Ryan and Leigh Chapple
I grew up, met, married and had 2 awesome boys (Nate and Gabe) in Georgia. The family visited, fell in love with and moved to Washington in 2014. The boys love to head back east during summers to spend 3 weeks with their grandparents. The boys are members of the local QA Scout Troop 72 and attend Hamilton and McClure Middle Schools. They are active in Ballard Knights Football and the QA Soccer Club during the sports season and Xbox during the off season. Leigh and Ryan consult in the Tech industry and host lots of tweens on the weekends. The family has the most authentic time together when they gather around their advent wreath which they inherited from a great grandmother.
Dan and Janet Sharp
Dan and I met in Seattle – I, a native having grown up on Capitol Hill, he, a transplant from the Midwest 40 years ago, have been married for 25 years and have a 19 year-old daughter, Ella. The two of us both have uncommonly glamorous occupations – Dan is a waiter, I am a housecleaner. Dan was born into the Christian faith and I became a Christian in my late thirties. We were members of University Presbyterian Church for 15 years, and Ella is still a member and very involved – she works there part-time, sings in the worship band, leads the junior high worship band, co-leads a 6th grade girl’s small group, attends the University Ministries services, and participates in mission trips. I have absolutely no idea how she gets her homework done! We’d been searching for a smaller church since moving Dan’s Mom, Kathryn, across the country to live in Seattle last year. We visited many churches, finding nothing that felt like home. Hadn’t considered the Queen Anne area, but this Summer we finally headed up to Queen Anne, and all it took was attending one service at Bethany to know that this was the place! We are very happy to be here, and very happy to be new members!
Kathryn Sharp
I was born in an American Baptist parsonage 90 years ago. I had a wonderful father whose example made it easy to believe in the Heavenly Father from an early age. I went to an American Baptist Church college and met my husband there. We were educators and I taught elementary school for two years before starting a family. We lived in Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma and spent the last twenty years of our careers in Kansas. We had four children who went their own way, three ending up in or near Seattle. In 1988, we retired to a lovely retirement community in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas. My husband and his twin, who had been a missionary in Africa for over thirty years, were united in retirement and we spent several happy years there and were charter members of the first American Baptist church in that state. By 2017, those family members were gone as were many friends, so I decided that it would be good for me to be near my two remaining children in Seattle. So now I am happily settled at Ida Culver house Broadview and enjoying a life of ease!