Be a Living Legacy
Live It and Give It The Spiritual Legacy of a Lifelong Teacher
Joyce Fortner was adopted at an early age. In her new devout Christian home, she was raised to understand that Jesus was coming soon. Her parents cared for many foster children throughout the years. They instilled in each child the importance of sharing the gospel with the world and to “do well whatever their hands found to do.” What Fortner’s hands found to do was to teach. “I was 14 when I was called by the Holy Spirit to be a missionary,” she says. “Though I had little clue what that was going to look like, my heart burned with the desire to live a life of service.” Fortner was sponsored through a partnership between her local Adventist and Methodist Churches to attend Andrews
8 RECORD MAGAZINE
University. There she earned an associate’s degree in biochemistry and a bachelor’s degree in education. Fortner taught in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois for two years, teaching 27 students in the one-room Adventist schoolhouse. In 1973, she married Don Fortner, a pastor, with whom she adopted four children in addition to their two biological children, raising them all to be witnesses for Christ. “My mother has always been first and foremost a Christian educator,” says Melissa Ramirez, Fortner’s daughter, who has followed in her mother’s footsteps to become a Christian educator. “Whether at home or in the classroom, each day brought reminders of how God lives in and through our lives.
