A son of Massachusetts’ south shore, Joel came to faith in 1991 and almost immediately became both confronted and burdened by the fact that while roughly half of all unreached people worldwide are Muslim, less than half of 1% of all missionaries are sent to the Muslim world. He heard the testimony of a disciple-maker living in Kazakhstan as a young believer, and committed his life that evening to serving Muslims worldwide with a faithful testimony of Jesus. He moved to Kansas City in 1993, just before spending the better part of 1994 living and working in Israel, while traveling regularly to Egypt and Jordan. It was in this time he truly fell in love with the Middle East, and returned to KC to pursue an engineering degree at UMKC.