Editor’s note: This is the first 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 commitment to become missionaries and how their life and ministry has been transformed with their understanding of "the way of Christ and His Apostles."
Mario and Amuy Monroy are a couple currently living in Spain and implementing the way of Christ and His Apostles. While they both are originally from Panama, their ministry path brought them to Spain where they have worked as missionaries for the last 14 years. Their heart for serving God and His Kingdom is evident in their words and actions and highlights their great strength in not just training church leaders to plant and lead churches in Spain and Latin America, but also in their hospitality and opening their home to gather as a church with neighbors, friends, and anyone else they find themselves in conversation with.
For the Monroys, their story has been a journey with many stops and detours that has brought them to where they are today. Before they met, Mario owned an engineering company which he sold when he started training to become a missionary. When he finished his training, his church needed help because it didn’t have a pastor, so he stepped into that role for a few years.
It was during his time as an interim pastor when he met Amuy at a conference, spotting her in a choir of 200 people, and knew he had to meet her. When the conference finished for the day, he introduced himself to Amuy, but it wasn’t until more than a year later that they met again when he invited her church to a youth camp and they started dating.
Amuy grew up in a Christian household and her father was the leader of her church. She had a desire to serve the Lord, and after meeting Mario, she made the decision to leave college where she was studying to be an architect to get married and join Mario in his pursuit of the mission field.
This led them to a seminary in Guatemala where Mario studied pastoral work and Amuy studied Bible and theology. At that time, their goal was to finish seminary and go back to Panama, but during their time in Guatemala, Mario became missions director for the country’s Baptist churches, and he started organizing the work of missions for Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroys began thinking of the possibility of working in muslim countries, so they prepared for an exploratory mission’s trip to Morocco.
While this was a three-month trip, they were allowed only two weeks in Morocco. They decided to spend the other two and a half months in Spain helping some missionary friends. When the Embassy of Morocco made a mistake with their Visas and passports, they ended up not being allowed to travel to Morocco, but stayed in Spain for the entirety of their exploratory trip. God used that time to clearly close the door to Morocco and opened their eyes to the needs of Spain and where God wanted them to be. Especially when the airline that would send them home went bankrupt and they lost their tickets. With it being around Christmas time, return tickets cost triple what their original tickets were. While Mario and Amuy remained in Spain waiting to go home, they were overwhelmed by the hospitality of families from the town that learned of their situation and brought them gifts and welcomed them into their homes for the holiday. This also confirmed the impact they could make in Spain.
When they returned to Guatemala to finish seminary, there were some areas they needed to tie up before they could officially move to Spain because Mario was a pastor at a church in Guatemala City. In 2010, they moved to San Fernando, Spain, and were welcomed by a group of churches that recommended Mario work with pastors of traditional churches and train them to plant new churches.
After six months of living in San Fernando, they moved 15 minutes away to Chiclana de la Frontera, seeing there was a need in that city with the many different backgrounds of people living there. However, after four years of training pastors to plant new churches, Mario and Amuy realized the churches in Spain didn’t have the vision for planting churches. Mario then decided to leave the pastoral work in their church and be one hundred percent focused on church planting.
In 2016, they decided to start a house church, and Mario came to the conclusion that he needed to develop a curriculum to train church leaders because of the postmodern Christian culture in Spain. He had searched for many other curriculums, but none were meeting the needs he saw. It wasn’t until a conversation with a friend from seminary that his friend mentioned BILD, and it was only because of their friendship that Mario decided to look into BILD’s curriculum of church-based theological education. His friend sent him Jeff Reed’s Paradigm Papers and Mario read through it once, and then again, and again, until he had read it six times in one week. He knew immediately it was what he had been looking for.
Mario said the impact of The Paradigm Papers was striking. He had been trained to be an engineer and he was trained to make things work, and for so long he hadn’t been able to put the pieces together. So when he read The Paradigm Papers, Mario understood why what he had been doing wasn’t working because the book highlighted key components of church-based leadership training and church planting that he hadn’t seen before. “I was trying to put these parts of the puzzle together but still using the same pieces,” he said, realizing that he was still working with concepts he had previously been taught in seminary. “And then I really understood again what the Church is, so it was like fresh water for me.”
The impact of BILD’s training materials was immediate as Mario started going through the First Principles series. “The first thing that changed was not only my way of teaching others, but the way I lead,” he said. “Until that point, I was a pastor. I was a minister. But I understood that I needed to change that. All of this paradigm had to change.”
The second thing that changed was how he viewed being a missionary. “I was the missionary with my family, and now the ministry was all together the family ministry. So I changed the way I led as a father and husband,” he said.
Once he finished the first book in the First Principles series, he was given Teaching the First Principles and immediately started going through the First Principles series with five young couples. “It wasn’t like me teaching them, it was learning together,” Mario said. “It was fantastic. All of the process was new for me and for all of us. And it changed our lives.”
These changes were seen in both Amuy and their children and how they connected with their ministry. Mario said, “We learned to dialogue together as a family and solve our problems in light of the Bible, and this made us more united and helped us love each other more. But it also connected our whole family more with the church.”
Understanding the church as a family was a new concept, but one that made sense in light of all that Mario and his family were learning as they poured through the First Principles Series. He had been a pastor since 1999, and his two older children had grown up attending a traditional church. He said, “For them, the church was ‘the place my father works,’ but now the church is their family. They love the church and it is a part of their life.”
Mario said the most important thing he realized as this new understanding unfolded was he was not doing the work alone, and he didn’t feel alone. “I feel that many of us are doing the work, and I have more time to focus on what I enjoy doing and what my gifts are,” he said.
Amuy said what she gained from her new understanding was the authenticity of sharing in the lives of those in their church, from the difficult and sad conversations to the celebration of happy occasions: All to meet needs and build up the body of Christ in their midst.
The simple gathering of a family of families has transformed the Monroys’ ministry in Spain. Not just in changing how they meet, but also in the convictions they hold as they minister to their neighbors and seek to open the doors to the culture around them.
The next story will take a closer look at the gathering and the Monroys’ outreach in their neighborhood, school, and their steadfast connection to Latin America.