Dan and Amy Marsden, photo via assistnews.net

Christian couple in New Zealand changes lives of many troubled kids

New Zealand couple Dan and Amy Marsden have a love for children which is changing the lives of many hundreds in and around one Christchurch suburb, reports John McNeil of Challenge Weekly, New Zealand, special to ASSIST News Service .

Linwood, long considered one of the more difficult socio-economic areas of the city, had been the focus of work they are doing through their Te Mapua Child and Youth Trust which is already breathtaking in its scope.

But they feel they have barely begun.

Aiming to help children from extremely difficult and disadvantaged home environments, Dan and Amy organise weekly boys and girls clubs, along with many children’s camps throughout the year. In addition, they have developed a team of volunteers providing behavioural management support to their local primary school, and have just started transporting 60 to 70 children every morning from their homes directly to school, where twice a week they also provide 120 youngsters with breakfast.

But wait, there’s more. They also mentor a volunteer team of about 180 people whose ages generally range from 15 to 25, training them for work with challenging children. As role models, they also permanently foster four children, though they’re looking to grow their household to up to 10.

It all began when Dan and Amy were only teens, working as volunteers at children’s camps, particularly at Living Springs at the head of Lyttelton Harbour.

When she was 17, Amy began directing children’s camps, and the pair began building a team of young fellow workers, many of whom they say are now teaching or pastoring.

Over three years, Amy and Dan began changing the role of the camps from providing holidays for Christian children, to ministering to children in need. In 1998, the camps became solely for respite care for children in need of deeper nurturing or for families that could not otherwise have the opportunity of a holiday.

“We worked for 10 years with a Christchurch group, the Holiday Camping Trust, who raised the funds,” said Amy. “But we became really involved with the families, and connected into their lives. We wanted to do that more effectively, and we began to seek God to provide funds for children.”

It was a key decision, bringing their passion for touching the lives of at-risk children with Jesus into their work.

Meantime, Dan and Amy moved from being just friends working alongside each other to falling in love and marrying, in March 2004.

Their ministry blossomed into children’s clubs, mentoring programmes, work in schools, advocacy for children – “you name it, we do it”. They and their team now reach about 700 children a year.

Training is an essential requirement for volunteers. All start by helping at one of the Te Mapua children’s camps for 6 to 10 year-olds. Before every camp there’s a weekend of training specific to residential care, and no matter how many camps volunteers have attended previously, they still have to undergo the training weekend. Some of the core leaders have been through at least 40 of them.

There is specific training for particular needs or new Te Mapua initiatives as well.

“The weekend away six times a year makes a big difference to having a unified team with the same standards and same ideals of leadership,” they said.

“They are the most amazing people with massively high standards. I’ve never met such a large group of honourable, high standard young people,” said Dan.

The leaders come from a wide range of churches and groups. Some even fly from Australia to work with the team. Inevitably, relationships form, and like the Marsdens some have now married after helping at camps.

Providing behavioural management teams to the Linwood Avenue School is becoming a major part of the Te Mapua ministry.

Six volunteers work one-on-one with children who require extra support, making up for the difficulty many schools have in finding adequately trained teacher aides.

“The children we work with tend to have quite high needs and low resources,” Amy said. “They are incredibly precious kids, often misunderstood and misguided. So it’s been a real honour to have some our team down there, inputting at a level that encompasses the school, their home, their health and everything, including spiritual health.”

Two further schools have now asked for this support, which the Marsden’s are hoping to provide this year, “but it’s a matter of finding the funding and the vehicles.”Despite the ministry being quite explicit with its Christian base, Dan said the schools embrace this.

“We’ve felt our job has been to lift Jesus up. Then it’s Jesus’ job is to draw the people,” Amy said. “We don’t want to provide just a behavioural support management team in a school – we want to provide Jesus to those children as the answer.”

The team has found amazing things happening in the groups they work with with the word miracle being bandied around byd secular people.

The miracles include a mother being healed of a cancerous tumour in her stomach after being prayed for by the team at a children’s club.

“There have been miraculous turnarounds with children who have been through every support system that the world supplies, but with a lot of love and patience and Christ-directed input have turned around, in some cases in the space of three weeks. They became just different children.

“Children that were restricted on the school grounds or only allowed to be at school until 10 o’clock in the morning are managing full days and more, and contributing in lots of healthy ways. It’s amazing to watch the growth.”

There have also been significant answers to prayer for funding and vehicles.

“It’s a bit scary to live like that all the time, but it’s wonderful,” said Amy.

Dan and Amy’s long-term vision is to continue developing behavioural management in schools – with better funding so the volunteers can become paid – and to see a move towards more family-oriented care, through a network of homes with a father and mother caring for up to 10 children.

“We are starting in our own home,” Dan said. “We don’t whether we’ll get to 10 – God might take us past 10 – but we’ll just take them one at a time. Whatever he brings, we’ll be fine.”

Despite their large ministry, family life is still the first priority for the Marsdens. Dan works fulltime as an IT developer at Lincoln University, starting early in the day so he can spend time with the kids in the later afternoon and evening.

“We do try and keep our home as a protected place for our family, because their needs are high as well,” Amy said. Our children are closely tied in with everything we do, but there are times when they just need their mum and dad.”

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[02/13/2008]

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