Joe is married to Shelly (they will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary on June 23, 2009). Joe and Shelly have two children—Jimmie who is eighteen and a senior in high school; Annie is fourteen and freshman in high school. Joe and Shelly grew up in Vancouver, Washington where they graduated from Columbia River High school. They both graduated from Northwest Nazarene University in 1984.
From 1984 to 1986 Joe and Shelly lived in Spokane, Washington where Joe was the youth pastor at Spokane First Church of the Nazarene. In 1986 they moved to Kansas City, Missouri where Joe attended Nazarene Theological Seminary from 1986 to 1989. Joe and Shelly moved to Colorado in 1989 where Joe has been the pastor of Golden Church of the Nazarene in Golden, Colorado since October 1989. Joe graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary with a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1999.
Joe teaches an online Master’s course (“Spirituality and Ministry”) in Northwest Nazarene’s online Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation program two times a year. He has also taught at Colorado Christian University, Melanesian Nazarene Bible College in Papua New Guinea, and Africa Nazarene University in Nairobi, Kenya.
Since 2001 Joe has traveled to Africa five times. He has taught four times at Africa Nazarene University in Nairobi, Kenya. He has also traveled and ministered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ghana, and Tanzania. Joe is preparing to take another trip to Congo and Rwanda October 31-November 16, 2009 where he will teach and mentor pastors as well as oversee and begin new micro-economic projects such as goats for the handicapped and elderly, sewing machines for single mothers, furniture-making, soap-making, tilapia ponds, community wells, and schools.
One of Joe’s passions is to change the world in Africa one boy, one girl, one mother, one father at a time by giving them a hand up rather than a hand out. As the old saying goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
