Ellis Association’s mission in Honduras takes to the airwaves

image_pdfimage_print

WAXAHACHIE —Ellis Baptist Association’s ministry to the Lencas of Honduras gets dialed up a notch when its radio station goes on the air Nov. 1.

In August, Director of Missions Larry Johnson traveled to Honduras to add acoustic panels and foam to the station’s studios.

In preparation for the Nov. 1 airdate, the station secured a frequency, erected a tower and attached it to a transmitter. More than four miles of copper wire had to be placed in the ground in 120 spokes of 210 feet to form the ground plane for the station.

Eddie Martinez of Waxahachie baptizes a new Christian during a trip to Honduras sponsored by Ellis Baptist Association. (PHOTO/Courtesy of Ellis Baptist Association)

The signal will extend beyond Honduras into northern El Salvador and western Guatemala.

The station will support an effort to create a church planting movement in Honduras among the Lenca people, Johnson said.

House churches started among the Lencas had been nearly doubling in number until this year when it slowed.

“We haven’t been successful in getting third- and fourth-generation church starts,” Johnson explained. “When you get to those fourth-generation churches, you have a church-planting movement. We don’t have a movement yet, but we’re praying that will come.”

Johnson expects the radio station to play a key part in energizing the effort.

“There are places you literally cannot drive. There are places you cannot take a four-wheel-drive vehicle. You might be able to get some places with a mountain bike, but some places you can only get to by mule,” Johnson said.


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


The radio station will bring the message of the gospel to out-of-the-way villages and also help to communicate with village leaders.

The ministry has not been inactive while waiting for the station to come online, however. Last year, a dam broke and wiped out a village, Nuevo Zuptal. The government gave the villagers a new place to rebuild but mandated that everyone relocated and help build the new homes.

“Because of that, they didn’t have a way of making any income,” Johnson pointed out. So for eight months, the association supplied the funds for food for the village.

On Johnson’s August trip, the team assembled 38 water filtration systems. He purchased 60 purification filters from Texas Baptist Men after reports from the association’s missionary, Armando Murillo, that water from the river was unsafe for drinking.

“When we finished putting them together, you could tell they were still a little bit skeptical about whether this was really valuable or not,” Johnson said.

“But when I took the bucket that we had first put together and showed them the difference—and it was brown, brackish water in the top bucket, and it was absolutely clear water in the bottom—they were convinced. They were excited.”

Already, a few Christians live in Nuevo Zuptal, Johnson said, and he believes a house church will be functioning there soon.

The day after the Ellis Baptist Association team worked on the water purification project, 30 of the 40 house church leaders gathered for training.

From the beginning, the plan has been to reach the Lenca through house churches, and the radio station will facilitate that effort, Johnson said.

“We knew the direction we were going was house churches. We knew we had to do gospel saturation, and radio is our method for doing that,” he said.

The effort in Honduras also has been good for the Ellis County churches, he added. As many has 80 people have made the trip to Honduras, and The Avenue Church in Waxahachie has made numerous trips. Even those who haven’t traveled to Honduras have benefited, Johnson said.

“They really feel their association is doing something—that it’s making a difference and that we’re trying to fulfill the Great Commission by following the Lord’s leadership.”

 


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard