am Davis, the new leader of WBC’s support community for those wounded by childhood abuse and neglect, tells her own story and invites others to find the hope and healing God has given her.

Pam Davis, the new leader of WBC’s support community for those wounded by childhood abuse and neglect, tells her own story and invites others to find the hope and healing God has given her.

Pam Davis had been attending Wheaton Bible Church for just a few months when her hunt for a place to serve took a sharp left turn.

A recently returned missionary and new faculty member at Wheaton College, Pam selected WBC when she moved to the area: she was looking for a church that offered both contemporary and traditional worship, one with a broad-based missions program, and she wanted to be part of a church with an active ministry to refugees—a group she felt called to serve.

“And,” she adds with a smile, “I didn’t want to go to a big church.” But as she visited churches, she quickly saw that a church of just a hundred or so members could hardly support the kinds of ministries she was looking for, so she started attending WBC and quickly felt at home.

After 22 years as a missionary in Thailand, Pam was eager to help ease the transition for refugees who had come to this area, so she set up a meeting with the Local Impact team to learn about the Refugee Resettlement ministry and how she could serve. At that time, however, few new refugees were arriving, and those already here had been assigned to other Friendship Partners (what WBC calls those who help refugees during their transition to life in America).

In that same conversation, Pam told the Local Impact team about her experiences in Thailand, including the work she’d done with those who had been sex-trafficked and labor-trafficked as children, and who had lived through the tumult of the Burmese war and the harsh existence of life in refugee camps.

As Pam described how she was able to help aid their recovery from that kind of developmental trauma, the team suggested that she look into WBC’s CHAI (Courageous Healing of Abuse and Isolation) ministry to recovering survivors of childhood abuse. That, they said, could be a great place to use her training and experience.

An Answer to Prayer

For Support Ministries Pastor Bill Brown, learning about Pam’s interest and availability was an answer to prayer.

That same week, Ashley Schmutzer, a licensed counselor who, with her husband, Andrew, had launched the CHAI ministry last year, had told Bill that she needed to step back from her involvement as leader of CHAI.

As soon as he received Pam’s contact information, Bill called to set up a meeting. It was quickly agreed that Pam would step in and lead the CHAI women’s group for the spring. In addition, as CHAI restarts for the fall, Pam brought the experience and expertise needed to step in and oversee the entire program for the new ministry year.

God’s Preparation

The story of how God prepared Pam for her work in Thailand, for her teaching career as a professor in the psychology department at Wheaton College, and for her volunteer ministry with CHAI, began when Pam was just two years of age.

At that time, a small local church reached out to her family—five children under the age of seven who had recently lost their father. Pam remembers how that little Bible church, located just a few blocks from their home, came alongside her young mother and the children, bringing groceries and welcoming them to the church.

It was through that church that Pam came to an early understanding of the Gospel. But even though she attended services regularly through her childhood, it was, she says, more like “playing church,” for her, in part because of issues in her family.

“My family was very dysfunctional,” Pam says. “I come from a family history of abuse, and because of that, it was really difficult for me to figure out how God fit into all of it. We said we were a Christian family, and looked so good on the outside, but inside it was rotten.

“It wasn’t until I got away from my family system and went away to college that I could really understand God’s sovereignty and His plan—even in the dark places,” she adds.

After graduation, Pam taught for a year in the United States but then decided to go overseas for a year as a short-term missionary. Then she decided to stay another year. And another after that.

“By the end of the third year,” she said, “I knew this was a career ministry.”

Initially Pam went to Thailand as a teacher, but as her training in professional counseling grew, she also got involved with missionary member care and counseling, as well as development and relief work. It was in that role that she worked with refugee children who were recovering from the effects of war and forced involvement in sex-trafficking and other childhood trauma—experiences that made her transition into the CHAI support ministry nearly seamless.

That kind of healing is what God did for me. He gave me my strength. He gave me my dignity. He gave me my laughter—and I so want to say to other men and women, ‘This is for you, too. This can be yours, too.’

“That kind of healing is what God did for me. He gave me my strength. He gave me my dignity. He gave me my laughter—and I so want to say to other men and women, ‘This is for you, too. This can be yours, too.’”

The Ministry God Had for Me

“I really believe,” Pam says of CHAI, “that this is the ministry God brought to me. I was looking for a place to serve, and God said, This is the place I have for you. And that has been very similar to the trajectory of my life. The ministries that God brings to me have been far more effective than the ministries I have tried to make work on my own.”

Pam also mentions another important reason for the commitment she feels to CHAI.

“I have experienced such phenomenal healing in my own heart as an abuse survivor, that I know there’s hope,” Pam said. She points to Proverbs 31:25 as a Scripture that parallels what God has done in her own life: “She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.”

“I think that so often what happens in abuse is that those things—our strength, our dignity, and our laughter—are stripped away from us. And many of these victims become people who feel powerless and weak, humiliated, and sad. And yet I believe that when we have experienced the faith, hope, and love of recovery, we are clothed with strength and dignity and laughter.

“That’s why I want to be involved in this ministry,” Pam said, “because that kind of healing is what God did for me. He gave me my strength. He gave me my dignity. He gave me my laughter—and I so want to say to other men and women, ‘This is for you, too. This can be yours, too.’”

Pam describes CHAI as “a ministry to those who were abused as children or who are still working through really significant childhood traumas. Our vision is to provide a safe place for people who have all experienced similar trauma to come together and find a place to begin to heal and to begin to tell their story in a way that is both safe and healing for them.”

A Typical Meeting

For those who will decide to be part of CHAI this year, the group will be using a curriculum called The Journey Begins, a guided study based in Scripture and written for people who are recovering from all forms of childhood abuse.

“Those who decide to be part of CHAI,” Pam says, “will experience a very safe, closed group, where they will get to know well the six people and two leaders in their group. During the twelve-week course, the first half hour is large-group teaching and Bible study. Then for the next hour and a half we break up into small groups of six members and two facilitators, men with men and women with women, for some guided activities that are based around the topic of that night’s study.

Pam Davis in her office at Wheaton College, where she teaches psychology and serves as director of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program.

“Our hope is that as those who attend begin to get more comfortable and move through the twelve-week session, they will get to the place where they will be able to share more of their story,” Pam said.

“Actually,” she adds, “we don’t think it’s wise for people to come and just blurt out their story at the very beginning. Sometimes when people do that, they don’t ever come back. So what we ask people is, ‘Can you tell your story from a thirty-thousand-foot perspective?’ Then, as people feel more safe and ready, they can ‘bring their airplane in a little closer,’ maybe telling a few more details of their story.”

The CHAI ministry is based on the belief that healing happens as a result of the interplay between the healing work of the Holy Spirit and the healing work of the community.

Worth the Risk?

When it comes to the question of whether attending a group like CHAI is “worth the risk,” Pam has a personal answer.

“I think for most of us who have a history of abuse, one of the things that we are very aware of is that sometimes we struggle to trust or we struggle to love fully with our whole hearts. Love is so central to the message of the Gospel, and I think sometimes our abuse history wreaks some of its greatest havoc on our ability to love God and to be loved by God, and to feel His love.

“So why risk? To me the greatest reason to risk healing and recovery is so that you can understand more about the abundant love of God and how that love changes us and how it makes us more free to love others,” Pam said.

“What I have discovered is that sometimes the deepest trauma and tragedy of childhood abuse is how the enemy uses it to keep us from fully functioning in God’s love for ourselves and for others,” Pam said. She points to the closing verse of 1 Corinthians 13, which reads: “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

“Those three things—faith, hope, and love—are all interwoven in the Gospel. And I believe the Cross is the reason we can have hope as abuse survivors. When I think of the Cross, I am reminded that there was first death, then life; first great suffering, then great glory; first pain, and then joy. As we are stuck in the suffering, the pain—what feels like death in sexual abuse—we can look to the Cross, where we find the path to faith, to hope, and to love.

The Cross is the reason I can be confident that there is real hope for abuse survivors—and for anyone—to find healing and the deep experience of God’s love.

Is CHAI for You?

CHAI meetings are held on Thursday evenings, beginning September 12. The fall session will begin with two open meetings that provide the opportunity to learn more about what CHAI is like before making a commitment to become part of one of the closed groups, which will form by September 26. For meeting details and other questions, send a confidential e-mail to CHAI@wheatonbible.org. 

By many standards, Jason Benner’s life was going well. The young father of two had a solid marriage. He was involved in his church and had achieved success in his career.

But aftereffects of the childhood trauma of sexual abuse—by teenage boys who were hired as babysitters for Jason during his early elementary years—were still evident more than three decades later, in ways big and small.

Jason points to years of struggle with explosive anger, episodes of crippling anxiety, and the draw of pornography, even after he came to Christ as a college student.

“As a new believer, I knew that I was a new creation—a whole new creature,” Jason recalls. “Believers, I thought, don’t struggle with those things.” But although he didn’t want to dwell on the past, he was never able to erase the damage inflicted on him as a child.

“When I got married, I thought that some of my struggles would go away—and I was growing in some ways—but in many other ways I still struggled. I was convinced I needed to deal with all this on my own. But the secrecy never let anything heal.

“It wasn’t that I denied that I’d been abused,” he added. “At least I had the courage to tell some people and say, ‘I was abused, and this should never happen to anyone.’ I told my wife when we were dating, and I talked to some leaders at my church. But I just came to feel like this was a thing people don’t talk about. It’s ugly, and it makes people uncomfortable, so I mostly stuffed it.”

As his own children grew near to the age he was when he had been abused, the anger, anxiety, and unreasonable fears became more pronounced. “I didn’t want to have my kids remember me as a dad who blew up because the noise they were making was bothering him, or as someone who was overanxious about everything. It was just eating me up.

“In many ways, the wheels were coming off the bus for me,” he said. Jason points to an experience during a business trip to China as a particularly difficult time.

Memories Resurface

“Walking around the streets from the office to the hotel where I was staying, I had to pass through one section that smelled like dank wood or cardboard—just a constant wet smell in the air—that was a mental trigger for me because I was abused in sheds that were wet and rotting. The smell sent me back; it was horrific. Even thinking about it now is hard. At that point things got a hundred times worse. A lot of feelings started coming back, vague impressions that I just didn’t want to deal with. But they were there.

“I did my best to stuff them, but they wouldn’t go away.”

It was about a year later, in a worship service at Wheaton Bible Church, that Jason heard Andrew Schmutzer, a professor at Moody Bible Institute, speaking as part of the Present Help in Present Trouble sermon series.

As Andrew spoke of his own experience of being sexually abused as a child, things clicked for Jason. He saw himself in much of what he heard that day.

One illustration Andrew shared really spoke to Jason.

“Andrew asked us, ‘Do you see this CD I’m holding? If I were to scratch this CD, you probably wouldn’t really see the scratch, but the CD would be damaged, and it wouldn’t play right. That is kind of like what happens with abuse. You have this distortion that happens in your life, and then you don’t see things right anymore. Your way of perceiving the world around you is altered, and how you relate is not the same. You get stuck when, you know, most people play on.’ That metaphor sank in with me.

“I still go back and listen to his sermon.” Jason adds.

“I realized, This is what’s been going on, and I could continue to stuff it for the rest of my life—do the whole macho-man thing of ‘We’ve got to be strong,’—or I could try to do something about it. After hearing Andrew speak, I knew I didn’t want to stuff it anymore.”

Jason Benner and his wife, Wende; daughter, Emmie; and son, Avery.

Finding Help and Hope

When Andrew announced that he and his wife, Ashley—a licensed professional counselor—were going to start groups for male and female abuse survivors, Jason was willing to go.

“I was terrified,” he says, “but I thought I needed to try.”

He went to the first meeting, and it wasn’t so bad. He mainly listened to Andrew speak. But going back for the second meeting, he says, was something else.

“Making myself go back was my hardest hurdle to overcome,” Jason said.

But once he committed to being part of the group, now called CHAI (Courageous Healing of Abuse and Isolation), he found a peace and a comfort that come from knowing there are other guys who understand what he’s going through and are going through the same things.

“We do a lot of calculations in our head of the cost of sharing versus keeping silent—doing the math and weighing the odds. But too often we figure it wrong and assume that we’ll just do our best to get through this life and then we’ll be okay,” Jason said.

“But knowing now the damage that I’ve done by trying to stuff it, I can’t imagine continuing that way. I didn’t want to destroy my life. I didn’t want to destroy my family, my relationships with friends, and with the guys I work with. I didn’t want to continue to have this explosive pattern and the anxiety and so many other issues. I can’t imagine going back to that.”

Jason describes CHAI as something like a veterans’ group. “I’ve never been in the military, and I don’t know what it’s like to be in a war. But I know what it’s like to be in this kind of war. I know what it’s like to be wounded in this way. And knowing other guys who can relate to that is very powerful.

“We’re all wounded, but I can’t imagine trying to make it on my own.” Jason adds.

Along with the support of the group, he’s gained other insights too. It was particularly meaningful to Jason when Andrew talked about how Christ’s clothing was also taken from Him, and how He was scarred—with scars that remain, even after the Resurrection.

“My scars will probably be with me until I’m in heaven,” Jason adds, “but I want to show my scars so other people can know there’s healing. That God can heal and that He loves the weary. Matthew 11:28 says, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’

“That rest is elusive sometimes, but it is there,” Jason said. “And acknowledging it takes away the power the abusers had over me. Breaking the silence, and the sense of camaraderie we have as a group give me hope and encouragement, knowing that I have brothers who have my back—even while the war is still waging—and that we’re holding each other up.”

Current statistics estimate

God uses all kinds of circumstances to draw people to Himself. In Mary Ann’s case, God used her job and the people she met there.

Mary Ann is an activity coordinator in the healthcare center of Windsor Park, the retirement community on North Avenue in Carol Stream. Sometimes her work involves planning and leading activities for groups of residents. Other times, she will connect with individual residents, visiting them in their rooms or taking them for a wheelchair ride around the pond.

On one of those visits, an elderly woman known for her love of the Scriptures asked Mary Ann to read the Bible to her out loud, and Mary Ann began to visit the woman regularly.

Mary Ann was honored to be asked to read God’s Holy Word. She had faith in God but had grown up in a religion that did not encourage Bible reading. As she read aloud for this resident, she felt for the first time as if she was getting to know God personally from His Word. A spiritual hunger began to develop as Mary Anne opened her heart.

Ernestine’s Invitation

Sometime later, Mary Ann met another elderly woman, named Ernestine Scull. Ernestine, a member of Wheaton Bible Church since 1963, invited Mary Ann to join her and another resident when they met for a Bible study. The print in the Bible was small, and the women soon realized it would be helpful if Mary Ann read the Bible out loud.

Each time they met, Mary Ann read the Scripture passage and then listened intently as the two women discussed its meaning.

What she heard in those studies and what she read in God’s Word brought a change to Mary Ann’s heart. For most of her life, she had believed that if she was good and did religious things, she would earn God’s approval. Now, for the first time, she began to understand the meaning of grace. From the Bible, she learned that salvation is a gift that we can never work hard enough or be good enough to earn, but a gift lovingly and freely given by God.

Mary Ann Roa and Ernestine Scull—a member of WBC for more than 50 years

Mary Ann remembers Ernestine saying, “We are saved by faith in Christ, not by our works.” Her dear voice still echoes in Mary Ann’s mind: Not by works . . . not by works.

One evening not long after, watching a Christian television program in her own home, Mary Ann prayed along with the speaker at the end of a message, bowing her head and saying the prayer aloud with him to accept Christ as her personal Savior.

In the days after that prayer, Mary Ann had a growing desire to learn more about Jesus, finding Christian radio and TV programs and a devotional book that helped her learn about God and His Word.

It is by grace you have been saved, through faith
—and this not from yourselves, it is the
GIFT OF GOD
—not by works, so that no one can boast.

—Ephesians 2:8–9

A Church Home 

During one of their conversations, Ernestine told Mary Ann about her church—just down the road on North Avenue. And in the spring of this year, Mary Ann attended a worship service at Wheaton Bible Church, encouraged by her friend Marti, a volunteer at Windsor, who accompanied her on that first visit to WBC.

Mary Ann came back several times, but initially she wasn’t sure this was the right place for her. She thought a smaller church might be better.

It was an experience during the Good Friday service that changed her mind. It was quiet that evening as she sat in the middle of the West Worship Center, looking around at the expanse of the room and feeling very small in comparison. The contrast reminded her of the enormity of God, and in that moment she felt His majesty and His strength. She felt God embracing her, and in His arms she was safe and secure.

In the weeks that followed, Mary Ann attended worship services as often as her work schedule allowed, even joining the Sunday-morning Alpha Course.

As she grew in her faith, she longed for her family to come to church with her. And on her birthday, that longing was fulfilled as two of her adult children were able to attend with her. She was overjoyed later that day at her birthday party to hear them tell their aunts and cousins how much they enjoyed their mom’s new church.

Another evidence of God at work? That same week, Mary Ann’s husband, Malit, who had not been to church in many years, accepted an invitation from a family friend who attends Wheaton Bible Church, to join him for a Sunday service. Since that time, Malit has begun attending services with Mary Ann.

Mary Ann is grateful for the way God has revealed Himself in His Word. And she deeply appreciates the women He used to introduce her to God’s grace.

“My family will tell you, I use to be a worrywart. I was negative, and I was easily panicked and easily discouraged,” said Mary Ann. “Now I am overjoyed that I have Christ by my side. I offer difficult things up to the Lord and surrender them to Him. I see things from His perspective. And I trust that He will bring something good out of bad situations. God can move mountains and turn things upside down!”

What caused this seismic shift in disposition? It wasn’t a new house or a new car. Life’s problems didn’t magically disappear. Mary Ann didn’t attend a self-help seminar on how to discover a new attitude.

No, it was as simple as hearing the truth of God’s Word and accepting His gift of grace—salvation through faith alone.

How long have you been a member of Wheaton Bible Church?

We have been attending WBC since 2004, when we moved to Wheaton. We had visited several times when in town visiting Kristy’s sister and her family. Having family in the church helped us easily transition into Wheaton and plug in immediately at WBC. We became members within the first year.

Describe one or two memorable church experiences.

I’d have to say that it would be worshiping together with the Spanish-speaking congregation for the ground breaking on the current property. Being together as a body of Christ at one time in multiple languages was an amazing time of worship. It has been wonderful seeing God’s hand on our congregation over the past eight years since that Sunday morning in 2006. We are a blessed church, and I am inspired by the passion and love our collective body has to reach others—right here in DuPage County and throughout the world.

How long have you been an Elder?

I’m brand-new to the Elder board. My first meeting was in February of this year.

What are the most challenging/rewarding parts of being an Elder?

Great question—I can’t wait to find out! As a new Elder, I must admit I am challenged with thinking about the time commitment. You can be praying for me and my family as I step into this role, praying that we remain obedient to the Lord’s guidance and His care for our family. I am humbled to have been even nominated as an Elder; even more humbled to now be confirmed to the Elder board. As far as the rewarding part, I am encouraged by the leadership of the Elders and our pastoral staff. I look forward to serving alongside these leaders over the coming months.

Brett, who serves in Student Ministry, talks with junior higher, Cameron Wilder.

How and when did you accept Christ as your Savior?

I grew up regularly attending church, but it wasn’t until my junior year in high school that I accepted Christ as my Savior. I was invited by my friends to attend a retreat. During the weekend, the Gospel was clearly explained, and my eyes and heart were opened. I literally and figuratively stood at the foot of the Cross. That day I gained a whole new understanding of Christ’s redemptive love for me and prayed the sinner’s prayer—asking God to forgive my sins, past, present, and future.

Do you have a favorite Scripture verse?

There are several I often have on my heart. Philippians 4:13 is one of the first verses I memorized, had posted in my room during college, and is still with me daily, inscribed on the inside of my ring. It says, “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

Throughout college, it was my encouragement to persevere. With Christ I could accomplish all things. Today, when I read the same verse, I am reminded that I am nothing and my accomplishments are only because of Him, and the glory is all His.

Tell us a little about your work.

I am a director in supply chain at PepsiCo in downtown Chicago. My team leads some of our capability and training development for manufacturing and distribution sites across the country. I also lead PepsiCo’s group supporting our military and veterans, inside and outside the company.

Tell us about your growing-up years.

I grew up in a suburb just outside Columbus, Ohio. My parents were both the first in each of their families to graduate college and move away from their hometowns—although just seventy miles away. I have an older brother and an identical twin brother. My parents as well as my older brother and his family live in the Houston area. My twin brother and his family are outside Boston. Despite the distance and infrequent visits together, we remain close via phone calls, texts, and emails.

Brett and Kristy Lucas, with their children (left to right), Annie (12), Micah (10), Abby (8), and Lauren (14).

Describe your family.

Kristy and I began dating toward the end of our senior year in high school and then long-distance through college. This year we will celebrate our seventeenth wedding anniversary. We are blessed with four beautiful children: Lauren, Annie, Micah, and Abby. The kids were all born in different states: Arizona, Georgia, New York, and Ohio. Next year we will have children at Longfellow Elementary, Franklin Middle School, and Wheaton North High School.

If you could speak with each member of the congregation,what would you say/ask?

I would encourage everyone to get involved somewhere within our church body. I love our time of gathering together as a large body on Sunday morning, but being the church happens at a personal level as well, as we grow our relationships with others who are part of the body of Christ. There are many ways to get involved—participating in an Adult Community, being part of a Community Group, serving with children or students, tutoring kids or ESL students with Puente del Pueblo—there are literally hundreds of different ways you can serve. You can even direct traffic in the parking lot or simply hold the door for someone else and say hello. We are all gifted in different ways and have differing abilities to serve, but we are all called to serve Christ.

Since we made the decision to relocate to our current campus, God has blessed our church with many, many faithful people who have given—often sacrificially—to support our ongoing ministry, to pay for the land for our new campus, and toward the cost of constructing our new facility.

In addition to the monies received from the sale of our downtown properties and the funds that were given to purchase the land and begin construction, we borrowed $22.5 million. After a little more than five years at our North Avenue campus, we are on target, even slightly ahead of plan, in our repayment of that debt. Even so, we are compelled by a sense of urgency to accelerate our debt repayment and free up more resources to make a greater impact on those far from God.

A central focus of our two-year ALL IN challenge has been an aggressive plan to pay down that debt even more quickly—and we have made some progress toward that goal. At this point we are slightly behind where we wanted to be, but because of extraordinary giving in December 2012 and the early months of 2013 as we began our ALL IN generosity journey, we have made accelerated loan payments in the amount of $2.8 million in the past fifteen months, bringing our total debt repayment so far to $8.1 million of the original $22.5 million.

Today, with that boost from our ALL IN giving, our total debt stands at $14.4 million, meaning that to date, we have paid for 76 percent of our campus. We are thrilled, because this has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars of interest expense—dollars that now are being used for ministry. We are so thankful for all that these numbers represent, in terms of the faithfulness, generosity, obedience, and sacrifice of so many people.

God has given us a vision and an opportunity to live the truth of Hebrews 12: 1–2: to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.”

We dream of the day when we have replaced debt with expanded ministry and the words ALL IN are no longer a label for a two-year focus but rather describe our wholehearted, ongoing commitment to be people who are given to the Kingdom-focused mission of making disciples who make disciples, both here and around the world.

Ecclesia Community Group Heads to India on a “Go on Your Own” Mission Trip

In late January, nine young adults in their twenties from our Ecclesia Adult Class left for a trip of a lifetime—a ten-day mission trip to Chennai, in the southern part of India, where they were involved in medical camps and construction projects for Gilgal Gospel Mission.

Steve and Jocy Enison, leaders in this young-adult class, had dreamed of going to India to serve alongside Gilgal Gospel Mission, whose US board president is Jocy’s father.

The Enisons shared this passion with their community group, and seven friends decided to join them. This ambitious group of twenty-somethings paid for the trip out of pocket but also raised $10,000 for supplies for medical camps and construction projects at a children’s home and administrative buildings for the mission.

From David and Debbie Frank— in Spain with GEM

When volunteers (such as WBC GO Teams) come to Spain to work in our camping ministry at L’Arcada, we try to communicate the devastating spiritual situation here and encourage them to get involved in reaching Spain for Christ through prayer, giving, or on-site serving.

Kelly, one such “international” staff member, came to L’Arcada on a church mission trip three years ago to help with our English camp. During the two weeks here, she developed a deep love for Spain and concern for the huge spiritual need here. That burden continued, and later she returned to Spain as an English teacher in Barcelona for three school years. During each of those summers, Kelly came to our L’Arcada English camp as a counselor and ended up having the same girls in her teepee all three summers. (They were all nonbelievers and asked to be in her teepee). God continued to work in their hearts as Kelly shared with them and maintained contact with them during the year.

This past summer something exciting happened! After three years at camp with Kelly as their counselor, four of the girls made the decision to accept Jesus as their Savior and requested a Bible. Kelly continues to maintain contact with them, as they are from the Barcelona area where she teaches.

When things like this happen, it reminds us of how amazing it is that God weaves the tapestry and uses us to bring others into His Kingdom. What a privilege!

From Wes Kennedy—in Mexico with a Church Plant of Chicago’s New Life Community Church

Wes Kennedy

There are an extraordinary number of single-parent homes in Mexico. In fact, Querétaro (where our church plant is located) has the highest number of single mothers in all of Mexico. For me it has been both a challenge and privilege to be a “father to the fatherless” for a handful of kids and teens who are my neighbors. This means building trust by spending time together, being generous in spirit, and speaking words of life to awaken the hopeless child inside. Sometimes it means giving a hard word of correction to challenge these boys and young men to take responsibility for their actions, to live with integrity, or to persevere.

One relationship that has yielded fruit is with Johan, who lives a few doors down from me. One night he came to our ministry house to do his homework, and we began to talk about his dad, who had left a long time ago to seek work in Texas. Johan confided in me that his grandma was a “bruja,” or witch. Sadly, he has seen his share of supernatural occurrences and has lived in a very real spiritual fear. I shared with him the victory that those who follow Jesus have over all spirits and darkness. We looked at Romans 8, which affirms that Christ followers are “more than conquerors” and “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

That night Johan prayed that Jesus would be King of his heart, mind, and life. Since then he has regularly come to our ministry house himself or for groups, and we are slowly beginning a discipleship process. I pray for Johan a lot, given his family’s spiritual background, his age, the absence of a father, and the pressures of the neighborhood. I’m confident that God orchestrated our friendship for a purpose, and I long to see Johan sink deep spiritual roots and produce a harvest 30, 60, 100 times!

From an Unnamed Missionary Couple—in an Undisclosed Asian Country

We are completing our first year of language study, and the Lord has given us little reminders of progress and his goodness along the way. Living in South Asia, we have quickly adapted to the frequent festivals and holidays. Recently, my parents were visiting from the US. While they were here, there was a Hindu festival called Dusshera, celebrating the god and goddess Ram and Sita.

Festivals here usually involve visiting people and bringing sweets, so we went to our language helper’s house, whose family we know well. My parents were quickly welcomed, fed sweets and traditional South Asian food. Part of this holiday involves the matriarch of the family blessing the family members for the year. We were all included in this tradition. She placed red colored rice on our forehead and wheat grass in our hair, saying a blessing prayer over us. This family speaks only Hindi, so it was encouraging to see the close relationship that has developed between us as we have taken steps to enter into their culture. Please pray for us as we love, spend time with, and share God’s truth with this family. He has blessed our language study, and He reminds us often why we are here.

An Interview with Mark Irvin, Pastor of Marriage, Men and Care

Tell us about growing up.

I was born in Toronto, Canada, the oldest of four kids. I have two sisters, and a brother who is ten years younger than me. My dad was a pastor. In 1967, when I was seven, he accepted a job as Dean of Students at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and we moved to Wheaton.

I have lived in this area ever since. I attended Emerson Grade School, Monroe Junior High, and the old Wheaton Central High School. But I never forgot my Canadian roots. While growing up in Wheaton, I was one of the few guys in the neighborhood who wore a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey when everybody else was wearing Chicago Bears football gear.

How did you come to faith?

I’m told that I came to my dad when I was three years old and said that I wanted to ask Jesus into my heart. He was an associate pastor at the time, so he asked the senior pastor of the church whether or not to encourage me. The senior pastor said that if I was pushing for it on my own, he should let it happen.

I can’t remember a time when I doubted my personal faith in Jesus. I remember some important, spiritually impacting times in high school, including some camps and a retreat during my freshman year, when I “put spiritual stakes in the ground.”

Wedding day for Mark and Sharon in June of 1982

 Tell us about your wife, Sharon. Where and when did you two meet?

Sharon was born in St. Charles and, like me, grew up in the area. Her dad, Arnie Howard, was a professor in Wheaton College’s business-economics department. Sharon is the youngest of four children.

We think we probably met in fourth grade, when we attended the same church, but our first memories of each other begin in junior high. I felt fortunate that Sharon even noticed me, because she often hung around with her older brothers, who were in the high school group.

We started dating our junior year in high school, and we dated all the way through college.

What came next?

I graduated from Valparaiso University. Within a month of graduation, we got married, set up our first apartment (on College Avenue in Wheaton), and took out a loan on a car—all those things that you do to create stress when you’re twenty-two years old.

Three years later we had our first child. Kristin was born in 1985. We originally said that we wanted to be married three years before we had kids, and Kristin was born two months before our third-year anniversary. So I like to tell young couples that Kristin was right on schedule. Three years after her birth, in 1988, Todd came along.

I might add that Sharon and I have been married 32 years now. I’ve been so blessed that God gave me a helpmate to do life and ministry with for these 32 years. While we each have had our own areas of ministry, it is great to do the marriage ministry together.

Our daughter, Kristin, lives in Glen Ellyn with her husband, Eric. Todd, who is now 25, lives in Arlington Heights.

Walk us through your professional career and education.

I was hired by AT&T after graduating from Valparaiso with a degree in electrical engineering. I eventually spent thirty years at AT&T, which later became Lucent and, finally, Alcatel-Lucent. During those years I was always in grad school part-time, starting with a masters in computer science at IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology).

In the meantime I was promoted to management and ended my programming-code and software-writing days. At that point I thought, If I’m going to be in management—where all the decisions tend to get made—the right next degree is an MBA. So in 1991 I went back to school again for four summers as part of an executive MBA program at Purdue. I was made a director at Lucent in 1999; there were about sixty people working for me in Boston and about a hundred here.

Then I got a new boss, who made Boston the only US site. So I had to lay off 100 people in Naperville (not fun), and I started commuting to Boston in 2002. It was rough to be a dad with that kind of commute. I remember missing an important concert, where my daughter received an award. It was at that time that I prayed for a change, and I promised God that if He led me to a job back in Chicago, I would go back to school for ministry training. In 2008, I started a masters program in biblical studies at Wheaton.

A recent photo of Mark’s family, (left to right) Mark; Kristin’s husband, Eric; Kristin; Sharon, and Todd.

Describe how God led you from business to ministry.

When I was in high school, I was president of my church youth group. Once somebody asked me what I wanted to be after college. I said that I was going to study to be an engineer. She commented, “I thought all presidents of the youth group ended up as pastors or in ministry.”

People talk about being “called” into ministry, but I didn’t have a burning-bush or Isaiah-type call. Nevertheless, I was always very involved in ministry as a volunteer. In the early nineties my focus was with men and Promise Keepers, the national men’s movement that featured weekend spiritual-growth gatherings in large stadiums with thousands in attendance. I took two groups of about a hundred guys two different years.

In addition, Sharon and I led the college ministry at the church we were attending then. I was a primary teacher, and Sharon led a small group of women. So we were always heavily involved in lay ministry. Sharon also served for a time as the director of the women’s ministry at the church we were attending.

When I was with Alcatel-Lucent, I felt as if I was an “evangelist” of common sense. In the business world, you come to the table with a certain judgment about what’s going on, what needs to happen, how you need to improve a situation, and all those types of things. I feel that I brought those same skills to ministry. I’m a firm believer that God doesn’t waste our skills or experiences.

After the commute to Boston and going back to grad school at Wheaton, I started to sense God was leading me to retire from Alcatel-Lucent and spend my time and energy doing ministry. I didn’t know what or where, but I did find less and less satisfaction in my “full-time job” and more and more enjoyment in using my gifts in the church.  When the chance came to become part of the WBC staff, it wasn’t even a question. Without even knowing how we would make it work financially, Sharon and I both felt this was God’s leading and His plan for us.

The other thing my business experience does is give me an ability to relate to guys. I know what they’re going through. I can talk their language. I’ve experienced the stress and had to do some of the hard things that work can involve. I can interact with what they’re dealing with and what their issues are, depending on the jobs they have, since I came from that world.

When and why did you come to Wheaton Bible Church?

We came five years ago, in 2008, for the very first services that were held in the new building. We had been part of a church plant for a number of years, and it felt like it was the right time to move on. We sensed we needed some deeper discipleship.

I remember that first Sunday, sitting in the Foundation Builders Adult Community under Chris Mitchell, and taking two pages of notes. Then we went to the worship service, and I took another two pages of notes. We very much valued the depth of what we were experiencing.

You have one of the longer job titles at the church: Pastor of Marriage, Men, and Care. Let’s start with marriage.

Sure. Sharon and I have always enjoyed mentoring, speaking into lives of young couples, peers, all sorts of things in that space. One of the things that we observed was that the family pretty much goes the way the marriage goes. At church we can have a great children’s ministry that speaks into the lives of kids, but that investment can be neutralized or undermined if they go home and see Mom and Dad, who claim to be Christians, not practicing faith in a way that honors God.

I think one of the reasons the greater church has struggled the way it has is that there have been so many families where the parents say that they’re committed Christians but they fight all week—even on the way to church. And the kids look at the parents and say, If that’s Christianity, I don’t want any part of it. 

Verses like Judges 2:10 are so challenging to me. It says, “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.” Current parents are on the front end of that storyline. The trajectory of their walk with God, and the way their marriages go, will dictate in large part the way the next generation is going to go. So I believe that getting marriage right is critical.

Popular culture continues to look at marriage from a negative viewpoint—being kind of like handcuffs. Others see it as sort of a financial transaction: as long as I’m getting more out of it than I’m putting into it, it’s a good deal. But the minute I’m putting more into it than I’m getting out of it, it’s a bad deal, and it’s time to look for a better one. We want to help stem that negative tide relative to marriage.

I feel that God has put that call on my plate. Before I interviewed for this job, I woke up one morning feeling as if I’d been wrestling with this through the night—the reality that marriages are either on a downward trajectory or an upward trajectory. Either couples start as newlyweds encountering speed bumps and don’t have any way to process them, or early in their marriage they are being discipled to deal with the speed bumps and communication. Pastor and author Tim Keller makes a good point in his book The Meaning of Marriage when he says something like, “Why should we expect two people who are neurotic and selfish and self-centered to all of a sudden become angels when they become married?”

Mark frequently teaches on Monday evenings at Re|Engage.

So we’re trying to be more intentional about the ways we want to help strengthen marriages at all stages. We think in terms of what we can do to help couples prepare for marriage, care for their marriages, and when needed, repair their marriages. Whether they are three years in or thirty years in, we want to be there to help when they hit a rough spot in the relationship.

In the prepare area, we have deepened and broadened our Preparation for Marriage class to make sure that we equip couples to go into marriage with their eyes wide open. We want them to spend some time talking about things like finances and living in a sex-saturated culture.

In the care arena, we’ve started by helping newlyweds. The As One Sunday-morning Adult Community was designed very specifically for newly married couples. We want to make sure they start their marriages on solid footing. It is far easier to start off well in a marriage than it is to attempt to repair it many years down the road. For couples further along, there’s Re | Engage. It’s for couples who either are struggling or who want to intentionally take their marriages to the next level. Re | Engage currently has five groups meeting, and around 10 couples have recently come to check it out. So somewhere around 34 couples have experienced or are currently experiencing that powerful program. The stories we hear about how God is using Re|Engage are just great.

Of course we also do some individual counseling with couples, but more and more, Re|Engage has been proven to be an even more helpful option for many marriages.

You are also our Men’s Pastor. Can you talk a little about how God prepared you for that role?

For more than twenty years I’ve felt that men need other men in their lives who are able to sharpen them. As Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” On a personal level, I’ve had one guy in particular who’s been an accountability partner since the early nineties. In fact, I’ve always tried to have at least two or three men with whom I pretty much share everything of what’s going on in my life.

As I’ve ministered to men for some time now, I’ve come to believe that there are a couple of kinds of relationships that a man should have with other men. The first is what Dallas Theological Seminary professor Howard Hendricks called “Paul and Barnabas” relationships—relationships between peers who are going through life together.

I was explaining to someone what that looks like in terms of three doors men can choose to open to others. Behind door number one are the things that we tell just about anyone—surface things, like how we feel about the Cubs or the Bears, or maybe what we did on vacation. We open that door regularly for anybody to see what’s going on.

On another level is door number two. We might open that door when somebody asks, “How’s it going?” If a guy thinks the other person might actually be interested, he may pause and say, “I could be doing better.” Or “My wife is sick,” or “I’ve got a cold,” or whatever.

Opening door number three is a step beyond that, where we would honestly answer a question like, “What are you really struggling with in life?” That can be tough to talk about, especially as it relates to sin. There are very few guys that you’re going to be open and vulnerable with enough to be able to say, “I’m really struggling with anger, or worry, or temptation, or something else.” It’s probably a really small group. But from my perspective, there is a need for those relationships if we want to grow as disciples of Jesus Christ. Men need those Paul-and-Barnabas-type relationships.

There are also the Paul-and-Timothy relationships we want to see men experience. To an older, more mature guy, I’d ask, Who’s the young guy that you’re pouring into? And to young men, I’d say, Who’s the older guy that you’re “going to school on” in terms of the mentoring process? 

We’ve structured our Men’s Ministry in a way that we hope will encourage those kinds of relationships to develop and grow. You can’t force friendship, because there is chemistry involved, but we can create a “fishing pool” where guys can meet. The Bible studies are a great place for the sparks of relationship to start, even if they have only a little bit of a door-number-two—or even three—component to it.

Talk a little about the Men’s Bible studies.

Thursday morning Huddle and Saturday Men’s Bible Study—each have the same type of format, beginning with a teaching time when we present truth. The second half of those studies takes place in small groups of five to ten guys sitting at tables. We want to make sure that we’re moving past instruction (taking in head knowledge) to applying the truth of what we learn in ways that make a difference in our lives. Prayer is also part of the small-group time.

There’s also a Senior Men’s Bible Study that meets later on Thursday mornings and offers the same kind of time in God’s Word and fellowship.

Top Gun is our intensive discipleship program for guys. It lasts at least a year and involves guys who are willing to commit a couple of hours each week to reading from a book we’re working through and other selected resources. There is also the challenge of Scripture memorization. In addition, each guy is expected to be growing in his prayer life and working intentionally through other exercises, including the development of a personal mission statement.

This year we have eight Top Gun groups, and a total of about sixty guys. That’s up from six groups last year, and we’re pleased to see more men getting involved in that kind of discipleship.

The last part of your title says, “and Care.” Tell us about what Care looks like at Wheaton Bible Church. 

Obviously, our support groups are a big part of our Care ministry. They are overseen by Support Ministries Pastor Bill Brown and include the Monday night family groups—Caring for Kids, Single Parenting group, DivorceCare, and  GriefShare. Celebrate Recovery and CHAI (for survivors of childhood abuse) also meet on Monday evenings. Other groups are Restore after Abortion, Faithful & True, and COMPASS (for men who are committed to living lives of sexual integrity). Also falling into the area of care are Career Transition Workshop and Networking group, Re | Engage, and Financial Peace University.

Care also has a natural link with another resource, which is individual counseling. For the last several years we’ve brought a professional counselor on campus to provide services in the church offices as needed to supplement the counseling that our pastors are providing.

It’s been interesting to see how the need for a good portion of those counseling hours—particularly for the 60 to 70 percent of the cases we were seeing related to marriage issues—has been eliminated as Re | Engage has taken part of the counseling effort and moved it to lay-people who are equipped to be on the front lines.  That’s definitely connected to the way marriages are  being healed and made stronger through Re|Engage.

You made a natural connection between Marriage and Care. Are there other ways your ministry areas work together? 

The longer I’ve been in this role, the more connectedness I am seeing between these areas. The truth is, men play key roles in families. Studies show that if only the father is regular in his church attendance and in his walk with God, the children have a far greater likelihood of continuing to be active in the church and following Christ than if it is just the mother who is regular in her walk. So, being able to help men grow as disciples is an incredible opportunity.

Considering the research and our own observations about the connectedness of spiritual growth for men, their marriages, and their families, my oversight of both men’s and marriage ministries is a natural blend.

I think that all these areas are continually working together within the Body of Christ, touching lives in a variety of ways. For example, as we help people get whole and healthy—and sometimes that means care for them as individuals or for their marriages—they often get connected with others in the church and begin building those relationships. And if they haven’t already come to faith, then they become followers of Christ and are discipled and grow.

Any final thoughts? 

A reality that’s central to much of what I work with in all these areas is the fact that we all are broken. If you’ve read books like Paul Tripp’s Broken-Down House, you can see that the problem is that we come to the table thinking we’re not broken, and we don’t acknowledge that we are fundamentally selfish. We don’t acknowledge that we want to make life about me. But once we start to admit that, it’s going to have implications in terms of our marriages. It’s going to have implications for us as men in the way we lead in the home, and in our relationships with our wives and our children.

The cure to that brokenness happens when we are in the Word and sitting under the teaching of the Word. Then we need to let the Word transform our lives. And that is exactly what’s going on in all these ministries we’ve been talking about. Whether we’re talking about one of the support groups, Re|Engage, or one of the Bible studies, we are all about getting people into the Word and applying its truth to the real issues of life. That’s where life change happens.

All the things we’re talking about, whether men’s ministries, marriage ministries, or the care ministries, the intent is to help facilitate those transformation stories of what God is doing in people’s lives.

Sometimes I think that the assignment my title implies is impossibly wide and deep, but I have to say that I love being a cog in that process of healing and growing and making disciples in and through Wheaton Bible Church.

Michele Hogan, with friend Heather and four of her six children: Kyrie, 17, Karina, 15, Kaiden, 10, Karsten, 8, and family dogs.

Three years ago, Heather Libby and her six children were close to being homeless. Heather’s marriage was ending, and the house where they lived was about to go into foreclosure.

Michele Hogan, a member of Wheaton Bible Church who has been Heather’s friend for more than twenty years, grew concerned about the family’s situation. She remembers Karina—one of Heather’s children, who was twelve years old at the time—voicing her fear that they would be living in their van. Michele told her she would never let the family spend a night in their car.

“I made a promise to Karina,” Michele said, and the time came when she had to back it up.

That day, Michele made the decision to invite one adult and six children to come live in her three-bedroom condo (with two big dogs soon to be added). It was wall-to-wall mattresses and kids and boxes and clothes.

“We had one room that was literally a bed and a giant blow-up mattress,” Kyrie, 17, said. “There was no room to move around.”

That situation clearly wouldn’t work for the long term, and one day Michele came home with a solution. She announced that she had bought a house.

She had originally looked at a different house she wanted to purchase, but someone else had already beaten her to it.

“It was a testament to how God provides that I didn’t get that one,” she said. It was so much smaller than the home she eventually purchased—a house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs for Heather and her family, and a master bedroom and bath downstairs for Michele.

So how do a single woman—accustomed to living by herself—and a family of seven adjust to living together?

There has been a learning curve, the two women admit.

“A clean kitchen is ridiculously important to me,” Michele said, “and I didn’t know that until seven other people moved in with me. Through this experience, I’ve learned how selfish I can be—like when I’m woken up, or a child is a smart aleck to me.”

Heather and Michele also admit that communication can be a problem. And sometimes they disagree over how to discipline the children.

“I think this would be a lot harder if we didn’t have a sense of humor,” Michele said with a smile. “It also helps that they really are good kids.”

The children have faced a lot of adjustments too: they lost their house, their parents got divorced, and they transitioned from homeschooling to attending public school.

To help with all the change, Heather attended WBC’s DivorceCare, and the kids attended Caring for Kids, which especially benefitted the two younger boys.

Heather remembers Kaiden coming home after Caring for Kids one Monday night and handing her a paper with these words written on it: Divorce was not my fault. 

“You could tell that was news to him,” Michele said. “Caring for Kids was a good place for the kids to talk about all that has happened in their lives.”

Michele Hogan, with friend Heather and four of her six children: Kyrie, 17, Karina, 15, Kaiden, 10, Karsten, 8

Despite the constant chaos of eight people—and two big dogs—living together, they are happy with the living situation.

“I love feeding people, so for me this is awesome,” Michele said.

Heather says their garage looks like Costco. “Not to make this a sob story, but we didn’t have any money, no groceries,” she said. “My kids did not know food galore until they moved here.

“As a mom, just knowing my kids would eat was great,” she adds.

Michele and her housemates also discovered the generosity of other people and have seen how God provides in so many ways. When the family moved in with Michele, they were given money for beds, furniture, and other accessories for their house. One friend even painted their dining room.

Just recently, Michele and the Libby family witnessed another generous act, when the family didn’t have the money to pay for this semester’s bill for Heather’s oldest child, a student at Wheaton College. As Heather was trying to figure out how to come up with the money, she was informed by the school that someone had anonymously donated money to pay for the semester.

“God has just shown up with checks when we didn’t expect it,” Michele said, “providing in ways we never think about.”

Now that three years have passed and another of Heather’s children is headed off to college next year, some changes are ahead.

“We’ve been here three years,” Heather says, “and it’s time to give Michele her life back.”

But Michele has never felt as if her life was taken away.

“It’s never been my house,” she said. “It’s our house. I look at it like this: I have a good job. I make more than I need to live comfortably. It’s not my money—it’s God’s money, and I’m just the steward.” 

Angela and John Raske’s decision to explore international adoption was not a spur-of-the-moment, out-of-the-blue idea. The idea of adopting a child from another country had been planted in Angela’s heart and mind when she was only about 10 years old.

“I grew up in a small town in rural America,” she says, “where something like international adoption was pretty much unknown. But one day I overheard an adult conversation about how a cousin who lived far away was going to adopt a child from India. I still remember where I was when I heard that news.

“I believe God planted that seed in my heart and covered it over for later,” she adds. “I don’t think I gave it much thought after that, but it was always quietly there. I grew up and got married, and we had two biological children.”

Angela describes her family at that point as “living the American dream. We had two kids—a boy and a girl. Dad’s at work and Mom’s at home.”

It was when her son was a toddler that the seed God had planted so many years ago sprouted and broke through to the surface. But although she and John had been married for more than ten years, she had never talked to him about the possibility of adoption or about her experience as a child.

Inwardly, Angela resisted God’s promptings. “It was too scary to talk about,” she says. “Once you say it out loud, it becomes real and you have to deal with it.” She even rationalized that what God really wanted her to do was pray that childless friends would choose adoption.

“I was in denial for a long time,” Angela admits. “We didn’t have close friends or neighbors who had adopted internationally, so it was a huge unknown. We had what I felt was an ideal situation, and I was afraid of doing anything that could mess that up. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to parent an adopted child well. It was really ridiculous, but I think I was just afraid of taking that first step of faith,” she says, “and the enemy had a long history of successfully using fear against me.” Yet, in spite of Angela’s fear, the idea of adopting a vulnerable child was never far from her heart and mind.

“My other fears didn’t suddenly go away,” Angela says, “but there was a tipping point when I knew that if I didn’t act on this, one day I would be a 90-year-old woman looking back and regretting that I had missed out on something good God had for me and my family.

“Eventually, I think I realized that I was probably done giving birth to children and that adoption was the way God would grow our family.” That realization became something of a spiritual crossroads: either she would bring it up to her husband and walk in obedience to God, or she would be in disobedience. “I was so nervous about it,” she says, but she took that next step and sat down for a conversation with John.

“‘This may shock you,’ I told him, ‘but I feel that God has asked me to talk to you about the idea of adopting a child. I’m not saying we have to do this, and I’m not going to try to talk you into something. But I believe God wants me to tell you what I’ve been thinking and ask you to pray about it.’”

That conversation took John by surprise. He’d always wanted a bigger family but had assumed that he and Angela would have more biological children.

“I think the idea was interesting to him, but not something he’d considered for us,” Angela said. “But while I’m a seriously slow and analytical processor, John is a make-it-happen kind of guy. It took him about twenty-four hours to say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Angela and John began to research the idea, following Angela’s pull toward international adoption, particularly from China. But, Angela says, “you can read and research only so much before you want to see what it looks like ‘with skin on.’”

They contacted a family who had biological children and had adopted a child from China, and the family agreed to talk, honestly answering John and Angela’s questions. With what they learned, the Raskes felt ready for the next step, with the goal of adopting a healthy baby girl.

Told that the wait could be four years or more, Angela—already raising two young children—was okay with waiting, even when she later learned that the expected wait had stretched to five or even six years.

“I think John and I had been doing life in our own strength and abilities more than we realized. Our faith was important to us, but this was definitely stepping beyond what we knew we could do on our own. It really stretched us individually. It stretched our marriage. It stretched our parenting. We had to love outside of our own little pot of ability to love. But the truth is, that is as necessary for biological kids as it is for adopted children.”

A New Church Home

It was around that time that the Raskes first came to Wheaton Bible Church. They were looking for a strong, biblically based church that would support them as parents in their desire to see their kids grow in their faith. Even though it was a big church, they saw many familiar faces from the kids’ schools and the community, and realized they had found their church home.

Not long after, a sermon series by Pastor Rob had a powerful impact on Angela  and John.

“He was teaching from the book of Joshua and was talking to us a lot about trading the American dream for the Kingdom dream,” Angela recalls. “That’s right where we had been—kind of at a crossroad.”

God had already been teaching Angela about walking in faith despite fear, and the series gave words to what she and John were already experiencing: giving up the false “safety” of the American Dream for something greater.

“God had invited us into His dream for us, and we had taken steps toward that. Those sermons confirmed that we were on the right path, despite our fears and the unfamiliar territory,” she adds.

Waiting—and Praying

While the wait for their adoption continued, Angela would visit the adoption agency’s website and pray for the hard-to-place children on the “Waiting Children” list. These were either older boys and girls or younger children with special needs that made placements more challenging.

Isaac enjoying a restaurant meal in China

One two-year-old became a special focus of prayer. Angela felt drawn to a little boy who had a huge grin and irresistible dimples, and was blind. Again, fear wrestled with faith. “We had said yes regarding adoption,” Angela says. “Now . . . special needs?

“Eventually,” she says, “we asked for a little more information about Isaac, and God seemed to confirm that he was to be ours.”

The Raskes switched their paperwork to the special-needs program—and quickly learned the careful process of adopting a child with special needs involved an extensive review of medical files, the development of  a rehabilitation and nurture plan,  and an approval process for the adoptive family.

Through that process, they sought the advice of an international adoption doctor, their own pediatrician, and other professionals—but through it all, Angela says, “we knew Isaac was ours. We were just exercising due diligence and building a team to bring him home.”

In 2008, about five months after they started the process of adopting Isaac, they traveled to China to welcome him into their family.

Isaac, age 8

The Impact of Foster Care

A special part of Isaac’s story is that in his earliest years, he had been given the wonderful gift of a loving Chinese foster family. While most Chinese children waiting for adoption live in orphanages run by the government, Isaac had been placed with a foster family because of his blindness.

John and Angela have seen the incredible benefits of the love that family poured into Isaac’s life as they nurtured him for his first year and a half.

“His foster family sent us a box of pictures of him, and his foster mother wrote me a long letter. The love in what his foster mother wrote was palpable,” Angela says. “The person who translated it said, ‘There are many tears on these pages.’

“We’ve always felt gratitude for that family, and Isaac will benefit his whole life from what they gave him. I never got to meet them personally, but I was able to write and thank them and occasionally send photos and updates on Isaac’s progress.”

A Connection Continents Away

It was Angela’s gratitude for Isaac’s foster family that fueled a very special cross-cultural experience several years later.

An invitation to be part of a GO Team to Costa Rica in March of last year—to serve alongside WBC missionaries Phil and Jill Aspegren in their ministry to vulnerable children—was both attractive and seemingly impossible for Angela. It was a wonderful opportunity to see firsthand how the Aspegrens’ ministry, Casa Viva, was bringing the concept of foster care to a part of the world where it was virtually unknown.

But with three children at home, Angela found that the logistics of getting away for over a week seemed overwhelming. Beyond that, a second very expensive international adoption was in the works, and the money to pay for the trip to Costa Rico just wasn’t there. But God provided on both counts, and Angela became part of a team of seven women headed to Costa Rica.

“I went with an eagerness to rub shoulders with these missionaries and the pioneer foster parents who were doing God’s work on behalf of children in need. I wanted to learn from them. I didn’t know what I had to offer, but I was honored to go and see what God was doing there.”

While in Costa Rica the team did a lot of small projects—including tons of painting, Angela says—and hosted two special events, one a luncheon for foster moms, where the team cared for the children and freed the moms for a crafting opportunity and a time of inspiration and encouragement.

Throughout the week, the Aspegrens had gotten to know Angela, and learned about Isaac’s adoption. When they heard about his experience in foster care they invited Angela to share her story with the Casa Viva foster moms—to thank them on behalf of the foster children in their care.

“I’d never had the opportunity to thank Isaac’s foster family in person,” Angela said, “to look them in the face and express my gratitude and tell them all the ways they changed his life. So, with the help of Annabel Garza, who translated for me, I shared the impact Isaac’s foster parents had on his life and expressed my deep gratitude for those Casa Viva foster parents. None of what they do is wasted. That’s true in China or Costa Rica or here in the United States.

Angela (far right) with members of the Costa Rica GO Team and some of the national women with whom they served

“I told them how children like Isaac are able to bond, love well, and become part of adoptive families—because of the love and care they received when they were part of foster families like theirs. Isaac is able to love well because his foster family loved him well.

“The foster mothers cried, and I cried. It was a powerful moment for all of us,” Angela said.

She came away from her GO Team experience with a deep appreciation for Casa Viva and for what Phil and Jill Aspegren are doing to change the face of care for orphans in Central America. “I was so impressed by their foster families, who were amazing, but also by their staff of people—psychologists and social workers and others—who are very good at what they do and who are passionate about their work on behalf of children in desperate need.”

Sharing a Passion 

Angela was increasingly eager to share her passion about adoption and foster care. “I knew that in a church this big I couldn’t be the only one looking around for information about these opportunities to get involved in meeting the needs of vulnerable kids.” she says. “I think there was always a desire to get together with other families who shared an interest in adoption and foster care, but when we first brought Isaac home, we were thrust into learning how to raise a child who’s blind and were dealing with a series of surgeries for Isaac. We didn’t have energy to start anything else.”

Angela Raske with a Casa Viva child.

So when Angela heard about an adoption-related activity at WBC in the fall of 2011, she was eager to be part of it. “I wasn’t personally acquainted with Sue Mitchell, the volunteer leader of the group, or Local Impact Pastor Chris McElwee, who was overseeing its launch, but I basically banged on the door until they let me in,” Angela adds with a smile. Not long after, Sue and Angela became co-leaders of the newly formed Adoption and Foster Care Ministry at WBC, jointly organized by the Local Impact and Children’s ministries.

With the recent adoption of infant twins, Sue has stepped back from that leadership role, and Angela now leads with the assistance of Toby and Murphy Meisenheimer, who have experience in Safe Families, foster care, and adoption.

“Our purpose is to provide connection and encouragement and equip people who have a heart for the vulnerable child, whether that’s through adoption, foster care, Safe Families, or other support measures,” she explains. “I don’t think everyone’s called to have a child in their home in this way, but I know how life changing it has been for me. I want to offer others a safe, non-judgmental place to explore these opportunities.”

Having welcomed Isaac into their family, the Raskes can’t imagine not having followed where God was leading. Today, with their adoption of a second child from China approved, they are eager to learn the identity of the little one—likely a girl—who will become the next addition to their family.

“God does not invite us to a life that is perfect or easy. He invites us to lose our false ideas about what makes life ‘good’ and find our true purpose and fulfillment in Him. The life He has for us is far richer and deeper than ‘perfect or easy’ can ever offer, and it starts with our own adoption: ‘When the right time came, God sent his Son . . . so that he could adopt us as his very own children.’”     (Galatians 4:4–5, NLT).

Our adoption was transformational for our family. We immediately became a conspicuous adoptive family, by which I mean that when you look at our family, there is obvious cultural diversity. We also became a conspicuous special-needs family. Because of that, our children have grown more accepting and more comfortable with people who come from a different story—whether because of a disability or an adoption or just differences in general.

Adoption has given Angela a new understanding of the Gospel. “Adoption is not just a social-justice solution that we came up with. It is God’s idea. It’s at the heart of the Gospel,” she says. “God didn’t just save us and give us Jesus’ righteousness. He said, ‘I’m also going to make you my child and give you everything that goes along with that. I’m going to give you My name. I’m going to make you a coheir—a sibling—with Christ. Adoption has deepened my understanding of what it means for me to be a daughter of God and a coheir with Christ.

“It has also deepened my understanding of what it means to be a parent and love my children. Before we brought Isaac home, one day I had this thought: Lord, what if I can’t love a child that’s not born from my womb as much as I love the two kids I’ve given birth to? That wouldn’t be fair to a child.

“And I sensed God saying, ‘That thing [love] you are doing with your other two kids, do you think that is all you doing that? That’s not you; that’s me.’ And He just kind of laughed at me, as if to say, Don’t you get it? Parental love was My idea from the start. No matter how our children come to us, we love them because of and through Him.

Philip and Jill Aspegren

Philip and Jill Aspegren, Serving in Costa Rica with Casa Viva

WBC Missionaries Phil and Jill Aspegren are the heart and soul of the Casa Viva ministry in Costa Rica, where they are spearheading a movement to connect children in need of a safe place to sleep with local families and churches. The ultimate goal of this “family-based model” is an expanded spectrum of care, ranging from biological family reunification to foster care to permanent adoption.

Throughout Latin America, the traditional pattern has been to care for children in institutional settings, using out-of-country funds,” Philip said. “Casa Viva is the only program in Costa Rica that is placing at-risk children into local families. We think local Christian families can become the number one solution for children in our region.”

Here’s how Phil describes the three elements that are central to the “DNA” of Casa Viva’s 11-year-old ministry:

1. Connecting children to families. “We believe that children grow best in families. Our desire is to place children with individual families and make sure that at least one adult forms a solid relationship with each child.”
2. Engaging local churches. “In developing nations, churches can become the solution for the children of their country. Our goal is to engage families from local churches and provide the tools, resources, and support structures they need so they can open their homes and receive one or two children.”
3. Finding permanent solutions based in families. “We are working to deepen and widen the spectrum of care, all with the goal of keeping children close to family and community. We begin by working to reunite children with their biological family network if at all possible. If reunification is not an option, we seek adoption or a long-term foster-care solution for each child.”

In just a decade since that model was introduced, Casa Viva has developed a network of thirty churches in Costa Rica with families who are engaging on behalf of children and opening their homes to at-risk children. A recent Casa Viva family event had more than 450 Costa Ricans in attendance.

While this is exciting, so is the fact that in 2014, the Aspegrens anticipate that 75 percent of Casa Viva’s funding will come from within Costa Rica. The national Costa Rican churches are recognizing their role in the care of children and families. They are responding to the overwhelming need by working to become the first and primary solution—and other Latino countries are taking notice! Ministries and organizations in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic are being trained by Casa Viva so they can introduce this Christian response to at-risk children in their countries, contextualizing it to their own settings.

Puente del Pueblo Case Manager, Irene Owens, with Timber Lake resident Laura

At Puente del Pueblo, staff and volunteers actively seek out ways to plant and tend seeds of God’s grace and love in the lives of West Chicago residents. Puente’s director, Matthew McNiel, imagines faith development as a metaphor of gardening rather than of hunting. “We take the long view, commit for the long haul,” he says. “We plant seeds in many different avenues and watch to see which come to life.”

A woman named Laura is just one example of this patient soul-tending. When her family moved to the Timber Lake apartments almost four years ago, she noticed flyers advertising summer day camps and enrolled her two school-aged children. That was the beginning of her relationship with Puente del Pueblo.

When the school year began, Laura started ESL classes, and her daughters joined Puente del Niño (after-school tutoring for children) and Puente del Futuro (the after-school program for teens). Through these programs, Laura saw her girls improve at school and learn how to be disciplined, make good decisions, and communicate well with their parents. They developed strong relationships with Puente’s staff and volunteers, and when Laura enrolled them in the Christian education classes, they learned how to study the Bible.

When Laura was asked what other needs she had, she expressed interest in a Bible study for herself. That was how she met Puente’s Timber Lake case manager, Irene Owens, who began meeting with Laura regularly for Bible studies.

Laura had always attended Mass but without understanding what it was all about. “There was something in me longing to learn about God. With Irene, I began to read small passages, but they had such big meaning. Something began to move in me, in my spirit. Sometimes,” Laura recalls, “I felt it so strongly that I began to cry. It was a very different experience for me. Irene was praying with me, and she was giving herself to me in a special way. I began to understand and see something in the Bible and in my life that I had not had the chance to look at before.”

The impact on Laura was clear to Irene. “It has been amazing to be part of this, because God opened her eyes and touched her. She has been very careful with her decision. One day she prayed ‘God, prepare my heart for the day that I receive you.’”

The two women continued to study weekly, and Irene remembers the day she asked Laura, “What will you do with Jesus?” It was a powerful moment for them both.

“Now I understand that God is life, that when you give everything to God, you receive everything,” Laura said. “I received Him here with Irene, received Him with my heart.”

Many Seeds Being Planted

Laura’s interaction with Puente is similar to the experiences of other families, with the first “seeds” planted through Puente’s summer camps and after-school programs.

By investing in children, Puente staff members see entire families touched. Some children learn about God through Puente del Niño or Puente del Futuro and then take the initiative to ask their parents if the family can attend church and learn more. Because of the relationship between Puente and Wheaton Bible Church, Iglesia del Pueblo (WBC’s Spanish-speaking congregation) is often where they first land.

Wil Franco, Iglesia’s youth pastor and Puente del Futuro Christian-education teacher, has worked with a number of the teens from these families. Compared to “church kids,” he says, most “Puente kids” know little about the Bible, about the Gospel, or about Jesus.

Laura and Irene meet for their weekly Thursday-afternoon Bible study.

“Anytime you teach them from the Bible,” he says, “they are blown away by it, often hearing these things for the first time—wow! They are blown away by the concept of grace and are shocked to see that God’s Word addresses their daily lives.”

Another major opportunity to plant seeds in the community comes during times of crisis. This winter, when a part of the polar vortex moved farther south than usual and brought dangerously low temperatures and wind chills to the area, a regional power outage left many Timber Lake apartments without electricity or heat. During this crisis—as with the 2012 apartment fire that forced 24 families from their homes—Puente partnered with Timber Lake management, reaching out to affected residents with tangible care in the name of Christ.

Irene speaks for all the Puente staff when she talks about how she embraces her work at Puente as an opportunity to glorify God. “As I serve the people, I give the glory to God and not to myself or Puente,” she says. “The community knows that they can count on us, but I tell them that it is God’s love they are seeing. ‘God did not forget you in this crisis.’ ‘God loves you.’ ‘God loves the immigrants.’ ‘God loves the single mother.’ When I offer an assistance check or a space heater to someone, I say, ‘With this help, know that God loves you.’”

Irene is also planting seeds as she has opportunity to teach and lead various classes and groups of women. “I try to communicate to them that God has loved them since they were little girls, and He knows their hearts as adults longing to learn. I intentionally, persistently tell them that God loves them, and that God put in the heart of church members to give money and time to create these programs, and into our hearts to meet and teach and love them.”

Personal relationships, built through time invested in the community, provide still more opportunities for Puente’s seed-planting ministry.

A Patient Process

One family has seen Puente’s steady relationship with them as they struggle with the realities of cancer, disabilities, and hardship. A family member confided that although he does not follow Christ, he has noticed something he can’t ignore: when he was abandoned as a child in Mexico and had nothing to eat, it was Christians who cared for him. Now, as an adult in another country, he and his family find Christians once more visiting, supporting, and loving them through hard times.

Wil Franco has also witnessed the impact of long-term faithfulness. “I’ve noticed over the past years that the journey can be more significant than the decisions.

“We’ve had several kids pray a salvation prayer but then seen no evidence of it in their lives. There are other Puente kids who have taken longer, but when they get it, their lives change.”

He says it can be tempting to aim for what he calls “microwaved Christians,” made immediately with little process or patience. But that is not God’s way.

“He is more patient than we are, interested in long-term change rather than quick decisions” Wil says. “There is a fruit that comes from being present in someone’s life for the long haul. There are many I know who have learned to respect our message even while disagreeing with it, because they have seen that we don’t walk out on them, because we haven’t budged.”

Irene remembers what it was like to be on this journey herself, to have seeds of God’s grace lying dormant in her spirit. “I didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, but people who loved Jesus received me into their homes. I continued walking in the dark, dark night of my life. But years later when I looked back, I saw a very long and dark road with a tiny little light in the midst: the opportunity to be given a home when I did not have a home, to receive love when no one loved me.

“God used Christians,” she says, “to put that little light in the middle of my dark night. Here at Puente, it is possible that in the dark night of many people in these communities, though we cannot see the fruit right now, they may one day turn and see that the light and love of God was present in their lives.”

When these seeds bring life and bear fruit within the community, as with Laura and her family, there is great rejoicing among the faithful laborers at Puente.

“I cannot describe the joy that you feel when God is transforming a heart, a life. There is nothing in the world like that” reflects Irene. “Christians who are not actively testifying to God’s life-changing power are missing something very beautiful. It is this joy that is my reward, the confirmation from the Holy Spirit that I am doing the right thing. Please pray to God for more avenues to plant seeds and reach people with the message of God’s love and grace.”

The WBC Filipino Bible Study group gathers to celebrate its tenth anniversary.

10 Years of God’s Blessing and Grace

One Sunday in February 2002, the Lord led us to visit Wheaton Bible Church, then on Main Street in Wheaton. We were looking for a new church and a new youth group for our son, Michael. We were planning to visit other churches, but the Lord had a different plan.

We soon transitioned from visitors to reluctant greeters as the Lord paved the way for us to meet other Filipinos who were “church hopping.” The first Filipinos we met were sisters Cristina Pajo Skonning and April Yambot. A few weeks later, they brought another sister, Tess Tolosa.

As we were greeting people at the Atrium one Sunday, a Tagalog-speaking Caucasian named David Salstrom approached us. Dave and his wife, Vera, had been missionaries to the Philippines for thirty-seven years—living there for longer than most of the Filipinos we knew!

It seemed as if every week the Lord brought more Filipinos—both individuals and families—to Wheaton Bible Church.

It had not been our plan to start a Filipino group, since we were already part of the Connections Adult Community and Anna was leading a women’s neighborhood Bible study in Winfield. However, the Lord led us to start a Bible study group at our home, with Dave Salstrom as our teacher. Our first meeting, on October 3, 2003, had about ten of us in attendance as Dave Salstrom taught about sin and God’s grace.

Through the years, the Lord answered prayers for the salvation of loved ones and friends. We’ve seen some in the group commit their lives to the Lord; a number have been baptized, and we have witnessed God at work in other ways, as many have experienced spiritual growth.

When the group grew to an average attendance of twenty-five to thirty people and outgrew our living room, the Lord provided a new place to meet. In February 2010, Wheaton Bible Church opened its door for our group to meet on the church campus in Lower 55. That move encouraged more Filipinos in our group to attend worship services regularly at WBC.

Since both Filipinos and non-Filipino friends and family attend, our study is conducted in English. Today, fifty-two people are part of our group. Dave Salstrom still teaches a Bible study one Friday night each month. We also meet once a month at someone’s home for prayer and fellowship, and we also have an annual picnic and a men’s fishing trip.

Looking back over ten years of God’s grace and blessing, we are looking forward to what the Lord will accomplish in the next ten years. To God be the glory!

It was the 2:00 am phone call every parent dreads.

Chris and Kathy Pelkey’s twenty-year-old daughter, Bethany, a college junior, away at school in Davenport, Iowa, had been hit by a car and killed.

That tragic loss took the couple, and the other two members of their blended family, to a dark and devastated place.

For Kathy, especially, Bethany’s death brought on a crisis of faith. She had been raised in the Catholic church and had continued to be involved in the church for much of her life. Even before the tragic loss of her firstborn, she had sought spiritual connection in prayer services led by a priest who had also become a friend. But the loss of Bethany, Kathy’s daughter and Chris’s stepdaughter, forced her to a place of deep spiritual crisis.

“One day, not long after we lost Bethany,” she said, “I remember standing in my kitchen and telling friends about how I was feeling as if I was just holding on, as if I were being pulled down into this black hole underneath me and holding on to the edge—so close to just letting go. God was either going to help me out of it, or I was going to fall into that pit.

“I chose to go with God,” she said.

That decision didn’t take away Kathy’s pain, but it was the first step on a faith journey toward hope and healing that continues to this day.

Chris, too, was raised in a family that considered itself Catholic, but he found little meaning in religion. He had no interest in the church in his teen and young-adult years, but as a single dad raising a young daughter, he felt the need for a church connection in her life.

Dealing with Loss

Chris and Kathy were both single parents when they met 18 years ago, each with a first-grader at the same Catholic elementary school. The girls were friends, and their parents met at the sixth birthday party of Chris’s daughter, Amanda. In the weeks that followed, a friendship grew between Chris and Kathy, and a year later they were married.

The blended family, including the two girls and Kathy’s younger son, had formed a solid unit as the years passed, and all were badly shaken by Bethany’s death. But unlike many couples whose marriages are torn apart by that kind of devastating tragedy, Chris and Kathy pulled together to find the help they needed to work through their loss.

They first sought support in a group for grieving parents, but after a couple of sessions realized that many who spoke at the meetings had found no healing—in some cases many years after their loss. The Pelkeys found it difficult to listen as those parents returned week after week to express their anger at the person who caused the accident or at inadequacies of the police investigation or other aspects of their loss and pain.

“There was no God in those meetings,” Kathy says, “so we went looking for something else.”

They’d heard about GriefShare, and Chris recalls how they went on the GriefShare website, where they learned that a group met at Wheaton Bible Church—near their Winfield home and right in the West Chicago neighborhood where Kathy grew up.

Their GriefShare experience, and the curriculum the group used, was just what they needed. “It wasn’t just everybody sitting around a table talking about their loss,” Kathy says. “We learned about what the Bible says about grief and how God meets us in the middle of our pain.”

At that time, their grief was fresh, and GriefShare offered Chris and Kathy insight about what they were going through, helping them through those early stages of grieving and preparing them for what they would experience in the days ahead.

Chris and Kathy Pelkey with Mary Ellen and Duane Martin

Intrigued

As they were on the church campus for those Monday-night meetings, Kathy says, “we started looking around. And it looked really interesting.”

They wondered what services at the church were like, so when a friend and her husband agreed to join them to check it out, all four of them came the next Sunday morning.

“A lot of it,” Kathy says, “was the hand of God, because everything just kind of fell into place.”

The friend, who was also visiting for the first time, recognized one of the people serving Communion. It was Duane Martin, who had attended a grad-school class with her.

Duane’s wife, Mary Ellen, recalls, “It just so ‘happened’ that Duane and I were Communion servers that morning and that Cindy, the woman from Duane’s masters class, noticed him.”

As soon as the service was over, the Pelkeys and their friends sought out Duane.

“We told him what a great place this was, and about our experience in GriefShare. We also told him how much we had enjoyed the service,” Kathy recalls, “and how we were looking for something new.”

Chris remembers his first impression of the sermon they heard that day. “I’d never gotten anything like that from church,” Chris said about Pastor Rob’s sermon. “He spent like twenty minutes explaining just two verses and the whole history behind them.”

As Chris and Kathy talked with the Martins that morning, Duane mentioned the Alpha class. Chris and Kathy were intrigued, and when Duane responded to their questions with a personal invitation, they accepted.

Kathy remembers thinking that it was such a big church but they felt so welcomed.

Exploring Alpha

Not only did Duane invite the Pelkeys to Alpha; he and Mary Ellen also attended the Thursday evening class right along with them.

As their table moved into the discussion time that evening, the first question for their group was, Have you had something happen in your life that changed your life forever? 

“I was stunned,” Mary Ellen said, “and so sorry when Chris mentioned their daughter’s death.”

Chris and Kathy’s experience in Alpha brought even deeper healing as they saw the bigger picture of God’s grace, knowing that even in their grieving,  God is with them.

Although Chris was raised with something of a religious tradition, he points to an evening at Alpha as the time he realized that salvation was not a “works thing” and he prayed, entering into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

The combination of what the Pelkeys were learning at Alpha and the teaching on Sunday mornings was having a powerful impact on their lives. “We’ve learned more in the three years we’ve been here than in our previous lifetimes,” Kathy says. “It seems like I just can’t wait to read something more and dive into it a little deeper. The fun thing about a relationship with Jesus is that there’s always more to know and more to learn.”

New Friends

Mary Ellen is thankful for these new friends that God has given them. “It has been incredible to see the transformation in their lives over these years,” she said. “God gave them such a hunger to know Him.”

She adds, “I’ve seen Chris and Kathy say yes to God and then immediately want to tell others about Jesus. Once their first session of Alpha was over, they went through the course again—this time leading a table themselves—and now they lead a Beyond Alpha Bible study group. They get disciple making.”

“Today, we have an ‘after-Alpha’ Bible study that meets at our house every Thursday,” Kathy said. “I call them our Alpha babies—although some of them are close to our ages—and I tell Duane and Mary Ellen these are their ‘Alpha grandchildren’ in that group.”

Because of what they’ve been through, Kathy and Chris have had many opportunities to share with others. “It gives us the perfect platform to talk about what God has done in our lives—that happens a lot,” Kathy said, “and God gives me the words to say.”

She also finds that a lot of people will ask her to pray for them, but she’s eager to tell them that they can pray themselves and have their own personal relationship with God. “You can talk to God personally,” I tell them, “and He listens.”

Kathy is thankful, too, for the Martins, who welcomed her and Chris that Sunday morning. “Duane and Mary Ellen have become good friends of ours,” Kathy says. “I am thankful for the way they shepherded us through Alpha and through our relationship with God—and it’s a continuing thing. We still talk to them and bounce things off of them. They don’t always have an easy answer, but most of the time they have pointed us to where we could find answers in God’s Word.”

There are still tough days as Kathy and Chris deal with the loss of their daughter, but over and over again, God has affirmed that He is with them in their pain.

“We aren’t seeking to understand why Bethany died. We’ll never, ever understand that,” Kathy admits. “But we do know that there is a bigger plan, and it’s our faith in God and His grace that’s holding us up through it all.

As her journey through loss has continued, Kathy has become more and more intimately acquainted with the God of all comfort, who gives her reminders of His love for her just when she needs it most.

“The sadness is still there,” Kathy says, “but the depth of the pain that I feel is the depth of the grace I’ve received.”

Andrea and Melanie

Melanie doesn’t recall the exact circumstances that drew her to the Hunger Team training that Sunday afternoon in 2011, but as the following days and weeks unfolded, it was clear that God had orchestrated a significant role for her in the lives of a young mom named Andrea and her three children—a role that was launched in that Sunday-afternoon workshop.

It was the very next day that Melanie got a call from the Hunger Team coordinator telling her that there had been several urgent phone messages from a mom who was asking for food to feed her family.

The First Meeting

Melanie agreed to follow up, and when she first showed up at Andrea’s front door—accompanied by Pam Moore, who joined her that day—they met a woman who needed friendship even more than she needed the box of kitchen staples they’d brought.

Andrea agrees with that assessment, admitting that her calls were as much a cry for help and connection as they were a request for food. Looking back, Andrea describes herself that day as “stuck.”

Not long before, she had walked away from the church where she grew up—a church, she says, that claimed to believe  in God but taught a lot  of things about Jesus  that aren’t in the Bible. Even so, leaving her family’s church had left  a serious void in her  life, and Andrea found herself in what she calls “a dark place.”

Andrea remembers the day when Melanie and Pam walked into her life. “They were warm and friendly,” Andrea says, “and Melanie invited me to visit the church. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she told me, ‘but we’d like to see you there.’ And then she invited the kids.”

Although Andrea wasn’t ready to go to church herself at that point, she was okay with her kids going to Sunday school. But after getting a second invitation a few weeks later, Andrea was ready to check it out.

“I remember the service being very peaceful—and the music was a nice surprise,” she said.

It was not long after that first visit that Melanie got a call from Andrea, who said that her daughter Angelina—then two-and-a-half years old—was very sick and they needed a ride to the doctor. There they learned that Angelina’s diagnosis was serious, and the little girl was transported by ambulance to the hospital emergency room.

Melanie and Pam, who brought a box of food—and much more—into the lives of Andrea and her family.

Throughout Angela’s hospitalization, Melanie, Pam, and others from the church became the kind of support system Andrea had never experienced—driving Andrea, who had no car, to be with her young daughter, and caring for the older children, keeping their lives on track. For a week, Melanie even took the two older kids into her home so Andrea could focus on the critical needs of her youngest.

During that crisis and in the weeks that followed, Melanie became acutely aware of the depth of Andrea’s spiritual need and her hunger to learn about God. When life settled down for Andrea, Melanie invited her to attend Alpha for Women on Wednesday mornings.

As she heard the talks at Alpha, Andrea says, “The message of the Cross became real to me.”

“That’s where I really saw the truth come together for Andrea—for her faith to really cement,” Melanie recalls.

One of Andrea’s fondest memories of that class is of the women she met at Alpha, women who readily responded to her eager questions and offered friendship in return. She also points to the lessons from the Alpha teacher, Lon Allison.

“They had us look in the Bible to find answers to our questions,” Andrea says, “and I was feeding and growing off all that information.”

Andrea followed up the Alpha course with a more in-depth Bible study called Beyond Alpha, where she continued to learn and grow.

As she experienced a new relationship with God, Andrea saw areas of life—including her parenting role—where she needed help. She was directed to the Monday night family support groups, where she joined the group for single parents while her son and two daughters participated in Caring for Kids.

They all looked forward to the family meal that begins each Monday evening, and what each of them experienced in their own groups brought some much-needed learning and healing—including the opportunity for each of the kids to talk about their feelings. Interaction with their adult leaders was also important, and those relationships continued even after the program was completed.

Andrea also remembers how valuable it was for her two older kids to write in the journals the program encourages. “Caring for Kids was really good for my kids,” Andrea recalls.

“It allowed them to deal with some of their emotions about what had been going on in our lives.”

Melanie, with Andrea, and her three children, Brianna (14), Angelina (5), and Alex (12)

For Andrea’s son, Alex, then in his preteen years, the program was literally life-changing. He was really struggling at the time, and in his group he found support from his leader and also from the other boys. This included a beautiful time of prayer one Monday evening when the boys prayed with Alex as he made a personal decision to accept God’s gift of salvation through Jesus Christ.

In addition to the spiritual growth and healing happening in Andrea’s family, they also had the opportunity to see the love of God’s people in action as a CareFest team swooped in to their home for a day of painting, repairing, and caring for their living space. Shortly after, much-needed furniture was donated for their use.

To Melanie, the donation of furniture—at just the right moment, from a family right in Andrea’s neighborhood—was another sign that God’s hand was evident in the entire situation.

“Really,” Melanie says, “I knew from the very first call for a box of food that God had planned for me to be a part of all this—to be introduced to Andrea and to be there when her daughter was in the hospital and her other kids had no place to go, and all the rest.”

Andrea agrees. “God brought Melanie into my life,” she says, “someone I could really trust. I’ve never known people like this.”

When some really difficult circumstances piled up for Andrea in the months that followed, she was able to see God’s hand even in the toughest times.

Melanie remembers how those troubles drove Andrea deeper in her new faith.

“It was a time of real growth for you,” she reminded Andrea in a recent conversation, “in both reading and learning, and in prayer. Every time we met, your questions were going deeper too. We’d talk about how Jesus works today, and how that applied to what was going on in your life.”

Today Andrea is participating in Celebrate Recovery and is part of a small-group Bible study connected to that support ministry. Those programs, along with some of the new friends Andrea has made in the group, are helping her work through some issues she’s carried since her childhood and young-adult years.

“I’m peeling back layers and figuring out some important stuff,” she says. “I thought I would never be happy again, but God has given me back my smile.”

She’s also learning a new kind of dependence on God. “I can’t do this on my own. I know that now,” she says. “I can’t live for God without Him guiding and directing me.

“I felt so alone—even with three kids in the house and neighbors all around and family nearby. I remember Pastor Lon [Allison] saying in Alpha, ‘You might feel lonely sometimes, but you’re never alone.’

“I didn’t think I could have a life, and now I feel like I have everything,” Andrea adds, almost overwhelmed as she tries to list all the evidences of God’s touch on her life.

What began with a willingness to knock on a door with an offer of food and friendship has made an eternal difference in one family’s life. It’s a story that’s still evolving, Andrea says with a smile, “but it’s already got a really nice ending.”

Not too long ago, I was overwhelmed with life. I was a depressed single mom of three in need of stability and hope. I was on shaky ground and had lost my footing. During that time I tried to return to the religion of my childhood, but the emphasis on rules and works only led to more discouragement. I knew God was there, but He felt very far away. I kept praying for wisdom and guidance.

One day I called Wheaton Bible Church, asking for food from their Hunger Team. I now know what I didn’t fully realize then: I didn’t really want food as much as I wanted friendship and a chance to know God better. Soon after I made the phone call, two ladies from the church, Melanie and Pam, brought a box of staple goods to my door. It is not easy for me to trust people, but it did not take long to see that these women were sincere. Their direct, no-nonsense style of communication told me that they wanted the best for me and my children.

They invited us to church. At first I just sent the kids, but eventually the children’s comfort and enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and I joined them. Over time, the message of the Cross became real to me. I began to love the people at church and the atmosphere of personal growth. More and more I felt free from the condemning voice of the religion I had grown up in and realized how upside down my beliefs had been. Now I know that I don’t do good works to get saved or to earn God’s love. Instead, God saved me by His grace. I am thankful for that, and in response to His love, I want to do good things.

I know God is there to help me when I give Him the chance. He has proved that He is trustworthy—like a loving parent. Even when I fail, I fall into His loving arms.

I realize that God heard my prayers in the midst of my despair. I was lost—now I am found. I was in bondage—now I am free.

It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves,  it is the gift of God—so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in  Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.  —Ephesians 2:8–10

I grew up going to church—once on Wednesday and twice on Sunday. I went to Christian summer camp and Vacation Bible School. I knew all the stories about God, from Creation to Jesus. I remember saying the prayer to accept Christ as my Savior during summer camp one year when I was 10 years old. But I said it then only because the camp counselor wanted me to be sure I had asked Jesus to come into my heart. I said it, but it didn’t change me.

As I grew older, I continued to call myself a Christian. I tried not to get into too much trouble. I thought I was a pretty good person. I would pray when I needed something or when someone was sick. But the whole time I was really just making my own decisions and living my life the way I had thought was best—the way I wanted to.

When I was a junior in high school, my parents became missionaries overseas. I saw some miraculous things happening among the native tribes in Brazil: people coming to the Lord, healings, and miracles that couldn’t be explained in any way other than that they were miracles. But while that was all amazing to me, I still didn’t have a personal relationship with God. I never understood.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I was looking for a preschool for my oldest daughter. I hadn’t gone to church on a regular basis for about 18 years, but I was familiar with Wheaton Bible Church because my brother had attended there when he was a student at Wheaton College—back when the church building was located in downtown Wheaton.

Around that time I had started getting a nagging feeling that I really needed to start using my life for good outside my own little bubble. I wanted to help people and thought church was the best place for that. On top of that, I wanted to find a preschool for my daughter, one I could trust to care for her in the best possible way. When I met the preschool director, I felt a peace that this was the place for my daughter and also a place I could explore.

Tina at her Baptism, with Pastor Chris McElwee

I began going to every seminar offered and started attending church as many Sundays as I could. I was looking for answers. I always felt there was this roadblock or mountain I had to climb to “get to the other side” and be a “good” Christian. I desperately wanted to do that. I also desperately wanted friends who would understand what I was searching for—friends who wanted more out of the day-to-day lives we were living.

One of the preschool moms I had gotten to know suggested I go to Alpha. I went faithfully, and during one of the sessions, we were asked if we wanted to pray the prayer of salvation. I did, and my table leader prayed with me. That day I truly accepted what Christ had done for me. That’s when I knew it wasn’t about what I did, or how I acted, or what I could do for others. It was about what Christ had already done for me. I didn’t need to do anything else. He had done it all, and I had accepted that. I wanted to live my life for Jesus from that point on.

I still sin every day. That will be a part of me as long as I’m on this earth. But I now know that what the Bible says is real and trustworthy. I know that God sent His Son, Jesus, to die on the cross to save me from my sins. I know my relationship with Christ is real, because I became a different person.

My family saw the changes, and I started to talk about God more and more without feeling uneasy about it. And now, Wednesdays are my favorite day of the week, because I start out the morning in my Bible study group and end the day helping at Awana. God has also given me a desire to live the kind of life described in Colossians, which tells us, “Get rid of anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander and dirty language. Don’t lie to each other. . . . Clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. . . . And let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts” (Colossians 3:8–9, 12–13, 15, NLT).

I am still a sinner, and I will never be perfect, but now I want to live for Christ.