December 8, 1999
Mass grave site in Juárez near
Baptist church, mission outreach
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___JUÁREZ, Mexico--Last week's grisly news of a mass-murder grave in northern Mexico struck close to the heart for members of First Baptist Church in Midland.
___The gravesite is not far from Puerta del Cielo Baptist Mission, one of several young but growing congregations the Midland church is helping amid a dusty sea of cardboard-house slums across Juárez.
___First Baptist sent volunteers to Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, last summer. They teamed up with Campus Crusade for Christ to show the "Jesus" film about 2,500 times, leading to 50,000 professions of faith in Christ. (The evangelistic missions effort was reported in the July 28 edition of the Baptist Standard.)
CHILDREN PLAY at Monte Sinai Baptist Church in Juarez, Mexico.
___Soon, a Sunday School class from First Baptist will spend part of its Christmas holiday ministering alongside Puerta del Cielo members.
___"This Juárez news story is within two miles of Puerta del Cielo, where our Sunday School group is going on Dec. 18," reported Deborah Fikes, chairperson of the Midland church's Mexico missions committee.
___"We have about 40 people signed up to go on our church bus," she said. "Some have questioned how safe this is, but our contacts in Juárez tell us this gravesite discovery and all the FBI agents there make it safer than it has been in quite awhile"
___Butch Villareal, First Baptist's on-site missions coordinator in Juárez, has asked Texas Baptists to pray for the situation and for Christians who will use the murders as an opportunity to share the good news of the Christian gospel.
A GROUP OF TEXAS BAPTISTS listens as David Wall describes the scope of Baptist work at Monte Sinai Baptist Church in Juarez.
___"Please pray so that the people of this area would seek God," Villareal said. "Pray for the Puerta del Cielo pastor and that God would give his servant wisdom as he ministers to the people that reach out in search for God."
___A leading pastor in Juarez also asked Texas Baptists to pray for their Mexican brothers and sisters all the time.
___"A lot of times we think we need a lot of resources," David Wall, pastor of Monte Sinai Baptist Church, explained to a group from First Baptist and from Buckner Baptist Benevolences, who visited Juárez last month. "But that is of no value if we do not have the blessings of God.
___"There are all kinds of needs, but the biggest is prayer."
___Wall, Villareal and their fellow Baptists in Juárez are accustomed to making much from little.
___They witness and minister to hundreds of thousands of impoverished new Juárez residents, who have moved to the city to overcome even deeper poverty in the countryside. They typically begin their new lives in Juárez living in homes made of cardboard boxes. When they can scavenge wooden pallets, they fashion more sturdy walls. Later, when they can buy cinder blocks, they frame tiny one- and two-room homes, with no running water and electricity pirated dangerously by thin wires grafted onto overhead cables.
DEBORAH FIKES of First Baptist Church in Midland listens to another speaker during the informational tour given during the BGCT annual session in El Paso. (Photos by Russ Dilday/Buckner)
___The churches are equally ingenious.
___Wall's 11-year-old, 80-member congregation helps support six missions, led by four full-time missionaries and two volunteer bivocational church-starters.
___In addition, the church is making inroads into the community by operating a "kinder," a preschool program for families in the community, teaching more than 100 children and reaching their parents.
___The kinder provides Baptists with opportunities to strengthen families and also share the gospel with them, Wall said. One example is a prostitute who brought her son to the church and told Wall, "Neither myself nor my child have any religion. For this reason, I'm bringing him to you to teach him your religion."
___The church capitalizes on that trust by teaching not only the children but also their mothers and fathers. "We continue to try to implement more programs to reach parents," he said.
___For instance, the church offers literacy courses, which teach reading as well as the gospel. It also offers parenting courses and basic education for adults who did not have educational opportunities when they were children. The kinder also has launched a chapel program to provide religious instruction to children, which Wall hopes and prays eventually will reach their parents.
___He dreams of expansion, in at least two directions.
___First, the church would like to expand the kinder to include an elementary school. Improved education is only one reason. "If we had an elementary school, we would have seven or eight years" to minister to the children and their families, he reasoned. "We would not only win them to Christ, but they also would become strong Baptists."
___Second, he would like to start more kinders in the city. Through more schools, the church can reach more children. Through more children, Baptists will reach more families. These families then can become the core groups for more Baptist churches, which in turn will reach even more families.
___Baptists in Juárez are busy reaching their neighbors across the city as they follow up on decisions recorded by people who watched the "Jesus" film last summer, reported Juan Francisco Lopez Glez, a layman who is president of the general Baptist convention of Juárez.
___The convention's 32 churches and 15 mission congregations are working diligently to minister to people who expressed an interest in knowing more about Christ and to others who accepted him as their Savior, he said.
___He noted Juárez Baptists need two particular kinds of help from their Baptist brothers and sisters north of the Rio Grande.
___First is training for Baptist church members, so that they can become capable of sharing their faith and ministering to non-Christians, he said. Second is discipleship for the brand-new Christians.
___The challenges seem ominous, but with God's help, Texas Baptists can be up to the task of helping Juárez Baptists spread the gospel, Fikes added, noting she has been encouraged by the responses to the "Jesus" film and Juárez Baptists' can-do spirit.
___"It's almost overwhelming," she said, "but we can do this."
___Contact Fikes at dnfmissions@worldnet.att.net
___
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