The Children Couldn’t Believe They’d Been Invited

“Warned to stay out, Pastor Abraham and his wife Karol walked in to invite a hundred children to Christmas — and kept coming back.”

About 550 children were expected at the Christmas gathering. About 650 came. Some came from a place no one had expected to see at a church event.

In the parish where Pastor Abraham and his wife Karol serve, near the foot of Cotopaxi, there's a community local people had told them to leave alone. Around thirty women work there. About a hundred of their children live there too — at home, because the brothel where the mothers work is also where the families live.

Prostitution is legal in Ecuador. That doesn't make it safe for those children, and it doesn't make the place less of a neighborhood. What Karol and Abraham walked into wasn't a raid. It was a community of a hundred kids who had never once been invited to a Christmas event.

They were told not to go

People warned them off. The community was controlled by dangerous men, they said. There was no getting in, and certainly no getting the children out for a Sunday afternoon at church.

Karol and Abraham went anyway, together, on a November day in 2023. They walked in to invite the children.

The children couldn't believe it

The children asked again, to be sure. They couldn't believe a church wanted them at anything, or that they'd receive something at Christmas. The invitation itself was the part they couldn't believe was real.

What Karol carried home

When the report reached the rest of us, one line stayed with everyone:

“Karol quedó impresionada de todo lo que vió.”

Karol was deeply shaken by everything she saw.

That’s the line that mattered. Not triumph. Not victory. Shaken. A pastor’s wife walked into a place she had been warned about, looked at a hundred children, and carried what she saw home with her.

That night I wrote to her and Abraham:

"Yo sé muy bien el dolor personal y emocional que cae en un ministro en situaciones tan delicadas. Gracias por ser siervos del Señor con corazones juntos con los más vulnerables."

(I know the personal and emotional weight this kind of situation puts on a minister. Thank you for serving with hearts turned toward the most vulnerable.)

Karol’s reply was simple: Gracias amigos por su apoyo. Creemos que Dios hará su obra perfecta. (Thank you, friends, for your support. We believe God will do His perfect work.)

Abraham’s was shorter still: Bendiciones desde Ecuador.

What THRIVE Community Care exists for

This is the moment to say plainly what Project M:25 is for.

We are not a rescue organization. We do not raid. We do not show up in places we haven’t been invited. The work we do is to support and walk alongside Karol and Abraham, who have built relationships there.

THRIVE Community Care exists because pastors like Karol and Abraham need more than encouragement. They need training. They need trauma-informed tools. They need a way to keep walking into communities like this one without losing themselves to what they see.

And they need to know they are not carrying it alone.

We walk beside them, behind them, around them — making sure that when they go where no one else will, there is support to keep the training current, the prayers steady, the support real.

The story didn’t end that night

At the Christmas gathering, the children from that community received their gifts and felt special that day.

In the months and years that followed:

• A community well was dedicated in the broader parish, opening clean water to families nearby

• 141 leaders in Abraham’s region have been certified through THRIVE Community Care

• Abraham was named MWOA Coordinator for Ecuador in early 2026

Karol and Abraham keep going back — to that community and others like it.

The work is slow and faithful, and it isn't finished. The children couldn't believe they'd been invited. In communities like this one, the invitation is the ministry — the fact that someone showed up to ask, and came back.

The work is slow. The work is faithful. The work has not ended.

The children couldn’t believe they’d been invited. In communities like this one, the invitation is the ministry — the fact that someone showed up to ask, and came back.