At Shepherd of the Hills, our mission is to Know Christ and to Make Christ Known. Our missions fund allows us to extend the reach of the Gospel by supporting missionaries in different parts of the world. Each month we focus on two different types of missions projects, a Mission Commitment or our core long-term missionaries we support each year, as well as a Missions Visionary Project where we support a new cause, visiting missionary, urgent need, and more.
The following biographies lists our Mission Commitment missionaries and where they are called to serve. Missionaries serving in sensitive countries are not listed, information on these missionaries can be found at the church office.
Jeff Grant
“Since I was a teen, I knew that God designed me for a purpose (Psalm 139) and that doing anything else with my life would be unfulfilling. God placed a desire in my heart to serve young adults, giving me the passion and creativity to reach them in a relevant way. We came to fall in love with ministry while working at a Christian camp in Lebanon, NJ. It was the first time we saw clearly how serving God was fulfilling our purpose in life and that nothing else would satisfy.”
Karen Grant
“I have wanted to minister to young women since God drew me back to Himself in college. Helping Jeff lead the young adult group at our church has grown my faith and developed my confidence to teach and lead. I believe God has blessed us and raised us up here because He wants us to reach out to the youth of New Jersey.”
After college, Jeff and Karen were blown away to discover that young adults are responsive to the gospel if approached in a relevant manner. It was through this group that we first felt called to reach out to this age group.
With an aching heart to serve God in full-time Ministry, both Jeff and Karen were captured instantly by the passion of Cru when introduced to it through a church member. This was the answer to years of prayer!
“So far, I’ve identified some of our nation’s biggest campuses that still don’t have an evangelical ministry. I’ve started contacting churches surrounding those schools and am beginning to launch ministries there through those churches. I’ve gotten to launch new movements in CA, NH, NJ, MD, OK, PA and TX, seeing students share the gospel for the first time!”
“I’ve been capturing stories of how God is using Cru missionaries and churches together, so that I can help bridge the gap in places where partnership just isn’t on people’s radar.”
CRU’s mission statement- Helping to fulfill the Great Commission in the power of the Holy Spirit by winning people to faith in Jesus Christ, building them in their faith and sending them to win and build others; and helping the Body of Christ do outreach and discipleship.
When David began in ministry it was with Haven of Hope in Philadelphia. Their objective was to be a place where the Gospel is presented boldly and women imprisoned by drug addictions can have a new life through faith, hope, and strength in Jesus Christ.
Moving on from there David worked at World Evangelization for Christ (WEC) headquarters in Fort Washington, PA. WEC helps local churches strategically focus their mission and ministry. They develop partnerships with missionaries in the field, recruits missionaries, and sends out short-term teams. It was while working here that David and Lee gained a desire to see the people of Morocco reached with the message of Jesus.
Feeling a calling from the Lord to use his gifts and talents to help evangelize and disciple, David is currently serving as a pastor of a congregation consisting of mostly sub-Saharan African Christians in the country of Morocco. Lee, his wife, is also working with the church in discipleship and women’s ministries.
David:
“In our current church, we are constantly encountering opposition by the government. There is a different procedure for procuring a building permit depending on the type of building you want to construct. For a regular commercial building, it is the urbanism authority who gives the ok. For a mosque, it is the Wali (the regional governor who reports directly to the King) who issues the building permit. And for a church? From what we can tell, there is absolutely nothing nowhere in current Moroccan law stating to whom a protestant church must report to. We might as well be Martians trying to set up a colony.
We ask that you pray for us to be able to visit the new attendies of our church; It's hard to fit in all that we have to do. Pray also for the deepening of the spiritual lives of our leaders and that they will resist the huge temptations that are constantly in their face. Pray for the continued progress on the sanctuary enlargement and that we can learn who to go to get the authorization. Please continue to pray for a hunger and thirst for the Word of God by our church members. At times, it seems like they are mainly interested in miracles, supernatural manifestations and "prosperity" more than the Giver Himself. Lastly, pray that God will draw those who are in the peripheral of the church family into a vibrant relationship with Him.”
“My name is Bob Mendelsohn. I was born on November 4, 1951 in Kansas City, Missouri, at Menorah Hospital. Being Jewish was always a fact of life for me. Whereas some boys tolerated Hebrew school, I was devout. Part of my devotion, I suppose, was due to the fact that I could excel. Cognitive learning (handling facts/figures) always came easily to me.
I had always been proud to be Jewish. There was some mystique to all these dos and don’ts that were supposed to improve me as a person and, in particular, as a Jew. I was fervent, not so much about God, but about “doing” Judaism correctly. It was my job, as a Jew, to observe these commands and comply. I figured that even if there were no God, it couldn’t hurt to comply.
Yet hard as I tried, I always seemed to fall short; there was always something more to do, or not do. My efforts never seemed good enough. There was always more learning, more kavanah (devotion), more attention to minutiae, more people to bring in, more kindnesses to extend, more stories to memorize.
In my early twenties I found myself in a conversation with a pair of street corner preachers. Their education was limited but their faith was genuine. The person of Jesus was very appealing. The New Testament was a defensible book; the gospel was a defensible story. As I found myself drawn to Jesus I began asking myself, how could I do this? How could I be Jewish and believe in Jesus? It seemed like such a paradox.
I went home and, over the course of a weekend, read through the entire New Testament. I concluded from my reading that I did not need “meaning and relevance.” I needed and longed for forgiveness. It was May 1971. I sat on the steps of my friends front porch and I prayed. I asked God to forgive me, to consider Jesus’ atoning death the covering for my sins, to give me a new life. And he did.”
After his conversion to Christianity in 1971 Bob became affiliated with Jews for Jesus in 1979. He is the leader of Jews for Jesus Austral/Asia, a territory which now includes Singapore and New Zealand as well. He lives in Sydney with his wife.
Bob travels throughout the world sharing the message of Messiah Y’shua. He has preached or ministered on the streets in Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Argentina, visited 47 of the 50 states in the US, all over the traps in Australia from Perth to Townsville to Melbourne to Port Macquarie. Not only is Bob’s style winsome, but his message of faith in Jesus is powerful.
Bob is also the creator and director of Project Timothy, an international messianic internship and discipleship program for 18-25 year olds.
Pastor Derrick Whitmore is the founder and currently serves as the Executive Director of Shattered Studios, a non-profit organization that shares hope and faith through the creative, performance, and media arts.
Derrick felt the call to ministry after the Lord healed him of the depression and low self-esteem he felt as a youth. While serving as the youth pastor of Shepherd of the Hills, Derrick observed some of the youth were dealing with similar levels of depression and even suicidal thoughts. He felt the urgent need to gather a team together to specifically address this need and soon Shattered Studios was formed. Not long after, Derrick felt God calling to devote more time into working with those struggling with depression and, as a result, he began working for Shattered Studios full time. Due to the large amount of missionary resources available in Orlando, FL, he decided to expand Shattered Studios to incorporate the Orlando metro-region.
His greatest desire is to help people, especially youth and young adults, come to personally know the Lord and grow in an unending relationship with Him. Derrick is also passionate about inspiring others to use whatever gifts they have been given to serve others and glorify the Lord (1 Peter 4:10-11).
"God is good, even when our circumstances may not seem so. Through the darkest times in life the people of Shattered’s new Orlando Team have done an amazing job helping us to continue to push forward on new ministry initiatives and developing new ways to reach out to hurting people. As I reflect on difficult times in my life, I continue to realize the importance of relying on others especially during our times of need. God created us to be in relationship with one another and to support one another in good times and in difficult times."
“We are Jeremiah & Briana Stokes. We have 3 children Eden(8) Jericho(5) and Noelle (1) and we are missionaries with New Tribes Mission in Indonesia.
We moved overseas July 4, 2010. We are both from Pennsylvania but opposite sides of the state. Briana is from eastern Pa and Jeremiah is from Pittsburgh. We both grew up in Christian homes but when we were in our first year of college we were confronted with the fact that there are unreached tribal people groups that have no access to the Bible and do not even have the opportunity to reject the Bible.
In America we have Bibles in so many translations and in the drawers of hotel dressers and we have the ability to accept or reject the Bible but there are people groups around the world that don’t even have the chance to accept or reject the Gospel because no one has ever learned their language and told them about what Christ did on their behalf.
We both decided that we couldn’t go through life in the states knowing this with a clear conscience and decided to become missionaries. It has been a long road with many ups and many downs but we know that we wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”
The Stoke family currently lives in the mountains of Papua Indonesia amongst a people group named the “Dem.” They are an isolated people group that have no written form of their language, never had any western influences and are completely remote. The only way in or out if by using a small missionary plane or their feet.
They are currently learning their language so that one day they will be able to present the Gospel to the Dem and translate the Bible into their language. Until they are able to clearly present the Gospel the ministry consists of learning the language and medical needs.
Where they live there is no power company, no water company, no roads or corner mini mart. They live off solar panels, water from a stream and the trip to the grocery store is a plane landing with a couple months’ worth of food.
