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What is CTEN?
CTEN is a servant organization which helps missionaries fulfill the unique vision God has given them. CTEN partners with the missionary’s home church to send them to the field. Then, through administrative support CTEN gets funds to the missionary, provides accountability, counsel, and helps the missionary remain on the field. Through pastoral care CTEN helps them be more sustainable, remain effective, and be healthy while there.
Missionaries Serving Missionaries
Most all of CTEN’s home staff raise their own support just as each CTEN Field Missionary does. This allows CTEN to keep overhead to a bare minimum and the vast majority of each donor’s contribution to reach the intended missionary and project.

Pastoral Care
A core value of CTEN is caring for God’s most valued resource, His people. A Pastoral Care couple personally stays in touch with each missionary from the time of their application, throughout their time on the field and through re-entry to the home culture if the missionary leaves the field. This pastoral care couple works with the missionary’s sending church to provide counsel, prayer, and support regular onsite visits to the field of service.
God has given us a passion and a vision to encourage others to experience life beyond themselves and witness the impact on the world.
We have now been given the opportunity to expand that passion as we begin a new adventure providing Pastoral Care for all US-Based CTEN Missionaries.
For Missionaries, the critical nature of the spiritual, physical, emotional, and financial health is seen in the fact that it is estimated in 2024 that over 47% of missionaries are leaving the field within the first 5 years!
The experiences Shirley and I have shared over 45 years of marriage and ministry, inside and outside the church, as well as in over 30 countries on 5 continents has prepared us for this next season. The relationships that we have formed over the years have uniquely prepared us to come alongside the 50+ missionary couples, families, and singles based here in the US and provide friendship, encouragement, support, and accountability, throughout their highs and lows in their ministries. These missionaries serve in a wide variety of ministries from international student ministry on university campus’, to serving the less fortunate in the intercity, supporting refugees from around the world, to soccer outreaches, as well as missionaries based here in the States that travel overseas, like Shirley and I have been doing for years.
The opportunity to multiply ourselves exponentially as we minister to and care for all these missionaries will only be done through divine intervention as we partner together and obey the calling that is on our lives in service to those to are obeying the call of God on their lives and ministries.
Our vision is the be the primary relational and spiritual support for CTEN missionaries based in the US.
As their first point of contact, we are encouragers, advocates, spiritual shepherds, and most of all, trusted friends. Our calling is to understand and live out the pastoral vision of CTEN by shepherding God's people, walking with missionaries and their families through the highs and lows of life and ministry.
As we continue our longstanding relationships with our partners in West Africa, we continue to work with Church Planting and building improvement/repair projects.

Matthew 28:16-20 (AMP)
"...'All authority (all power of absolute rule) in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations [help the people to learn of Me, believe in Me, and obey My words], ...and lo, I am with you always,... even to the end of the age.'”
Mark 16:15
“Go into the world. Go everywhere and announce the Message of God’s good news to one and all."
Living Beyond is a ministry founded on the assumption that all believers in Jesus are Called to missions. We are all Called to Pray, Give, and GO. We can all do something. We are all in this together. If you consider yourself a "believer", then you must consider yourself a "disciple" of Jesus, no less called and chosen than the very first 12 apostles. God’s story in you has the power to transform your story and encourage others to GO, unless you are specifically called to stay home to Pray and Give. Shirley and I have been called to GO!
Would you stand with us in PRAYER for God's Power, Protection, and Provision?
Would you ask God what He would have you do to GIVE and invest in this vision?
To find out more on how you can partner with us at Living Beyond, click the link here.

“The tap on the shoulder is the almighty power of God acting without help or hindrance upon an elect fallen sinner, so as to produce a new creature, and to lead him into the particular work which God has for him”. Peter Marshall Sr.
You are on Mission!

Isaiah 55:11
"'I don't think the way you think. The way you work isn't the way I work.' ...So will the words that come out of my mouth not come back empty-handed. They'll do the work I want them to do, they'll complete the assignment I gave them."
The Message

Revelations 12:11
"...by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death."
New International Version

Romans 10:14-15
"But how will people call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher (messenger)? And how will they preach unless they are commissioned and sent [for that purpose]? Just as it is written and forever remains written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!'”
Amplified Bible

Would you pray and ask God how
He would have you partner with us?
A short quote from a book I’ve read recently, “A Church Called Tov” by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer, touched my heart as it relates to our calling to tell stories.
“God wired us as humans to make sense of our lives through storytelling. We understand our lives—and the lives of our families, our churches, our nation, and our world—by forming the facts (or non-facts) into a narrative chain. And we live in and through those stories.”
“Scientists who study the brain and the mind (which are distinct entities for the specialist) tell us that when our brains are not focused on a task, when they are in downtime, our minds naturally go into story telling mode—weaving an ongoing narrative about the past, present, and future. In a sense we do not know who we are or how to live until we understand our place in the story.”
Stories can be so powerful. Stories become imprinted in the heart and mind like no other method of teaching or learning. The gospels are such narratives. They are the stories of the life of Jesus.
They are stories of real life encounters with Jesus. Only God through His Holy Spirit could take Scripture’s reflections of Christ’s time on earth in human form and weave them into our very experience. These stories from the Bible are not fictitious characters from a novel. They are stories of real people from all walks of life that had real life encounters with the creator of the universe. The stories of their encounters with Jesus did not end with themselves. The multiplication comes in showing how His story in them transformed their lives and those they came in contact with. We are changed by our experience with Jesus when our narrative becomes His story of transformation in our lives. The multiplication continues as the stories are shared, touching the life of others.

I had the high privilege to work on part of this video for OneHope that tells about my dear friend, a mentor, and brother from a different Scandinavian Mother.
This is an Advocacy video we produced for a least reached region.
This is a testimony of 16 year old boy named Miracle, how his life was transformed by the Lead Today program partnership between OneHope and John Maxwell's Equip Leadership Training.
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