We are grateful to be working together as a team to share the message of new life in God's Kingdom among the Makua-Metto of northern Mozambique. We see the threads of God's hand in the tapestry of our lives, influencing us to take the steps that have become the journey that is working in this place; there is not room enough here to tell all the stories of God working to shape and purify each of us through all those influences, so here we will share only a brief history of how we came to live and work here.

Through much prayer we came together at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas in 1999-2000, as a team of six couples heading for Africa together.  After masters’ degrees for most and fundraising and team dynamics training for all, in March 2003 we left for nine months of language school in Lisbon, Portugal.  We landed in Nampula, Mozambique in December of 2003, and our first year was unbelievably challenging; God sustained us through a team division that took two couples to another province, as well as local problems that resulted in a one-year exile from our own province.

The early years were filled with the long hours of endurance-building activities of Makua-Metto language and culture acquisition, learning to work with brand new churches, and figuring out how to love each other as a team.  Eventually young churches began to birth new churches in neighboring villages through connections of friends and relatives, and by 2009 there were 39 churches.  Church planting eventually evolved into leadership development, women’s ministries, women’s craft cooperatives, sustainable agriculture, Bible translation efforts, children’s ministry training, and literacy training, among other works, and now in 2017 there are 75 churches consisting of about 2500 members.  The work is not ours - it belongs completely to God and we are humbled to participate.

The road has always been hard; we have experienced disappointment with leaders, slow growth, two droughts, loss of teammates, discouragement, armed robbery, internal conflicts, sickness, and false accusations turned in to local officials.  But God has always been the source of strength and endurance during difficult times, and those trials are tiny in comparison with the immense joy of walking with new believers and growing leaders as they follow Jesus into God’s kingdom of redemption, resurrection, and New Creation.