Our VisionIt is man’s privilege to proclaim the glory of God to the ends of the earth! Our family of five plans to be involved directly in this wonderful calling from our Lord. We’ve been preparing to be foreign missionaries for several years. It is our vision to be church-planters in a tribal setting that has not been previously exposed to the Gospel. We believe God has led us to plant churches in Papua New Guinea (PNG). We think the Lord may be leading us to the Eastern Sepik region. We know God will reveal His will more specifically as our plans progress and the time gets closer. After a short-term trip in March ’09 to this area in PNG, Matt developed a love and great interest for the people there. People frequently begged Matt to return to them to bring their village the “Good News” about Jesus Christ. Even people in an unreached tribe wanted us to come and live with them in order to teach them the Bible. They do not understand the significance of their request, but they know that the Word missionaries bring is life-giving. There are still hundreds of tribes in PNG where the name of Jesus Christ is not known and has never been proclaimed. The harvest certainly is great and the laborers are indeed few! Our vision has correlated with the vision of To Every Tribe and the Apostle Paul: (Rom. 15:20-21) to bring Christ to a place with no foundation in Christ.
Dr. John Piper described well the purpose of mission. Piper says, “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.” (Let the Nations Be Glad, p. 17) We also want God to be glorified through our lives and ministry. We know that God uses the “foolishness of preaching” to bring about faith and repentance within a regenerated person (1 Cor. 1:21). We are so excited to be the means God uses to bring salvation to His people! In preparing for foreign missions, we have learned to be more useful to God in the area where we live now.
It is our desire and prayer to leave for PNG as soon as the Lord builds a team for us to go with, and as soon as we have the financial support we need to go. It is our intention to serve in PNG for as long as the Lord wills. While we wait for Him to build our team and funding, we pray that we can glorify His name in southern Texas and wherever else He may lead us in the meantime.
Our Call to Mission and Progress
We were first called to the foreign mission field in the fall of 2005. The Lord used other missionaries from PNG to encourage us to go serve there. In fact, we were told outright that God wanted us to go there. We then took a year to search for God’s will in scripture and prayer. God confirmed through His word, experiences, our desire, and other people that we are called to foreign missions. We sold our home, paid off our college debt with the proceeds, and Matt attended seminary on-line to prepare. We drove from Maine to South Texas to attend the Center for Pioneer Church Planting with To Every Tribe. We are certain that the Bible and missions training we received will prepare us to effectively share Christ with people in animistic cultures. Matt went to PNG for the month of March, where he ministered to a tribe in the mountains and to two tribes in the Sepik swampland. Now that Matt has graduated from the CPCP with significant training in Scripture, theology, church history, missiology, culture, team-building, and many other relevant topics, we hope to form a mission team and move to PNG for three months of language/culture training. After that our goal is to live in a remote village where we will, Lord willing, proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a people who need to hear, but have never heard.
Matt’s Testimony
I grew up in Salem, Massachusetts in a Roman Catholic family, not understanding salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone. Then God brought me to a saving knowledge of Himself when Leanne challenged me with the gospel in college. This led to me reading Scripture for the first time. I quickly adjusted my beliefs to what I was reading in the Bible. Many of the things I learned contradicted the teachings and traditions of the church I grew up in, and so I found another. I received Jesus as Savior at age nineteen, during the beginning of my sophomore year of college. Leanne and I went on two short-term mission trips and got involved with Christian Intervarsity in college. We were married before our senior year of college. We grew spiritually through helpful pastors and friends, the short-term mission trips, hardships, and most of all, through studying Scripture. Upon graduating college I began a seven-year career as a crisis-counselor. This became a great ministry as I learned how to better share my faith with struggling clients. Leanne and I settled in central Maine and planned to raise our family there, but over the past three years, my wife and I have been realizing God’s unshakable claim on our lives to be His ambassadors to a foreign people. That’s when I attended seminary for one year and we sold our assets to leave for mission training in Texas. The training and mission trips to Mexico and Papua New Guinea have been greatly used by God to confirm our calling and to encourage us. We count it a pure and undeserved privilege that God has called us to vocational mission work. We’ve been married for eight years, and have been blessed with three daughters and a baby on the way. It is our desire to be well-pleasing to the Lord in all things.
Leanne’s Testimony
I grew up in a home in which my parents taught me about Christ from the time I was a young girl. Unfortunately, a split in the church we were attending caused my parents to leave the church and never return again during my young life. Though my parents were passionate about the importance of believing in the Lord, they didn’t regularly study their Bible or encourage me to, so I grew up believing in a God whom I didn’t know. I had a desire to know Him, though, and when I began attending The University of Maine at Farmington in 1997, I also began participating in worship services at a local Baptist church. I didn’t see the significance of reading my Bible until my father encouraged me to search the scriptures for truth. He recommended that I begin with the book of John. It was when I began reading the scriptures that the Lord revealed to me aspects of the Christian faith that I had never known prior to reading the scriptures.
During those first few years of college I also rubbed elbows with a religious group which seemed very godly to me. Though I thought I was a good Christian girl, they were quick to point out that I was extremely ungodly and most definitely on my way to hell. Though I have since come to regard this group as a cult, I believe that the Lord worked through them to bring me to see my sin and repent of it. I can’t pinpoint a moment when this happened, but I’m certain that over my first two years of college the Lord brought me to fear Him, to know Him, and to love Him.
In the spring of 1998 I was baptized at the Baptist church I had been attending, and also journeyed with my brethren there to the Dominican Republic for two short term missions trips. The Lord drew me nearer to Himself during these visits to the Dominican, and I believe it was then that He first began to plant a desire for foreign mission work in my heart.
Prayer Requests
Pray for a team that we might join to work and live together in PNG. To Every Tribe has taught us to build a team of three units for the best results. A couple or single missionary is one unit.
Pray for financial support for our journey to PNG and the monthly expenses of living there.
Pray that God will go out before us to prepare hearts to receive the gospel and be saved.
Pray that we will be faithfully serving our Lord on and off the field for His glory.
Pray that the Lord will prepare our hearts for the job He has set before us.
Family Information
We are both from the New England area, Matt from Massachusetts and Leanne from Maine. Almost our entire family lives in New England. We have three daughters; Jacy, (6) Julia, (3) and Tabitha (18 months). We are also expecting a baby in November. We are currently homeschooling Jacy, who is a kindergartener this year. We hope to continue to home school on the field.
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