We Hired Him for His Tools. He Stayed for Everything Else.
MULTIPLY IMPACT · FROM THE FIELD
How a carpenter in Quito became the Bible in his neighbors' living rooms, and why his story is the heart of Multiply the Mission.
When Project M:25 bought the Agua Viva campus in 2012, the houses were basically empty: no kitchen cabinets, no bookshelves. Long-term missionaries Rick and Janice Waldrop, mentors to us and the couple who decades earlier founded Casa Shalom in Guatemala, the first Church of God children's home in Latin America, were moving into one of them, and they needed cabinets.
So they hired the carpenter who lived down the road.
His name is Armando.
Armando tells this story himself, on camera. He was one of the men in the neighborhood known for coming home drunk and mean, and he says it plainly: he hurt his family. He spent every dollar and every free hour drinking, because drinking was easier than facing his life, and he was not looking for God when he walked onto our campus with his tools.
Jan is the kind of person who does not slow down. She is into people, she talks to everyone, and she makes herself part of their lives the way some people just do. She hired Armando to build her cabinets, and then she did not stop talking. Day after day, while he measured, sanded and fitted hinges, Jan told him about her life, her family and her Jesus, and she asked about his life too, and listened.
He got curious and started asking questions back. He wanted to know about this Christ Jan kept talking about, and the relationship that began as a kitchen-cabinet contract became something else. Before long, he gave everything to Christ.
The change did not land all at once. Some weekends he was at church, and some weekends he was back at the bottle; the old life had gravity. Then one day his grandson was hit by a car. The boy should have died, and he did not. Armando says God did a miracle and saved him, and from that day he has never had another drink.
Then he started studying. Armando never finished high school, and the seminary's academic doors were not open to him, so we found other doors: Bible courses through the Ecuador Church of God, local church classes, anything we could put in front of him that fed the hunger. He took every one. All the time that had gone into drinking now goes into Scripture.
““Carpenter by day. Evangelist by night.””
Today that is still what Armando does. He walks San Fernando house to house, checking filters, cleaning them, and praying with families. He sits in living rooms a visiting American never could, and he knows whose grandmother is sick, which marriages are struggling, and when a child needs more than one home visit can provide.
Why this story is the heart of Multiply the Mission
This is what we mean by Multiply Impact: a carpenter named Armando, formed by a campus, a friendship that would not stop, a nontraditional path to study, and a chance to do the work. It is the leaders trained in the THRIVE Model's methods, most of them already where the work is.
Our model is simple, even if it takes years: learn, practice, return, replicate. We create the conditions (a campus, a relationship, a path to study when the seminary's doors do not open, a real job, a community of people who keep showing up), and the Holy Spirit creates the carpenter who becomes the chaplain. Then the chaplain helps reshape a neighborhood.
Multiply the Mission
The International Resource Center capital campaign builds the housing and infrastructure so more leaders (pastors, interns, future Armandos) can come, learn, and take it home. The campus formed him, and we are expanding it so it can form thousands more.
