Dan Upchurch

Dan Upchurch grew up in Missouri in a multigenerational Southern Baptist family as the youngest of seven children. He met his wife Lori at Missouri Baptist University where he received a Bachelor of Theology degree. The two were married in 1985 and moved to Fort Worth where Dan completed his MDiv in 1987. After seminary, Dan served as a full-time pastor in two Missouri churches over 13 ½ years. During his first pastorate the couple’s three sons were born. Today each of their sons serves as a bi-vocational pastor, one in Denver, one in Missouri, and Stephen here in Georgia at Chauncey Baptist Church. Since the summer of 2000, Dan and Lori have been serving as Southern Baptist missionaries in the former Soviet Union. Half of that time they served in Belarus and since late 2010 he and Lori have been ministering in Ukraine. While serving as an IMB missionary, Dan finished his PhD in World Christian Studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2017. From 2010 to the summer of 2018, Dan helped to coordinate the church planting program at Kyiv Theological Seminary in Kyiv, Ukraine. Currently he serves as a practical ministry instructor and coordinator of the Master’s in Church Growth and Development degree at the Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary in L’viv, Ukraine. One of Dan’s greatest desires in life and ministry is to join the Lord in developing leaders for local churches that help these churches to be strengthened in the faith and increasing in numbers (Acts 16.5).