Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard Vega.
Richard, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
We are At His Feet Ministries and started our journey in 2017. We started off going into lower-income communities and just serving the people in that community. Serving the community by taking food, clothing, and any donation items needed most by each community, all while sharing the love of Jesus Christ. Our motto is to do what it takes to help people get “at the feet of Jesus” because, At His Feet, our lives change.
Our ministry started to grow exponentially after Houston endured Hurricane Harvey. The people in our city really needed items they lost, food, and hope after a devastating catastrophe. I really believe that Harvey was a beautiful time where the city united; it was a time where you could see multiple people with different backgrounds, people that spoke different languages, people of different shades of skin color come together to help the next person out. At that time, we were not really involved with mass distribution but when Harvey hit, we rose to the challenge to meet the needs in front of us. God opened the doors for us to be able to be a hub in a community in the southeast side of Houston so much so that we were able to feed 33,000 people in just 11 days.
Since Harvey, we are actively involved with multiple outreaches throughout the city of Houston. We have yearly back to school bashes, where we serve the community and distribute 500 backpacks filled with school supplies. We also have a Blessed Fest in November and one in December as we team up with amazing men and women of God. We go out into a community, whether it is in 3rd Ward, 5th Ward, South East side of Houston, or Greenspoint. As we go into these communities, we are able to take Christmas gifts, gift cards, bus passes, we pay electricity bills, etc. really, just go out there and serve and show the love of Christ to people in their time of need. Many people do not understand that the Holidays are tough for a lot of people that don’t have much and especially those that have kids or just lonely during this time. We make sure that we are involved, and we go out with hugs and smiles. We offer prayer and we take Christian hip-hop to minister to the streets and just go show love.
In 2017, we started doing Christian hip-hop with our ministry and it was quite fun and interesting at the same time. I started working with a lot of new artists that I did not know and collaborating with. We chose Christian hip-hop as we wanted to be able to have it as a tool when ministering to different neighborhoods that we go into. We wanted to be able to relate to and communicate with our audience to give them something new to listen to. I remember when I first started coming to church, I didn’t know that Christian hip-pop even existed, it wasn’t until a couple of years in my walk with Christ that I met an individual named Von Won and he introduced me to Christian hip hop. It blew my mind because it would have made my walk a lot easier in those other two years if I knew that this type of music even existed.
Christian hip hop has been fun; I’ve gotten to work on projects in the past with a lot of great artists here in the city of Houston such as Bun B, Pall wall, 007 from the 5th Ward boys, Gifted the Flamethrower, Lil Flip and Scarface; which are a lot of legends in the rap world for Houston. When it really got live for me in the Christian hip-hop world was when I was able to get on some tracks with 007 from the 5th Ward boys. DoubleO7 was a part of a group that backs in the 90s and early 2000s I listened to and it had more of an underground rap gangster scene that wouldn’t be played on the radio with the explicit lyrics it had. Meeting Double O7, knowing that he was a Christian and how God had changed his life around, gave me new meaning. It was a real eye-opener that here’s a guy that has traveled the world, signed a rap alot record, been in the studio with Tupac, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Do or die and the list goes on, would take a timeout to help go save souls with At His Feet Ministries.
For the past couple of years, we started to do a conference for ladies called the Jewel Conference that my wife spearheads with her team. We have grown tremendously in That area; I am super proud of my wife and her team, her vision that she has had over the past couple of years. We have taken it from just 100 registered people, two over 750 registered ladies. We see the freedom and breakthroughs of women every year. One great testimony was that a young lady came to the conference received prayer as she was not able to have any kids and less than a year later, she had her miracle baby.
During COVID-19, we stayed a couple of weeks silent then realized that Jesus has called us to be out in the community. He told us to go into the nations. At the end of March, we contacted the Houston food bank and we launched a food distribution where we were able to feed roughly 2000 people during that time. We then launched being a mobile food distribution site throughout southeast Houston. Twice a week in different areas of southeast Houston, we serve an estimated 1000 boxes of meals which feed about 4000 people and we receive about 1500 gallons of milk on a weekly basis. We open prayer tents at the distribution sites and many families are touched. At the beginning of the COVID-19, there were a lot of ministers and leaders that were hunkered down and fearful of getting outside the walls. I think for far too long the churches have been able to sit still and let people come to them. Since COVID it cannot be the case anymore, we cannot let it stop us. I believe it is especially important for people to see the love of Christ in the middle of a pandemic.
Our ministry is a beautiful multi-cultured mix of individuals that believe we need to have a united country, centered in showing the love of Jesus to everyone; we know that At His Feet, we are made whole, new and are changed!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The struggles along the way is mostly losing people. Losing people that have served with us, that have committed to our ministry and decided to go on a different journey. The second part is losing people we have ministered to in the community, brought them to church, disciple them and lose them to death.
At His Feet Ministry – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
What sets us apart from others is that we work in excellence. Our team of the evangelist are always prepared to hit the trenches!
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I define success when I see how God completely transforms people.
Contact Info:
- Address: 9701 Almeda Genoa Rd. Houston TX 77075
- Website: www.ahfministries.com
- Phone: 8324258518
- Email: Rvega@ahfministries.com
- Instagram: Ahfministries
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AHFMinistries/?ref=bookmarks
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