Missions Insider

A Sunday morning church service seemed as good a place as any for an armed stranger to begin looking for the man he had been hired to kill. Inside the church building, he heard the preacher reading from the Bible about someone asking Jesus what the greatest commandment was. It was the following, second greatest commandment, however, that caught the gunman’s attention: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

For an ethnic Mixtec woman like Donaji, nightmares were not just scary but predicted disaster in this world and the next. The 40-year-old fruit-vendor in a remote village of western Mexico believed she was surrounded by gods of rain, trees, mountains, stones and forces in nature telling her she was doomed. No amount of animal sacrifices could ward off the destruction of her soul that the dangers and deaths in her dreams portended.

He had lost the woman he had married 11 years before when she finally decided she had to get away from the violence erupting from his addictions to drugs and alcohol. Enrique knew his life was in ruins, but the 35-year-old electrician in Peru felt helpless to repair it. When a neighbor in his village brought him to a native missionary’s church, he seemed impervious to the gospel preaching but liked the worship atmosphere. He returned to the Sunday services for months.

Alberto, who had been raised to believe in God in Colombia, borrowed a motorcycle with the idea of ramming it into oncoming traffic to kill himself. He had taken to carousing with new friends who led him to alcohol and drug addiction, but when he became seriously ill, they had abandoned him. His choices had led him to the edge of a dangerous pit of despair.

Witchcraft was a way of life for an ethnic Mixtec father of six in a Mexican village who lost his two youngest children to mysterious illnesses. Villagers who relied on his potions and rituals in their yearning to acquire fortune or favor believed that Roberto’s two young sons must have died in a war of spells between him and another specialist in witchcraft – and that his rival’s spell also doomed his other children to die. It took a long, long time for Roberto to realize his perpetual drunken stupor would not take away the pain.

Roberto was a rebel guerrilla in Colombia until he opted for freedom in Christ – a decision that landed him in jail. Soon after putting his faith in Christ, he began attending worship services. Roberto shared his dramatic testimony in streets and parks, proclaiming Christ’s salvation and inviting others to refrain from doing evil and instead serve the Lord. Recently his devotion to the will of God made another dramatic leap.

A year ago a large mob of tribal villagers in southern Mexico, armed with guns, ordered two native missionaries to leave for preaching about Christ. Deeply suspicious of anyone outside their village, the tribal people feared that the native missionaries were going to draw people away from their religious mixture of indigenous and Catholic practices. Already two families were paying close attention to the Bible.

When a native missionary in Brazil went to an unreached people in the country’s southwest, it didn’t take long before he found out about the most hated man in the village. The missionary had heard that Carlos* looked for excuses to fight with his neighbors. Constant drinking fueled his temper, and his drunken rages often left his wife with bruises impossible to hide. When his wife dragged him to an open-air evangelistic event, they never dreamed what a powerful ministry would emerge from it.

Patricio went into a prison in Ecuador for aggravated assault and came out wanting to plant a church among the unreached in a remote northern jungle. Evangelists with a native prison ministry led Patricio to Christ, breaking through the spikey shell shielding his tender core and seeing him change from hardened hot-head to determined missionary. He spent months in Bible study, and he knew sweet fellowship in an otherwise hostile environment. But that was just his first transformation.

A village strongman in a remote area of northeastern Paraguay told a native missionary that he would kill him if he continued talking with people about Jesus. No Protestant missionary had ever gone there before Oscar. The strongman, Gonzalo, told Oscar the Christians were causing division in the community.