Mission Highlight: Jon Wilson of Amor Ministries

Over forty years ago, Gayla Cooper felt reluctant to spend even one day ministering to children in a Tijuana orphanage.  However, after meeting a group of children from a Mexican orphanage, Gayla’s heart was touched so deeply that she decided to pack her bags and move to Mexico to work in the orphanage full-time.Meanwhile, Scott Congdon traveled to the very same orphanage with a community service group from his college.  The children had such a profound impact on Scott, that when he returned home, he began collecting food and clothing for the children, returning to deliver the collected items.Together, Scott and Gayla soon discovered that they shared the same dream of ministering alongside the poor in Mexico.  In March of 1980, Scott and Gayla founded Amor Ministries.  That fall, they recruited their first ministry group to participate in a building project at a Tecate orphanage.Scott and Gayla were married a year later and four more missions teams traveled to Mexico with Amor.  Today, the ministry continues to live out the Congdon’s initial calling and builds homes alongside families each day.What we believe in:#1 – We love Jesus.In all things we look to Jesus. We work because of him and we want our work to point to him.#2 – We are diverse.The churches we serve are diverse and our staff reflects that diversity. You are guaranteed to find someone here who thinks differently than you about just about anything theological, political, or even where the best tacos are. Iron sharpens iron and, in the end, see #1.#3 – We have healthy conflict.We are learners, which means that we are open to being better in all things which means we need to be able to discover with our coworkers how we can be better. Even when we seek to be better, it doesn’t always feel good to hear how to be better, so we always refer back to #1.#4 – We eat together.Any Christian community worth its salt breaks bread together. It breaks down barriers and creates opportunities for deeper relationships. When we meet, more often than not, we eat together. Sometimes we even compete in our annual Chili Cookoff!#5 – We laugh.Ministry is fun. We serve a savior whose first miracle was turning water into wine at a party. We are at a nexus point of people’s lives being transformed. Ministry is also hard which is why we make sure we laugh a lot.#6 – We are servants.The words, “That’s not my responsibility,” don’t exist with us. We go the extra mile with our groups, our donors, our pastors, and our teammates which frequently takes us outside of an eight-to-five schedule.#7 – We constantly seek God.We are structured like a business but we spend time listening to what God is saying to us as part of the body of Christ. When closeness and proximity to God is your top priority (see #1), there’s no more exciting place to be than to be listening.How to volunteer, donate and help:https://amor.org/Support the showSupport us here:https://www.bpcusa.org/financial-ministry/BPC Youtube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/c/BrentwoodPresbyterianChurch