A few years ago, Chris Simpson was protecting heads of state, including then-President Donald Trump, as a longtime U.S. Secret Service agent.
Today, he’s overseeing an international ministry in 98 nations connecting businessmen and women to Jesus Christ.
Simpson, in a telephone interview prior to the Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast on May 21, said the ministry he heads, CBMC International, has a membership of 45,000.
“It has two missions — share the Gospel and invest in businessmen and women in discipleship relationships,” he said.
Simpson, who was raised in West Tennessee, said the work could at times involve young professionals and engaging them weekly with the Gospel.
Or, he said, more mature Christian executives could potentially connect monthly for several hours with an experienced business owner who can share lessons.
Each nation has its own staff and board of directors, while he serves in communications and coordination for all the national ministries, Simpson said.
“Ministry is done in a domestic context,” said the organization’s president and chief executive.
He said CBMC International grew out of CBMC Inc., which was started in the 1930s and is headquartered in Chattanooga.
Simpson said he came to CBMC International after serving as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and nearly 2 1/2 decades in the Secret Service, where he protected foreign heads of state and seven presidents.
Most of that time protecting presidents was spent with former Presidents George W. Bush and Trump, he said, before retiring in 2022.
(READ MORE: President Bush lunches at Porker’s)
Simpson, who is married with three children, said that despite his career in the Marines and the Secret Service, there was still a void in his life.
While he had given his life to Jesus in his early 20s, he kept fighting God, he said.
“I was playing keep-away from the Lord for a decade,” Simpson said. “I wasn’t completely surrendered to God. That foundational joy I didn’t have. I found that only Jesus Christ could fill the void.
“The Lord lovingly brought me to that place of full surrender,” he said.
Tom Francescon, a member of the prayer breakfast’s executive committee, said last year’s event drew more than 2,000 to the Chattanooga Convention Center, making it the largest communitywide seated event in the area.
If you go
— What: 45th annual Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast
— When: 7-8:30 a.m., May 21
— Where: Chattanooga Convention Center
— Tickets: Online at ChattanoogaPrayerBreakfast.com
Francescon said Chattanoogans John Stophel, John Wright, John Steffner and Ted DeMoss had met with then-Mayor Pat Rose in the 1970s to share their vision about an event to encourage morality and ethics in the lives of people in positions of leadership in business, government and the professions.
(READ MORE: Pat Rose runs for mayor)
The first breakfast meeting in 1978, which was then called the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast until the name changed in the early 1990s, had drawn just several hundred when it featured former White House attorney and Watergate co-conspirator Charles Colson, Francescon said in an email.
In 1974, Colson served seven months in federal prison in Montgomery, Alabama. But he had become an evangelical Christian in 1973, later founding his nonprofit ministry Prison Fellowship and then Prison Fellowship International.
Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.