Shaping lives: Potter's Field turns marriage mission into international children's ministry

A local ministry centered around healing marriages has evolved into taking care of children in four countries.

Michael and Pam Rozell started Potter’s Field Ministries in the early 1990s. They traveled across the country, showcasing Michael’s pottery skills and Pam’s singing in an effort to heal broken marriages.

“In America we’re so disposable. We have the ‘microwave mentality.’ Marriage is hard work,” Pam said.

Michael was asked by a pastor to go to El Salvador, and their ministry extended into Central America. 

Michael was upset about living in a 900-square-foot apartment at the time, and came back from his trip thanking God for air conditioning. Michael said God revealed to him that he wasn’t trying to get him to be thankful.

Instead, “What are you going to do about the children?” was the message he believed God was sending him.

The Rozells were eventually able to start a boys’ orphanage in El Salvador in 2006. They have since added children’s ministries in Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Uganda. These include after-school literacy programs and help with food and medical needs.

A program called “Change for Change” provides water, food, clothing and education for a child for 67 cents a day or $20 a month, Michael said.

The Rozells have relationships with thousands of churches in the United States through their touring ministry. Those contacts help fund their worldwide children’s ministry.

Michael related details of their ministry in Uganda, which helps children living with AIDS on islands in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake that is the source of the Nile River.

“My first trip to Africa, I realized they needed much more than money, they needed help,” Michael said.

Their school in Entebbe, Uganda helps 2,500 children per week. These children have been relocated to 10 islands in the lake, Michael said. There’s no clean water on the islands. Most of the children’s parents have already died from AIDS.

“They bring their water [on] canoes. They trade for it and prostitute for it. Most die from diarrhea and malaria.”

He tells of parasites that exist in the water and snails that attach themselves to one’s body.

Michael shared a story about a boy named Ibrahim who they were able to relocate from an island to a Christian boarding school in Entebbe.

“God broke into this kid’s life and snatched him out of the pit of hell. Now he’s going to get an opportunity for life.”

A woman who works for Potter’s Field Medical Outreach has become Ibrahim’s foster parent, he said.

The Rozells had been helping children through World Vision International when they decided to start their own overseas ministry. 

“We wanted more hands-on and involvement,” Michael said. “My wife her whole life has had a heart for Africa.”

The couple hasn’t been able to have their own children, but now has thousands of surrogate children across the globe.

“We’ve been offered to go to every continent of the globe,” he said.

The sheer need of these children is enormous, but “you can’t look at the size of it,” he said. “You have to look at the child. You can’t look at those you can’t reach, you have to look at those you can.”

A staff of 15 at their ministry headquarters — Potter’s Field Ranch in Olney — trains people to help in the international children’s ministries. The mission school started in 2009. It typically trains those ages 18 to 30, Michael said.

Potter’s Field Ranch started with a vision to provide a respite for pastors and counseling for those in troubled marriages. The program located on the 80-acre has been in place for 19 years, after the Rozells purchased the site from Willie and Jo Helmer.

“I am just in awe of what God does through our ministry,” Pam said. “There’s not a lot of workers in the field [internationally]. It’s a pretty amazing and awesome responsibility.”

Pam, who was raised in a Southern Baptist church in southern Georgia, eventually became Miss Georgia. She used a scholarship to get a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina. Then it was on to Broadway, where she danced.

She later met Michael, who was working on Wall Street at the time. They had a whirlwind romance and eloped to Las Vegas three weeks later.

“I fell for Michael in two hours,” she said. “Two hours later he asked me to marry him.”

Pam said she found out on their wedding night that he was addicted to cocaine. He was also an alcoholic and addicted to gambling. He had four warrants for his arrest for unpaid speeding tickets in southern California.

“We spent the first four months of our marriage going to court,” she said.

Michael had a salvation experience with God two days after their marriage, and she said he was delivered from his drug addictions one year later, she said. He was later healed from rage, which stemmed from little to no relationship with his father, she said.

Pam said she fell away from God while working on Broadway and as Michael says, was into eastern mysticism, or the New Age movement.

 “I was traveling the world, extremely promiscuous and a ‘party girl,” she said. “I was extremely backslidden [from God].”

Michael took her to church two days after they got married, she said. Michael had just been witnessed to days before by a high school friend at a class reunion, he said in a DVD recorded at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 2009.

“There’s been a supernatural change in Michael’s life,” Pam said.

“We had a really rocky marriage the first seven years and didn’t know we were going to make it,” she said. “I became a woman of prayer. I learned how to intercede. We have to learn how to be warriors in Christ through prayer. If you do not become a person of prayer, you are going to lose the battle.”

Their marriage is evidence that God “can take something really bad and make it phenomenal,” Pam said. “It’s been a pretty cool roller-coaster ride. It’s been the best adventure I could’ve ever hoped for in my life, serving Christ.”

For more information on Potter’s Field Ministries, go online at www.pottersfield.org or call 406-881-3639 or 1-877-337-2624.