About Us
Our Mission
Connecting and equipping business leaders to build enterprises that glorify God and advance the Kingdom.
Our Vision
To create a connected network of Christian chambers across Pennsylvania, like tributaries feeding one river, where businesses flourish spiritually, personally, and professionally, setting a Christ-centered standard of excellence and influence.
⬅ Watch our video to learn more!
Why Pennsylvania? Why Now?
Pennsylvania is not an accidental backdrop for this work.
In 1681, before he ever crossed the Atlantic, William Penn wrote to a friend about the land he had just been granted. He hoped it might set an example to the nations. There might be room here, he wrote, though not in England, for such a holy experiment.
He was not proposing a colony. He was proposing a test. What happens when people shaped by faith are free to follow their consciences, trained in useful work, governed by laws they consent to, and expected to use what they have for the good of their neighbors?
Penn built the conditions for that test into law. His 1701 Charter of Privileges, which served as Pennsylvania’s constitution until the American Revolution and helped lay the groundwork for what became the First Amendment, opens by declaring that no people can be truly happy, even under the fullest civil liberties, if their freedom of conscience is denied. He grounded it in a single line: that Almighty God is the only Lord of conscience.
Because no People can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Consciences. (William Penn, Charter of Privileges, 1701)
That sentence is not a relic. It is the founding charter of the state your business operates in.
The Holy Experiment Isn’t Over
Historians generally mark the experiment as ending around the Revolution. But notice what that means. It was not disproven. Nobody ran it to a negative result. It was set down.
The Commonwealth is still here. The freedom of conscience is still written into its bedrock. And the people who could take the experiment up again are not in government. They are in truck cabs and back offices and job trailers across Pennsylvania, employing their neighbors, serving their communities, and wondering whether their faith has anything to do with their work.
It does. That is the whole question the experiment was designed to answer, and it is still open.
The PA Christian Chamber of Commerce exists to take it up again. Not as nostalgia. As mission.
A Word About the Moment We’re In
Anyone paying attention to American life can see the cracks. Family structures are fragmenting. Church attendance is at historic lows. Loneliness is being measured as a public health crisis. Civic trust is collapsing. Whole categories of moral consensus that once held a society together are being renegotiated in real time.
Christian business leaders feel this acutely, because business owners feel everything acutely. You hire from this culture. You serve customers shaped by it. You lead employees navigating it. You make decisions every day that put your convictions on the line.
We are not interested in panic. We are interested in faithfulness. The early church didn’t flourish in a Christian culture. It built one, from inside a far more hostile world, by living and working differently.
Working differently requires knowing how. That is why the Chamber is built around teaching, not just gathering. Conviction tells you what kind of business to build. Competence is how you actually build it. We are committed to both, because a movement of Christian leaders running struggling companies changes nothing, and a movement of excellent companies with no convictions changes nothing either.
A Calling We Don’t Want to Skip: Praying for Those in Authority
Scripture is not subtle on this point. “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:1 to 2).
It is easy in this cultural moment to talk about elected officials with cynicism, frustration, or partisan heat. Scripture calls Christians, and Christian business leaders especially, to do something harder and more strategic: to pray for them. By name. With persistence. Across party lines. Whether we agree with them or not.
The Chamber takes this calling seriously. We pray for our governor, our legislature, our local officials, and our judges not as a political statement, but as an act of obedience and a strategy for the peace of our Commonwealth. We invite our members to do the same, and we provide the framework, the resources, and the rhythms to help. Every equipping session closes in prayer, and prayer for those in authority is part of that rhythm.
If the marketplace is our mission field, then prayer for those who govern that mission field is not optional. It is foundational.
Our Statement of Faith
The PA Christian Chamber of Commerce is built on a biblical foundation. Our Statement of Faith is not a formality. It is the bedrock of everything we do. Every member is required to read and affirm this statement as a condition of membership.
Our Statement of Faith covers six areas: the authority of the Word of God, God’s Deity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the nature of evil and Satan’s defeat at the cross, salvation through Christ alone, the sanctity of human life and biblical marriage, and our calling to missions and service.
This statement does not exhaust the extent of our beliefs. Our board of directors serves as the final interpretive authority on the Bible’s application in all matters of life and practice.
How We Got Here
The PA Christian Chamber of Commerce was founded in 2026, but the vision behind it has been decades in the making. Karl and Jillian Diffenderfer spent over two decades in Pennsylvania’s business and nonprofit community, coaching hundreds of leaders, building organizations, and watching the same two patterns repeat.
The first: Christian business leaders who felt they had to choose between their faith and their work.
The second: leaders with deep conviction and real integrity whose businesses were quietly struggling, because nobody had ever taught them how to price a job, read a P&L, hire well, or hand off responsibility without losing control. Their character was never the problem. Their training was.
Neither of those is a personal failure. Both are gaps the church and the business world each assumed the other was filling. The PACCC was established to fill them: a place where faith-driven entrepreneurs can stop hiding what they believe, start building from it, and get equipped to build it well.
What began in Lancaster County is designed to grow, not as a franchise, but as a movement. Chapter by chapter, leader by leader, Pennsylvania’s marketplace can be transformed when Christians operate with both conviction and competence. That is the vision. That is why the PACCC exists.
Our Leaders
Karl Diffenderfer,
Founder and President
Karl Diffenderfer founded the PA Christian Chamber of Commerce with a bold conviction: that faith-driven leaders are Pennsylvania’s greatest untapped business asset, and that they need a community built to equip them.
With over two decades serving Pennsylvania’s business community and more than 10,000 documented coaching sessions, Karl has walked alongside Christian entrepreneurs at the most pivotal moments of their professional and spiritual lives. He has seen firsthand what happens when leaders align their faith with their work, what is lost when they don’t, and how often the difference comes down to whether anyone ever taught them the fundamentals.
The PACCC is the culmination of that experience. It is the organization Karl wished had existed for every leader he has ever worked with. He lives this mission daily through his walk with Christ, his 25-year marriage to Jillian, as a father of four, and as a grandfather.
Karl Diffenderfer is a faith-driven change agent with over two decades of experience equipping Christian business leaders across Pennsylvania to integrate biblical conviction with professional excellence.
Jillian Diffenderfer,
Co-Founder, Operations
Jillian Diffenderfer co-founded the PA Christian Chamber of Commerce with a singular focus: building an organization that serves with both excellence and Kingdom purpose. Her expertise in nonprofit operations, marketing, and strategic leadership has shaped the PACCC from its earliest days.
As a coach, communicator, and strategist, Jillian works with Christian business owners and leaders through seasons of growth and transition, particularly around questions of identity, calling, and spiritual formation. She has spent more than 20 years helping people align their personal lives and professional work with God’s purposes.
Through the PACCC, Jillian creates the infrastructure that makes the mission sustainable: the systems, the community, and the culture that allow faith-driven leaders to do more than attend events. They get formed.
Jillian has been married to Karl for over 25 years and is a devoted mother to four children and grandmother.
Jillian Diffenderfer brings over 20 years of experience in marketing, leadership, and spiritual formation, co-founding the PA Christian Chamber of Commerce to help faith-driven leaders align their calling with Kingdom purpose.
Leah Nagle,
Ambassador and Events Manager
Leah Nagle has a gift that cannot be manufactured: she sees relationships before they exist. She walks into a room, reads the people in it, and knows, before anyone else does, who should meet whom, what partnership is waiting to be formed, what collaboration is one introduction away.
As co-owner of Udder Bliss Creamery in Elizabethtown, Leah has built something most businesses only aspire to: a genuine community gathering place. She has done it through intentionality, creativity, and a deep investment in the people around her. Those same instincts drive her work with the PACCC.
As Events Manager and Ambassador, Leah designs and executes experiences where faith-driven business leaders don’t just exchange business cards. They build real relationships, discover real opportunities, and encourage one another in their Kingdom calling. She serves as a bridge between the local Elizabethtown community and the PACCC’s statewide mission.
Leah Nagle is a connector and community-builder who creates meaningful events where faith-driven business leaders forge authentic Kingdom-minded partnerships.
