Bill O'Byrne
Team Leader and Co-Founder of Imago Christi
Bill O'Byrne was an overseas missionary with Church Resource Ministries (CRM) in Saint Petersburg, Russia from 1993 to 2015 with his wife Priscilla, where they raised four children. Bill taught Spiritual Formation and Biblical Studies at Saint Petersburg Christian University for 18 years. During Bill's tenure in Russia, he co-founded the Order of Imago Christi within CRM (now: Novo) in 2004 together with Tom Ashbrook and Endi Kovacs. Bill and his family moved to the US in 2015 to take up the team leadership role in Imago Christi and presently live near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Bill has an M.Div and M.A. in Christian Education from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Bill is passionate about Contemplative Worship, cross-cultural ministry. He enjoys sailing and crawling around rocks whether on a shoreline, or in the Fountain Formations in Colorado, or along the Delaware River in Pennsylvania.
"I experienced a period of darkness in the year 2000, in the events leading up to and following me donating a lobe of my liver to my father, and his subsequent death. The decision whether, as the father of young children at the time, to donate was an ordeal, let alone the surgery itself, its complications and aftermath. I was desperately hanging on to God, but He was silent. In time, He met me profoundly in the terrible silence, and I learned to wait for Him there in a new way, but I needed a lot of help to understand my experience.
"The next summer I met Tom Ashbrook, who introduced me to some new categories and pathways, along which to pursue further intimacy with God. The contemplative silence that the Lord had begun to open up to me prior to my liver donation has now become a regular and central part of my life with God."
Bill coaches leaders and missionaries in all Imago Christi Resources, provides spiritual direction and leads retreats on request, and presents at Discovery events internationally. He has directed dozens of pastors and missionaries around the world, served as a listener for the Ignatian Exercises, and as a spiritual director for a trainee in the Selah school of Spiritual Direction. Bill authored A Lenten Journey: A Contemplative Devotional on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ (2012). Links to Bill's books and articles can be found on this website.