Roger grew up in Southern California, in an ethnically dutch neighborhood, where his parents were members of a Dutch Reformed Church (RCA). He completed his secondary schooling in Bellflower and received his B.S. in Business Administration from California University in Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) in 1965. He became a Christian through the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ in 1965 and eventually joined their full-time staff in the summer of 1966. He subsequently trained on university campuses in the States and was sent overseas to Germany in 1968. He was part of a team that pioneered a Campus Crusade university student ministry in that country (Campus fuer Christus). He returned to the USA with his family and studied at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he received an M.Div in Theology and a Minor in Missions in 1979. He then returned to Germany and helped found the Institut fuer Gemeindewachstum (Institute for Church Growth), a ministry designed to provide evangelism/discipleship training and resources to local churches for all denominations. In 1991, he returned to Southern California to study at Fuller again, where he was enrolled in the D.-Missiology program with a focus on developing leaders in the local church. He has been on full-time staff with Lake Avenue Church as Associate Pastor of Missions and Evangelism from 1993 to the present. Roger is married to Lilli and has three grown children, Karen, Kirsten and David.