Press

Local musician smuggles faith into China

North Adams Native Tours in West Africa

by Janet Lee
Daily News Lifestyles Editor

It’s a long way from North Adams to Senegal, West Africa, but that’s exactly the journey Christian recording artist, Timothy Mark, recently enjoyed. He terms it “the journey of a lifetime.”

With the African tour, Mark culminates 10 years of concert ministry that began in his home in North Adams in 1988. Now a resident of Englewood, FL., he continues to be amazed at the way the music ministry has developed through the years. In the past year he has performed internationally in Panama, Croatia, and West Africa, and will be in Italy for two weeks in august. A tour of the Mid-west will bring him home to Southern Michigan for 11 concerts over six weeks in July and August.

“It will be great to be home again,” Mark said. “This area is where it all began for me and will always have a special place in my life. I feel the experiences I am enjoying now are built upon the foundation I developed growing up in the community of North Adams, My family and the values I learned in the farming community have carried me a long way.”

Mark is known for his sense of adventure, and the tour in Africa certainly afforded many opportunities. The first half of the trip was spent in the Eastern most part of the country traveling by land Rover to various tribal villages.

“My second night in Senegal I spent in the village of Badioula. It was over 110 degrees during the day, making it difficult to keep from becoming dehydrated. We slept outside under the wide African sky to keep as cool as possible. There was no breeze. In the village, a dance was taking place for a marriage that was happening the next day. One of the missionaries and I walked into the village with our flashlights to see the dancing.

“The sound of the drums grew louder as we walked through the mud-built round houses with the conical thatched roofs. The was a large group of women dancing in a circle to the beat of the drums. I felt like I was in an episode of National Geographic. The moon had yet to rise but there was enough light from he stars scattered across the sky to see the dancers and to watch the drummers keeping the rhythm with their calloused hands on the large wood drums. It was a fascinating experience for me.”

Wildlife was also abundant in the Eastern part of the country. While driving early one morning, Mark was able to see baboons, monkeys, warthogs, hyena, hippo, gazelle, deer, and a variety of colorful birds. It was one of many highlights for him.

But the trip is also memorable for other, less glamorous reasons. The trip was a first for Mark into a Third-World country and in many ways left a strong impact on his life and ministry.

“Even in the large cities poverty is overwhelming,” he said. “Young children beg for money alongside crippled adults, legs withered from polio or other diseases. In some areas, raw sewage flowed in open ditches, the stench making it difficult to breath. Trash was everywhere making the capital city of Dakar seem as if it had been carved out of a land fill. Dust and diesel exhaust clogged the air.

“Of all the places I have been, this one was the most challenging for me from a simple, physical perspective. I think emotionally it wore me down over the three weeks I was there. It is hard to absorb it all without it impacting you on a deeper level,” he said. “I feel as Americans we tend to take our comfort for granted. While in reality we enjoy a standard of living most of the world does not know.”

While there is little one person can do for such an overwhelming need, Mark feels the trip was a success.

“The most important thing we can do is to help meet the people’s needs on a spiritual level. It is the greatest need they have,” he said. “My involvement in Senegal was primarily a ministry of encouragement to those folks who have committed their lives to developing literacy and meeting the spiritual needs of the people. I hope I was able to encourage and lift them up in the work they are doing there.”

Mark will be sharing many stories from the trip during his concert tour in this area. Dates are yet to be announced.

Local Musician Smuggles Faith into China

By Roland Stoy
The Daily Reporter

Quincy - Timothy mark is a talented musician, with two CDs. to his credit, a growing concert calendar and a chance to go national with one of his latest tunes.

He, in all respects, appears a nice, you, law-abiding man. And in many ways, he is.

So why does he risk criminal activity?

As a Christian, he feels there are some other rules and laws to follow, including coming to the aid of Christians under the thumb of an oppressive government. And that is what he did recently in China, he said.

There are an estimated 30 to 60 million Chinese Christians who risk persecution to be believers, said Mark, visiting his parents in North Adams and his friends in Branch County over the Thanksgiving holiday. Meanwhile, there is only one Bible for every 10,000 of those Chinese believers.

To help change those numbers, he has joined a group called Revival Christian Ministries, in which adventurous Christians are recruited to visit Hong Kong and load up on small Bibles and religious tracts to smuggle into China.

Once across the border, a contact is made and the materials whisked away.

Mark said if you get busted at the border, Chinese officials confiscate materials and refuse entrance. If one is busted inside China, he loses his visa and is thrown out of the country for good.

“I got nervous crossing the border,” Mark said. “I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe that’s why the border guard decided to check my baggage.”

But at another point on another day, Mark made the crossing and competed the mission.

“The next day, I got so sick and depressed. I think it was the devil attacking me after what I’d done, and it ended up being a good time with God,” he said.

It wasn’t, he was certain, the sight of the squid or butchered chickens with the heads still on them in the open air markets.

Nor was it the excitement.

A couple of years ago, Mark toured strife-torn Bosnia with his concert ministry, and prior to that he had been to Panama and to Senegal just after and embassy had been blown up.

A 1983 graduate of North Adams High School, Mark moved to a farmhouse just outside of Quincy where his musical career took shape.

Two CDs and many local concerts later, an offer to take a part-time position at the Evangelical Free Church in Englewood, Florida came up, and after much prayer, Mark felt led to take it. He packed and headed south a year ago.

Now he feels his work is finished there and has resigned. The concert dates are rolling in like a hurricane off the Gulf of Mexico.

Mark intends to retain a base in Florida, and while working on the national release of his “Church Across the Street,” a tune about an unwed and pregnant young woman, continue his concerts both here and there.

After all, travel is nothing to him. He’s been from lost to saved and around the world.

Friday, December 4, 1998, The Daily Reporter, Coldwater, Michigan. Used by permission.

On the Mark

By Roland Stoy (staff writer)
The Daily Reporter

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Singer and songwriter Timothy Mark will bring his concert ministry to the Coldwater First Baptist Church (FBC) tomorrow, Oct. 21 and on Nov. 9, Mark will be opening for Avalon at a Beginnings Care for Life benefit concert at Spring Arbor.

It is all part of a continuing busy schedule for the Quincy native, now a resident of Nashville and an ongoing global traveler.

Add to his titles of singer, songwriter, and adventurer in the service of the Lord, that of author.

Those who visit his newsletter at timothymark.com found in his October installment a story about his visit to a chaotic soccer game in Bolivia, and finding Jesus in the midst of the chaos, another excerpt from his forthcoming book “Over the Edge: Read Life Stores of Adventure and Faith.”

With his busy concert schedule, how has he found time to write?

“Most times I will have a crazy experience and then I will write the kernel of that experience on a scrap of paper and put it in a file of article ideas. Then I block out time to just write. I don’t have a lot of time to write, either songs or articles, so it is a bit of a trick. I usually end up making time to write when I have a deadline. I’m bad about procrastinating” he said.

He said the book is metaphorically intended to be a “devotional book on steroids with a shot of testosterone thrown in for good measure.”

“I want to involve the reader in a dramatic story and then show how that applies to my life as a follower of Jesus Christ,” Mark said.

He said many of the chapters go back to his days in Quincy.

“Some go even further back than that. But having lived in Quincy for so many years, there were a ton of events that occurred during that time—multiple trips overseas to China, Africa, South America, and Europe – as well as events that occurred right there in Qu8incy,” he said. “God seems to have a way of putting me in circumstances that are unusual and then giving me the idea of how those circumstances can be used to communicate Biblical truth. When I have the opportunity to speak or share the concert ministry, I often weave those crazy stories into the message.”

For example in the October excerpt, “The Christ of the Chaos,” he tells of going to a soccer game in Santa Cruz with 12,000 fanatical fans.

“Time wore on and the game remained scoreless as the crowd was continuing to work into a froth. Players fought on the field. Fans fought in the seats…Finally, two-thirds into the first half, Fabio Gimenez, number seven for Oriente, took a pass from a fellow teammate and bobbed and weaved toward the defending goalie. The crowd held its breath. The kick was solid and authoritative and blasted past the goalie and into the goal,” Mark wrote.

He said anarchy ensued, but in the midst of it, Gimenez ran across the field, peeling off his jersey and revealing on his undershirt the words in big, black, block letters, “Jesus Salva Tu vida,” which means “Jesus saves your life.”

He wrote, “I couldn’t believe it…There at the moment of disorder and disarray, Christ shows up…Isn’t that just like God? Right when it gets the craziest, when the pandemonium is pressing, when it feels like everything is out of control, Christ shows up.”

Mark has shown up before in support of the Beginnings Care for Life pregnancy center in Coldwater, and wholeheartedly supports their mission, which is “to reach out in the love of Jesus Christ to our community in a spirit of help, truth, and hope. We offer education, material assistance, and spiritual counsel in order to foster healing and positive choices for women, men and their pre-born children.”

Beginnings over the years has helped many hundreds of women, mostly young but also older, with pregnancy, post-birth and parenting support, and in cases of abortions –which they of course do not encourage in any case – special counseling.

Tickets can be had for the 7 p.m. concert at the Spring Arbor Free Methodist Church with Mark and Avalon by calling (517) 639-8122.

Avalon, consisting of Jody McBrayer, Melissa Greene, and Janna and Greg Long, has just released an eighth studio album, “Faith: A Hymns Collection,” which contains classics such as “Holy, Holy Holy,” “It is Well,” “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away.”

As for Mark’s book, he said “At this time my plan is for a soft cover, about 190 pages, no pictures. I have worked with the editor and he is doing a good job…I hope to have it published by the spring but that could change depending on if I can get a publisher to handle it.”

He said he would prefer not to go the self-publishing route.

Meantime, those who attend the FBC tomorrow morning will find Mark at the 8:45 traditional and 11 contemporary services.

The church is on Bishop Avenue, across from the water tower near Coldwater High School.