During the summer of 2002, we had the opportunity to take a life-changing mission trip to Manila, Philippines. On our first morning there, we attended a worship service at Lighthouse Christian Community Church, the church that we would be working with over the next week. Their pastor and missionary, Chuck Quinley, preached a sermon about the Great Commission. That message so resonated in our hearts that we will never be the same again. At the end of the service, we made our way to the altar and surrendered our lives to the call to cross-cultural missions.
When we returned to the states, we started making initial preparations to move to the Philippines and enroll in the Asian Seminary for Christian Ministries, which we thought would lead to us becoming full-time missionaries somewhere in Asia. However, God had other plans. About a month later, we found out that we were expecting our daughter, after a year and a half of trying, and she was due at the exact time we were supposed to leave for the the Philippines. So, even though we were ecstatic about Laynie's impending arrival, we were a little confused after hearing God's call so clearly.
What He knew, that we didn't, was that a within months of our anticipated departure date, Stephen's mom, Cheryl, would be diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer and that we would be needed here. After a 22 month battle, Cheryl went home to be with Jesus. Her death rocked our world in a way that cannot even be described. God, in His sovereignty, knew that it would have been too difficult on our family to be so far away during that trying time. However, during everything that happened, we never forgot the call God had placed on our lives.
In 2007, He began to stir in our hearts again regarding the Great Commission and we joined an organization called Apartment Life to do missions work in metro Atlanta. We left our home and moved our family into an apartment complex to plan community events and provide care to residents in need. The whole purpose of the ministry is to build relationships with your neighbors, which opens the door to share the love of Christ. While God greatly blessed our ministry with Apartment Life, we knew when we started that it was just a preparation ground for an even bigger work that He had planned.
In the fall of 2008, God began to nudge us about the next step in our journey. A couple of weeks later, we ran across the story of a missionary couple called to Italy. The statistics we read about the spiritual darkness in Italy were staggering! We felt right away that God was calling us to Italy, however we began to pray and seek godly counsel for confirmation. We met with the missions pastor at our home church, Victory World Church, as well as others that we felt would speak wisdom into our lives. The Lord continued to confirm over and over that He was calling us to plant churches in Italy.
In this process, we learned that although we would be sent as missionaries of Victory, we needed to find a sending organization that could partner with Victory and handle all the administrative and logistical needs of sending us and keeping us on the field. Through research and prayer, God lead us to The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), an organization which specializes in partnering with churches to facilitate sending missionaries all over the globe. After an extensive application process that took about 9 months, in September 2009 TEAM accepted us as missionary appointees to Italy. Since that time we have been working to get the training we will need in our role as church planters while also raising our financial support.
