been so malnourished that she was the size of a 1-year-old. Obbyem was both physically and mentally retarded and could not learn very many things easily, but she picked up English very quickly and became a wonderful translator!
When David left for boarding school in Jos in 1974 with Katy following in 1975, the Lautenschlagers entered a long period of only seeing their children a few times a year for while they did their schooling. For Bobbie, this was the most difficult part of their mission work. She and the other missionary wives in Ukele (Peggy Fajen, Ruth Boettcher, and Wilma Rupprecht) all learned to drive in “the bush,” which allowed them to drive to see their children periodically and also to get together for Bible study once a month. Though they may have been accustomed to driving alone in the U.S., this was quite an accomplishment in that area of Nigeria with its underdeveloped infrastructure and poor roads or no roads at all.
After some years of working in various areas of Ogoja Province (locations where there were other LCMS missionaries), Bobbie was asked to be matron of Emmanuel Medical Center. She agreed to the work, but with her work at Emmanuel as well as continued travel to do clinics and immunizations at other locations, she began to feel drained spiritually, mentally and physically - it was exhausting and too much for one person. Nevertheless, she persevered for some time. She was also involved in helping save twins by educating mothers about how to increase their flow of breast-milk, so that a weaker twin would not be abandoned because its mother could not nurse it. And the Lautenschlagers campaigned against baby bottles, which seemed to the mothers in the area to be a good “European” thing to use, but which could often prove fatal to infants when mothers did not have the knowledge to prepare formula for the bottles or did not know how to keep them clean.
All this work kept Bobbie and John quite occupied until 1984, when, after a six-month furlough, they moved to Imo State of Nigeria, in the area of the Igbo-speaking people. Here they met a wonderful Nigerian couple, Rev. Johnson and Ma Johnson. The Johnsons were Nigerians, missionaries from another part of Nigeria, and were very adept at cross-cultural living and sharing of the Gospel. John and Rev. Johnson would often work together, and the families became close friends. During the year and a half they were in Imo State, Bobbie took some time to recuperate from all the work she had done in Ogoja and did not do any clinical work. Besides keeping their home running, she limited her time to some work with churches and the headquarters of the Lutheran Church of Nigeria.
The Lautenschlagers had a further six-month furlough in 1985 and returned to Africa in December, to Sierra Leone. Bobbie remembers Sierra Leone as a beautiful place where their children (still in high school in Jos) loved to visit them. John and Bobbie began in the town of Kayima, where they studied the language and did mobile immunization clinics as well as informal medical assistance for their neighbors. Bobbie recalls fondly Kumba, the woman who lived across the street from them who cooked and brought them food on the many evenings when they returned from doing immunizations. The work of immunization clinics was so tiring that “we probably wouldn’t have eaten at all” if this lovely woman had not provided for them. The Lautenschlagers also made friends with Peace Corps volunteers and other expatriates in the area and would often invite expatriates to their home for holidays. They held “light” worship on Easter and Christmas and were able, through their hospitality and their faith, to witness to the love of Christ among their expatriate neighbors.
Soon Bobbie and John settled in the town of Fensedu. When they arrived, the area was experiencing a very severe measles outbreak - the Lautenschlagers had met some mothers had lost five or more children through repeated epidemics of preventible infectious diseases both in Nigeria and in Sierra Leone, and this epidemic impressed upon them the urgency of childhood immunization work. The government hospital in the area wanted to start a program to immunize people against measles and other preventible diseases, and Bobbie, with some others, organized a traveling immunization team. Because they had a reliable Toyota SUV to travel with, the group was called “Bobbie and the Wheelers”! Often they would travel as far as they could by vehicle, walk to an outlying village to do immunizations for one day, walk another several miles to another village and stay the night, spend the next day doing immunizations in that village, then walk back to the truck in the evening to return home. It was a grueling schedule but very important for the health of the people in the area. Besides this major task, Bobbie once again worked with mother-child health needs and trained others to do health work.
By 1989, both David and Katy were in college, and Bobbie felt that it was imperative that she spend time with her children, given that they had been in boarding school so many years. It was of course very difficult for Bobbie and John to leave the people they had been working with for more than three years, but they finally did return to the U.S. permanently in 1989. They settled in St. Louis, and Bobbie went to work as a nurse in the student health clinic at Washington University, then as a hospice nurse in Lutheran Hospital. She also served along with John as caretakers of the LCMS mission apartments in the city. Bobbie retired from nursing in 1994 and served as secretary of Trinity Lutheran Church for five years.
The Lautenschlagers’ daughter Katy (with her husband Owen Fine and their son Nathan) returned to Nigeria as missionary teachers for five years, and Bobbie therefore had the opportunity to visit Nigeria again twice when their second and third grandchildren were born there. In 1990 John traveled to Africa for a walking tour down the Niger River, beginning in Sierra Leone and ending in Nigeria. This trip took 6 months, and during that time Bobbie became interested in the story of the original Niger River exploration and wrote a screenplay based on a book she had read about those events. Since then she has been heavily involved in film, screenwriting and the film community, both in St. Louis and all over the U.S. She, with John, has also become involved in the efforts of Christian Friends of New Americans, an organization that seeks to assist and to spread the Gospel among newly arrived immigrants. Her busy life continues as she follows her vocation(s) and shares Christ’s love in many ways.
Phase 2 Information
Biggest missiological issue faced
One of the main questions the Lautenschlagers ran into during their mission work was that of the role of medical work in the mission program. Many mission organizations do medical work, usually in response to the obvious needs of people groups to whom missionaries are sent. Some organizations and missionary personnel, however, think of medical work only as something extra or as a foot in the door for evangelistic work. John and Bobbie always witnessed to their faith and shared the love given to them by Christ in their medical work, and they consider medical work to be just as important in church-planting as educational ministries and evangelism. It is incorrect and hurts the work of mission to think of medical work as separate from evangelism. And as Bobbie says, “It’s what Christ would do, so we did it.”
Polygamy was a major theological issue that the mission and the Lutheran Church of Nigeria (once it was established) consistently faced. In the areas where the Lautenschlagers and other missionaries worked, it was common for a man to have more than one wife. Missionaries and local church leaders of course discouraged this practice, but the question was what to do if a man who wanted to become Christian was married to more than one wife. To divorce one or more women would create an untenable situation for the women who were divorced. Given how deeply rooted polygamy was in the pre-Christian culture of these areas of Nigeria, eventually the missionaries realized that it was the Nigerian church that would really have to deal with the issue - it needed to be addressed by Christian leaders who were part of the culture by birth.
Bobbie recalls that there were practical issues of worship and how to live a Christian life. When a person became Christian, the question was whether that person needed to actively destroy his or her spirit shrines that had been used previously for animistic religious practices, or was it enough to stop using the shrines and let them fall into disrepair. These and other questions of how people could most faithfully convert from a previous lifestyle to a Christian way of life and worship continued to surface as Christianity grew in the area.
Most significant contribution during missionary service
The church in the Kukele-speaking area of Ogoja grew rapidly, and this was in large part due to the medical work of Bobbie, John and others in this area. The “jujus” that people used in religious practices were often used at times of illness, and when medical missionaries were able to heal the sick without recourse to jujus, it helped develop a new way of understanding the world and spirituality for the people who were served. The realization that they did not need to rely on jujus for their well-being allowed many people to open their eyes to the message of the Gospel, which then touched their hearts.
Bobbie was also thankful that the medical missionaries were able to heal people and to save lives that otherwise would have been lost. To be able to save individuals and spare families the pain of losing their loved ones was a blessing, and as Bobbie notes, “you can’t worship God if your life is gone.” God used the medical teams to spare people for His church.
Connection to today’s mission
The government of Nigeria has taken over the administration of the health clinics that John, Bobbie and other medical missionaries founded and worked at. However, many of the clinics still have members of the Lutheran Church of Nigeria in important positions. That fact in particular keeps the connection strong between Lutheran work in Nigeria and medical work in areas that need it badly. The legacy of the medical missionaries is also one of caring - medical missionaries helped instill in the medical workers of the county a sense of medicine as a vocation of caring for people, not simply a business set up to make money. Bobbie and John continued to demonstrate their conviction that healthcare is a vocation of love when they worked in Sierra Leone.
After returning from mission work, Bobbie served on the board of Lutheran Bible Translators for six years. She continues to work with Lutherans in Medical Missions and, after sitting on its board for several years, has served as its executive director since 2004. In this capacity, she has traveled on behalf of LMM to Vietnam and south Sudan to assess possibilities for medical mission work. Bobbie also served as coordinator for the LCMS worldwide missionary retreat in 2007 and as convener of the first LCMS conference on Muslim ministry, “The Friendship of Jesus and Muslims,” in 2008. Along with John, Bobbie volunteers for Christian Friends of New Americans, an organization dedicated to assisting and sharing the love of Christ with new immigrants to the St. Louis area.
Lessons Learned
- “People are people” - cultures are very different, but all people are human beings and share similar human and spiritual needs and desires.
- In Nigeria the Lautenschlagers worked as part of a team, with different missionaries undertaking different tasks in a coordinated fashion. This was a very effective way of doing ministry, and Bobbie finds it unfortunate that most missionaries currently have to work alone.
Bobbie was pleased to learn while on the mission field that it is possible to make lasting, and equal, friendships, as missionaries working with people of a different culture.
- Because missionaries have certain resources at their disposal and because mission organizations do provide financial and other support for local churches, it’s important for missionaries to be mindful about how they use their resources and what forms the generosity they practice takes. There are often so many needs on a mission field that one could give away all one’s money without reservation, but the question is how to foster relationships through sharing of the Gospel, through forming friendships, and also through use of resources.
Best Practices
- Inclusion of medical mission work in the overall plan for mission work is incredibly important. Not only are medical needs great, but medical work is evangelism and is an incredible asset in conjunction with other kinds of evangelism. It’s equally as important as church-planting and educational work and can be an extremely effective relationship-builder, at the present time particularly in Muslim communities.
- An improvement that has been made since the Lautenschlagers served on the mission field is a greater recognition of the role of missionary spouses. At the time Bobbie and John served, although they both certainly had enough work to do, missionary wives were not really recognized as part of the mission team. This has changed in recent years, and it helps the work of mission when spouses can hold jobs and can contribute to mission work in a recognized capacity.
- When the local church became independent and the structure of the field changed so that missionaries served under the national church rather than vice versa, the transition was difficult but very necessary. It’s a best practice for missionaries and local church leaders to be mindful and plan carefully for how the administration and spread of the church can be handed over to the national church organization - both real authority over the work of the church, and real responsibility for the results of the work.
- Partnership with and education of local church leaders and workers is crucial on the mission field. It’s important to create a local structure that can survive beyond the time of foreign missionaries on the field, and there are some kinds of work that can be better done - or done only - by local Christians.
Phase 3 Information
Inspiration for entering foreign missions
Bobbie credits John with her introduction to the truth of the Christian Gospel and the call to mission. She attended church as a child but did not really understand the message of faith given by grace in the Gospel until she and John became close and he talked to her about his own faith. John was interested in mission work, and once Bobbie became a Christian she understood what that meant and became excited about her own call to mission.
Quotation by/about or brief story:
- In Nigeria the Lautenschlagers knew a woman named Mama Agnes who was a strong, influential and independent older woman. Mama Agnes had a bicycle that she rode everywhere by herself - not a common undertaking for a woman of her age. One day the man who served as ambulance driver for the medical mission came upon Mama Agnes riding her bicycle along the road, and as the two vehicles passed close by each other her bicycle tipped over and Mama Agnes took a hard fall which injured her. The ambulance driver immediately got out of his truck, picked her up and drove her to the nearest hospital, which was some distance away. After this experience, Mama Agnes put away her jujus and became a Christian. She said, “it wasn’t a juju that picked me up off the road, it was a man.” The care shown to her by a Nigerian Christian man made an incredible impact on Mama Agnes, and after this she devoted her life to the spread of the Gospel. She became instrumental in founding a Christian medical clinic in another village, organizing area women to build and run it. Mama Agnes was also involved in the care of others, in particular a young woman who needed to be flown to a hospital because she was in prolonged labor but was having no success in giving birth. Because Mama Agnes had never flown on a plane before, most people thought she would never be able to handle it - but she readily agreed to go with the young woman, stepped on to the plane, and never looked back! Later when she was asked about the experience, she said, “We just went up, and went along the road up there, and then came down again!” She was a remarkable lady and an incredible force for the spread of the Gospel.
- Kumba, the woman in Kayima, Sierra Leone, who cooked for the Lautenschlagers nearly every night while they were working to immunize against measles, was another example of a strong and dedicated woman. She in many ways made Bobbie and John’s work possible for the first few months of their time in Sierra Leone.
- Bobbie and John often felt that God was watching over them during their time on the mission field. There was a time when they were driving home after getting vaccines in the state capital. It was during the dry season, so the fields were being burned in order to clear them for the next season’s crop. John was at the wheel, and he saw something moving immediately ahead of them and slammed on the brakes. The car stopped just as an enormous tree fell across the road in front of them - so close that the front of the car bumped into the tree as it fell. Bobbie, John and the others who were with them, though shaken, were amazed at God’s providence in allowing John to see the danger and in sparing them from it.
