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A Missionary Biography of Jesse & Kristen Kroll

Kristen and Jesse were both raised to know the Lord by wonderful families of faith - Kristen in swampy sub-tropical LaBelle, Florida, and Jesse in the forested and frigid Great Lakes area of northern Wisconsin. Although godly living was modeled for them throughout childhood, neither understood what it meant to live joyfully under the lordship of Christ until the Holy Spirit led them to explore God's Word during their teen years. Through the Bible, Jesus revealed Himself to both Jesse and Kristen as an intimate friend and Savior. Our Great Commission, to "go and make disciples of all nations," then became their consuming passion and calling in life. 

Kristen’s call to missions began at age 16 when she attended a conference which challenged her to begin the coming new year in prayer. Shortly after the conference, she was at a New Year’s party and felt led to get alone in a quiet room to do just that: to ‘pray in’ the New Year. As she prayed, she felt the Lord was telling her: “I want to use you for the nations!” With this conviction, the desire to go overseas as a missionary became a consuming passion in her life, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia. Through Campus Outreach, her collegiate ministry in which she was highly involved as a college student in Georgia, she was able to go on a summer mission trip to Bangkok, Thailand. She ministered by connecting with Thai college students, sharing her faith with them, and saw the Lord use her mightily as dozens of unreached Thai students ended up coming to an evangelistic camp through the ripple effects of her ministry. Jesse’s call to missions began when his family’s Christian Missionary Alliance church in Oconto, Wisconsin welcomed some Wycliffe missionaries serving in Columbia. Through his childhood years, his parents read him these missionaries’ prayer letters, which became living seeds of a missional calling which would take root later in life. After worldly living and a ‘party’ lifestyle in later high school and early college, this lost 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire met the Living God! The Lord began to break Jesse of his sin and conformity to the crowd. Through reading the Bible, Jesse met Jesus and began to experience the joy of following Him. His dorm and classrooms at the university were full of international students from all around the world, and as he read the Great Commission in the Gospels and Acts, Jesse had an intense desire to serve overseas as a missionary, but also to reach out to the many nations on his college campus.

In college during the late 1990s, this missionary calling tugged so strongly that both Jesse and Kristen found it difficult not to go overseas immediately, but the Lord used their time of waiting as Jesse received mentoring in disciple-making from the Navigators and Kristen from Campus Outreach. Kristen earned her bachelor’s degree from Valdosta State University, and eventually her masters in speech and language pathology from Nova Southeastern University. Jesse earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire in comparative studies in world religion, then benefited from training and experience for two years with the Navigators' EDGE Corps program as a campus missionary at Indiana University and in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In the year 2000, the Lord called Kristen to Vietnam and Jesse to Mongolia. Little did these young missionaries know that, en route to Asia, the two would meet for the very first time at a training held by their organization ELIC (English Language Institute – China). The Lord hinted to them both as soon as they met that this person they had just met was their future. The second time they saw each other was in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at ELIC’s mid-year conference. Kristen had done mission work in Bangkok a few years before, but to Jesse on his first visit to Thailand, the Lord foreshadowed great things to come: both in their budding friendship and in this beautiful country. After about a year of building a friendship mainly through writing emails and occasional ‘voice chatting,’ Jesse finally realized that to court this beautiful young woman properly, he would need to live on the same continent! So in June of 2002, Jesse moved from Bayanhongor, Mongolia to LaBelle, Florida, where Kristen had moved a year previously from Vietnam to complete her master’s degree and practice speech therapy. By July of 2002, Jesse and Kristen were engaged, and by December of that same year they were married at Carlson Methodist Church.

Jesse worked as Carlson’s first full-time youth/children's and assistant pastor for about five years, from 2002-2007, while Kristen did full-time speech therapy and volunteer ministry. After their first daughter Trinia was born in 2006, the young family of three then continued their missionary calling in Thailand beginning in 2007.

Jesse and Kristen studied Thai language from 2007-2008 in Lopburi, Thailand, and then served in campus ministry at the Naresuan University Youth House in Phitsanulok, Thailand from 2008-2011. Their second daughter Joyah was born in Thailand during that term. After a two-year home assignment, their family of four returned to Chiang Mai, Thailand in 2013 to work in mission mobilization among Thai and tribal churches in North Thailand, teaching the Bible and mentoring indigenous believers in evangelism. Jesse, Kristen and their two daughters returned to the USA in 2015 to help family members battling cancer, and to recover from some of their own health issues which had developed overseas. During their time in Florida, Jesse completed his Master of Divinity degree at Asbury Theological Seminary's Florida Dunnam Campus in Orlando, graduating in 2018.

About the time of Jesse’s seminary graduation, Jesse and Kristen were seeking the Lord about what His next calling for them would be, wondering if their overseas missionary service was completed. About that time, some friends, who had also served with ELIC in East Asia, began excitedly sharing how their ministry at a Midwestern university felt even more strategic and effective than the outreach they had done for more than a decade in Asia! The Lord used that testimony to lead and guide the Krolls to another Midwestern university campus: The University of Wisconsin – Madison, where each year about 7,000 international students and visiting professors from over 120 nations study and work in research fields. The Kroll family has been serving with OMF International's Returnee Focus team in Wisconsin since September of 2019. They are ministering with East Asian and other international students at the University of Wisconsin. They are excited to continue their calling to reach the nations through internationals who are future leaders who will be returning to impact their own unreached people groups and other ethnic groups around them! In the last five years, the Krolls and the teams they lead and serve on have seen over a dozen internationals come to know Jesus, and they are trusting the Lord for this impact to continue to multiply as these workers are sent out into the Harvest in America and back in their home countries!

One of their greatest joys in their current mission work has been that their daughters Trinia (age 18) and Joyah (age 15) have had the opportunity to serve alongside their parents in befriending, loving, serving, and witnessing to international students. Their daughters have helped teach English classes, host international dinners at their home, done road trips with internationals, served in nursery care and children’s programs, hiked, camped, cared for babies, and more.

About two years after Jesse left Bayanhongor, Mongolia, the one small church of ten or fifteen Mongol believers had multiplied to two fellowships with two-hundred members! Fast forward a few years, and a network of house churches would exist that were making such an impact on the city that opponents of the Gospel were worrying their influence was fading! The Krolls praise God for what He has done over the years as they have gotten to be small vessels of His glory by sharing His Gospel among the nations. They are seeing glimpses of this kind of multiplication happening with their current international friends, and they rejoice in faithful expectation and hope for what they pray will happen as they ‘make disciples of all nations’ on campus in the USA.

- Jesse