Larry & Linda Burk

The Burks

Larry first attended Calvary Memorial Church 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, in the Caribbean. Larry and Linda met on Bonaire in 1968 and married in 1970. Linda helped organize the Music Library and sang with the English Choir and Spanish Ensemble recording music for the programs. In 1988 they were seconded to Slavic Gospel Association in Wheaton, Illinois, where Larry helped build new studios for the Russian programmers.

The opening of Russia at that time brought change to SGA’s radio ministry, so in 1994 the Burks were sent to the TWR Swaziland station, which broadcasts to the sub-Sahara African continent. In 2001, the Lord led to another radio mission, HCJB Global (now Reach Beyond), and to Ivory Coast, to assist Christian groups in Africa in setting up local FM radio ministries. Political unrest in the country precipitated a move back to the States in 2004, 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 by shortwave radio to the Asia region, including Japan, the Koreas, China, southeast Asia, and islands in the western Pacific. Here Larry came full-circle, again operating transmitters.