I introduced Danny Morales to the readers of the TPE Blog a few days ago. I just shared a little about him there. Here, in my personal blog, I want to share his whole story. It's appropriate here because, even though we have never met, we have become good friends. Here is what I wrote in the TPE Blog, followed by the one paragraph that was included there, and two more that weren't. I will share more later.
I want you to meet Danny Morales. Danny has been instrumental in helping TPE get blog literate. He has taken a lot of time, long distance to help me learn a lot of things I didn't know. Thanks, Danny for all the time you have put in to help the ministry of TPE.
I consider Danny my first "reverse mentor." This is what my friend Dr. Earl Creps calls the young guys who help the older guys learn young stuff. He has been an immense blessing to me.
Danny has been doing this long distance from his home in Hawai'i where he is in the military and ministry. I wanted to know more about him. Here is part of what he shared with me:
Martha and I are church-appointed missionaries to young adults based out of Christian Life Center (A/G) of Douglas Arizona. Our missionary field are young adult military members and their families. Since entering the Navy in 1999, we have evangelized and discipled many who are now active in ministry. We have two boys, Danny Boy and Michael David, who are missionaries-in-training. Martha is a teacher at a local Southern Baptist preschool where Michael attends and is actively involved in chidlren's ministry at First Assembly of God Hawai'i, where we have been attending since arriving in late December 2005. I am a Ranger Kids Commander at First Assembly and have taught Danny Boy and now Michael for the last year and a half. Martha and I both work under Pastor Cari Hurst as military points of contact for The Reef, the Young Adult Ministry of First Assembly. We help Pastor Cari and her missionary husband Russ in any way we can and consider our involvement with them, our military friends-in-discipleship, and our boy's spiritual development the highlight of our tour.
Our vision is to win, build, and send young adults within the military and to make disciples of all nations through friendship networks. To date, we have helped in making government-funded missionaries and evangelists through the young adult sailors we have directly and indirectly discipled. To further accomplish this vision, Martha and I co-founded a ministry known as Club Alpha Omega Young Adults International in December 2005. The ministry network is new, but so far we have been privileged to commission three young adult leaders who are active in ministry today in three separate A/G churches in three separate states. The Lord also has blessed us with networking opportunities with AGWM projects such as Network211 and Africa Tabernacle Evangelism. We hope one day to fully partner with them and other ministries to fund building projects through our Club's Lighthouse Project, a missions-giving program exclusively for and by young adults. We also hope to revolutionize translation of Pentecostal literature through online collaborative technologies such as wikis and forums. To that end, we launched testbeds in nine languages in March 2006 for this purpose under the initiative Mountain Movers: Missions Without Borders. If the name sounds familiar, we were inspired by the old foreign mission's edition of the Pentecostal Evangel.
Martha and I are committed Pentecostals and come from families who have ministered in the Assemblies of God for many years. Several of her brothers and sisters are lay ministers in A/G churches in California and Arizona. Her mother Carmen, who went to be with the Lord in 1995, was a fierce prayer warrior and pillar of her Spanish A/G church in San Pedro CA. I also come from a background that goes back to the early Pentecostal revivals amongst the Latin Americans along the border with Mexico. My grandmother Teresa was a church pioneer and pillar in Mexico and Arizona. Her and my parents experienced much persecution at the hands of former Catholic friends and neighbors. The persecution hit a flash point with the mob killing of my eight-year old aunt, Esther, who was burned alive while she sang the Spanish version of "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know."
(To be continued)
