Feliz Navidad and Happy Holidays to all of you,
I have always liked "Feliz Navidad" better than saying, "Merry Christmas" because in Spanish the translation is “Happy Birth” (of Jesus of course!). I love that! Well, there is no sense in lying, the holidays are hard on us missionaries. Watching everyone’s social media posts with family and friends is not easy. Please know that we are not trying to seek sympathy, but rather ask for your prayers for us and any other missionary that you may know during this time of year.
We had as good of a time as anyone could expect on Thanksgiving, being so far away. We celebrated a traditional Thanksgiving meal with our entire church family here and they seemed to really enjoy going around in a circle and giving thanks for a blessed year. To our surprise most of them said they were most thankful for having a local congregation to be a part of! One family told us that after many years of praying the Lord would send someone to San Pedro, they were most thankful that the Lord answered their prayers! We were overwhelmed to hear of their thankfulness and we too are overwhelmed to be given the privilege of serving in this small corner of the world. Please continue to pray for our little church in the Andes Mountains!
As Christmas approaches, the pastor of a church down in Oklahoma contacted me and asked if they could financially sponsor an outreach to the poorest and neediest of our community! Obviously, we were thrilled with the opportunity to reach out to the many families in need here. We have decided to let each family in our church pick three families outside of our church to bless in our community. We thought this would get everyone involved, and as they know the community better than anyone, they were well equipped to pick which families we were going to try to bless. Please pray for every family that's picked, that we get just the right gifts, and that the Lord uses it to draw them to Himself!
On an absolutely different note Priscilla had this on her heart to share:
As the year comes to a close, I tend to get introspective and evaluate how the ministry and our personal lives have gone over the last twelve months. This year, I wanted to write something a little different, and hopefully the Lord uses it for His glory.
Every night we read with our kids about a missionary or “hero” of the faith. A few nights ago we were reading about the life of John Williams. Most of you have probably never heard of him, I know I hadn’t before we started reading his biography, but his life has really given me things to mull over in the last weeks of reading about him. When we were reading the other night, it said that in April of 1838, after having been a missionary in Polynesia for twenty years and finishing his only furlough to England during his ministry, eighteen people were moved to join him and his family on a ship back to Polynesia to become missionaries where there was no gospel presence. Eighteen people, in 1838, when there was a guarantee that most would lose children to disease, that all of them would give up everything they’d ever known, that they would live in grass huts, and many would never see their families again… Eighteen people agreed to go with him to serve the Lord because they believed the gospel was important enough to make that sacrifice. It struck me that in twelve years in Ecuador, in an age where very little sacrifice has to be made compared to John Williams’ time, we still haven’t seen people respond to the call to serve where people are unreached. Williams was later martyred in his attempt to share the gospel with a particularly violent and cannibalistic tribe, and he went there knowing full well the risks involved. That kind of devotion to the gospel isn’t supposed to be reserved for the missionaries and the pastors of this world. Radical devotion to our Lord and Savior is a requirement of all of us. But are we really ready to live radically for Jesus?
Christianity in the USA right now is dying. Our youth have seen the vanity of the prosperity gospel, the hypocrisy of parents who preach the importance of church but don’t live for Jesus, and a general devotion to religion but lack of relationship. It’s no wonder that we don’t have people who want to become missionaries when they’ve only ever seen people “playing church.” From the book, Everyday Evangelism: Sharing the Christian Faith, by Dave Early and David Wheeler: “As unbelievable as it may seem, recent research indicates that there are now more than 200 million non-churched people in America, making our nation one of the largest unchurched countries in the world. Author Justice Anderson has stated, “The American church is in the midst of one of the largest mission fields in the world today. Only three other nations—China, India and Indonesia—have more lost people. 1” These are just numbers from the “unchurched” category, and we all know that not everyone who attends a church is a true believer or follower of Jesus. Knowing this, those numbers should make us all even more concerned. Clearly most of you who read these letters don’t fit into this category of the unchurched or the hypocritical christian, but the situation is sobering and dire. Andy and I have been praying and praying and waiting for help for years, but that help will never come if this trend continues.
I know this letter isn’t a cheerful end of year commentary about how blessed the ministry has been (and it has been a wonderful year of growth in our little community, that I praise the Lord for!). I understand this probably isn’t what you came here to read. What I hope this is, is an encouragement for us all to get on our knees and pray for the lost all around us. I hope this is an encouragement for us to look at christians of ages gone by in our own culture, and look at the places most on fire for the Lord today, and see what needs to change in our own lives and congregations. Let us examine ourselves, and see a 2023 where we worry less about the money in our bank accounts, and the new gadgets we can buy, and worry more about our neighbor lost, dying, and going to an eternity separated from the Lord. Pray for missionaries, pray for our churches and our country, and for the sake of the one who gave all for us, let’s get to work.
-Priscilla, Andy, and children
PS. As we wrap up another year we will strive to have tax receipts out and in the mail by the 15th of January. As we heavily depend on others to help with this, please be patient with us as we work on all our end-of-the-year duties.
Links to the Book on John Williams: https://www.amazon.com/John-Williams-Messenger-Christian-Heroes/dp/1576582566/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FHI3V0YNHG5B&keywords=John+Williams+YWAM&qid=1671042500&sprefix=john+williams+ywam%2Caps%2C170&sr=8-1
Dave Earley and David Wheeler, Everyday Evangelism: Sharing the Christian Faith (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 328–329.
Please send all monetary contributions to:
Acts 1:8 Mission Society
PO Box 212
Harrison, OH 45030.
You can continue to make all checks payable to: “Acts 1:8 Mission Society” with “DVarga” in the memo section (All funds donated in this way will continue to go entirely to the DVarga family AND our mission work in Ecuador and are tax-deductible).
You can also write checks to Priscilla or Andy DVarga with "gift" in the memo section, but you will NOT receive a tax-deductible receipt at the end of the year for funds given this way.
If you need a quarterly tax statement or just want to contact us, please just write to the address above or call our phone #:(513) 334-8281
To donate through PayPal electronically please scroll to the top of the homepage at www.dvargamission.org and click the "Donate" tab.
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