On Saturday, June 24th, 18 high school students and five adults departed
from Vineyard Boise to go and minister at an orphanage in Mexico. After an 18-hour charter bus trip to San Diego and a 1 1/2 hour van ride over the border, they will arrive at La Mision, a small town about 20 miles north of
Ensenada.
Trip leader Rick Van Cleef can't count the number of times he has visited the orphanage, called Puerta de Fe (Door of Faith). "It must be more than a thousand," he said.
"Every time I go down there, I think God is just having a sense of humor with me," Rick said. "Before I was a Christian, I hated Hispanics. But on my first trip to Mexico with a Christian group, we were on a bus crossing the border, and immediately I just had a heart to serve there."
Rick poured his heart into learning Spanish and understanding the culture and mindset of the Mexican people.
"God put a love in my heart for the Latin people, and all I've wanted to do is find a way to minister there," he said.
The Vineyard Boise group will help lay the foundation for a recreation center and construct a footbridge across a creek that runs through the orphanage's property. But the greater mission is the interaction the group will have with the 95 children and teenagers who live at Puerta de Fe.
Probably only five of the kids are true orphans, Rick said. The rest are there because of financial hardship or abuse situations at home. Their ages range from 1 to 19.
There are no free schools in Mexico. But as long as the kids stay in school, the orphanage commits to pay $50-60 a semester for their education. It even pays college tuition for the 19-year-old resident.
All the kids attend church every Sunday, and American church groups are constantly at the orphanage helping with a variety of projects. But the teenagers at Puerta de Fe typically struggle to find any kind of meaning in Christianity.
"They go to church because they have to. They're around Christianity all the time," Rick explained. "But church is boring to them, and they can't see any point to being a Christian. To them, it's irrelevant to everyday life."
With a little courage and lots of prayer, the Vineyard Boise group hopes to change that perception.
"Our main reason for going is that the power of God would be revealed through our high school students, so that the kids at the orphanage can see the relevance in Christianity and know that the power of God is real," Rick said.
Vineyard Boise's youth pastor, Trevor Estes, has no concrete expectations for the trip but simply desires to give the students a "chance to minister, whatever that looks like."
"We've been studying Mark in youth church, and when we looked at Jesus sending his disciples out, one thing we talked about is how we wouldn't consider them qualified for ministry, but Jesus did," Trevor said. "We just recognize that youth can be used right now. They don't have to go off to college first and get some ministry degree.
Rick became involved in missions work to orphanages in Mexico in the early 1990s with a group from the
Anaheim Vineyard. Eventually, the group formed a non-profit organization with the goal of starting its own orphanage. In the course of investigating the legal and logistical issues involved in such a venture, one of the couples from Anaheim was invited to become the assistant directors of Puerta de Fe. During the past 6 years, they have helped the orphanage establish a wide base of support from Christian churches and civic groups in the United States.
When Rick lived in California, he made the trek to Puerta de Fe nearly every weekend for five years and served on the orphanage's board of directors. He's known many of the kids for more than seven years and some of them from before they came to the orphanage.
In January 1997, Rick moved to Boise. Although he was hundreds of miles away, the orphanage still captured his heart. He has made 13 trips to Mexico in the past few years, and three trips to Guatemala. "I have a very understanding boss," said Rick, an electrician by trade.
Although the primary purpose of this week's trip is to minister to others, Rick anticipates the experience will minister in powerful ways to the Vineyard Boise group, as well.
"We've never taken anyone down there who didn't first of all have their eyes opened to how blessed we are" in America, Rick said. Secondly, just about everybody who makes a short-term mission trip "gets a heart for the ministry of foreign missions."
Rick explained that many of the teenagers who visited Puerta de Fe from the Anaheim Vineyard are now active in full-time ministry. His hope is that many Vineyard Boise teenagers "will be able to realize what the call of God is on their lives for a lifetime of service."
Although the trip promises to be an exciting, eye-opening adventure for the teenagers, heeding that call to ministry is the ultimate motivation behind the trip.
"What's important is that we go in obedience and faithfulness and let God use us how he wants," Trevor said. "It's not so much about us. It's about God."
