introducing our missionaries...
The Elfords now reside in Sherwood Park, not far from their children and grandchildren. You can read here of the places they have served with us, and how the Lord initially led them to join NCEM.
For Roan, joining NCEM was like coming home. “It was based on a feeling of my comfort zone,” he admits. It was much later, he says, that he allowed God to show him his need to truly submit to Him.
In 1953 Roan moved west from Ontario with his missionary parents, Bud & Marge Elford. He remembers childhood days in Buffalo Narrows (Saskatchewan) and Churchill (Manitoba). His early teen years in Brochet, Manitoba, he describes as “exciting, with many hours spent hunting and fishing.”
Roan left home at age 14 to attend high school and says from then he grew up rather independently. He attended two other high schools before graduating from Caronport (Saskatchewan) High. He then attended Ontario Bible College.
That is where he met Pat, who grew up in a Christian home in southern Ontario and came to personal faith in Christ as a child. She’d planned to go to nurses college, but went to Bible college first.
Missions was not a new thought to her. The church she grew up in was “very missions minded,” and her parents had been personal friends with NCEM missionaries who visited their home. As Roan and Pat considered their future together, Pat was still thinking of missionary nursing, but Roan wanted to go North. So Pat spent a summer with NCEM as a test. “God gave me a love and appreciation for the Native people,” she says, “and for Roan!” They were married soon after.
The Elfords first served among the Denesuline people at Stony Rapids in Saskatchewan’s far north, then they took a special assignment with NCEM, helping train new missionaries.
“It was based on a ‘chronological’ approach to Bible teaching,” Roan explains, “starting in Genesis, emphasizing God’s character, nature, man’s sin, the broken relationship between man and God, and the need for repentance.” This was teaching for unreached First Nations people, but Roan realized that he himself had never fully repented of his own sin. “As a missionary, pride prevented me from repenting,” he says. But in 2001, through a crisis, his pride was broken and he experienced what he describes as victory and new life.
By then they were serving at Lac La Biche, Alberta, where Roan was Business Administrator and Pat an instructor at Key-Way-Tin Bible Institute. In 2008 they moved to Prince Albert where they served in NCEM leadership, Roan as Chief Financial Officer, and Pat as Executive Secretary and Candidate Coordinator.
That move wasn’t easy for Pat, who never thought working in the Mission office was something she’d be called to do. “However, God enabled me way beyond my expectation, and gave us joy in there.”
