From the Middle of Nowhere to Everywhere: Mac and Roy’s Stories

Mac and Roy are InterVarsity alumni who are bringing God’s love to the world through both of their ministries. We sat down with them on the InterVarsity World Changers podcast. Below is a summary of their story, but you can listen to the full story here on the podcast.

Both Mac and Roy landed at the humble University of South Dakota with big dreams. While Mac was a new Christian exploring living for Jesus for the first time, and Roy was a church-raised evangelist hoping to be a pastor, neither ended up where they expected. 

After meeting and becoming friends in InterVarsity, Mac and Roy’s vision for God’s kingdom was forever transformed by their campus ministry experience and by their Urbana 79, leading them to create organizations Movement.org and the Faith and Work Movement. Now, they mobilize and encourage leaders to carry out contextualized ministry in hundreds of cities and workplaces, not just throughout the country, but around the world. 

Mac’s InterVarsity Story

Having just become a Christian at the beginning of his senior year of high school, Mac was new to faith when he stepped onto campus in the fall of 1977. This didn’t hold him back, however, from getting involved in InterVarsity. In fact, his InterVarsity involvement progressed quickly.

Joining a Bible study in his spring semester of freshman year, Mac was already serving on the executive student leadership team by the time he was a sophomore. Then, when he was a junior, he was elected chapter president. 

That same year, Mac attended Urbana 79 and still remembers the call to action from the  influential evangelist, Billy Graham: “[He] challenged us on the evening of December 30 to be willing to go anywhere in the world God would send us. And we responded to that. We had no idea where that would take us.”

Upon graduation, Mac came on staff with InterVarsity, serving the chapter he’d been part of for three years. Roy was one of his students. 

God eventually put New York on Mac’s heart, and remembering the commitment he made at Urbana 79, he moved to serve with InterVarsity there. It wasn’t until 10 years later that he was called to something new.  

Roy’s InterVarsity Story

Roy wasn’t even planning to attend a secular university; having gone to a Christian school from kindergarten to 12th grade, Roy wanted to be a pastor and had his eyes set on a Christian college. 

His future InterVarsity staff worker, John, changed his mind. Roy met John at a church college fair event and ended up spending the whole time discussing his call into ministry with him. 

“[John] said, ‘You need to go into the university, especially if you’re thinking about ministry, because you need to understand how the world works and how people who haven’t been raised like you’ve been think,’” Roy recalls. 

Agreeing he could benefit from gaining a new perspective, Roy enrolled at the University of South Dakota. When he got there, he found ministry opportunities everywhere and leaped into leadership. He started strategically evangelizing, figuring out which places needed to be reached. He even moved from the nicest dorm on campus to the worst one because he knew students there needed to hear about Jesus. 

Like Mac, Roy was deeply impacted by Urbana 79, and he gained a new heart for unreached corners of the world. Learning that ¼ of those unreached by the Gospel live in China, Roy committed at the conference to search for opportunities to minister to that part of the world. 

Roy attended Fuller Seminary after graduation for their Chinese Studies program. He used what he learned there to serve in Taiwanese, Japanese, and African American churches…until God called him into something new. 

From a City to the World

When Mac moved to New York, he discovered a city in great need. Violence was common and expected at that time, and less than 0.6% of the population attended church. Moved to action, he organized a prayer gathering, inviting 16 different churches to come together to pray for their city…and 75 churches showed up. 

Over the last 35 years, about 200 churches have been active in this regular prayer effort. But God didn’t stop there.

Mac created a church multiplication alliance, and by 2003, it had 10 different denominations working together. They commissioned research in 2009 and discovered that evangelism in New York City had increased by 300% in 20 years.

In response, Mac created Movement Day to bring together faith leaders and discuss how to further their impact on the city each year. This has been going on for the last 15 years, and the impact of Movement.org has now reached past the city and even the country. Mac has interacted with leaders from 900 cities around the world. In total, over 60,000 leaders have been involved. 

“A lot of that was an outgrowth of the influence of InterVarsity,” Mac reflects today. “We’ve learned the conviction that the width of our influence spiritually is in proportion to the depth of our intimacy with God.”

From the Workplace to the Nations

Roy was also inspired by InterVarsity when he began his ministry, Faith and Work Global. Roy discovered a desire to bring faith into the workplace, and he realized that each company was like its own campus that needed to be reached with the Gospel.

“InterVarsity talks to us about loving our campus. And it was that DNA that really helped me form the ministry that I started,” Roy said.

It all began when Roy discovered that though Google’s headquarters sit in Mountain View, California, they have a research and development center in Kyiv, Ukraine. This meant that his workplace ministry could reach people internationally.

Using his InterVarsity experience of planting Bible studies, Roy started making sure every corner of Google was reached by an employee-led Bible study or small group. Before long, employees started reaching out to him to ask for help starting groups in their own workplaces, and Faith and Work Global began impacting other large companies like Apple, Cisco, Meta, and LinkedIn. 

Roy was amazed by how much God was doing. “It was just all a very natural, organic, relational spread of the Gospel into workplaces. Our mission is to impact companies who impact the world.”

Reconnecting and Collaborating for the Kingdom

After years of successful ministry, Mac and Roy reconnected and began exploring the idea of combining the efforts of both of their ministries. When they did, they were both struck by how much God had done through them: two people from the middle of nowhere, used to bring God’s love to the world. 

“We both came from Nazareth!” Roy exclaims. “Can anything good come from Nazareth? We’re from South Dakota for Heaven’s sake! That one university has produced two global ministries on opposite coasts!”