Who we are

• We both grew up attending church every Sunday. 
• Mindy's family typically went to church more times each Sunday on vacation each August than on any Sunday during the year...her dad was a pastor and rarely got to visit other churches when he was working. 
• Dean's family regularly attended Presbyterian and Evangelical Free churches  while he was growing up.
• We met in seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois
• Dean was working on his Master's of Divinity with the goal of being a youth pastor
• Mindy was working on her tan, but taking classes in the Certificate in Biblical Studies program with a goal of working in another culture as a missionary outside the United States
• We got married and had three kids
• Dean became a youth pastor, but also worked at various times as a substitute teacher, a temp at a mortgage company and at an insurance company, and as a hotel night auditor
• Dean wrote and published a series of mysteries for kids, the Bill the Warthog books, and several other books, including a drama collection and a romantic comedy ebook
• Mindy stayed at home when the kids were little, but also worked at various local newspapers, temped for companies ranging from a sustainable housing cooperative to a hospital (oddly enough, they were next door to each other), and worked at a large winery, a hardware store and a lumberyard
• We got more and more curious about the Church in the United States 
• Also, our kids grew up and moved away
• Our minivan, with over 100,000 miles on it, was going strong, though we still didn't like it very much
• We can still physically handle camping in a tent and sleeping on people's floors
• We enjoy road trips
• We were on the road from December 30, 2015 through January 20, 2017. During that time, we visited churches in all 50 states
• Since January 2017, we've been living in Fresno and working on Cheers and Amen, the book about our year of traveling. It's almost done, and we've got big plans for launching it on July 4, 2018