Steve’s Testimony

I was raised in Kenya, East Africa where my parents served as missionaries. I accepted the Lord as my Savior when I was 3 years old. My parents told me that I came into their room crying that my uncle was going to hell, and they led me in the salvation prayer that night. I always knew that there was a call on my life, then at the age of 16 I felt a specific call to missions and made plans to serve in Kenya as a missionary. I wanted to help open up unreached areas of the country to the gospel.

After high school in Kenya I went to LeTourneau College in Longview, TX where I earned an engineering degree. During that time I also found my life partner, Sally, and we married at the end of my junior year. She had been preparing herself for the mission field and we both knew that God put us together.

In 1973 Sally and I, together with our daughter Rachel, arrived in Kenya and after a few months of language school began to work in the northern frontier among the Rendille Tribe. Our initial ministry was to develop the infrastructure for a mission station; this included the buildings and maintaining a regular water supply. Our son Philip was born during our first term on the field.

Over the following years we planted several churches and established a school for training indigenous evangelists to reach the nomadic people. We also helped open up several other mission stations and dispensaries among the Turkana and Shangila tribes and served briefly on the Comoro Islands where we worked to get a hospital up and running. Although we were seen as effective by the mission board, we were deeply troubled at our failure to see truly transformed lives. It all seemed so powerless.

In 1978 after a lot of searching we received the baptism in the Holy Spirit and began to see some awesome things happen in the ministry. Things that had been difficult before, now became normal as we saw miracles and many salvations. After 18 months we were called in to the mission headquarters and told that we must either sign a statement that we would never again speak in tongues in public or we would be forced to resign from the mission and leave the country.

By now we were “ruined” and had no choice but to resign. The group who had been instrumental in introducing us to the Holy Spirit was based in England and, after a short visit to family and friends in the U.S, we moved to England to work with a five-fold ministry team. We had no clear direction other than to find a group of people who were serious about the Holy Spirit and return to the mission field as soon as possible.

We soon realized that the Lord had other plans; He was more interested in changing us than in our ministry. We were introduced to a true spiritual father and found great joy in having someone who cared speak into our lives and ministry. As a result of this training we found much greater release in effective ministry.

During the last three years in England we planted a multiracial church in the inner-city of Leeds. We moved into the center of the most deprived area of the city and saw a great church emerge which represented the incredibly diverse community. Many gave their lives to the Lord, including several Muslims who saw the racial diversity in the church and responded to Christ. As soon as this work was established, the Lord spoke to us that it was time to return to the United States, because revival was coming and we were to be based there to be a part of it.

So in mid 1991 we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to be part of a church plant. Over the next two years through some great difficulty, we saw a growing church established.  While in Atlanta we began to get a real burden for training the next generation. Up to this point it had been about us doing the work and training a few leaders to take it over. Now we hungered to train many others it do it themselves and so we began to work on a master’s degree at ORU, believing that we would need a degree in the future to be able to do the training that was on our hearts.

In 1995 God sovereignly moved us to Springfield, MO where we planted Dayspring, the church we now serve as founding pastors. We have seen God bless and establish a wonderful group of people and believe that this is the base church from which we will work. Dayspring is a revival center with a passion to live in continuous awakening. Healings and miracles have become a normal part of the revival culture, and we live to nurture the awakening in the body of Christ.

The group of ministries that we were a part of in England, now called ICLC, has become a network of several thousand churches in many nations. My wife and I serve on both the national and international leadership teams and travel extensively doing conferences and leadership training. We are also a part of the Global network advisory board and foresee an ever-increasing role within the Global network over the coming years. Randy has become a real spiritual father in the area of the revival and awakening, and we look forward to discovering all God has for us in this relationship.