The bumpers were gone by the time Melinda Guynn got back.
Not stolen. Just shaken loose somewhere on a dirt track deep in the bush, the kind of road that exists more as a suggestion than a path. She had driven out to check on one of the 29 kids’ clubs she and her husband, Rex, oversee across remote villages in Northern Uganda. Some are so far out that “remote” doesn’t quite capture it. You drive until the road stops being a road.
This October marks 20 years since the Guynns moved to Northern Uganda as Missionary Ventures missionaries. Their story isn’t really about the road, though. It’s about what waits at the end of it, including a prayer that was there long before they arrived.
An Ordinary Life, Interrupted
Twenty years ago, Rex and Melinda weren’t missionaries. Rex was an Army veteran who joined the Zephyrhills Fire Department in 1985 and rose through the ranks: driver engineer, captain, fire inspector, assistant chief. By the summer of 2006, he was acting chief, 21 years in, with the top job in his own hometown within reach. Melinda managed a doctor’s office and kept things running at home.
Still, both felt a pull. Rex served at his home church, rode with the Christian Motorcyclists Association, and volunteered in prison ministry. Together they took twelve mission trips to places like Haiti, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Kenya, and Uganda, each one a few meaningful weeks away from an otherwise ordinary life.
Then Melinda broke her back, and the trips started turning into something more. Then she left her job to volunteer with Missionary Ventures full-time.
The Trip That Turned “Someday” Into “Now”
In 2004, the Guynns traveled to Haiti just as the country came apart. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had fled into exile, and Port-au-Prince dissolved into chaos: buildings burning, gunfire in the distance, streets gone eerily empty. They made it out safely.
Four months later, they went back anyway.
That second trip was the hinge point. Two people who had spent years visiting the world’s hard places decided they were done just visiting.
The decision cost them. Rex retired four years early and forfeited a quarter of his pension. There was no guaranteed paycheck on the other side, only their calling from the Lord, Missionary Ventures, and whatever their supporters could help carry. They sold what they owned, and in October 2006 they left Zephyrhills as full-time missionaries.
They hadn’t set out for Northern Uganda specifically. They said yes and let God choose the place, and the road led to Kitgum, a region just emerging from a 22-year rebel war.
A Prayer Answered Before They Arrived
Recently, sitting in church in Uganda, the Guynns heard something from Pastor Ronald that stopped them cold.
In the late 1990s, years before Rex and Melinda ever set foot in Africa, Ronald’s sister had prayed that God would establish a church on a piece of land near their home. The war was at its worst. Children were being abducted. People were dying. There was no church for miles and, it seemed, no reason to hope.
Years later, God sent two unlikely people from Florida to that exact region. They eventually planted a church on that land, and Ronald became its pastor. They never knew about the prayer. They just knew they’d been called.
"We were so unqualified, but God knew we were the answer
to someone's prayer. I didn't know it at the time. I just knew
God sent us. Crazy people like us. You, too, may be the answer
to someone's prayer."
29 Villages, One Simple Core
Today the Guynns oversee a large ministry that includes 29 kids’ clubs, each in its own village, and each built around a non-negotiable core: teach children about Jesus, and stick to the Bible.
Simple doesn’t mean loose. Under a local team that includes Florence, Pastor Ronald, and Pastor Simon Peter, the clubs run on a disciplined rhythm. Pastors make surprise motorcycle visits every other week to check on volunteer leaders and the health of each club. Struggling clubs are strengthened or closed. Thriving ones get a crew of pastors who go door to door recruiting more kids.
That structure is how you keep something alive across villages you can only reach by bicycle or motorcycle. Some clubs have grown to 80 or 100 kids and function like mini-churches. MV short-term teams have joined in over the years, running games and lessons alongside leaders and handing out the soccer balls kids ask for by name.
“God knows their name,” the Guynns say. “God knows who they are, where they are. He has a plan for them. We are going to be part of that plan, telling them about Jesus.”
Four Churches, Four Chapters
The Guynns’ network includes four churches, each at a different stage. Two meet in permanent buildings, including the church on the land Pastor Ronald’s sister prayed over. A third has land, deeded and surveyed, with latrines already built, but still meets under a tree. A fourth, closest to the South Sudan border, meets on borrowed land, also under a tree, in a region where the need for the gospel is as urgent as anywhere on earth.
For that third congregation, all that’s missing is the building itself: brick walls and an iron roof built to withstand the region’s weather, rather than a traditional grass roof. It won’t sit empty between Sundays. It will serve the area’s kids’ clubs, pastors, feeding programs, and more.
Called to Serve: From Broken to Business Owner
If one place shows the full range of the Guynns’ ministry, from evangelism and discipleship to practical skills and restoration, it’s the Called to Serve Vocational School.
This year, 218 students are training in tailoring, hairdressing, mechanics, and bricklaying. In November, 120 of them will graduate as the school’s tenth class. To date, the school has graduated nearly 600 students. Ronald himself did something rare for a pastor in the region: he attended seminary in Jinja.
The school is certified by Ugandan officials and known well beyond its own gates. It’s also one of the only schools in Northern Uganda that equips graduates rather than just training them. The Guynns cover half the cost of the tools and supplies each graduate needs to open a business, so a diploma becomes a working trade the day they walk out the gate.
It goes beyond the professional skills that students learn.
Ninety-five percent of students arrive without knowing Jesus. Many arrive abused and broken down, carrying more than any curriculum could address. But discipleship is woven into every day of training, and the Tuesday chapel service fills the altar. Students leave trained and restored, and they carry that restoration home to their villages.
Some of those stories are hard to believe. One student arrived planning to become a witch doctor and found freedom in Christ during chapel. Read her story, and more about the Guynns’ ministry, in From Brokenness to Breakthrough →
Growth has outpaced space. The classrooms double as dorms at night, so many classes move outdoors under trees. When the dorms are full, some students have had to sleep outside the gates down the road, which has proven dangerous. The school needs more classrooms.
A Voice That Reaches 50 Miles
Every Friday night, the ministry goes on air on a secular radio station, reaching thousands of listeners across at least a 50-mile radius. The church’s worship team sets up in the sound room with a keyboard. There’s worship, there’s preaching, and in the last few minutes the phone lines open for callers.
It may be the widest-reaching thing the ministry does each week, touching villages and homes no kids’ club or church building could physically reach.
Feeding Through Famine
Every Sunday, the ministry feeds more than 200 people, mostly children, along with any adult who is hungry that day. Right now, the need is especially urgent. The rains didn’t come as they should have, harvests failed, and families across Northern Uganda are going hungry.
“They’re desperate,” the Guynns say, “and dying because of hunger.”
About $2,000 feeds roughly 100 families for a month. That’s $20 for a family of four.
The Jesus Film, and What Comes After
At least once a month, a team led by a young leader named Vincent takes kits from the Jesus Film, one of MV’s partner ministries, out to the villages. (Vincent also leads worship and runs chapel days at the vocational school.) The team targets villages where kids’ clubs already exist, and relationships are already built.
The film works. People respond. People come to Christ.
That creates its own challenge: new believers in a village with no church have no one to shepherd them. So the team sends someone from the main church to help plant a new congregation. It doesn’t always succeed, but they keep pursuing it, because the alternative is leaving people without the gospel at all.
Where it works, the Guynns help support the new pastor while the young congregation grows, sometimes even providing a motorcycle as long as the pastor can cover his own fuel. New pastors can enroll in a year-long program through a local Baptist Bible college, and a few, like Ronald, go on to seminary.
It’s slow, and it isn’t always clean. It’s also how village after village ends up with a church where there wasn’t one before.
Twenty Years of Lessons
Ask Rex and Melinda what they’d tell a new missionary, and neither reaches for strategy first.
“You really need to truly love the people,” Rex says, “because they can tell. No matter how you enter a new place or a cross-cultural environment, you are the visitor. They know, and they can feel whether you love them or not.”
Melinda adds a caution. “We’ve all had great ideas about what we wanted to do when we went to a country,” she says. “But you need to be led by the Holy Spirit. If you just go by what the Holy Spirit tells you to do, it works.”
That conviction led to a hard correction a few years ago.
“We felt like we had turned into a construction company instead of what God sent us to do,” Melinda says. “We changed our focus and got back to what we were supposed to be doing with the people.”
It’s also why their name isn’t on any building, church, or program. “You won’t find our name on anything,” Melinda says. “It’s all in the name of the community. No one person owns any property. It’s theirs, and that brings involvement.”
The same instinct shapes how they face the pull of local witch doctors.
“Why would I trust Jesus to heal me,” Rex asks, “when I can go to the witch doctor and feel like I get my answer? We have to teach them the Bible speaks for itself. I don’t have to do the work. The Holy Spirit does the work.”
After two decades, Melinda sums it up with a kind of plainspoken wonder.
“I find it very amusing when I sit back and look at what God has done,” she says. “There’s no way we could have done it. It’s almost like He does it to entertain me, because He’s pulled off things that were just impossible for us to do.”
Twenty Years by the Numbers
And most importantly, every life that has encountered God over these 20 years. Those can’t be counted.
Are You the Answer?
Twenty years ago, the Guynns didn’t know they were walking into the answer to a prayer prayed years earlier by a woman they’d never met.
More prayers are being prayed in Northern Uganda right now. A mother whose harvest failed is asking how she’ll feed her children this month. A vocational student is praying that graduation will come with the tools to start a trade. A pastor leading a congregation under a tree is praying his own family won’t go hungry while he serves everyone else’s.
You may never move to Uganda. You may never meet Pastor Ronald, the young woman who walked away from witchcraft, or the congregation waiting on its building. But through Missionary Ventures, you may still be the answer they’re praying for.