Exclusive stories from the mission field
At a small nightclub in rural Peru, the blaring music was drowning out the message a local missionary was giving nearby at a three-day gospel event. Villagers asked the nightclub owner to turn the music off, and he grudgingly consented. He was further annoyed when the preacher and other Christians visited him the next day and invited him to attend that night’s evangelistic event.
Hungover from another night of drinking, a father of five in Brazil recalled that his wife had fled the previous night, figuring she had better chances of survival among wild animals in the jungle than at home with him.
A half a century ago, a man who declared himself the son of God told Brazilian villagers that only those who believed in the large cross he was carrying would be rescued from an imminent, fiery apocalypse.
David Montoya didn’t believe in God, and he and his family didn’t go to church because he feared priests would ask for money.
The village chief and other key community leaders near a town on Brazil’s Amazon River told a native missionary to leave.
By the time other native missionaries visited the village months later, the leader of a ministry based in Brazil said, nearly every inhabitant was addicted to alcohol.
“The community was taken over by the power of darkness; the spirit of suicide took over the young and old,” he said.
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.
