Our Vision
To see Christ glorified and enjoyed amongst the peoples of Europe through the spread of a gospel-centered church-planting movement.
Our Mission
To mobilize church-planting teams serving with Pioneers International across Europe through missional leadership, research, recruitment, resourcing, and training.
OUR JOURNEY
When we married in 1999, our vows included commitments to one another, as well as to serving the Lord alongside one another all of our days. By God’s grace we’ve been doing that for over 17 years and on three continents—in the United States, Japan, and the Czech Republic. After about 15 years overseas, our latest calling has us in Colorado, as members of Pioneers International’s (PI) Europe Core Team. We work alongside PI’s Europe field leader to resource, train, and mobilize PI’s 71 ministry teams in 21 countries across Europe. See below for more about this vital piece of global missions.
Prior to our assignment stateside, we were church planters in Brno, Czech Republic for two years and Mark pastored a church for American service members in Okinawa, Japan for ten years.
Our greatest passion is that Jesus Christ would be known and enjoyed within every tribe, tongue, and nation throughout that world. To that end, we are committed to church planting ourselves or to providing support to church planters across the globe. During this season, because the Lord has called us to care for Jen’s dad as he suffers from Alzheimer’s and Dementia, we are funneling our 15-years of overseas experience into mobilizing those who are planting churches across Europe’s unreached people groups.
WHY EUROPE?
In short, Europe is a strategic place to plant churches because it is once again an unreached continent, and it is home to immigrants from hundreds of people groups from Asia, Africa and Europe who are also unreached with the gospel.
Europe is now considered post-Christian. Although Europe knows religion, demographers estimate only 2%-3% of Europeans claim to know Jesus personally. We have seen firsthand the suffocating effects that a secular atheist worldview has on Europeans.
Additionally, with the high immigrant population—not to mention the radical influx over the past year—representatives from people groups throughout Asia and Africa have an opportunity to hear about Christ in Europe. Many of PI’s Europe teams are reporting significant success in sharing Christ with Muslims as they flee violence in the Middle East and encounter the kindness of Christian church planters in Europe.
