Dick and Carolyn Manion

Dick and Carolyn Manion have been part of the TBM family from its beginning. Dick served as one of the Mission's founding board members and its first executive director from 1985 to 2008. With more than fifteen years in church planting, he understands firsthand the challenges of establishing Bible-teaching churches in places not open to the gospel.

Both Dick and Carolyn grew up in Michigan and graduated from the Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music. Dick planted churches in southeast Idaho over a fifteen-year span, leaving that field after the death of his first wife in 1974. A few months later he moved back to Michigan with his five children, where he met and married Carolyn Kyser, then on staff at the school.

Carolyn grew up in a Christian home just fifteen miles from Grand Rapids and came to the Lord as a young child. Dick was raised near Detroit, the son of a General Motors factory worker. When they married in 1976, Carolyn stepped into an instant family of Dick's five children, ages two to fourteen, and together they went on to raise two more.

Since stepping aside as executive director in 2008, Dick served as the Mission's Great Lakes Representative.