A Christmas Celebration at our Home in Altamira in 1998

Christmas in Brazil

1. Many people could barely afford food, making Christmas a time when the gap between the haves and have-nots widened.
2. Many families had missing members, such as siblings or parents, and lacked a culture of warm family celebrations. When they did get together, the neighbor children told us, it always ended up in drunken arguments, resulting in the families not talking to each other for the next several months. (I had high hopes for a young boy who was deeply involved in our church activities and aspired to be a missionary. One December, he excitedly told me he had been invited to spend Christmas with his relatives, which meant he couldn’t participate in the church nativity play. His relatives lived in another part of Marabá. When the big day arrived, he went off on his Christmas adventure. That night, at the party in his home, his relative stabbed and killed someone and fled the scene with his girlfriend. The police showed up. The young boy was terrified and ran and walked all night through a swamp and across the countryside to return to the house where his grandparents raised him in a house adjacent to our church property. He did participate in the nativity play, and it was a good Christmas, but he eventually met a violent end at a young age. We went to his funeral.)
3. The Christian community often viewed Christmas as a pagan holiday, so many refrained from celebrating it with their churches. Instead, they celebrated New Year’s enthusiastically.
4. When our Brazilian friends attended a missionary celebration, they were surprised by our modest gifts, like coffee or a chocolate bar. They believed gifts should be expensive, sacrificial, and lavish to show the value of friendship.
5. In Brazil, we fostered a culture of Christmas celebrations that included cookies, communal meals, and sharing the goodwill God showed by sending Jesus. Now, all our churches eagerly anticipate the Christmas season.

Our Most Important Message

Missionary work is more about who we are than what we teach or our place in the org chart. As we live among people, they see how we treat our family, respond to disappointments, ask forgiveness, overlook offenses, celebrate, empathize, and react to a million situations.

Who we are is by far our most powerful message to our families, neighbors, and everyone we influence.

The Hansen Family Christmas Gathering
There isn’t one sibling or relationship among the growing Hansen family that doesn’t enjoy talking to everyone else. Harold and Joan often comment on the invaluable gift to their whole family, considering it one of their crowning ministry blessings. Harold told me, “I just wish everyone could stop, look around the room, and reflect on our blessing of unity.”

Seeing people who have served God sacrificially all their lives being blessed with a loving family just feels right. It doesn’t always work out like this because of so many uncontrollable factors, but it feels right when it happens.

Harold and Joan (Deanna’s parents) have ten Great-Grandchildren.

One is in Minnesota this Christmas.
The eight in this photo all have Brazilian moms,
children of Ross and Karin’s or our daughters.

Our oldest daughter, Anni, is responsible for the food bank ministry at Central Heights Church in Abbotsford. In this photo, Anni orients a group of volunteers on how to serve those who come just before the doors open. Once a month, they have the privilege of serving the marginalized with abundant free food. The food bank in Abbotsford rotates through several locations each month in Abbotsford.

It is so fun seeing people in different surroundings. Anni shines…

Lucy and Paul come to Grandpa and Grammy’s for a visit. Lucy is a talker. She is trying to figure out how the thoughts in her head can come out as sounds through her mouth. Paul, on the other hand, is more interested in Christmas lights and the big world out there.

Canadian Geese at Mill Lake

Do you know that great feeling of getting a new computer, and you can set it up any way you like when you do a clean install of all your programs so they fly? These babies started with a clean slate. By the time they are born, they already know many things, but they still need to work hard to understand what kind of world they landed in.

Imagine a baby who, whenever they look up, has an encouraging parent or relative trying to connect with them and meet their needs. Now imagine another baby, born on the same day in a marginalized community to a single, working mom who has a few siblings from different dads who are each working on their own issues. I think of this all the time. Who would I be, or who would you be, if we had been born into a home in our neighborhood in Marabá?

This photo is from a couple of years ago of a friend I met in jail. He claimed he was falsely accused of a violent crime because he had a similar motorbike and resembled the real culprit. He was arrested just a few blocks from the crime scene and had to wait in jail for seven months for his case to go to court. After his release, we visited his home several times and met his father, who raised him. He lived in a violent town about an hour from Marabá. Many inmates were young men from that town, and Deanna and I sometimes drove around looking up and visiting their families.

Merry Christmas, and we wish you the best week so far!

We have many options when it comes to Christian missions.
Partners who support Deanna and I are helping Train Leaders and Plant Churches.
We are working at planting and releasing church-planting communities where people can work out their faith and help others do the same.

1. We started by learning to work together with many people to plant churches from scratch.
2. We were instrumental in the beginnings of three, including Central Church, Mirante Church, and the Marabá Church.
3. We now use our experience and learning to help other leaders effectively Train Leaders and Plant Churches.
4. We are influencing an organizational culture where reproducible church planting can happen organically in many locations simultaneously.
5. In 2025, we will travel and minister among our people in Brazil. We have also been invited by Milton and Lu (the national directors of Vineyard Brazil) and Michael and Helen Hansen (pastors in Ohio) to go on another survey trip, this time to Portugal. 
6. Even as we want to release and bless leaders to plant churches in Brazil, we want to help Brazilians become cross-cultural church planters. In the abundance-thinking nature of the Kingdom, finding international God stories will increase our appetite for local God stories.
7. We have great hope for the future.

A Good Deal

Investing with church planters is a good deal because your investment continues to produce fruit for generations.

So then, you will know them by their fruits (Mt 7:20).

This is a historic photo of the beginning of the first Vineyard church in Altamira in 1996.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Mt 6:20–21).

If you desire to help with long-term community transformation and assist people in finding their reason for living, consider joining our us or other church planting missionaries with financial support.

If you want to be part of this ministry or to increase your involvement, please click on the donation link at the bottom of this email or contact me at rick.bergen@xtrememercy.com. 

In 1995, three of us went on a survey trip from Santarem to Altamira to determine whether we wanted to open a mission base in that region. Our goal was to prayerfully talk to the people, expecting God to reveal His will to us. We drove for 14 hours through thick dust, smoke, and fires.

I cut and pasted the following excerpt from a newsletter I wrote immediately following that life-changing survey trip 29 years ago.

One of my concerns was alleviated this trip…” Are we really going to move to an area that already has churches?”

There was about an inch of dust on everything in town. It had the look and feel of an old western town. Since we had only one full day in Altamira, we decided to save time by dropping Timoteo off to talk to the government agency involved with land while we fueled up the truck. After waiting in line for a while at the one gas station, we were told they were out of diesel, so we were delayed a few minutes as we located a different one. Just as we returned for Timoteo, he showed up a little red in the face. “This agency referred me to an office on the next street. Arriving there, I saw that the worker was drunk. Stepping in from the doorway to talk to him, I heard a commotion outside. Three men were robbing the bank next door, and one had an automatic weapon. As they finished, they shot a government employee who was entering the door right beside me where I had been standing just minutes before. He landed in the hallway with blood pouring out of his leg. I was a little concerned you would show up right then, yet I didn’t want to run as someone might shoot me for a criminal. The military police showed up, heavily armed, and I got out of there.” We were told by the town’s people that these occurrences were often.

Deciding it was not a good day to talk to that gov’t office, we decided to look along a relational track. Since we had given Timoteo’s friend’s brother and family a ride to Altamira, the friend’s brother, Vincente, introduced us to his brother-in-law, a cowboy in Altamira. Mauro, the cowboy, is currently breaking horses for a living and knows everyone in the region. He decided to show us around. “Are you looking for an acreage on the edge of town? My friend (another cowboy) was just shot and killed 9 days ago. The Federal Police are investigating, and it appears a farmer has hired a killer to do the job. This guy now wants to sell cheap and get out of the area. He has a nice little place.”

I realized they still need strong gospel witness in Altamira.

We thank the Lord for His continual guidance and protection.
Rick, for all of us.

(Note: We found out later that violent bank robberies were not that common, and we lost track of Mauro. But we started with the information we had).

That survey trip convinced us to move to Altamira to start a church-planting mission. The first Vineyard church in Altamira is now one of the most vibrant churches in the booming city that has now grown to 123,507 people. We met in our garage until we had 80 people coming in regular attendance. Each Sunday, we would push our truck out to get it jump-started because, for about six months, we didn’t have enough money for a spare battery. We shoveled and swept out the heavy red mud the truck tires left from the dirt roads. We splashed water on it to keep the dust down and pulled out our wooden, homemade benches. Next, we moved to a dance hall, but they sometimes asked us to leave early so they could continue their worldly activities. Finally, the Lord helped us purchase the location where the church meets now. 

The Altamira Central Vineyard church is now a life-transforming disciple-making factory and church-planting church.

Clenildo preached there a couple of weeks ago and told them about three remote communities consisting of 50-60 families with no church presence of any sort. Clenildo wrote the community leaders a letter to see if they would be open to him coming. They welcomed him with one stipulation, “Only if you come and evangelize all of us.” They are hungry for the gospel message and peace with God. The people of the Central Church accepted the missionary challenge as Clenildo spoke.


1996 – The car garage of our rented home was the first meeting place of the Central Church in Altamira in 1996. Clenildo is standing in the white shirt while Angelita is leading worship.


The Vineyard in the USA commissioned leaders to ordain me as the first Vineyard pastor in Brazil. Behind Deanna you can see Nilton and Cleuci. Nilton was one of Luke Huber’s right hand leaders before Luke died in an airplane crash. At that time Nilton was the leader of the Brazilian team with whom we worked.


The Vineyard USA gave me several signed ordination certificates so that I could ordain Vineyard pastors under their authority. That is how we did it back then. After we had been in Altamira for a year, we were thrilled that other missionaries came to help us. Here we are ordaining Nilton, with Bud Simon, Raimundo, Clenildo, and Samuel standing behind me.


2024 – We were honored to have an emotional maturity conference at the Central Church in 2024. Deanna assigned breakout groups to the conference attendees during the leadership training weekend event. The group has moved from the red-mud-stained rented garage to white ceramic tiles in their own building.


Athila (black t-shirt) and Elke (green blouse by Deanna) are dynamic, well-loved senior pastors of the Central Church. We’re having supper late at night after one of the conference sessions.

We were invited to Jim and Vicky’s 64th wedding anniversary meal. Jim (grey sweater) and Harold (blue coat, black-rimmed glasses) were super-instrumental in the early days in Altamira. They helped us buy our first large boats, the first Central Church property, the airplane, and innumerable other projects. They took a long shot in investing in us as unproven young leaders, for which we are forever grateful. The man standing with the red plaid shirt and his wife beside me in the red coat were at the meetings in 1993 as we prepared to leave for Brazil.

We seek more partners to carry the work forward to the next generation of missions and missionaries.

Pastor Elmer Martens, sitting beside me, is 95 years old and has been a pastor and superintendent most of his life. He was the fill-in preacher for three months for a church just this year (Yes. Ninety-five years old). If you come to Chilliwack and go to McDonalds for coffee in the morning, you may see him talking to a marginalized person about the hope of the gospel. At one point in the evening, the man standing by Jim in a blue coat at the far end came and sat between Pastor Martens and me. I asked him how many grandchildren he had. “I don’t know how many grandchildren I have, but I have seven great-grandchildren.” Then he explained, “Elmer here knew me before I was married. He led me to the Lord, baptized me, married my wife and I, and dedicated our children to the Lord.” 

Can you imagine a group of people who stay in good relationship with one another and work out their faith together over many decades?

• Do you think you ever connected with someone like this when you were an infant?
• How is that relationship these days?
• What happened?

Chiri helps Olivia and Zack make baby Ellis feel welcome in their family.

Ellis syncs up with his mom.

May God give you the best week ever! Lucy thinks “the best week ever” is normal. May your life be filled with exceptional weeks.