John and Rosa are missionaries serving with Youth With A Mission. John has been with YWAM since 1990 and Rosa started a year later. Their ministry focuses on the unreached people groups of the 10/40 Window – those who
never heard the Gospel.
John’s primary work is producing videos of unreached people groups in English and Spanish for prayer and mobilization purposes. He is part of a YWAM communications team called Procla-Media Productions. He has been to 50 countries. Rosa works in training Latino missionaries to go to difficult countries. She also runs a strategic alliance to reach the Punjabi people group of India and Pakistan.
John and Rosa are presently living in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas along the Mexican border. They have one child, a beautiful girl named Analise, who looks a lot like her dad.
JOHN
By God's grace, my Christian heritage is a rich one. My mother was raised a Mennonite on a small Pennsylvania farm and my dad found Christ in the Mennonite church. Only a couple years after their wedding they went to Mexico as missionaries. That has been over forty years ago now. The place they chose was Allende, a small town near Monterrey, Mexico.
My dad worked at the Nueva Esperanza Bible School there (where Rosa and I were married on August 18th, 2001) and was actually the person instrumental in bringing its current director, Margarito, from his village to study there. That was around 1958. In 1959 my mother was killed in a tragic auto accident on the highway between Allende and Monterrey. She was a dedicated follower of Jesus, completely sold out for God, and made a tremendous impact for the Lord in her brief 23 years on this earth. Her life and death continue to have a deep and
lasting effect on me. I was just two years old at the time and my brother was
only eight months old.
A few years after the accident, my dad met my "new" mom, a dedicated missionary in her twenties preaching the gospel in the nearby Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. Today, we are a family of six children, most married and with their own children. My parents, now in their sixties, continue working in Mexico as missionaries and will more than likely live the rest of their days there.
Because of this seed planted early in my life, I always wanted to be a
missionary. On the 3rd of January 1990, when I was 32 years old, I sailed with
the Anastasis, one of Youth With A Mission's mercy ships. It marked the beginning of my experience as a full-time missionary with YWAM that would
lead me to the very ends of the earth.
Soon after my training with YWAM in Guatemala God began to give me burden
for the most isolated, hidden and unreached peoples of the world. By God’s grace, He has allowed me to go to some of them. The first to such an unreached people group was in 1992, right after the YWAM Olympic outreach in Spain. A friend and I visited the isolated and mountainous Berber people of Morocco. Shortly afterward, God began using me to produce videos of unreached peoples (such as the Berbers) for prayer and mobilization purposes, which I have been doing now for 15 years.
Currently, here in southern Texas, my wife Rosa and I are producing unreached people videos in Spanish to mobilize Latin Americans into needy Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist harvest fields, and also working in the area of training.
ROSA
I was born in a Christian family. We were a family of 6 children, two girls and four boys. One of the boys is my twin brother. My parents were very active in church while I was growing up, so a big part of my childhood was spent in the different services the church had during the week. That led me to the Lord when I was 9 years old, and baptized me at 12.
When I was nineteen, my twin brother got very sick and was dying, I felt like I wanted to die as well. So, one Sunday night when everybody decided to go to
the church meeting, I stayed alone with him at home and saw that he was
getting worse. I went crying to the back patio and talked to God. I said, “I don't want him to die, why don't you take me instead, or why don't you heal him, and I will give you my life. You can do with me what ever you want!!!” That same night, the church youth group came to see him. They started worshiping with a guitar, the room was full, and I started worshiping God too. Then I suddenly saw my brother wanted to sit up and wanted some water to drink. It was a big surprise since at that point he couldn't talk, not even open his eyes!! God had healed him.
Some years later God called me to serve Him. In January of 1991, I went to YWAM in Juarez, Mexico, and stayed there for almost three years. I served in
the area of training, and evangelism in our neighborhood. In September 1993, I went to learn English at the YWAM Dayspring base in Tyler, and the following year I did the School of the Bible there.
In September 1995, I went to Peru to serve with YWAM there. I worked in training at the base and was involved in training for indigenous pastors in the Andes. In September 1997, I went back to U.S.A. to help in a project to translate the Christian Growth Study Bible (the YWAM Bible) into Spanish, and also to be prepared in specific training to serve with the unreached peoples of the 10/40 Window. In September 1998, I went to the YWAM base in Colorado Springs, and stayed there in the base working for the Punjabi people of Pakistan. I have been able to go to Pakistan in two different trips, eight and nine weeks long, serving
the church there.
In August 2001, I married John Fries. He is also a missionary with YWAM also. Since then we have been working with YWAM, and with my church in Mexico, and with it's mission agency, mobilizing its pastors (there are around 80 congregations associated our church in Monterrey, Mexico) and its people into missions. I also help John translate some of his videos of unreached peoples
into Spanish, making them available to different Latin countries.
