I grew up in a Christian family, but my faith was never deep while growing up. After a semester of college, I withdrew, moved back home and told my parents I was done with Christianity. For the next year or so, I worked and saved my money to go back to my university town, Tucson.

Within a month of moving back to Tucson, with God orchestrating events, I came to see how much He loved me in spite of my rejection of Him. It broke my heart and I gave my life to Him. I was back in church by Easter and from that time on, every time the church doors were open I was there. At the same time I had friends in a Navigator college ministry, so I also plugged in there.

I started reading my Bible without any instruction or advice, so I started at Genesis with the goal of reading straight through to Revelation within a week or so. That didn't happen! It took about a year, instead. But by the time I was into the minor prophets, I'd already become convinced that God's heart was for the whole world. So I volunteered to go anywhere to tell people about God's love.

Not long afterward I made a friend who was planning to go to China once he graduated from university. He had already been trained through the Navigators in evangelism and discipleship, so he began discipling me. About the time he graduated, I re-enrolled in university to get a four-year degree, then go off to China myself to work again with my friend. University was a chance to see a longer-term commitment through to the end, which could be a useful quality should the field get tough. (As it was, the Lord made the field easy, and more fruitful than anything I'd done in the States!) A four-year degree would also allow me to teach English, should my support be insufficient—something else I've never had to worry about!

What attracted my friend and I to Training Evangelistic Leadership was it's emphasis on large-scale evangelism and commitment to openness in China, which I felt was more Biblical than anything else I'd encountered. The two also end up working in harmony: You can't do a lot of evangelism if you want to keep secret about what you're doing. But if you're open, and the evangelism brings a lot of fruit, you don't have to worry about it, because you're not trying to hide anything anyway! And that really is how it was for us in China. We regularly saw at least 10 people make decisions for Christ each month, and sometimes 10 a week! Desiring to ground these people made it hard to hide what we were doing. And we were blessed by our different (and unofficial) partnerships with various open churches in China. The Lord also granted that we could be a blessing to them, in that we brought so many new believers to their churches.

This kind of open and fruitful ministry in China made life there exciting, to say the least. Rachel and I are still trusting the Lord for many more years of fruitfulness in His service. We're praying that God will raise up many of those we work with to go into the international mission field.