Our Story

Long before this ministry was called Crossing ALL Borders Ministry (named in 2018) it was referred to as The Mission Room. Since my parents and I came to know the Lord through missionaries from the US while my dad was stationed in Japan, we have had a heart for missions. So, in 1984, shortly after getting married I started shipping small packages to missionaries for my ladies Sunday school class at Faith Bible Fellowship.

We did ministry for fifteen years out of three Sunday school rooms with donations from individuals in the church, friends, and family. The ministry grew in a whole new way in 1999 when we received our first donation from a company. We received pallets of UPS damaged and overstock items from the Bob Barker Company in Fuquay-Varina. They are the leading supplier in the USA to prisons and detention centers. They also supply to hospitals, schools, and law enforcement. As their business has grown, so have our donations. We went from ten pallets every other month to as many as twenty-eight a month currently. One of the items we receive a lot of is damaged or discontinued prison uniforms. You will read about how we repurpose the fabric on our sewing page.

The 16,000 square foot warehouse space we are blessed to use was owned by Bob Barker until March 2020. He was so kind to bless us with using it rent free prior to selling.

At the age of 19 and 20 my husband Ashley and I got married and started attending Faith Bible Fellowship in Raliegh. The ladies at that church were collecting things for missionaries all over the world. There was a brochure, Workers Together, that went out from Wheaton Bible College every other month. It would list missionaries all over the world. The brochure included things that they needed personally or things they needed for the ministry. The ladies would collect the donations but nobody knew how to ship them. Shipping internationally is complicated. It’s different for every country—what’s needed, how to ship it. At that particular time, I was doing architectural drafting and office design for a company that set up dental offices in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Above: Joeth’s second book, God's Power in the Midst of War, is a compelling testament to faith, resilience, and miraculous provision amidst the war in Ukraine.

We had a shipping department at that company. I went to my boss and I said, “Hey, can I use the shipping department on my lunch break? I’ll pay for everything. I’ll bring on my own supplies.” He agreed, and that helped me. I started learning how to ship internationally and fill out all the customs forms. Because of that, the ministry started internationally. We didn’t know we were starting a ministry, we were just being obedient. I want to tell the young people reading this that God will work in small things, and he can start them even now in your life. If he can trust you with something small, he will continue to give more and more and more and more. God used something I had from my job to help move those shipments to different missionaries and missions' organizations. That was one small thing that God had put in my life that made a big difference. My husband and I still just really felt God was calling us to go into foreign missions and we battled it for a long time. But in the meantime, I’m like, “Okay, God, I’m going to be obedient to what you’ve given me to do at this moment at this time, and maybe this is the stepping stone to go to a different country and serve you.”

One of the things we collected was canceled stamps. A family in Canada would sell them to Canadian stamp collectors because, back then, the only way you could get US stamps was for somebody to bring them in. And all the money they raised went to support the printing ministry of a family in Bolivia. They would make between three and five thousand dollars a year selling US stamps.

Another thing we sent was layette sets. One lady would make blankets and go around to yard sales and get onesies, put them in a Ziploc bag and call them layette sets. We would send them to a particular mission hospital in Chavuma, Zambia, Africa and they would give them to new mothers. Every time a woman would have a baby, they would give them one of those. Then they would say, “If you bring your child back for all their immunizations, then when their immunizations are complete when the baby turns two years old, we’ll give you another outfit.” Women would walk sometimes 10 or 15 miles from their villages to make sure that they got those immunizations.