Larry & Linda Burk

The Burks

Larry first attended Calvary Memorial while studying radio engineering at Moody Bible Institute. His career in missionary radio began in 1965 at the Trans World Radio station on Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles, operating high-powered transmitters that broadcast the gospel to South America, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean. Linda joined him in 1970, and in 1972 they transferred to the TWR station in Monte Carlo, which broadcast in many languages to Europe, Russia, the Middle East and North Africa. Larry serviced the recording equipment in the studios there as well as that of individual broadcasters in the region. In 1988 they were seconded to Slavic Gospel Association in Wheaton, Illinois, where Larry helped build new recording studios for the Russian programmers. In 1994 they moved overseas again, this time to the TWR Swaziland station, which broadcasts to the sub-Sahara African continent, with Larry again working in studio maintenance. In 2001, the Lord led to HCJB Global, another radio mission now called Reach Beyond, to Ivory Coast, to assist Christian groups in Africa to set up local radio ministries. Unrest in the country in 2004 precipitated a move back to the States, to serve in “radio-planting” through the HCJB Global Technology Center (now SonSet Solutions) in Elkhart, Indiana. In January 2008 the Burks officially retired, but later assisted the staff at TWR Guam, short-term, to send out the gospel to eastern Asia and islands in the western Pacific. Linda supported the staff at each location in a variety of ways – finance, hospitality, music – and home-schooled their younger children.
 

 Larry and Linda have four adult children: Nathan, Heidi, Bethany, and Jeremy, and nine grandchildren.  They now live with their daughter Bethany Kistler and her family near Momence, Illinois.