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 founded the first children’s home in Guatemala decades earlier — were moving into one of them. 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. 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. He was not looking for God when he walked onto our campus with his tools.
But Janice — Jan — is the kind of person who does not slow down. She is into people. She talks to everyone. 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, her Jesus. She asked about his life too. She asked questions. She listened.
He got curious. He started asking questions back.
He wanted to know about this Christ Jan kept talking about. The relationship that began as a kitchen-cabinet contract became something else. Before long, he gave everything to Christ.
But the change didn’t land all at once. Some weekends, he was at church. Some weekends, he was back at the bottle. The old life had gravity.
Then one day, his grandson, Stalin, was hit by a car. The boy should have died. He didn’t. Armando says God did a miracle and saved him. From that day, he has never had another drink.
And then he started studying.
Armando never finished high school. 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.”
— Bobby Lynch, on Armando
That’s Bobby’s line, and it’s still true. Armando still builds. When the Quito campus needed beam work this past year, he was the first call. Our team has a phrase for him: un artista, sin patrón. An artist, with no pattern.
But the carpentry isn’t the headline anymore.
If men’s ministry on our campus had a title, Armando would have it. He volunteers for everything. He shows up. He advocates for the work — and especially for the water program.
That part matters. When M:25 launched our very first home water-filter installs in his community — the project that became Give Water — Armando went house to house with us. He didn’t just install. He sat down. He prayed. He listened. He was the chaplain. The way Give Water is still delivered across Latin America today — a filter plus twelve months of presence — has Armando’s fingerprints on it.
So does the physical work. He built the shelving that holds most of the filtration systems in homes across Ecuador. The carpentry never stopped being part of the multiplication. It just expanded.
“He is the Bible in someone’s living room in a way no American missionary can be.”
— Bobby Lynch
Today, that’s still what Armando does. He walks San Fernando house to house. He checks filters. He cleans them. He prays with families. He sits in living rooms that a visiting American never could. He knows whose grandmother is sick. He knows which marriages are struggling. He knows 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. It’s not a slogan. It’s a carpenter named Armando — formed by a campus, a friendship that wouldn’t stop, a non-traditional path to study, and a chance to do the work. It’s Mili, who left M:25 to train 600 pastors back home in Guatemala. It’s the 471 leaders we equipped in 2025 alone — most of them not Americans, 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, even when the seminary’s doors don’t open, a real job, a community of people who keep showing up. The Holy Spirit creates the carpenter who becomes the chaplain.
And 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 carry it home. The campus formed him. We’re expanding the campus so it can form thousands more.