Second week of Ministry!

This week was amazing! We spent all week doing SMT in different neighborhoods partnering with lots of different local churches.

What does a normal week look like for us? (Just a reminder)

Each week will be a little different, but we do have a weekly schedule. Each Sunday we will go to a local church and meet the pastor and community. This will be the church that we are serving with for the week to come! Monday-Thursday are our ministry days. These days consist of whatever services the local church and community need (SMT-strategic ministry time, clinics, etc.). Fridays are what we call “ATL” (Ask The Lord). We don’t have anything planned on Fridays because this is our opportunity to open our hearts to see what God has for us! Some ATL days we may get to just enjoy the country by going to tourist areas or local shops. Some days we will have opportunities to work with other ministries in the area that we feel called to, and some days the Lord will lead us into things we won’t expect! At the end of the week, each Saturday we take a sabbath to rest and spend time with the Lord processing the week and looking ahead to the next week. I am so grateful that World Race exercises a Sabbath!

What is SMT?

SMT stands for Strategic Ministry Time. We split into two teams of five and go out with a translator into neighborhoods to spread the gospel. We partner with local churches, so sometimes pastors or other church members will join us to get to know the community better, but they don’t always. We spend all day just walking around neighborhoods making conversation and asking to be invited into people’s homes. Our goal is to intentionally and deeply connect with people so that we have a strong relationship through the love of Christ. Ultimately, we want to share the gospel with each person, but by building a good relationship we can discern the situation well and share the gospel effectively and truly pray through each thing we say.

The community in the Dominican Republic is so beautiful! Everyone here is truly hospitable. People are so willing to invite us into their homes and it’s customary for them to offer us any seats that they have. May people and families will offer us drinks or anything we may need. It’s normal for people to be friends with others just because they are neighbors, which is very different from the US. It provides such an amazing way for us to be a part of each community in an intimate way that we wouldn’t get in America.

September 25th-30th

This week was fully an SMT week! All day every day! We mainly went to communities in Jarabacoa. We went to a total of four communities each with a different local church. The main community in the Dominican is Catholics, which makes it kind of hard to share the gospel because they know who God is, but they don’t always know who Jesus. However, many Catholics go to church just for the community and for normalcy, but don’t really know what they believe in their hearts. We’ve also run into a lot of drug addiction, which is really hard to see, and those people are very hard to minister to because they aren’t always in a mental space to hear what we want to share. Overall, the best way we’ve found to connect with people and share Jesus with them has been to share pieces of our testimonies. It really is amazing to see how God working in someone else’s life can impact someone else so deeply just through the story.

I don’t feel like I have enough space to share every single person we talked to, but I will share some of the people we spent the most time with and the ones who I will be asking for prayer for! A is an older woman who has grandchildren and great-grandchildren who we met on Monday. She had her first child when she was 16 years old with her husband who is about 20 years older. She goes to catholic church and is very close to her children and grandchildren. We didn’t get to connect much deeper on her family situation, but we did get to pray for her and build a good relationship while showing the love of Christ. On Tuesday we met a woman named Crystal and her dad. Crystal is 21 years old, a catholic, and studying english at the university. Her father doesn’t go to church anywhere, but we did get to talk to him about Jesus and he seemed open to the local church! Our translator Darlin invited Crystal to Mission of Hope because in two weeks we need extra translators for some of the groups, and she said she would come for an interview! She got accepted and will now be translating part time for Mission of Hope! On Wednesday I met a woman named Missy. Missy is not her real name, it’s just what the local neighbors call her because no one knows her name. There is definitely drug influence in her life and possibly other mental struggles. She doesn’t have a home, but in the neighborhood she lives in the people give her food and try to talk to her. I felt called to pray for her, so Darlin and I found her and talked to her. She wasn’t fully coherent to what we were saying and she didn’t make any sense in what she was saying to us, but we did lay hands on her and pray over her. I will continue to pray for her because only God can invade her life and make changes now. On Thursday we met a beautiful family who already know Jesus! M and C have three kids, one of whom is only four months old. It was such a blessing to hear what God is teaching them right now and pray over their family and their relationship with the Lord!

Friday: For our Ask The Lord day we found a ministry pretty close to where we are that works with young girls who have been human trafficked. They are a full rehabilitation program and they share the gospel with each girl. We had an amazing opportunity to go hear the testimony of the woman who started the ministry and do some yard work on their campus that the needed done. We got to connect with a few of the girls and play a game of volley ball! They have about 7 girls at a time for 6 months (roughly) It was very eye-opening to see the deep hurt of this country in the area of sexual sin. Pedophelia only became illegal three years ago, so it is a big problem and heavily normalized. Their ministry is doing great work and I was so blessed to be a small part in what God is doing there!

Prayer Requests:

-Pray for A and her family as they continue to grow. Pray that she would truly know who Jesus is and find a non-catholic church to build community in

-Pray for Crystal as she navigates becoming a translator for MOH, that she would hear the true gospel and build a good community within this ministry. Pray for her dad, that he would come to know the truth of God

-Pray for Missy, that God would invade her life and change it in a way no one else could. Pray for her overall well being

-Pray for M and C that they would be able to show Jesus to their children well and that God would continue to move in their lives. Pray for the health of their family as their children grow!

-Pray for the ministry we worked with on Friday, that the Lord would change the lives of each girl that goes through the program. Pray for the Dominican Republic that God would rest here and the country would be changed forever. Pray for the sexual sin that is taking over, that God would take over instead.

-Pray for my group as we continue to build relationship and explore all different kinds of ministry

-Pray for the people I didn’t get to share about in this post, but we did talk to. Pray for each family that they would find Christ and experience is love in a deep way specific to them. Pray for emotional and physical health for almost all of the people we connected with. Overall, just pray for the movement of Christ, especially within the Catholic churches

Below I have posted some pictures from our week!