How Steve and Barbara Shantz Answered the Call

After 73 years of collective service, we are honoring Steve and Barbara Shantz and all the ways the Lord has used them to bring people across the globe to himself. 

A short talk in a church service changed the course of the young married couple’s lives.

The speaker was Lloyd McDonald, a fellow Canadian and an engineer, who with his wife, Eleanor, was serving with TWR on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. 

“When they mentioned Trans World Radio, Bonaire, and [that] he was an engineer, Barbara and I looked at each other,” Steve Shantz would recall years later about that service at Benton Street Baptist Church in Kitchener, Ontario. “And it was a lightning bolt [that] hit us, and it was: That’s it.”

That was in 1981. McDonald’s brief remarks would launch Steve and Barbara Shantz on a TWR career that would take them to Europe, North Carolina and back in Canada, from Steve repairing studio equipment to leading TWR Canada for a year, to Barbara developing a change in TWR’s international fundraising philosophy that is guiding the ministry today. 

Altogether, Barbara served for 30 years with TWR and Steve 43. Together they had a profound impact on the ministry. 

“I think they were always ready to do what it took to move the gospel forward,” said Ross Campbell, chairman of the board of TWR Canada. “That’s what’s really wonderful about them.”

Early Preparation

The couple were not yet 25 when they heard that call to serve with TWR, but God had been preparing them for missions much longer.

Although Steve was born in Toronto, his formative years were as a missionary kid, in Ecuador for five years and Peru for three years, as his father served as director of Child Evangelism Fellowship in those places. By the time he attended Conestoga College of Applied Arts and Technology in Kitchener, he aspired to be a technology-oriented missionary – specifically, a transmitter operator. 

Barbara recalls a clear call to missions while she was growing up in southern Ontario, when she was in third grade.

“We were studying about the Mediterranean Sea, and later I realized it was the Lord who had spoken to me and said, ‘Someday you’ll go there,’” she related, tearing up at the memory. “When God speaks to you, you can’t really forget it.”

The Shantzes’ first assignment with TWR would be in Monaco – on the Mediterranean.

Steve met Barbara Doerksen just before he began college. They started dating and then corresponded across the miles as he went to school at Conestoga and she attended Confederation College in Thunder Bay, Ontario. As Steve realized their feelings for one another were getting serious, he wrote to Barbara, explaining that he had a calling to missions “and any girl that I would get serious with would also need to have that calling.”

Steve feared that would end the relationship. Instead, Barbara explained that she had been called to missions since she was in third grade. 

The couple married in 1976.

Off to Monaco

After raising support – a core group of eight churches and about 40 individuals would stay with them throughout their careers – they arrived in Monaco in 1982. Steve soon moved from repairing studio equipment to serving as systems engineer for TWR computers in Europe. Barbara became the training officer, translating the thick WordPerfect manual into an abbreviated real-life format TWR personnel new to computers could comprehend. She taught the system for TWR in Monaco, in the Netherlands and finally on Bonaire.

It was sometime during the Shantzes’ service in Monaco that Steve Hippe, chief financial officer for TWR, started to get to know them without meeting them. “Steve and Barbara and the kids were on furlough, so I stayed in their apartment,” Hippe explained. “That was a common practice for missionaries back in the day.”

Although he didn’t yet know the Shantzes, his stay in their apartment, seeing family photos and mementos, along with the positive mentions about them from other members of their team “gave me a sense of who they were,” Hippe said.

Later, Hippe would get to know Steve Shantz better – and discover common interests in the outdoors and in hockey – when they both served on TWR’s Global Executive Team.

“He’s got such a heart for the ministry,” Steve Hippe said of Steve Shantz. “[He is] deeply, deeply committed to the people that we’re trying to reach.”

Steve Shantz also personifies the servant leadership culture of TWR, Steve Hippe said.

The Shantzes served in Monaco for 12 years, relocating to Kelowna, British Columbia, in 1994, where Steve served as TWR representative for western Canada. They had sought a move back to North America so that their children, Aaron and Jasmine, could experience their home culture, Steve said. Barbara took a job with the Kelowna City Art Gallery to help pay the bills. She discovered she loved the visual arts and had a passion for fundraising.

‘Faith Reliance’

But with their kids out of high school, they relocated to the TWR Americas offices in Cary, North Carolina, in 1999. Steve earned his Microsoft certification and came as computer systems administrator. Barbara started out in project management and then as church ministries director. Meanwhile, she was working toward a degree in business administration from Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Barbara also was developing her seminal contribution to TWR. She researched and created “TWR and Faith Reliance,” a publication as well as a four-part seminar series. The idea was to empower partners outside of the West to fund their own projects.

“Faith Reliance is a call not for dependence on funding plans administered abroad but for reliance on God for every kindness in every nation,” she wrote.  

Faith Reliance became TWR’s global policy in March 2012.

“I probably will never forget walking out of a [Global Leadership Team (GLT)] meeting in March 2012 after having worked for nine years on faith reliance and the GLT voting to accept faith reliance as part of our DNA,” Barbara said. “It was an amazing day for me.”

Her work caught the attention of the Lausanne Movement, with its focus on world evangelization. Later, she would become TWR’s representative at Lausanne International in the area of global ministry funding.

“This is a very important part of her legacy,” said Tim Klingbeil, chief development officer for TWR and Barbara’s supervisor at the time.

Barbara showed national partners how they could become self-sufficient, Klingbeil said. “She’s innovative. She’s creative. She’s a visionary thinker.”

Into Leadership

In 2002, Werner Kroemer, then TWR regional director for Europe, invited Barbara to bring that teaching to Eastern Europe. The Shantzes relocated to Vienna, where Steve could service computer network needs in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. They returned to Cary – Steve in 2008 and Barbara in 2009 – after Steve agreed to serve as TWR’s chief information officer.

Not without hesitation. 

“That meant going from technical work, being a real hands-on guy, into leadership,” said Steve, who describes himself as a blue-collar worker. “And that was a hard decision. We really prayed hard about that.”

About the same time, Lauren Libby became president of TWR International. The two men forged a close working relationship.

Libby calls himself “a Steve Shantz fan.”

“The thing about it is, you could give him something to do, and it would get done,” Libby said.

During that time, in 2010, Shantz received a resume from Cassius Smith, an aerospace engineer from Alabama who was retiring, and with his wife, Valerie, was looking to volunteer in missions. The two men connected over the phone.

“We just hit it off immediately,” said Smith, now interim president of TWR International.

Smith served as a volunteer in Steve’s department for six years before becoming the deputy to Libby. He described Steve as “dynamic, innovative, creative … very, very sharp; friendly.”

Seeking Successors

In 2016, when Libby needed someone to lead the Latin American ministry, he turned to Steve. As a Spanish speaker who loves the Latin American people, Steve understood that he was equipped for the role, but not for a lengthy stay.

“I believe that the vice president of Latin America and the Caribbean should really be a Latino that happens to speak English, not a gringo that speaks Spanish,” he said. 

One of his main tasks, Steve decided, was finding his replacement.

“The Lord brought Esteban Larrosa along,” Steve said.

Larrosa was national director for RTM (Radio Trans Mundial) in Uruguay when Steve elevated him and Annabel Torrealba into regional roles in 2018. Larrosa stepped in as international director in 2021 and as vice president for the region in 2022, with Torrealba as international director.

“I could see that Steve was very supportive: delegating, empowering and allowing me to make decisions,” Larrosa said about the mentoring process.

Meanwhile, the Shantzes had relocated to Saint John, New Brunswick, in 2017. Barbara left TWR, having worked in or visited about 50 countries for the ministry. She took on a new role as a major-donor fundraiser for ShareWord Global and formed her own consulting business, Give Way Visioneering. She continues that work to this day.

Libby called Steve to a new role in 2022, as vice president for Digital Ministry. Again, Steve immediately started searching for his own successor and soon settled on Tyler Church.

At the time, Church was TWR’s Global Video Team director.

“He was just very intentional about his transition into the next season,” Church said of Steve. “You know, he never held on to anything too tightly.”

Steve reached out to Church in August 2023. Church became Steve’s deputy in November of that year and assumed the role of vice president of Digital Ministry in March 2024. The plan had been for Steve to ease into retirement as he continued to consult with Church.

Canada Calling

But in February 2024, TWR Canada came calling, asking Steve to serve as interim president, beginning March 1, 2024.

Steve said he felt it was his duty to take the role, but he knew it would be challenging. “Of all the things I’ve done in TWR, that’s probably the most difficult role that I have done,” he said.

Nonetheless, he went beyond expectations, Ross Campbell said.

“He recognized weaknesses [and] right off the bat, [he] started to improve them,” Campbell said. “He never shied away from doing the difficult task. … Steve was … critical to maintaining the stability in Canada and moving the mission forward.”

With Brent Campbell (no relation to Ross) having become TWR Canada president on March 3, the Shantzes finally are beginning the transition to retirement.

That means spending more time with family. Jasmine and her husband, Terence, share leadership as ordained ministers in the Anglican tradition in Saint John. They have two children, ages 14 and 8. Aaron and his wife, Shelley, have two sons, ages 14 and 10. Aaron works with at-risk high school youth and Shelley stewards a forested property and her market farm, also in New Brunswick.

It takes Steve two hours and 15 minutes on his Harley Davidson Road King to get to the property next to that farm where he’s building a cabin. His ever-ready smile grows even brighter as he talks about riding that motorcycle and then working on the cabin or teaching his grandson how to change the hydraulic fluid on the tractor.

“Mainly, I’m the fix-it person,” he said. “My blue-collar troubleshooting is coming back into play.”

Barbara and Steve Shantz had careers with TWR that went beyond anything they could have imagined as 20-somethings on that long-ago morning at Benton Street Baptist Church. It’s clear all of their resources come from God, and all of the glory returns to him.

“It’s just taking what God has given you and taught you and you have learned, and applying that into his kingdom,” Steve said. “When I say, ‘Wow, that really moved the needle,’ it’s because of what God did in me that I was able to have something to contribute.”

Images: (top, banner) Steve and Barbara Shantz attend their retirement party in 2025, (top, left) Steve and Barbara Shantz at work with TWR in Monaco in 1998, (middle, right) Barbara delivers a presentation for TWR in 2012, (bottom, right) Steve Shantz (right) and Jon Fugler (left) record from the TWR studios on the island of Bonaire during a Latin America campaign, (bottom, left) Steve and Barbara, alongside their children and grandchildren, at their retirement party [photo courtesy of Barbara Shantz].