A few years ago, two Brazilian women showed up at the church I pastor and asked to look at our archives because they were writing a book about a missionary who was sent out by our church in the 1930s. This young woman, named Ernestine Horne, sailed to Brazil in 1934. The next year, she started a training school for women that has since grown into a global ministry called Betel Brasileiro. The small training school for women grew into a Bible college and seminary for training pastors and missionaries. They have trained thousands of students in more than twenty locations across Brazil, as well as in Portugal and Japan.
From that school, they developed a denomination of 150 churches across Brazil. They have a missions organization with 52 missionary families in fifteen countries, on every continent except North America. They also have projects around the world to help those in need, working with children and widows, and so on. They also have a publishing branch, publishing Christian books in Portuguese. It’s pretty amazing. At the end of October, I got to go down to Brazil for the 90th-anniversary celebration and learn more about what God has been doing. It was an incredible experience. And a challenging one.
While I was there, I met a man named Ronaldo who is a missionary in the Amazon rainforest. He and his team of missionaries take trips down the Amazon River by boat for five days to find remote tribes and tell them about Jesus. These tribes in the Amazon don’t speak Portuguese. They’re remote, cut off from the world. They speak their own tribal languages. There are more than 300 indigenous languages spoken by Amazonian tribes. And Ronaldo and his team have reached all the villages that are accessible by the river, told them about Jesus, started establishing churches, and translating the Bible. The only tribes left are the ones that hide in the jungle. They don’t want to talk to outsiders and run from them.
So Ronaldo and his team of missionaries bushwhack through the jungle for days to find these people who don’t want to be found in an attempt to learn their languages and tell them about Jesus. Ronaldo said to me that not even their satellite phones can get signal in the jungle through the thick tree cover, and they have to be careful where they sleep so they don’t get eaten by animals. But through all of that dangerous, hard work, people who are otherwise completely cut off from the outside world and had no hope of ever knowing their Creator have heard about the grace of God through his Son Jesus and put their faith in him.
Another missionary I met went with her husband and children to Bengal, India, to plant a church among the Hindus and Muslims in that region. God granted them success, and some people put their faith in Jesus and began gathering as a church. They are persecuted for their faith. They didn’t have enough money to build a complete church building, so they sat under tarps fastened to the frame of a building. And then, a few years ago, the husband died, leaving his wife and children alone. Thankfully, the husband had a life-insurance policy.
I would like to pause the story here and ask what you would do in her shoes? Would you take the life insurance and your children and go live in safety somewhere else? That seems like the reasonable thing to do, the advice most of us would give her. But she cashed in the policy and used the money to finish the church building and lives as a single mom of three, trying to care for this struggling church in a less-than-ideal situation because she believes that she is not alone, but that God is with her and is providing for her and her children and the church. She asked for prayer for her church, and she said, “Don’t pray that we won’t be persecuted. Jesus told us we would be persecuted. Pray that we will be faithful when the persecution comes.” We could add to that prayer request the prayer that God raises up some godly men to lead as elders in this church.
I also heard a testimony from a missionary named Alexandre. Alexandre, before he became a Christian, was the lead singer of a famous 90s Brazilian boy band, the Paquitos. If he had continued down this path, he could have been rich and famous in Brazil and maybe beyond. But he traded that all in to follow Jesus—literally. When he became a Christian, he renounced his previous way of life and publicly burned all his possessions because he had acquired them through wickedness. Today, he and his wife are missionaries in Niger, West Africa—one of the most dangerous places for Christian missionaries in the world. He showed us a picture of him standing in the charred remains of his house after Boko Haram burned it down. But he and his wife cheerfully serve in this difficult and dangerous mission field, and they have adopted more than nineteen children from there. They do this because they know God is great. He is gracious, and he will provide for them.
When you hear these stories of faithfulness, of trusting in God’s provision, is your response to praise God for his greatness? Does it stir in your heart a realization that most of us don’t live that way? We don’t trust God that much. We would never do that. I felt that strongly while I was there. And in the midst of that, over and over and over, people came to me and thanked me for sending Ernestine Horne to them. I told them that Ernestine died before I was born. No one in our church was alive when she was sent. We didn’t send her. And in fact, though our church has a generous missions budget and we support quite a few missionaries, we haven’t sent anyone from our church in a long time.
The last time our church raised up members of the church to go on to be long-term overseas missionaries was over forty years ago. The missionaries have served faithfully in Germany all this time and are preparing to retire in the next couple of years. When I realized that, I began to wonder what had happened to us. I absolutely believe that God is sovereign over these things, but I also believe we bear responsibility to faithfully call our people to love the Lord Jesus more than we love our comfortable lives, to feel deeply the call of the Great Commission, and to be willing to answer the call. We are praying as a church that God helps us live up to this responsibility well and that God sets aside those whom he would send. Would you join us and pray the same thing for your church?
