I hope you enjoy the following Photos from our Spring so far. We’ve been having a lot of fun leading the School Of Ministy Development here at Youth With A Mission, Denver.
Much love to you all!
The following is a group of photos from our Brazil outreach. I hope you enjoy. Thank you for being a part of the journey : )
Mark & Maritza Davies
We all made it back safetly and we’re doing a week of debrief here in Denver. Graduation is on Friday.
Here was our last update:
Wrapping up this outreach was a lot of fun. The last portion of our trip was by far been the most full and busy.
We lived in a church new the center of town right next to a very dangerous slum. Rio is an interesting place… To say the least.
Our last week, we peached in churches about missions and dying to self (fun topic) and the kingdom of God.
We also spent two whole days in the Favela Borel. That’s where our friend, anthony lee, took a team and spent 30 days with the Ywam base there. It’s hard to explain what it’s like there. The base has been there, right in the middle of the community for about 22 years. We got to do a bunch of work projects there to help them get ready for the community projects that start this week. They run a clinic, school and music training center. Its amazing to see the transformation that has taken place there in the last year.
One fun story:
We decided to join a local pastor to enter the favela near the church at midnight to go into the party scene and preach the gospel. It was insane! We saw people doing all sorts of drugs and a lot of prostitution. We carefully moved down the street going party to party, stopping the music, preaching and then praying for people. They were all soo receptive and happy to see us. To top off the night, we found the #1 drug trafficker in the favela, the “kingpin” is what they call him. The pastor had been working on relationship with him for about 4 years. We walked Ito their bar, met them all, spoke with them about Jesus and then got to pray for them. Afterward, he told the pastor that he was welcome to come back any time because he really needs Jesus and he wants more prayer. Pretty sweet time! We were all a bit nervous to go in the favela because of the risk and danger. But God made a way for us and it all worked out well for us! We are heading over there again tonight to hand out bibles and talk with more people 
We finished up outreach well. The attitudes of the team members were great. We were all healthy and felt a great sense of urgency to really grab every moment that came our way.
We spent a few days debriefing near the beach and then we flew out on the 3rd of Feb.
Mark
To see a few photos of our time, please Click Here
We hope you enjoy your week! Thank you again for praying for us during our time in Brazil!
Mark & Maritza and the Brazilian Team
Contact us
1markdavies@gmail.com
303.424.1144 – Ywam Denver base
303.586.1909 – Call us directly in Brazil, for free! (it rings at my cellphone)
To see our Prayer / Itinerary Page Click Here
We have been having so much fun here! We are truly blessed. In our time in Barão de Cocais, we saw over 600 people make the decision to follow Jesus. So awesome to be apart of that step of their lives!
We are now back in Curitiba, Brazil. after a few days here, we head to Rio de Janeiro for the remainder of our outreach.
We’ll post out official update here in a day or so.
All the best, Mark
Enjoy the photos below:
We have been blown away by this portion of our outreach!
We arrived here in Padrão de Cocais, a city 20 hours north of Curitiba. We traveled by bus. It was pretty fun! It was the longest road trip a lot of our students had ever been on.
Our kids did really well too! We had a little section of the bus almost all to ourselves Please pray for them to get really good rest. They have been very tired. Everyone here stays up really late and it gets a little noisy.
We are staying in a school here (school is on “summer break”) with 180 other missionaries in training. It’s amazing! They even had to build outdoor showers for us, using huge portable swimming pools as water tanks…!
We are doing a coordinated evangelistic outreach here in this town and combining our efforts with a local church. They have been covering the city with prayer and asking God to move strongly.
Today we mobilized all 200 of us and went around a part of town inviting people to come out and watch our presentation. 150 came out and watched dramas set to music, dances and teaching. At the end 80 people gave their lives to Christ! We have their numbers and names and the local church has a plan to visit and disciple these new followers of Christ. We’re pretty stoked!!
Another neat thing about all of this is that a number of the brazilians that we are working with were saved from drug use and life on the street a few years back by this same kind of ministry that we are doing in this city. It’s crazy to see them reach out to people just like who they used to be before encountering Christ
So there you have it, that’s some of what we’ve been up to! I will post our previous update below, after the photos.
With love,
Mark & Maritza & kids and the brazil team
From Jan 2nd
Happy new year!
I, mark, am writing in the middle of the night because we just ended a church service that lasted 4 hours. It was intense! Praying, shouting, dramas, worship & three sermons…. Yes, three! Then, we ate afterward with the pastor and his wife. Long night!
On wednesday, we welcomed nathan and sarah back on our team. They are two of my phase ii students who went home for Christmas. It’s great to have our team together again! We celebrated by having a family night!
This week went by very quickly! We spent time in worship and prayer, cleaning up trash and praying for our neighborhood, “bar ministry”, door to door evangelism in a local “favela”, visited orphans for a day and a few church services.
Here is one cool story:
While doing street ministry downtown, we met some members of a church and We ended up going to their church and presenting and teaching.
As it turns out, this church has been praying for God to infuse them with passion for missions and evangelism. The pastor was so encouraged. He said that we were answer to their prayers. We went out this week with them and did evangelism too, it was fun! The pastor kept saying, ” this is out of my comfort zone, but I need to learn to do this…” ah good times!
Please keep praying for our friends at ABBA Church. God is getting ready to do something very large here in this town and we’ve had the chance to sow into that.
Tomorrow morning, Monday, we are loading up in a bus for the 14-20hr bus ride to Padrão de Cocais, a city near Bello Horizonte. We will be participating in a sort of Brazilian “Mega-Cities” outreach. Looks like about 250 yawners will be with us there doing all sorts of evangelism. We will be there for 2 weeks, then returning to Curitiba.
Please pray for safe travels and intimacy with Jesus. Our team is a little introverted and we’ll need to be creative about getting “alone time” over the next little bit.
Please pray for us a family too. We’re well, just a little tired. The kids are a huge hit here. Especially Tirzah! She has like 3000 boyfriends.
Also, we went out to eat with Jim Stier and he sent his greeting to you all!
Thank you so much for your prayers! We live and miss you all!
Ciao
Mark and Maritza and the team
Ps, it’s freezing here
Here are a few photos from today, Tuesday.
We had a little band playing Christmas music come down the street on Christmas eve. Pretty fun! The people here really know how to celebrate!
Mark
Hey guys! Just a quick prayer request.
We found a AWESOME project house today! Its big, open and ready to be redone. We have been house-less for over three months and looked at many homes and this is the best one we’ve seen, ever! It even has a walk out basement that we can rent out to other YWAMer’s : )
We are going to put an offer in tomorrow and we’d love for you to pray with us, that the owner accepts it.
The house need a lot of work so we need a new kind of loan called a 203k renovation loan. That kind of loan will give us the extra cash we need to fix the place. Please pray we qualify for a higher loan. If that doesn’t work, we’d need a savvy investor to loan us 30k to do the renovations and then pay them like a second mortgage. (We already have some money saved for projects but this house requires more than what we have ; \
we also need to find a contractor who will work with us to build a plan for bringing the whole house up to speed. (We might already have one, but we’ll see : )
All of this is coming about about 3 weeks before we leave for brazil with our Outreach team. God’s timing is always fun.
Anyway, we’ll let you know what happens with all of this stuff. Thank you for your prayers and love.
Mark and Maritza
Below, you’ll find some of the final updates from our Discipleship Training School Outreaches that went out this Summer/Fall.
Enjoy!
Mark & Maritza
Philippines Week 6
Hello friends and family!
Wow, it’s hard to believe this will be our last time to write you from the Philippines. This past week was full to say the least!
The theme of the week was breaking ground in the hard places with spiritual warfare and evangelism. We started the week with an all-night prayer watch, and we had open air evangelism services in a few really difficult communities– they were all so amazing!
We were able to minister in a nearby jail and were BLOWN UP by what God did– thirty two men gave their lives to Jesus and all of the women were very touched by the Father’s heart.
We also went back to hang out with our bar-girl friends a few times, and seven out of the nine of them came to church with us on Sunday!
We helped YWAM Subic, our contacts, move out of their main headquarters this week without another place to move into, which was very stressful because that headquarters is where they hold all of their classes and bible studies to reach out to the community– even a livelihood center where women can learn to sew bags as a source of income. The night before we helped them move, they got a phone call with an offer for another building! They checked it out, and it’s conveniently located right in the middle of the neighborhood where we have been doing bar ministry! Our friends from the bars can continue to be loved on and disciples by them, and even find another way to make money with the livelihood center!
In the last 6 1/2 weeks we have seen 115 people come to the Lord that we know of and 18 people instantly healed. We truly have seen God shine His light in the darkness! Thank you for all your prayers and support, we have been blessed to be a part of all this. See you guys soon!
The Philippines team
Hello from Amsterdam!
Well its hard to believe, but this is our last week of outreach! Wow! 76 days on the road and the team is doing great!
Late Monday evening, we flew out of Israel and headed for Holland with a bit of a delay (4hours) in Rega, Latvia. Our time in Amsterdam has been great so far. We’ve had some time to play soccer with some kids in a minority neighborhood, do some random acts of kindness and pray for people in the Dam (Amsterdam Centre) During our time on the Dam, one of our girls was photographed for the newspaper and interviewed about why we were holding “Free Prayer” signs. It was a cool opportunity to be a shining light for the Kingdom!
Another cool thing that we got to do, was spend a day cleaning/scrubbing a house for a nearly blind lady who needed eye surgery. The Doctors wouldn’t do it because her house was such a filthy mess and they were afraid of infection. It was so bad that it was hard to believe anyone could live there. (nasty cleaning job.. you have to see the pictures on facebook!) It was such a sense of accomplishment to see her house sparkling clean. She actually wept with thankfulness!
This coming week we’ll finish up our time by joining in with the DTS here in Amsterdam for some lectures on “Identity in Christ”. In the afternoons, we’ll be doing some local ministry and playing some more soccer with our new friends. At the end of the week we’ll be doing our outreach debrief time and then fly to Denver on Sunday!
Please pray for:
Safety as we ride our bikes to ministry times
For the team to finish strong
Much love,
Jonah, Merel and the ATW
Mozambique – week 6
Writing from Maputo currently which means we are finished our first bus ride of 17 hours from Dondo to Maputo. We will be doing a church service Sunday morning then leaving for a 10 hour bus ride to Joburg. We finished our ministry time in Dondo strong. Here are some highlights:
-Theresa was a woman who had a broken family and failing business. After receiving prayer and coming to know the Lord her entire life has turned around. She said all relationships in her family have been restored, her business is doing amazing, and her pastor told us that she has been going around to all of her neighbors telling them about the transforming love of Jesus!
-We met a girl last week that had TB. She proclaimed that if we prayed for her that she would go back and get re-tested and it would come back negative: what faith! We prayed, she got re-tested, and the tests were negative-she was completely healed from TB.
-A witch doctor came to know the love of Jesus!
-A woman who was paralyzed on her entire right side was healed and she is now able to walk!
-Entire families heard and accepted the truth of Christ
-We were able to pay for 200 capalanas for the 200 widows that Iris ministries serves
All in all we had an amazing time in Dondo. The students have been great in not complaining about having to get our water from a well, having the power go off frequently, taking bucket showers, the heat, mosquitoes, ants, mango spiders, matacanyas, no internet, and the hardest – instant coffee!
Mozambique will certainly be missed, but I think we are all ready to get back to Footprints to spend time with the orphans for another week before we head back to the states next Saturday. We leave at 8pm Joburg time.
Please be praying for continued good travel, we stay healthy, unified, and have an amazing debrief time as a team.
Thanks for your prayers,
Eric, Amy, Jenna, and the Africa Team
As you may have guessed, we spoke to the owners of the house we were looking at while we waited for our loan to be approved. I spoke with them, but in our opinion, they were asking too much for the condition of the house.
So, we have continued to hunt! We looked at 8 houses today and a few last week. There are not many options in our price range near where we need to be.
We found one great option today and we will be putting in an offer in the morning (Wednesday). It’s a “Short sale” and we are planning to offer them less than their asking price : ) We’ll see what God can do! It’s always “no” until you ask. Right?
We are inviting you to pray with us for the next few days for God’s favor. We’ll try and keep you posted about what happens.
Mark and Maritza
PS for those of you who are wondering what we’re going to do if this doesn’t work out…. Don’t worry, we’ve been thinking of just renting until we can raise more support, etc… We’ll save our down payment and see what God opens up after we get back from Outreach in Brazil (Feb)
We spoke with the owners of the house we’ve been looking at and they are not willing to lower their asking price. Ah well. The house search continues … We are confident that God has a great house in mind for us, some where : )
We do have a sense of urgency about finding a place soon because we are leaving for Outreach to Brazil on December 18th and we need to be out of the place we’re staying by the beginning of December. Will you join us in prayer? We need breakthrough in our finances (Loan and cash in the bank) and for God to lead us to the right house at the right time. Thankfully we already have some money saved for a down payment, but the bank want to see us have more in reserve.
Thanks for joining us on this wild ride! We’ll keep you posted on what develops. I’m sure it’ll make a great story that will give God some great glory
Mark & Maritza and the three wee ones.
We are excited to announce that we will be leading our first Outreach from a Discipleship Training School in quite a while. The last team we took was right after the shooting took place at our campus in Denver in December 2007. We went to Argentina.
This time will be a little different for us. We are going to go to Brazil for two months and we will be taking our kids with us!
We will be traveling from Denver on December 18th and returning on February 4th.
For now, it looks like we’ll be visiting southern Brazil and possibly Boston on the way down or back.
Thanks for your prayers as we prepare our team
M&M
After about 12 years, Maritza has finally become a citizen of the USA! Yeah!
Just to keep you up to date, We close on our house tomorrow, the 31st… STOKED! We’ll be living at our YWAM DENVER mountain campus for the next few weeks, till we can find a new place.
Thanks for your prayers!
Love
M&M&S&S&T
Good afternoon Friends
We wanted to bring you up to speed on somethings that are happening. To do that we need to back up a little.
As you may or may not know, in 2008 we purchased a condo and also had our twin boys, Seth and Samuel. We had insurance but then got denied After they were born… Bummer, lots of debt and and bunch of doctors to pay. Fast forward almost 3 years… We are still trying to pay our debt ($20,000) and we’ve been raising support too. It’s a bit too much for us to carry now that we’ve added Tirzah to the mix. Since our income is not up to where it needs to be, we started praying to ask God what to do.
In short, we have some equity in our condo and we fee like God told us to sell it. So we put it on the market and 3 weeks later, DESPITE the economy and bad housing market, we got an offer and we’re under contract! God is Good! : )
We have two more things that need to happen in order for us to go to closing on the 31st of August.
1. Home inspection – Happened yesterday – haven’t heard anything yet…
2. Home appraisal –
We are writing to let you know what we’re doing and to ask for your prayers over these two things. Pray for favor : )
Secondly, we have no where to live (Yet) This is another prayer point for you. We are believing God for a single family home with a little yard close to the YWAM Base. We have looked at a few homes that need work and for that reason they are cheaper. (We’re pretty good at fixing and seeing potential in homes) The biggest hurdle for us will be getting a loan (Our income is low and and difficult to explain to lenders because it fluctuates)
So, we have two options:
1. Get a loan and buy a fixer-upper – preferable
2. Rent a place – pretty tough to find a place that would meet our needs at the right price
We are so excited and thankful for what God is going to do and for being able to erase our debt! Thank you for standing with us all these years! We love you and we’ll let you know what happens : )
Mark and Maritza (Seth, Samuel and Tirzah too)
Could it be that revival is about to hit the heart of man in the USA? I believe so! We are getting ready here in our home and at YWAM Denver by calling for God to revive us and renew our passion for Him alone. It has been an amazing week! God is awesome and he is shaking a lot of things. We also have a crazy thing happening with our training schools… turns out that this summer (which is usual a low enrollment time) we have quadrupled our numbers from two years ago! WOW!
