Joli Cullen

I was born in 1968 in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. My mom and dad divorced when i was very young. I grew up with my mom and my older brother. When I was 11 years old we lived in a townhome and my mom worked lots of jobs to support my brother and I. One day our neighbor came knocking at the door. My mom had been playing some rock music rather loudly, and I expected the neighbor, Mrs. Pewter, to ask us to turn the music down. But she didn't. She asked my mom if she would like to come to church. 

We really liked the church. Mrs. Pewter was the organ player there. My mom joined the choir. She was a really good singer. One day, pastor Bob came by our home. He shared a gospel presentation with us and my mom. My mom, my older brother and I accepted Jesus as our savior. We were all three baptized on the same day.

My earliest recollections about church was that there were many sermons on "The Rapture". I remeber the pastor saying once that you might not get to see the Bronco game this afternoon, the rapture might happen. I remeber watching the movies, "A Thief in the Night" and " A Distant Thunder", at church. 

My mom remarried the same year that I turned 11, and we ended up moving with my step dad to Sandpoint, Idaho. We did not have a home to move into, just 20 acres of land, and my stepdad was going to build us our home. We spent the summer living in a big tent. it was big enough for a kitchen table and bed frames that my stepdad had built. We kept our milk cold down in a well. The house did not get finished in time for the winter so we had to rent a house. I loved the house we rented. It was on a little lake and we could go ice skating. It was a very long bus ride to school though. And it was too far to stay involved in a church, but I did help with the Vacation Bible Schools in the summers as an assistant with my neighbor.

The area was so beaiutifu, we lived very close to Lake Pend Oreille..

When I was going into 10th grade, we moved agin. This time to Middletown, NJ, and that is where I graduated high school. I was known as the "goody two shoes'. God protected me during my formative years and i just never had any desires for anything the world had to offer me at that age. I loved listening to Christian artists of that time. I had many friends who were Catholic and Jewish. There were not many Evangelicals that went to my school. My mom and stepdad had started a family together while we were in Idaho, and i had 3 half sisters I adored. They stopped going to church though, so I road my bike to church and joined a youth group.

I graduated high school just in time for my family to move again. Now we were headed to the Florida Keys. I started driving to Key Largo, FL to attend church and met my husband, Doug, in the singles group.

God was orchestrating every step of my journey from Colorado to Idaho to the Florida Keys.

Thank God for His plans and purposes for us. 

Doug and I got married in 1986, anmd we started a fmily. We had one boy and two girls. we were both very involved in church. I taught in children's ministry.

In 1995, we started attending Key Largo Baptist Church ( now known as Beachurch) when they got a new pastor, Steve Vetter. Another couple and us started a children's ministry. It was there that God called us into full time ministry though we didnt know what it would be at the time.

We attended a pregnancy care center banquet in 1993 and heard the moving testimony of Gianna Jessen whi was aborted but did not die. She was 16 at the time and she sang and shared her testimony. After that banquet we began to train to volunteer with the local pregnancy center. 8 years later, we surrendered our lives and left our home and business and Doug began attending Bible College. Upon Graduating 4 years later, Choose Life Ministrioes began, and we have been traveling and sharing the message of the Sanctity of Human Life across America ever since.