Wayne Myers, who boosted church construction for hundreds of congregations and promoted a culture of giving generously throughout his 75-plus years of ministry in Mexico, died peacefully at his home in Mexico City on February 1 at the age of 102.
Known for his motto, Vivir para dar y vivir para servir (“Live to give and live to serve”), Myers built relationships with pastors of megachurches, midsize churches, and tiny village gatherings, frequently guest preaching at and leading fundraisers for them. Through partnerships with church leaders, he cared for widows and orphans, distributed food in remote parts of the country and in Indigenous communities, and organized weeks-long evangelistic campaigns.
From the pulpit, Myers always smiled at the congregation, praising God regardless of his circumstances. He frequently exclaimed, “¡Aleluyita!,” adding his own Spanish customization to the common praise. Known for the moral and financial integrity of his ministry, Myers often proclaimed that a life of faithful obedience to the Lord is “dulce como mango” (“sweet as a mango”).
Myers touched thousands of Mexican evangelical churches, a reality he often acknowledged through self-deprecation.
“We have not raised 6,000 churches; we have helped to build them up,” he once said. “If I had raised 6,000 churches, Paul the apostle would ask for permission to leave heaven to come and ask about my methods.”
Many local leaders saw him as the most influential missionary in Mexico in the last hundred years.
“Paul said that he had on himself the marks of Christ,” Efraín González, senior pastor at Centro de Avivamiento Naucalpan, said at his memorial service last week. “Mexico could very well say that it bears the marks of Wayne Myers’s ministry.”
William Wayne Myers was born on August 31, 1922, to farmers in Morton, Mississippi. He gave his life to Christ as a teenager when his cousin, who was serving as a missionary in Argentina, shared the gospel with him during a visit home. His cousin also advised his new Christian relative to attend a local Baptist church.
“That church took me to the foot of the Cross,” Myers later recalled. “But they left me there!”
During World War II, Myers enlisted in the US Navy, where he served aboard the USS Enterprise. During his 19 months on what would become the country’s most decorated ship, he was struck by the faith of some of his fellow sailors.
“I saw a small group of believers full of the Holy Spirit. … They prayed hard!” Myers later shared. While at first intimidated by the group that prayed so loudly that “their prayers could be heard from the stern all the way to the bow,” he eventually joined them.
One night, in the middle of a five-hour prayer session with the group, Myers said he encountered the Holy Spirit for the first time.
“The glory that resurrected Jesus from the grave washed all over me, giving me Jesus in a whole new dimension,” he later recalled. “He called me to serve him.”
After his military service, Myers attended a Bible college in Pasadena, California. There, in addition to attending 22 hours of classes a week, Meyers began to pray anywhere between 4 and 15 hours a day. During one of these times, “[God] told me in an audible voice, ‘Son, I’m calling you to Mexico to serve my whole body, not to raise a body for yourself,’” he said.
Obedient to his calling, Myers left for Mexico, unable to speak Spanish and without a specific destination. “I had one thing going for me when I went to Mexico,” he later remarked. “I knew that I knew nothing.”
During his first years there, Myers floated from city to city, serving in various churches’ children’s ministries and organizing small evangelistic events. He helped fundraise for local pastors who wanted to share the gospel on the radio, work he continued throughout his life.
In the 1960s, Myers befriended Gordon and Freda Lindsay, the evangelists and missionaries behind Christ For The Nations college (CFN) in Dallas, joining forces with them on their church infrastructure projects. After Gordon passed away in 1973, Myers continued partnering with Freda, accompanying her on overseas ministry trips to promote CFN missions projects. In 2023, the ministry even named an award in his honor.
Though Myers’s preaching and personal faith had strong charismatic influences, he never aligned with a particular denomination and served alongside churches across the theological spectrum. In the beginning of his ministry, Myers mainly served with Assemblies of God and independent Pentecostal churches. But as nondenominational churches became more common, he extended his counsel and resources to the Mexican evangelicals planting these congregations.
“I abhor sectarianism because it is born of a spirit of superiority, and this is the opposite of the spirit of Jesus Christ, who came and served us even to the death on the Cross!” he said.
When Myers was preparing to move to Mexico, he said he heard God give him clear instructions regarding the financial support of his ministry. He could not disclose personal needs, he could not buy anything on credit, and he could not borrow money from anyone.
These calls for financial prudence shaped Myers’s family life and ministry. Miguel, who Myers and his wife, Martha, took in at age 12, recalled how Myers once pawned the family refrigerator in order to fulfill his financial pledge to help a small congregation.
Myers frequently preached on generosity. He believed without a shadow of a doubt that “we only own what we give away,” explaining that what Christians gave away was an investment in heaven. He also taught that not giving to God according to income forced God “to reduce our income to match our giving.”
Despite his willingness to preach at churches like Casa de Dios, controversial pastor Cash Luna’s $44 million state-of-the-art congregation, Myers never wavered in his messages on Christian financial charity.
Beyond Mexico, Myers supported orphanages in Central America, Asia, and Africa and founded an initiative to help pastors’ widows. Myers also helped fundraise and build connections for missionaries who translated the Bible into various indigenous languages in Mexico and across Latin America.
Over time, the church construction ministry that Myers had started years earlier added 6,000 roofs to congregations in Mexico, as well as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. Myers kept a handwritten log of projects he believed God had asked him to support. (Some said the number had surpassed 10,000 by the end of his life.)
As he grew older, Myers struggled to slow down. When he was 90, his doctors told him that his heart was only working at 50 percent and advised him to radically reduce his ministry commitments. Nevertheless, Myers continued to preach up to four times a week, and at the age of 101 he was still preaching one-hour sermons, inviting those present to give their hearts to Christ if they had not done it before.
“We honor the legacy of a true hero of the faith,” wrote Marcos Richards, pastor of Comunidad Olivo, one of the largest churches in Ciudad Juárez and Myers’s close friend. “An example like few others of generosity, integrity, and dedication to the gospel.”
Myers is survived by his three biological children, David, Rebecca, and Paula, along with Miguel and several grandchildren. His wife, Martha, died in 2021.
The post Died: Wayne Myers, Missionary Who Taught Mexican Evangelicals to ‘Live to Give’ appeared first on Christianity Today.