Why We Built a House of Prayer

People ask us sometimes how we went from rescuing trafficked children to running a house of prayer, like those two things must belong to different lives. We understand why it looks that way from the outside. From where we're standing, they were never separate at all.

When we first came to Thailand in 2014, we came to fight. We packed up four kids under eight and moved our whole family across the world because we couldn't unsee what we'd seen on that scouting trip. Angie stepped into international HR for the work. I trained rescue agents who went into the dark places and brought kids out. We were doing something that mattered, and we knew it.

But five years in, we were running on empty in a way we couldn't outwork. So God did something we didn't ask for: He gave us a sabbatical. A whole year with nothing to prove and nowhere to be. And in that stillness, He didn't just rest us, He rebuilt something in us. We learned, slowly and a little painfully, that the work was never supposed to come before abiding in Him. Every good thing we'd done in five years had drawn from a well we hadn't been tending.

"In the presence of Jesus, chains break, hearts heal, and lives are transformed."

That's the sentence that changed how we built everything after. The Seed didn't start as a strategy. It started as an admission that we needed a place to come back to Him before we tried to carry anything for anyone else again. We wanted a room where people could set down their striving for a couple of hours a week and just be with God. No performance, no program to run. Just presence.

Twelve years into this now, our conviction hasn't softened, it's sharpened. Every nation needs revival. Not another initiative. Not more activity dressed up as ministry. Revival, one heart at a time, starting with our own. That's still what Tuesday nights and Friday nights are for. That's still what The Wellspring will be built on when it opens this fall. And honestly, that's still what we need too, every single week.

If you've never been to a prayer room like ours, here's what we'd want you to know: you don't have to have it together to walk in. Some of the most sacred nights we've had were the ones where somebody walked in exhausted, sat on a bean bag, and just breathed for the first time in weeks. That's the room working exactly like it's supposed to.