Our Staff

Our Director - Jerry Peyton
Jerry has over forty years of experience in ministry: visionary development, pastoral ministry, teaching in college and high school, and organizational leadership, including building networks and coalitions of churches and ministries to address critical issues. He was the principal founder of the Tucson Crisis Pregnancy Center in 1981.

Jerry is a graduate of the University of Arizona and has master’s degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary and Trinity International University, including certification by the International Human Rights Institute in Strasbourg, France. He currently serves as the part-time dean of the Institute of Biblical Studies at Northwest Bible Church in Tucson.

Jerry has served as a pastor, college faculty member, and teacher at Desert Christian High School and Pusch Ridge Christian Academy, both in Tucson, Arizona. He was a firefighter on the Tucson Fire Department and the city director for TFD’s minority recruitment program.

Jerry’s passion for justice and championing the oppressed has included ministering to those being brutally persecuted in Sudan. His first master’s thesis focused on women’s issues, and his second thesis involved the development of a coalition of organizations ministering in Sudan. For two decades Jerry spoke on sexuality in high schools and colleges, and served as the founding chairman of the Tucson Sex Respect movement, seeking to implement an abstinence-based sex education program in public schools.

The threads of Bible and worldview teaching, justice, compassion for the oppressed, sexuality, women’s issues, and networking/coalition building are woven throughout Jerry’s life and ministry.

Jerry and his wife, Georgia, have three children and nine grandchildren. Their first job after being married was to serve as resident counselors for the Arizona state school for juvenile delinquent girls. They have also experienced the devastation of child sexual abuse in their own family. As a result, ministering to the victims of child sex trafficking is not a completely new direction for them. It is another step in a similar direction.

Stephani Pretti – Assistant to the Director

Stephani's call to ministry began in 1999 when she joined the high school youth staff of Pantano Christian Church as a volunteer youth coach. In 2005, she joined the ministry full time and became the Student Ministries Associate Pastor focusing primarily on ministry to young women. In 2008 while attending the Christ In Youth summer conference with the high school students, Stephani was first made aware of the victimization of child sex slavery. The realization that children and young woman were being brutally victimized in this way set her on a life path of working to fight this injustice.

Stephani began working fulltime at the CPC last year as the Manager of Church Relations. She has been introducing churches to the free, online Pure Path materials designed to help teens, their parents and youth workers develop a lifestyle of moral purity. In addition to assisting our director, Stephani will be working with churches in establishing our child sex trafficking educational program designed for teens and parents.

Stephani is a graduate of the University of Arizona and resides in Tucson near her parents, siblings and their families.

Sex trafficking in Tucson

Watch 12/11 video of Jerry Peyton on In Focus with Bob Lee

Our Staff

Sex trafficking in Tucson

314 "Johns" arrested in multi-state sting

Dozens of children rescued in effort targeting prostituted children

Helping Stop Child Sex Slavery