Chris & Denise Williamson
Maintenance Specialist
Denise and I prayed to ask Jesus into our hearts at an early age. While we both were growing in our faith, we each had many opportunities to hear from missionaries from many various places. While in high school, we were both challenged to make our Faith our own and be active in ministry through our churches. Denise had the opportunity to serve with the Alliance Youth Corp in Ecuador and later did her student teaching at the Alliance Academy in Quito, Ecuador. After college, Denise moved to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, to teach at a Christian school and we met at the church I (Chris) had grown up in. In just a few months we were engaged and then married in August of 1994.
During those few months of courtship, we felt that God might have us serve him full time but we were not sure what that would be since I did not have any formal Bible school training and was working in building maintenance. Not too long after our son, Nathan, was born, Denise saw an advertisement for an aircraft maintenance school in Broomfield, Colorado. We made a trip out to Colorado to check it out. In October of 1996, we moved our small family so that I could start school. My life hero has been Nate Saint, the missionary pilot and mechanic. So, when I started school, God gave me thoughts on the possibility of serving in mission aviation. By the time I finished school, God had blessed us with our daughter, Courtney.
Fast forward a few years, I became busy with my career, our family grew with the added blessings of Kyle and Hannah, we purchased a house and put roots down in Farmington, Minnesota. During those years, we had the opportunity to take a couple of short-term mission trips with the churches we attended, and each time God stirred up the thoughts of missions a little bit. The hurdle that we found was that most missionary aviation ministries wanted you to be a pilot and a mechanic, but I did not have my pilot’s ratings. Then we were introduced to Missionary Aviation Repair Center (MARC) in Soldotna, Alaska, by some friends who started to serve God there and found out that they had a place for those who were mechanics but not pilots. As we have seen their ministry grow at MARC, the seeds were planted that maybe God did have a place for us in missionary aviation.
In April 2017, our pastor started one of his messages with a question, “What would you do if you knew that you could not fail?”, and ended it with this challenge, “What would you do for God if you knew that you could not fail?”. Right away God placed MARC on Denise’s heart. On the way home from church, she asked me what I thought of our pastor’s question. I paused for a moment and said that this may sound crazy, but I would go and serve with MARC. We suddenly knew that God was leading us in a new direction for our lives. One year later, we have accepted a position with MARC for me to work as a maintenance specialist. We arrived in Alaska in June 2021 are are now serving full-time at MARC.