I was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and raised in a Roman Catholic milieu. I rejected the Roman traditions and began searching for the Truth in life when I was sixteen. After graduation from high school in 1971, I spent the summer hitchhiking around Western Europe and met two people who were to influence me greatly; Francis Schaeffer and Timothy Leary.
After getting involved in hallucinogenic drugs and oriental mysticism at Georgetown University in 1972, I hitched across Europe—stayed again at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland where my oriental convictions were shaken by Os Guinness, but continued on to India where, in April 1973, the Lord used an Indian Christian to drag me into the Kingdom.
I then went to France, land of my ancestors, and after a year of preliminary language study in Paris, enrolled at the Reformed Seminary in Aix-en-Provence where I met Aline. We were married in March 1978 and have been blessed with three children; Calix (1980); Justin (1982) and Anaïs (1984).
Aline was raised in a nominally protestant home, descendants—on her mother’s side—of the Huguenots. After a period of adolescent rebellion, she was seized by the Lord’s covenant grace when she was 18 (in 1973) and enrolled at the newly opened Reformed Seminary at Aix-en-Provence where she met me and from which we both graduated.
We worked for three years (1983-86) in student ministry in Lyon under a cooperative agreement between MTW and Campus Crusade for Christ. Then we joined the MTW church planting team in Marseille where we worked from 1987-97.
For the sake of our children’s education, we settled in South Florida in 1998 where we were seconded to “Ministries in Action” and have been working with some of the 500,000 South Florida French-speaking Haitians, Quebecois and French. Since 1998, we have been doing evangelistic radio broadcasts, teaching in a Haitian Bible school (Institut Biblique et Théologique de la Floride), preaching in Haitian churches, and developing the IONA teaching ministry to the French-speaking Caribbean, principally in Haiti. Also, we've had opportunities to teach in French West Africa (Togo, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Senegal), as well as, Tunisia.
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