One to One with Lee Yarbrough

Recently Nigel Ring spent time in Montana with Lee Yarbrough (apostolic team leader for Mexico) and took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

NR: Lee, you’ve had many years in Mexico but are now in the USA. Where do you look on as home?

LY: Home still is Mexico! We lived in Mexico for 22 years having left Alaska in 1985, after two years of marriage with a one-year-old child. We’ve been there ever since with three of the four children born there.

NR: Were you brought up in Alaska?

LY: No, in Southern California.
I went to Alaska to work in the oil fields and met my wife, Stacey, on a blind date. We ended up getting married and moving to Mexico.

NR: How did you become a Christian?

LY: I never knew anything about church but when I was fifteen years old I went to three church meetings in the space of about 24 hours! I saw a lady get healed in front of me and I said, ‘Whatever these people have, that’s what I want.’

One night I just felt the presence of the Lord and knew
I had to give my life to him. In the morning my brother came, prayed for me to be filled with the Spirit and I began speaking in tongues. That Sunday I got baptised in the ocean!

NR: Were there challenges as a Christian on the oil platform?

LY: Very much so! I walked away from the Lord for a time but he protected me in very many ways. It’s a very tough business, there were several accidents and some friends and co-workers died. The Lord was working on me and after several years I really came back to him.

NR: Alaska and Mexico are a long way apart. How did you go from one to the other?

LY: In 1982 the church I belonged to was sending a mission team to Mexico. I thought, ‘I want to go on this team, I want to go to Mexico!’ Right then I felt the Lord was calling me to Mexico some day so I said, ‘Lord if you really want me to go, I want to be invited by the local people. I would like to have an opportunity to share, and I want one of the leaders of my church to be in favour.’ All those things lined up perfectly and I knew God was going to send me there.

NR: How did you make that transition?

LY: When I came back to the Lord I trained to be a disc-jockey with a Christian man who owned a radio station. I then went to Bible College for two years. My leaders were in favour of sending us to Mexico to a town in the South called Puebla. At the time my older brother was there. From there we moved to Leon Guanajuato and a church plant in Orizaba, in the state of Veracruz. Then it was to Aguascalientes and finally Guadalajara.

NR: Cross-cultural church planting obviously has its own challenges. What would you say to someone else who was thinking of doing the same?

LY: For cross-cultural ministry the Lord gives gifting. We got a prophetic word that the Lord was going to give us a special grace to be able to adapt to culture, to learn the language and fit in with the new cultures. Without an ability to learn the language it’s very difficult, especially to preach and teach. Just learning the background of a culture, the idiosyncrasies of the people, even religious tradition is a challenge. You have to be willing to listen and learn rather than tell them. When you live amongst local people, when you model something to them and you’re willing to receive from them, they see you as one of their own. For single people the person they are going to marry must share that type of a vision. It is actually on the ground where you learn the things you really need.

NR: Were you being supported financially from a church in the USA?

LY: Yes!

NR: Is it a hindrance not living from the same source as the members of the church in a Mexican economy?

LY: Yeah, I think so. We eventually got support from the Mexican churches and that’s very important because you feel more connected to the culture. That is the best way.

NR: Were you planting under any apostolic oversight?

LY: The church in Alaska believes in apostolic ministry. As far back as 1985, we’d talked about apostolic teams and had conferences in the jungles travelling together and teaching about apostolic teams. So we’ve always been in that context.

NR: Was that apostolic ministry an effective church planting ministry?

LY: Very much so! The church in Alaska was amazing. It started in 1959, and during the ‘Jesus Movement’ in the United States in the ‘60s a lot of hippies were getting saved. God got hold of them and turned them into church leaders and church planters. In the early ‘70s Dick Benjamin was recognised as having an apostolic ministry. The church became a sending church and was doubling each year; 100 to 200, 200 to 400, 800 to 1600. More than 1,500 people were sent out to start approximately 80 churches in the United States. In the early ‘80s we were sent out so Mexico was involved in that equation.

NR: When did you come across the Newfrontiers family?

LY: In the late ‘80s I met Terry Virgo and Ray Lowe at a conference in Guadalajara. There was a change going on in Mexico with what we were doing as a church and with leadership, and God sovereignly connected us together.

NR: Was there something in particular that you latched onto?

LY: Very much so! I can remember sitting under a tree in Guadalajara with Ray talking about the church being built on apostolic and prophetic ministry. It dawned on me that I was missing the undergirding of grace, the message of the grace of God that made it all work. Then, at that conference, there was a message about apostolic doctrine and this impacted me greatly. That foundation of grace and good apostolic doctrine was what was missing!

NR: You now bring apostolic oversight in Mexico. How many churches are there?

LY: We have seventeen churches and five church plants ranging in size and demography. We have churches within the indigenous tribes – the Pamé Indians have three churches in the villages and with the Otomé Indians there are three more. Leonardo, one of the leaders in the Otomé tribe said to me, ‘Lee, I have a problem. In the village adjacent to us we’ve been meeting in a home gathering 60 people and we don’t really fit in a home. I was wondering if it was OK if we planted a church?’ I said, ‘Of course you can!’ We’re also building into Mexico City, the largest city in the world.

NR: Are there particular challenges working into an apostolic sphere where, at one extreme you’ve almost an American type of economy and at the other tribal groups and extreme poverty?

LY: People understand how much God cares for them and loves them whether it be rural or urban, in wealth or in the midst of poverty. God breaks through all those things and brings a spiritual prosperity no matter what the natural circumstance might be. To see God give people dignity in the midst of poverty, to see the smile on a face and the worship that takes place under a thatched roof is astounding. That’s God! I love that!

NR: You’re now here in Missoula. How did that came about?

LY: Our relationship with this church goes back more than 30 years now. It was founded and led by one of my best friends, Steve Valentine, who was an Olympic athlete. He suddenly got very sick with leukaemia. One day I said, ‘Steve, have you thought about the future? What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I know what I want to do but I don’t know if I can. I want you to come and take this church but I don’t know if I can do that because you live in Mexico.’ I answered, ‘That’s for God to sort out; you have a responsibility to put that down.’ So he wrote that down and within two months he had passed away. I was in the airport on my way to see him when I got a call from my wife to say that Steve had died. I looked down onto the walkway. On the right side of the lane, painted down the middle, it said ‘Stand’ and on the left side it said ‘Walk’. I realised, we could either stand still and see where something would take us, or we could walk into what God had for us together. I said, ‘OK Lord, I’m open to do whatever you want to do.’ That was the initial stage of me getting led to Montana.

NR: How long did it take you to recognise the Lord saying, ‘You are to move!’?

LY: About five months talking to the leadership team in Missoula, the team in Mexico, Terry, David Holden and Ray Lowe. It seemed right to us and the Holy Spirit so we said, ‘OK, we’re going to go for this and see what God has.’

NR: What were the challenges that you, Stacey and your family faced with ‘re-entry’?

LY: Re-entry is a very important subject. I say this, I am a Mexican trapped in a white man’s body but so are my wife and four boys. We are on a mission together. You realise as you re-enter that, not only have you changed but the culture has changed. So we come with Latin mind-sets into an American culture, even though we look totally American. Also, culture has changed in the United States tremendously since we left. Put those two things together and it’s kind of amazing!
Mexico has a very warm embracing culture, a big family together, looking out for one another. You then come to a society that’s way more individualistic, very much consumer mentality, so it’s kind of a shock to the system. We believe that church life is built to relationship, to love and ‘one anothering’ so we’ve worked hard to try to bring a little bit of the warmth of the Latin American culture to the US scene. That’s the kind of thing we’ve struggled with in this re-entry.

NR: Moving to Clark Fork City Church you inherited another man’s vision. How did you make it your own and embrace it?

LY: I do believe you inherit another man’s vision in a way but Steve was a great man who loved the Lord. You look for the common things in vision together, helping people understand God is still on the move and that there’s still vision for the future. People have seen their pastor die, in faith for healing. The church had fasted and prayed and was a bit shell-shocked asking, ‘What went wrong?’ You have to be very patient and help them to believe in vision again.

NR: You’re still apostolic into Mexico and also have links in this area. Can you share about these?

LY: Being in Montana doesn’t mean that Mexico doesn’t continue. I constantly travel there. By bringing us here, the Lord is also allowing a network to begin forming in the Pacific North-West. We have people very seriously looking into Newfrontiers in the states of Idaho, Oregon and in Washington State, in the Seattle area in Tacoma and on Whidby Island. God has brought together some friends that have a common history from Alaska days more than 30 years ago who have been on their own for many years. We also have a church in Bolivia and a small nucleus in Brazil and I’ve had some contact with people in Peru. The Lord is up to some big things!

NR: Adopting churches has big challenges. What are some of the issues that need to be faced?

LY: You inherit certain values that are maybe different from your own. God brings people together for these times to speak into situations for His purpose and for what He desires to do. So you’re very much in faith. But I think the starting place is to win the heart of people because there’s a historical and experiential context there. After all, God’s won our heart with His love and His grace. So, if we can do the same that’s probably the biggest key, then we can start dialoguing through the ramifications, the changes or the adjustments needed at times that will enable us to consider new things.

NR: What does it mean to you, Lee, to be a part of the Newfrontiers family?

LY: It’s amazing and difficult to put into a few words! It means to be part of what God’s doing across the nations and it’s a huge privilege. I am constantly astounded, whether it is doing an interview with you, talking about what God’s doing in Mexico or around the world, being in Brighton at the conference, being part of the International Forum team and sitting with people from all walks of life, countries, cultures and languages and realising that God’s put us together. People have been captivated by God’s heart; they really care for you and love you, are concerned about you, as an individual, as a family, and in what God’s doing with us together. Wow, who would have thought that? It’s only God that does things like that!