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 For 30 years charismatic missionaries Randy and Marcy MacMillan have been teaching Christians in Colombia the secret of spiritual warfare.
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Everybody has heroes. Mine are missionaries—especially those who leave the comforts of home to preach the gospel in dangerous places. That’s what Randy and Marcy MacMillan did 30 years ago when they moved from Florida to Cali, Colombia—a violent city that soon became the headquarters for one of the world’s deadliest drug cartels.
Since they began their work in Cali in 1976, the MacMillans have survived persecution from religious leaders, assassins hired by cocaine traffickers and death threats from satanists. But today their Christian Community of Faith church is one of the largest in Cali, and they have 30 other churches in Colombia—plus congregations in Venezuela, Spain, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Meanwhile as this quiet spiritual transformation was occurring over the course of three decades, the power of the Colombian drug cartels was crushed—after the Christians of Cali united in prayer and asked God for a miracle.
“Our desire has always been to bring the presence of God to our city,” says Marcy, who spoke with me in August when I was in Bogota, Colombia for a conference.
A native of Colombia who lived in the United States when her father was a diplomat, Marcy believes that praise and worship has been a secret weapon in the spiritual war for her nation. As soon as she and Randy moved to Colombia 30 years ago from Jacksonville, Fla., they began to teach people how to worship God in intimacy. That was a challenge, since most Colombians had been taught in the Catholic Church that God was difficult to approach.
“Our desire has always been to bring the presence of God to our city,” says Marcy
“This nation had never heard of the concept of praise and worship as we know it,” Marcy told me. “So we were persecuted every step of the way, for teaching them to dance, to speak in tongues, to use banners [in worship] or to prophesy.”
The MacMillans began to sponsor worship symposiums that ran every two years, starting in 1986. At the same time they began hosting national conferences on prayer and intercession.
In the mid-1990s the violence got so bad in Cali that people could not leave their homes at night. Randy and Marcy, whose two children were living with them at the time, had to learn to stay “in fine tune with the Holy Spirit to know what to do and what not to do,” they told Charisma in a 1999 interview.
But the tense environment served as a wake-up call to the churches of Cali, and a group of pastors agreed in 1994 to stage a citywide prayer vigil. More than 50,000 people gathered from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. to pray for the city and nation during the first event. It was held three more times.
In May 1995, a pastor at the prayer vigil led the huge audience in prayer and specifically bound the seven leaders of the drug cartels. Three weeks later, 7,000 soldiers road-blocked the city and rounded up drug traffickers. Within 70 days, half the Cali cartel members had been thrown in prison. After another prayer vigil in 1996, the foremost leader of the Cali cartel, Santa Cruz, was arrested.
“In order for God to visit the city, we pastors had to come together,” Randy told Charisma.
Today, the MacMillans can look back at over 30 years of ministry. Currently, Randy has been forced to curtail his travel because of recent heart attacks. Marcy, who has always been involved in all aspects of the ministry, is taking an even more visible role at the church and with the leadership of Missions South America, their network of churches.
The heart of her ministry will always be worship. She knows this is a key that will liberate all of South America.
“Worship has always been our message,” she told me in Bogota. Then she handed me her most recent recording, Gracias, a collection of Spanish-language songs she wrote and produced with her daughter Sarah, who now lives in Miami.
Recently a Colombian woman who had been a guerrilla and who was planning to commit suicide found a copy of Gracias in a trash can. She picked it up, listened to the music and decided to turn from atheism to Christ. She later told Marcy when she met her: “Please don’t stop singing the words of life.”
Marcy knows, perhaps better than most of us, that songs have an invisible power. That’s why she plans to continue her work until Colombia is totally transformed.
“Perhaps because we faced so much violence in Cali,” she says, “that’s why we’ve been so radical about needing the presence of God.”
J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma. Reprinted with permission from Charisma & Christian Life, October, 2006. Copyright Strang Communications Co., USA. All rights reserved. www.charismamag.com .
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