I have always wanted to be a missionary, and Nakwan (Kwan) has always wanted to be a Pastor. God has given us the opportunity to do both.

Kwan grew up in New York. He knew God had called him to the ministry from the tender age of ten. As a child, he wrote sermons and preached to his teddy bears. By 16, he was preaching at youth services. In his early 20s, he found the Adventist message and was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist church. Shortly after, he enrolled at Oakwood University to study theology.

I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist family in Minnesota with solid roots in Jamaica. As a small child, I loved reading mission stories and longed to be a missionary. I enrolled at Oakwood University and found like-minded individuals in a campus ministry doing local and overseas mission work.

In my last semester at Oakwood, I was introduced to AFM through Oakwood’s Theological Forum Team, of which Kwan was the chaplain. I soon began taking steps toward becoming a student missionary and accepted a call to serve as a student missionary in the Republic of Guinea, West Africa.

That semester, Kwan and I started a courtship that quickly led to an engagement. We decided that I would serve for one year as a missionary while he finished his last year at Oakwood, and then we would start our lives together.

After serving as a missionary in Guinea, I was certain about my calling to become a full-time missionary. However, Kwan’s aspirations to be a pastor did not align with mission work. Despite this, God wanted us to marry, and we entrusted our lives to him. We were married in June 2015 and started a family soon after. A few years later, we accepted a call to pastoral ministry.

However, six years into ministry, Kwan developed a speaking disorder that forced us to step away from pastoral ministry. We prayed and fasted about what God would have us do next, and in December of 2023, God began showing us the need to serve as career missionaries in Japan.

It started with a documentary, which led to a deep dive into Japanese culture, resulting in the realization that Japan is facing several crises. Young people are no longer getting married or having children, the suicide rate is alarming, and because of the breakdown of the family structure, many people are dying alone, never having heard the name of Jesus. On top of that, only one percent of the population is Christian, making the archipelago the world’s second-largest unreached people group. Knowing this, we were ecstatic when AFM invited us to accept a call to serve as career missionaries in Japan.

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