By God's Grace

In the early 1980s, Debbie Papuc (later Debbie O'Connor), a member at South Delta Baptist Church, was called to be a missionary to Mexico. The Lord and SDBC sent her, and she was a faithful missionary. In that context, I was fortunate to meet her and we married here at SDBC. We were both trained by South Delta Baptist and were later sent out as missionaries from South Delta to Honduras.

By God's grace, we started and raised our family in Honduras, while serving with a very good Baptist agency for 26 years. The Lord was gracious to start a rather vibrant movement of brand-new Baptist churches in the rural (very rural) mountains of Western Honduras, where we also started a bible school and produced bible training materials to mobilize a solid number of in-country leaders.

After our time in Honduras, we set up a home base north of Seattle to provide training for church planting around the world, which is what we have been doing this past decade.

Over the last eight years, I've been serving with Action Canada of Calgary (in collaboration with e3 Partners). My family and I traveled exhaustively around the world, to a great quantity of countries, training and mentoring others for God's purposes.

In November 2021, Debbie went to be with the Lord after having suffered with cancer for more than two years and battling it all along the way. She passed away having left a great quantity of disciples who love the Lord and who have been reproducing her model for disciples making disciples.

I have continued steady-on as a cross-cultural missionary and I travel almost non-stop. My agency asks me to train others, especially in Latin America, but also in Africa and South Asia.

Recently (after one year and two months of being a widower), I married Shalyn Anderson of Monroe, WA, who also lost her spouse of roughly 30 years. Shalyn is also called for mission outreach and has been traveling to Africa and Nepal. Our first ministry trip as a married couple will be in June to Malawi, Africa where we have been asked to co-train 30 in-country leadership couples on healthy marriage. After this, we are scheduled to be in Nepal during the fall of 2023, training others for evangelism, discipleship, new churches, and healthy marriages.

Thank you for being a part of my life and for your generous support for many, many years, but also for loving the Lord and for loving me.

We will be featuring Patrick's ministry on Sunday during our service. You can also catch up with Patrick, meet Shalyn, and learn more about their ministry by visiting the Spotlight Table before or after the service.

Missions