April 7, 1999
'Powerful' revival
follows disaster in Honduras
___By Mark Kelly
___International Mission Board
___TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (BP)--As many as 100 churches will be started this year because Southern Baptists responded with compassion after Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras last fall, Southern Baptist missionaries in the Central American country say.
___Three associations of Baptist churches have seen 19 congregations planted since Mitch killed more than 5,600 people and left more than 200,000 people homeless in late October and early November,reported Sam Jones and Larry Elliott, two career missionaries working in Honduras through the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.
MISSIONARY DAVID HARMS facilitates delivery of food to the Continental Evangelical Center, a rural church near Trujillo, Honduras, in an area ravaged by Hurricane Mitch. (IMB photo)
___"We are in the midst of one of the most powerful revivals I have ever experienced," Elliott said.
___Southern Baptist volunteers are helping IMB missionaries and Honduran Baptists with relief projects that range from road clearing and bridge building to house reconstruction and garden plots.
___The result has been hundreds of people accepting Christ as Savior and churches being started in isolated communities that previously had no access to good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.
___The hurricane destroyed roads and bridges all over the country, leaving already-isolated communities completely cut off from the outside world. Relief workers had to use mules and burros to pack relief supplies into mountainous regions. Often it took two days or more to reach villages.
___Yet wherever the relief supplies went, people made professions of faith in Christ, and now Honduran Baptists are working hard to train pastors to lead the new congregations that resulted, Jones said.
___In Progreso Baptist Association, an ambitious garden project will serve as a food supply for a whole community, Elliott said.
___Texas Baptist Men are providing plastic pipe for an irrigation project. A bulldozer has been rented to open a road into a region four-wheel-drive vehicles couldn't reach even before the hurricane.
___"For the first time, a vast area will be exposed to vehicular transportation and the penetration of the gospel," Elliott noted.
___He recalled one pastor who crossed two chest-deep rivers to reach people who made decisions for Christ during food distribution efforts late last year.
___"That pastor said 11 people have accepted Christ and continually beg him to come help them," Elliott said. "With tears in his eyes, he told us there are just too many new Christians asking for his help for him to meet all their needs.
___"When we helped him see he has already begun a new congregation in that community, he was overcome to the point that he buried his head in his hands and wept for several minutes."
___Even school children in the United States have helped with the relief efforts in Honduras.
___At East Elementary School in Kings Mountain, N.C., 335 children collected change to help the Elliotts minister in the wake of the hurricane. Of the $650 they raised, more than $200 was in pennies.
___And Amy Dunbar of Wheeling, W.Va., asked friends to bring $5 donations to her birthday party instead of presents, "since I really did not want anything for myself."
___With additional contributions from her family, she sent a check for $70 to help with hurricane relief.
___Despite the massive needs for reconstruction, Jones asserts his faith that God is able to meet those needs and that God's people will take advantage of this opportunity to share the love of Christ with people who never have experienced it.
___"I believe Hurricane Mitch has given us an open door to say to the tens of thousands of unreached people on the last frontiers of Honduras that Jesus is alive in the hearts of his people," he said.
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