Mark Hatch

Hello all! My name is Mark Hatch. I recently completed a year-long internship with a ministry in Tijuana, through which I served the local community in various capacities while also learning about the Great Commission and God’s heart for the nations. Throughout this time, I could not help but prayerfully wrestle with God’s plan and purpose for my life and what role I can play in the Great Commission. By the end of the internship, I was convinced that God was leading me toward some kind of missions work. This meant I would need a few things, including a college education, plenty of training, and preparation.

As I was working through this, I also fell in love with the city of Tijuana and became more and more aware of the needs of the city. I began praying that, if God would allow it, I could stay in the city throughout my college years as I figure out what my long-term involvement in missions may look like. I would have liked to have had a clear idea of what to do next when my internship ended, but the only clear step to me at the time was to continue my education, so I set my sights on that as I prepared to come home.

But God heard my prayer. The day after my internship ended, I spoke with the interim pastor of the church I attended in Mexico, and without me even telling him about my desire to stay in Mexico, he offered me a position with another ministry he leads.

The ministry is called Dunamis, and its focus is serving orphans and vulnerable children in the Tijuana area. They do this through partnerships with local orphanages, hosting events for local youth, going into the streets of the red-light district, bringing food and water to underprivileged children in the area, offering classes through a portable mini-school, and much more. They also have a number of small community centers throughout the area where they host these events, and they have additional plots of land where they hope to build new centers.

For now, I have agreed to go down for one year to become involved in the ministry, learn the various dynamics of the work, improve my Spanish, and see what it will look like to continue online school while serving with them. After that, we will evaluate how things are going and decide whether I should stay longer. The hope, however, is that I will begin taking on a leadership role within the ministry and help build a missions program so that churches from the United States can come and serve alongside us as we minister to the Tijuana community.