Who We Are & Why We Started This Blog

Hi, we are Steven and Jenn Chang. Welcome!

The Missions Leaders blog exists to provide tools, insights, and resources for leaders in the missions world.

Who We Are and Our Story

We have been team leaders among the unreached for the past 8 years, and we want to pass on the lessons we’ve learned in how to thrive, develop, and lead others towards the vision that God has given.

After our parents immigrated from Hong Kong (Steven’s) and Taiwan (Jenn’s), they eventually landed in Austin, Texas, where we grew up. Somehow, even though we went to the same church youth group, piano teacher, elementary, middle, and high school, we didn’t become friends until we both started going to the University of Texas at Austin.

In college, we both went on a short-term trip to Thailand, where God opened our eyes to the reality of the unreached. We were sharing with a store owner in southern Thailand that we were there to tell people about Jesus, and he replied, “Who is Jesus?” He had not only never heard the gospel, but had never even heard the name of Jesus.

We started dating later that year, and throughout college, felt confirmed that we were supposed to pursue a role in long-term missions. At the same time, several of our best friends that we had grown up with and been college roommates with also felt the same, and we decided to go overseas together as a team.

After working in the tech industry and preparing with our church for overseas work, we launched to the field as newly-married, 25 year old team leaders over a team of 12 in Southeast Asia. Which was insane – not recommended. But through all the culture stress, conflicts and crises, and numerous failures, God continued to meet us with grace.

6 years after our launch, we had the privilege to see our initial team of 12 expand into 3 teams of 20+ total staff, coaching almost 50 national church planting teams in our country who are making disciples and multiplying churches.

In 2021, we had our lives turned upside-down when Jenn had sudden seizures on a coaching trip to visit church planters. She was diagnosed with brain cancer, and we returned to the US for surgery, radiation, and chemo. It has been an intense process of surrendering our futures, health, ability to do ministry, roles, and many other things, and receiving from God the things He wants us to focus on with the time He has given us.

One of the big realizations from this season of cancer and processing was that our time is limited, and we want to pass on the things we’ve learned from going through cancer and from leading on the field. (We wrote some posts about lessons from our cancer journey that you can read here: 1, 2, 3. Medically speaking, Jenn is doing really well but will be on observation for potential recurrences for the rest of her life.)

Why We Started This Blog

Our passion and calling is to see the Great Commission fulfilled through the multiplication of healthy churches throughout the world. Currently, there are still 3.3 billion unreached peoples represented in 7400+ unreached people groups.

We believe that every follower of Jesus has a part to play in this mission, and that leaders are the key to seeing this happen! But the lack of leaders is also the limiting bottleneck – there are very few well-prepared, well-developed, and well-coached missions leaders trying to take on this insurmountable task – we want to help!

We’re passionate about living out of our union with Christ, missions, leadership, men and women working together, identifying giftings and roles, and many other topics that this blog will explore. We like good food, travel, cute animals, sci-fi and fantasy books, and self-deprecating humor.

We hope the lessons and insights in this blog are helpful for established or aspiring leaders in the missions world, but also for all goers, senders, and Kingdom leaders of all types.

We want to help you! If you are an aspiring or established missions leader, we’d love to connect with you! Please visit our contact us page.

And most of all, our desire is that the words and thoughts shared here would be exalting and glorifying and honoring to our friend, Savior, and King, Jesus. He is the reason why we have life, why we do what we do, and he has been our Teacher and has been with us through all these things.