OUR STORY

Our story begins with God’s merciful intercession in one of our founders’ life after years of living an ungodly lifestyle. In February 2017, God miraculously opened Steve’s eyes to the truth of the gospel and regenerated his heart causing him to be born-again with new desires to stop living for himself and pursuing sin and to start living for God and pursuing Christ. Up until that point, Steve was barely aware of and never thought about orphans or vulnerable children. With this radical change in perspective, Steve began praying for God to use him and God gradually guided him towards orphan care. In March 2017, God answered that prayer with an opportunity to help a friend fundraise for clean water efforts in Africa. Due to this involvement, Steve was soon contacted by the director of an orphanage called Friends of Hope Uganda Child Ministry (FOH) in Jinja, Uganda with a cry for help. Due solely to his newfound faith in Jesus, Steve did not ignore the cry and agreed to pray for the director and his orphanage. Over the following few months, Steve communicated with the director learning more about his organization and the situation in Jinja while supporting them through prayer.

As the clean water fundraiser was coming to an end, Steve was praying for God to continue to use him and asking what might be next. Around this same time while praying for provision for the children at FOH, Steve got an overwhelming sense that he was asking God to do something He had made him very capable of doing himself. It was that moment that he took the first step of faith to make a small donation to FOH. The director was very grateful and invited Steve to help the organization to grow and expand fundraising in the USA and other countries. Given that this appeared to be a clear answer to prayer, Steve initially agreed with enthusiasm. Upon thinking about it a little more, he decided to hit the brakes and do some due diligence. For the next year or so, Steve tried to verify the legitimacy of the organization and prayerfully consider the opportunity to partner with them in this way. After many months, Steve was able to get a friend of a friend of a family member to go and visit with FOH and they reported back positively. Though it wasn’t much, Steve took this as confirmation because all other indicators were saying “yes” and he figured it was going to be the best he could get without going and visiting himself, which he planned to do.

Believing he had exhausted his own due diligence efforts and was sensing that it was something he should get involved with, Steve broached the subject with his direct family. After a month or so of prayerful consideration and deliberation, we decided to take a step of faith and see what God might do. We were aware of the risk and uncertainty and felt completely inadequate/unqualified, but we trusted that if it was something God wanted us to do than He would guide us and provide us with what we needed.

We formulated a board, and after much additional prayer and contemplation decided that creating Moving Orphans’ Mountains (MOM) was the best solution to helping the children at FOH. The organization was created to partner with organizations like FOH to help them through a materially focused approach to become self-sustainable. The organization was incorporated in May 2019 and launched publicly in August 2019. Vince and Steve visited FOH in December 2019 and were impressed and pleased with what they experienced. A few months after their return, we were gearing up to take things to the next level when some conflicts/accusations began to arise involving the FOH leadership.

Up to this point, we had been working with FOH administratively/materially to help them grow as an organization and become more legitimate. We had also been doing some very soft and small-scale fundraising to try to reduce the financial burdens of the orphanage. While we were doing all of this, God was at work in our own hearts and faith journeys. He had been teaching us the importance of the local church and increasing our knowledge and understanding of the gospel and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Around the time of the trip to visit FOH, Steve was feeling very convicted about the gospel and the importance of the local church. He wanted MOM to get more involved on the church side of things and with sharing the gospel, but it seemed to him at the time that there were roadblocks preventing this from happening. When the conflicts arose at FOH, we launched a full investigation as best we could from 1/3 of the way around the world. After a few months of investigating, all we could conclude was that we had no idea what the truth was and that this was exactly what God was trying to show us. Without giving us anything to confidently substantiate or deny the accusations against FOH, God showed us that our original approach to helping FOH was not feasible. Fortunately, He had already been working within us to create a change in our approach, and He used the conflicts to accelerate us towards a new way. Nonetheless, it was a difficult season as we considered the possibility that we had it all wrong and that to this point we had done nothing but waste our time. It very much felt at times that there was no way forward, yet God remained vocal through His Word and sustained us through that time so that we did not give up.

In July 2020, God began resurrecting us into an entirely different organization. Sermons on Exodus 4 and Mark 8 made Steve realize that while he did have a lot wrong, somehow God was using his misguided zeal, naiivity, gullibility, stupidity, etc. as a foundation of something even better. Somehow God wanted to take what was in our hand and make something out of it that we could never have made on our own. We were right to try to point people to God which was a large aspect of our original motivation. We were wrong, however, to try to do so by trying to muster up such great success that people would have to admit that it must be God at work. Resurrection glory was not obtained by miraculous works. No, it was obtained through the suffering of our precious Savior, Jesus Christ. If we want to see orphans and vulnerable children raised to new life in Christ, and we do, then it must be through the sufferings of Christ. And since the Church is the continuation of the sufferings of Christ, then true and lasting help for orphans and vulnerable children must be done through the Church. These realizations caused us to go from trying to partner with orphanages to trying to partner with local churches and from trying to move the physical mountains of physical orphans to trying to move the spiritual mountains of spiritual orphans. Through this change in approach, God will get all the glory through His Church, everyone involved will be better protected, and orphans and vulnerable children will be far better served by the Church which is the only thing on this planet that is properly equipped to do so. In June 2021, we launched our first church partnership with Gateway of Hope Baptist Church in Jinja, Uganda. In January 2022, we launched our second church partnership with Calvary Chapel Jinja.

The wicked will go down to the grave. This is the fate of all the nations who ignore God. But the needy will not be ignored forever; the hopes of the poor will not always be crushed.
~ Psalm 9:17-18 ~

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You can learn more about our story by taking a look at our blog.