- Portable Kingdoms -
Once upon a time there lived a royal family in search of a kingdom
Our Story
Princess Story
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Amber was born and raised in Southern Pennsylvania in Amish Country. Her family both challenged and impacted her spiritual growth and she grew to appreciate life, both the good and the bad. From the time she was five and her dad came back from a business trip in Australia, she was fascinated with the global Kingdom of God.
In 2003 she graduated from high school and went to Olivet Nazarene University, majoring in journalism. This lasted one semester, after which she felt a call to cross-cultural ministry and eventually graduated with a degree in Religious Studies, Intercultural Studies and a minor in Spanish.
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At the end of her first year of college she had the opportunity to leave the country for the first time on a missions trip to Brazil. This trip inspired her to learn Portuguese alongside her Spanish, and eventually sparked a fire for her semester in Europe and eventually further studies at NTS in Kansas City.
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Prince Story
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Cesar was born in Barra do Corda, MA, Brazil, to a lower class family in a time where the divide between the rich and poor of Brazil was indeed very great. He was raised in relative poverty until his mother was able to take over a "boate," a night club/brothel. Though this certainly had a difficult impact on his life, it also has become his testimony.
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One night, as he was sleeping in the house behind the boate, he dreamed of Jesus visiting him, calling him. It was then that he had his first personal encounter with Christ, and he was soon to see Christ's delivering power as well as his greatness.
A few years later he came to the United States to work with his brother, who was already here. Together they started a siding business first in Georgia and then in the Kansas City Metro area.
A United, Portable Kingdom
When Amber decided to go to Kansas City for seminary in August of 2007 (almost immediately after her semester abroad, she also knew she wanted to find the cultural communities in the area. Within 45 minutes of her arrival she was already on her way to an African get-together a college friend had invited her to, and she also was looking for places to practice her Portuguese. One of the best ways to find a community of any kind is to look for a church geared towards that community, so she typed "Brazilian church Kansas City" in Google and found a church called Living Hope Brazilian Church.
Cesar was, at the time, in a partnership with his two brothers and a friend of theirs doing siding subcontracting. The day Amber went to the church for the first time, he was there sitting beside a friend of his and turned to him and said, "She's the one. I'm going to marry her." Of course, the friend laughed at the time. That same friend was in their wedding in May of 2008.
I February 2009, after having had a traumatic miscarriage the previous November, Amber discovered she was pregnant for the second time. Audrey Bella was born that October and has since been an energentic and happy burst of sunshine throughout the Portable Kingdom. The name Portable Kingdom came out of the months after Audrey was born when Amber realized that they would be juggling work, the immigration process and their dreams, perhaps for the rest of their lives. The immigration process alone meant they had to be ready with little notice to move everything into storage and spend an indefinite amount of time in Brazil (indefinite ended up being seven months).
Even after returning, it is our dream to keep our families, both in the USA and abroad, united, and our dreams of missions work on fire. This means that, while we are now seeking roots, we continue to seek to be portable, able to go to where God calls or, on a smaller scale, where our families live with or without planning.