2016 New Missionaries to Asia

Trevor & Hayley Amack | Cambodia

Trevor felt the Lord calling him to full-time ministry in high school, but through several short-term missions trips with his youth group, he felt that missions was not for him.

After college, he moved to Seattle for a youth pastor internship. He gained a lot of experience and met his wife, but never found a position in full-time ministry.
Needing to pay the bills, he went into marketing but kept volunteering at his church and applying for ministry positions. Then, he took on the role of volunteer college pastor, and realized God had opened the door for full-time ministry in a way he hadn’t anticipated, while still providing for him financially through his marketing career.

During his first years as the college pastor, the students asked to go on a missions trip to Cambodia where the church had just sent ABWE missionaries Todd and Jen Janes. The trip was challenging. Hayley was seven months pregnant and towing an 18-month-old on her hip. The heat was stifling, everything was dirty, and Hayley got Japanese encephalitis.

While the Amacks loved the Cambodian people, they never wanted to go back. But then they attended a missions conference at their church and heard, over and over again, missionaries begging for help.

“Many were retiring and other just needed more workers,” said Trevor.

Without speaking to each other, Hayley and Trevor had the exact same feeling that God was calling them back to Cambodia. They decided to take a month to pray for more confirmation. They reached out to the Janes for prayer and learned that they had been praying for them to join them ever since they left two years earlier.

“In Cambodia, the name of Jesus is vastly unknown,” said Hayley. “There is a silent cry. They live in fear.”

Trevor and Hayley, along with their four children, are hoping to minister to college-age students in Cambodia through coffeehouse ministry and house churches.

Traver & Amy Freeman | Australia

Traver and Amy met in college, but really got to know each other through a missions trip where they ministered together for three weeks in a small, rural town in Australia. They fell in love — with each other and with the country.

As soon as they returned home, they wanted to go back to Australia, so Traver arranged to do his required pastoral internship with the same pastor they had worked with the previous summer. He spent three months interning and learning more about the country before Amy joined him for the last three weeks.

Through his internship, Traver got to see the day-to-day life of missions in Australia. He saw the vast need and traveled through several towns with no churches and no one trying to reach the people there.

When he and Amy returned to the States, Traver researched the need in Australia and was shocked to discover that in 2007 only 11 percent of Australian people reported that they regularly attended any type of church, and in 2011 that number had dropped to 7 percent.

“If my math is correct, less than 2 percent of Australians attend a Bible-believing church,” said Traver. “When we saw that, the Lord just opened our eyes to the need of this place, and we knew we had to return.”

Together, they are praying to plant a church outside of Sydney and Amy is hoping to complement that work with a deaf ministry. They are looking to establish their ministry in an area without a gospel-preaching church.

“Australia is just as much of a mission field as the 10/40 Window or any other place. They need the gospel just as much,” said Amy. “And we’re going to be ministering near Sydney, where 40 percent of the population was born outside of the country. Both the need and the opportunity are huge.”