Editor’s note: This is the third part of a multi-part story highlighting a family in Spain who has partnered with BILD since 2016. This story will focus on the Monroy family’s strategic intentions with their time to cultivate opportunities to share Christ with others and shepherd and establish the families in their house church.
Hospitality has been key to the Monroy family’s outreach in their community in Spain. They have not only opened their home and welcomed their neighbors in, becoming known as the “house with the open gate,” but have also opened their entire lives.
Mario and Amuy, and their three children, Katherina, Josiah, and Lucas, recognize their stewardship to plant and establish churches in Spain and have committed their lives to God’s plan and their role within it. This commitment can be seen in the time they reserve to continue their own faith development, time to train church leaders in Spain and Latin America, and in the time dedicated to building relationships with friends, neighbors, and their church family.
Each day after the kids are taken to school, Mario focuses on office work and continues his own study of BILD’s leadership training materials. Amuy works on translating BILD’s resources into Spanish, and once or twice a week, she carves out time to meet with neighbors and friends one-on-one. “If my neighbor needs me to visit, I go and am with her. If a friend has a problem, I go and I have coffee and we talk,” Amuy said. “If a friend needs to go to the doctor, I go with her. I am intentional with women who don’t know the Lord. This isn’t church time, but time for the people around us.”
Most evenings are reserved for Mario to equip local church leaders, and because of the time difference, he meets late at night and sometimes into the early morning hours via Zoom with a group of network leaders from 11 countries in Latin America. He also meets regularly with his BILD coach for continued support and problem-solving and for help developing strategies to continue training leaders for church planting in Spain and Latin America.
Family time is not forgotten as Mario and Amuy carve out intentional time each day when the kids come home from school. They have a mid-afternoon lunch and catch up on what is going on in their lives, school, and work. Friday evenings are reserved for family time as the Monroys will bake pizza together for a family movie or game night.
While time during the week is limited, the Monroys use their Saturdays to foster the relationships they have developed with their neighbors. It is an intentional time to meet with people who are not a part of their church. “Saturdays are a little crazy because here, when you visit a family, you know when you arrive, but you don’t know what time you’ll leave,” Amuy said. “Last Saturday, our neighbors invited us to go for lunch. We arrived at 1 p.m. and we were there until 11 p.m.”
Amuy said that what starts with lunch and good conversation leads to staying for coffee and dessert. And then, because conversation is still happening, a dinner invitation is extended with more conversation. “If they ask us to stay longer, we stay longer,” Amuy said. “We cannot do this every Saturday, but we do this two Saturdays a month.”
These opportunities the Monroys have cultivated to minister to those around them have led to growth within their church as they invite people into their home on Sundays. The Sunday gathering in their home includes neighbors, friends, and immigrants from other parts of Europe and Latin America. Pursuing and fostering relationships with their church family and others throughout the week has been intentional and allowed the Monroys to establish deep, meaningful relationships. In turn, being involved in each other’s lives has helped establish the faith of people within their church as they have come to understand the church as a family of families.
“This country is a very individualistic country,” Mario said, “so for people to walk together with the idea of being in community and a family of families; it is something that took them a while to realize.”
A well-established church family is important, so Mario dedicates a lot of time to what he calls his base group–the families and leaders within his church. He recalls an online meeting when Jeff Reed was teaching about the importance of having healthy, gospel-proclaiming communities. “Jeff mentioned that we cannot run in the process, but that it would take time and we needed to be patient,” Mario said. “Understanding this meant we focus on the first main group, this basic community to create a base group of families and believers to establish a group of mature people in-Christ. So now I work with this group to establish a process to maintain a healthy church.”
As the church continues to grow, Mario said he can see how the church could naturally organize itself to be sustainable for future generations. Much of this is by living life together and being involved in each other’s lives for teaching and mentoring. The next story will focus more closely on this process of establishment within the church as believers have come to understand God’s plan through His Church and their role within it.
Read the first and second parts of this series on the BILD stories website here: