When Prisons Open

Trent & Tina Morrow have served as missionaries in Uruguay for the past 24 years. Trent shares about their work in children's ministry, their involvement with Teen Challenge, a drug and life controlling addiction rehab program, and their recent work in prison ministry.

Trent discusses the challenges and successes they've experienced. He also shares about the unique cultural and religious context of Uruguay, and how they've seen God work in miraculous ways, particularly in the prison system.

Transcript

When Prisons Open
Guest: Trent Morrow
Season 3, Episode 19

Announcer (00:00):

Welcome to the DoorWays® Ministry Network podcast.

Ric Shields (00:12):

Thank you for joining us on this episode. I'm Ric Shields, and I serve as your host and as the director of the DoorWays® Ministry Network.

(00:18):

I'm speaking today with my friend Trent Morrow, who along with his wife Tina, have served as missionaries in Uruguay for the past 24 years. Is that right, Trent?

Trent Morrow (00:29):

That's correct.

Ric Shields (00:30):

Thanks Trent, for joining us via Zoom from Montevideo, Uruguay,

Trent Morrow (00:36):

You pronounced that very good. Very, very good, Ric.

Ric Shields (00:38):

Well, actually you could do Montevideo, Uruguay.

Trent Morrow (00:39):

There you go.

Ric Shields (00:42):

I didn't do that. <Laugh>.

(00:44):

There may be those of us who have a hard time finding Uruguay on a map. So, if you would give us an idea where you're at.

Trent Morrow (00:51):

We're in the southern part of South America. We're actually below Brazil on the east side of Argentina, on the Atlantic Coast. It's a rather small country in comparison to Brazil and Argentina. It's part of what they call the southern cone of South America.

Ric Shields (01:07):

You and Tina went to Uruguay in what year?

Trent Morrow (01:11):

We arrived on Friday the 13th, 2002 <laugh>.

Ric Shields (01:16):

And was Landon born at that time?

Trent Morrow (01:19):

No, he wasn't born until April 2005.

Ric Shields (01:23):

So, is he born in Uruguay?

Trent Morrow (01:24):

No, he was actually born in the States because he's adopted. We prayed and believed for a child and we were so blessed. Just a miracle, honestly, how that whole process took place. And he's, he's been with us every day since the day he's been born.

Ric Shields (01:39):

Hey, we're grateful to have children that were adopted into our extended family too, and we couldn't love them anymore had they been naturally born. So good for you.

Trent Morrow (01:49):

Exactly.

Ric Shields (01:49):

Good for Landon.

(01:50):

So how is Uruguay unique among other countries in Latin America?

Trent Morrow (01:55):

You know, if you've been to Mexico or you've been to Central America or other parts of Latin America, you kind of tend to get an idea that maybe all of Latin America kind of looks the same or feels the same. And there are certain aspects of that. Obviously, the language is Spanish there, but the rest of it is very different, more European feel. And in Uruguay, they are no indigenous peoples there. You know, when this whole area was colonized, they were either run out or, or eliminated. And so, most of these people have European descent so a lot of them are high percentage are Caucasian. And so, it's very different than what you would expect for Latin America as a nation.

Ric Shields (02:38):

What is the religious background there?

Trent Morrow (02:40):

You know, Uruguay was kind of formed as a nation, as a result of a conflict between Brazil and Argentina, kind of as a buffer zone state. And the people that were in Uruguay at the time forming the Republic of Uruguay were atheist. And so, the Uruguay Constitution has an element of atheism in it. They teach atheism in the schools, but they participate in a lot of occult activity. They're open to spiritual things, but Christianity, they have a built-in bias against Christianity here.

Ric Shields (03:13):

You probably were some of the first missionaries I knew that felt called to go do children's ministry. So that's unusual to me. And talk to me about that. Did you find that to be unusual in the case when you were called to Uruguay?

Trent Morrow (03:29):

Yeah, it's very interesting. When we went into missions, we were in the class of 2000. Before that point you had to be a missionary, you had to have pastoral experience as a pastor for a couple years. Children's ministry was not a category that you would go into as a missionary. And they had just kind of made some changes and some adjustments. Even the national churches have seen the need for different types of ministry that may, may need to be, you know, developed in their nation.

(04:02):

And so even in Uruguay, they took away the requirement that you had to, you know, plant a church, build a church building as a missionary. So, they allowed us to come in with the idea of ministering with the, you know, local churches with the national church to basically develop children's ministry in the nation reaching children.

Ric Shields (04:24):

We both know that ministry is filled with fabulous success and abysmal failures. Can you tell us about one of the times in children's ministry that you didn't quite make it above average? And maybe then tell us about a time or times that you've exceeded expectations.

Trent Morrow (04:41):

Well, I'll be honest, the things that happen in missions for missionaries that, you know, sometimes people think, well, maybe it's the language, maybe it's the culture. There are things that happen relationally that can really sidetrack you. Differences of opinion and conflicts. And I have learned through this process that no project is more important than relationship. I have guided myself by that, just from learning lessons that you guard relationship, the project will always be there. You can always come back to the project, but don't make the project more important than the ministry and relationship that you're trying to do. Once you lose relationship, you've lost influence over any project that you may want to do or have in mind, or that God's put in your heart. And so, you know, some of the failure is relational.

(05:31):

If you relationally, you're so hard, you know, bent on this is this is the way it's got to be done and you lose relationship. I'll be honest, that's some of the hardest failures because relationship is hard to recoup. It's hard to regain trust. It's hard to regain that relationship that you might have had. And so that's one of my biggest things that I have learned as a missionary is not to get really too uptight about if the project isn't going the way I think it should or all the details are not the way that I believe it should go.

(06:02):

But then working with, you know, national church pastors and leadership, sometimes there's a give and take and sometimes you just have to back off and guard the relationship and then come back to that. The project will always be there. The need will always be there, but it's bringing people along with you. And so, I would say that's one of the biggest struggles in missions because if you end up with a lot of situations with no good relationships in the past, it makes it hard to go forward.

Ric Shields (06:30):

You know, our mutual friend. Lindell Warren, who previously was the Missions Secretary for the Oklahoma District of the Assemblies of God used to say this. "Ric, Ministry is predicated upon relationship." No relationship, there's no ministry. And I've appreciated it over the years, and that's exactly what you're reflecting and, and saying is the case in your life and ministry as well.

(06:58):

Trent, you started ministry to the children of Uruguay. You've been holding kids camps for like the past 20 years, I think, and have seen real success in those efforts.

(07:08):

And then in 2013, you found yourselves working with Teen Challenge, a drug and life controlling addiction rehab program. And that makes sense to me because the kids you are reaching out to got older and your focus broadened to include teenagers then young adults. And not to suggest that portion of your ministry is unimportant. It's not. And you've had phenomenal opportunities here with Teen Challenge and thank you for making space for that.

(07:34):

But I'd like to focus the remaining few minutes on something that happened in September 2018. You were invited to speak at a prison, probably the toughest prison in Uruguay. Not just petty thieves, but a pretty rough crew. Tell us about that.

Trent Morrow (07:51):

You mentioned Teen Challenge. We started working and ministering with Teen Challenge. And out of that developed some relationship with some former graduates of Teen Challenge out of our home church here in Uruguay. And one of those graduates is very involved in a part of the main core team that is in this particular prison, in prison ministry in 2016.

(08:14):

They had basically built, with their funds and with other churches funds, no outside missionary funds came in, but they basically built a chapel in the middle of this prison. And it's a beautiful building. It's the best looking building in the whole thing; has a baptistry built in. And in 2017, the end of 2017, 2018, they began to ask him if in the group of ministry for the prison, if they would be willing to refurbish an area of the prison that there were no prisoners, and to make that a Christian sector.

(08:47):

And there's a whole story behind that, but it was just incredible their openness to that. And because it's an atheistic nation, in September, they brought me in because they didn't have money to finish it. They had gotten as much as they could get done on this barracks. And they came in and it was really a supernatural event for me. They treated me like I was the ambassador from the United States showing me around the prison officials. And I was totally taken back.

(09:16):

You can in that prison, and I'm sure it's like that in many prisons, but you can feel the tension between light and dark. It's real. I left there and made some phone calls and some emails, about three or four calls and emails. And we were able to raise the, I think it was $8,000 we needed to get that done because we had to get it done by the end of 2019. Thanks to the Lord and people giving we were able to dedicate the first Christian sector in any prison in the history of Uruguay in December 2019.

Ric Shields (09:50):

That is pretty incredible.

Trent Morrow (09:51):

Well, and even since then I believe we got to communicate with you in 2021, just before we were able to come back to Uruguay and right after Covid. This prison, it's difficult to explain. It's just a supernatural act of God. Even a Uruguayan, if they're in prison, they're not going to change their belief system. They're not the type of people that just, "Oh, I need to look into something else to help me." They're very, very hard in their, in what they believe.

(10:21):

And all of a sudden God began to explode in this prison and men just begin to come to the Lord. And whole areas, 40 men at one time would come to the Lord and worship and praying and asking for forgiveness. It been incredible. So, in the December of 2021, just shortly after getting back, we dedicated the second Christian sector in that prison.

(10:46):

And to be honest, there's so many things that have happened. There's a maximum security, medium security and a minimum security. We have the entire medium security part of the prison is ours, 300 men are a part of that whole thing. And we are over all that. There are five more little sectors that we're working on, but we have half the minimum security and we have half the maximum security. So more than half of this prison is in Christian sectors.

(11:14):

Now, I want to clarify, they're not all perfect Christians. They're all in process. And we have built in discipleship and devotionals in each sector of the prison with people that we are training inside the prison to minister to them and help them. And that's a struggle because that's constantly changing all the time. So, these are violent offenders for the most part.

(11:36):

A lot of them are in there because of drugs; drug use, drug selling. Majority of them are very, very young. It's heartbreaking. A lot of them are in their early to late teens, early twenties, and they will get out. You know, they might have a two year or three year sentence, but the way we look at it is, God's given us a chance. They're coming to us. We don't have to go find them somewhere. The Lord's bringing them here. And we're able to at least plant that seed of hope of, of Christ in their life and give them, give them the information that they need about who Jesus is and what he's done for their life, and that they have hope and they don't have to live the life that they've been living.

(12:14):

Most of them are generational, you know, problems. You know, if your father was a thief, you're a thief. If your father was a liar, you're a liar. If your father was a drug addict and an alcoholic, then you are too. And so, a lot of this is generational that's been going on and we really work towards breaking that in their lives for Christ.

Ric Shields (12:33):

You're listening to the DoorWays® Ministry Network podcast. My name is Ric Shields and I'm joined on this episode with Trent Morrow, an Assemblies of God missionary who serves with his wife, Tina, and son, Landon, in the country of Uruguay.

(12:46):

You had no anticipation of this kind of ministry when you first went to Uruguay 24 years ago.

Trent Morrow (12:53):

No, I'll be honest. It, this kind of thing never, never entered my mind in the least. Not even close. One of the things that really impacted is, oh, this would've been late 2022. We went and I bought some bibles, had some Bibles, and we were in sector D. There's A, B, C, and D; four sectors. There's 300 in each sector in the max Security. And I had, I don't know, 50 Bibles or something. And so, we start handing out these bibles at D. Had a few we gave out to C because there was a couple of believers in there. There was some Christians in D, there was a good group about 40 guys in that one sector. And we never messed with B. B was the worst sector. They are the most violent offenders. The prison officials wouldn't even go in there. They had put up mesh in front because they would just throw whatever at the guards and just, we just never messed with them because they were so difficult.

(13:49):

And we were sitting there and we had like four Bibles left and we were all talking and I go, "Should we give them B, four Bibles? And we're like, yeah, let's do it. We never, we never do anything with B. Let's go to B. And we went to B, this was on a Monday, we go to be, B and there's just a little hole. And so, we're squeezing these poor little bibles into this, through this little hole about to tear them up just to get them through there. And there's mesh on there, and we begin to pray just touching the ends of their fingertips through that mesh. And there's probably 10 guys we prayed for, that was a Monday.

(14:23):

Come Wednesday the prison officials were alarmed. In B they heard some stuff going on. They ran up to the top and they had rubber bullets ready and they had gas ready to shoot down there. They thought they might have a riot going on. And the guard records it, and his is two days after we give four Bibles. There are 300 men, the worst of the worst in Uruguay in a huge circle. And three guys in the middle. We didn't know who they were. We, we, we nicknamed them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. We didn't know who they were. And they are worshiping the Lord and the guard could not believe it. And he recorded, we have like a seven second clip of that. And it really makes you wonder. If you're a person of faith, of prayer and fasting, I think you, who you are and who Christ is in you doesn't just leave. When you leave it, it passes. And God's word is incredibly powerful.

(15:25):

So, four Bibles changed a whole area. We go in there now, we preach in there, we're in there twice a week preaching in this area that no one would go into. And we have been doing that for over a year. And I just tell you, it's incredible. It's like walking through a Bible story. It's like God's doing it, but you get to witness it and you're kind of walking through going, I can't I'm, this is a miracle. I can't explain it.

Ric Shields (15:52):

How about some of the guys now that have been in there, but they're getting out. What's happening? How has their life been changed?

Trent Morrow (16:00):

Yeah, it's difficult. I will say, working with Teen Challenge, it's very similar because one of two things. They either go back to where they're from and go back to their old habits. A lot of times, unfortunately, if they try to find a church because of their background, and the churches a lot of times are more conservative, they don't really make a space for them, a little bit of leeriness. And so, there's a little bit of that. And then the other thing, sometimes they have nowhere to go, so they end up on the street and they have no job. So, then they end up, you know, stealing food or they, you know, trying to survive and they end up back in jail. We've seen that a lot. The good news is we have some that we have processed through our church that have kind of done like a halfway kind of house through our Teen Challenge program.

(16:47):

And some of them have come out really well. This is our thinking at this point. We're going to really know how well we're doing in this ministry when we see these guys leaving and being productive, not just in society, but we really believe productive spiritually. That's what we're praying for and that's what we're working for.

(17:06):

And that's one of the struggles. You're dealing with a lot of, of issues that you don't have control of. Even if you get saved and you want to serve the Lord, there's issues there that are really hard for a lot of them to overcome. And so, this is one of our areas where we're really praying and believing that God's going to even give us more, more victory in that.

(17:25):

It is a church inside the prison. And so it is that ongoing discipleship. We do water baptisms just a few weeks ago. We baptized 22. We're hoping if the weather holds here in the next couple weeks, we'll be able to baptize about another 30. But we do at least three baptisms, four baptisms a year, and then we do communion. And we, on all these things, we go through teaching on all of this, the importance of it, the communion with God.

(17:54):

I mean, we've had guys demon possessed in, in some of our services, be set free. So, you're dealing with a, a variety of problems and, but at the same time, you're seeing God do all kinds of miracles in their lives. What's interesting is a lot of times we have guys ministering, they're doing devotionals every day to their group. They're doing Bible studies and they get out and there's no opportunity for them in the church. You know, they've been ministering and I think that's one of the hardest things for some of these guys. They get out and there's really no space for them in the local church. And we're really working on getting that awareness out to our local churches to give opportunity, give space for them to, to be integrated into the local body. I think there's a prejudice, there's a fear, there's a built in fear. It's everywhere. "Oh, you’ve been in prison? Whoa, I don't know if we want to be around you." And so, I think that there is kind of that element of fear with people that have been in prison.

Ric Shields (18:52):

Well, thanks for sharing your heart and for sharing these stories with us.

(18:55):

Trent, would you be so kind as to pray for those who may be listening and feel like God wants them to change their life focus. Maybe he's drawing them into ministry or is giving them a burden to assist those who are frontline workers. Pray that we find our place and take our place in advancing the Kingdom of God together.

Trent Morrow (19:18):

Absolutely, Ric.

(19:18):

Dear Father, we thank you for this time that we've had together. Lord, I pray right now for anyone listening, Lord, that if you're speaking to them, that you're calling them to do something that maybe they're not accustomed to, they're not used to hearing, they've never felt like they're equipped enough to do the ministry that you're calling them to do. Lord, I just pray right now that you would speak to them, that you would give them reassurance, that it's your voice, Lord. That you're calling. And I pray you would open doors for them, Lord, that no man can close. That you give them a smooth path, towards your will and to your purposes and to your plan.

(19:56):

And Lord, I pray that they would be productive in your kingdom, Lord, that they would bear much fruit. And Lord, I pray that you will use them. Lord, I pray God that you would give them opportunities. And Lord, we need people that will reach people that are the unloving, the mean, the hurtful. And Lord, they, they need Jesus to and Lord, your opening hearts towards those people. And Lord, I just pray God, that you would give them the opportunity to do that. And that Lord, you give them the confidence and faith Lord to move forward in that call. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Ric Shields (20:32):

I hope you found this podcast to be helpful. If there's someone you think may also enjoy or benefit from this episode, please consider passing the link along to share with them.

(20:43):

If you'd like someone to pray for you, drop me at note at info@doorways dot cc. I'll pray for you. And if you'd like, I will share your note with others who will pray and believe for God to work on your behalf.

(20:54):

Until next time, may the Lord bless you as you'll follow after him. Thanks for listening.