Sept. 8, 2009 | By Gary D. Myers
NEW ORLEANS - A small mission team from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary left for Peru July 2 with great expectations. They expected to see God work in a mighty way.
They were not disappointed.
What the team didn't anticipate was way God would work during their trip. Mark Tolbert, associate professor of evangelism and pastoral ministry, and his team faced several "set backs" that turned into divine appointments long before they even reached Peru and well after they expected to be home. The lesson learned: mission trips begin when you walk out your front door, not when you reach your destination.
The divine appointments started with the providential makeup of the 19-member team. Seven team members were from the seminary, seven from Woodland Park Baptist Church in Hammond, La., and a family from Colorado.
"Everybody made a unique contribution," Tolbert said. "God put the team together in an amazing way." This was evident early in the trip.
The team planned fly from New Orleans to Miami and catch a flight to Lima, Peru. Storms delayed their arrival in Miami. When they finally made it, their connecting flight was long gone. The next available flight to Lima left in three days.
One team member, a former airline ticket agent, used her skills to find a solution. She found seats on a flight to Mexico City and a connecting flight to Peru.
"We didn't know we needed her, but she was there with us," Tolbert said.
On the flight to Mexico City, Tolbert experience yet another divine appointment. A flight attendant noticed the NOBTS logo on Tolbert's shirt and asked if he was going on a mission trip. Tolbert said that he was and shared the details of the missed flight in Miami. He told her, "I wasn't supposed to be on this plane."
The attendant replied, "I wasn't supposed to be on this plane either." Her schedule had also changed due to the weather in Miami.
She told Tolbert that her husband had recently been baptized as a believer, but that she was not a Christian. Tolbert had an opportunity to share the gospel with her for 45 minutes on the plane.
"Although she didn't make a decision with me, it was incredible how she wanted to know (about the gospel)," Tolbert said.
After they reached Lima, the team traveled six hours to the city of Huancayo to lead a training conference for church leaders. The city, with a population of 400,000, is located in the Monterro Valley, nestled high in the Andes Mountains at an elevation of 10,000 feet.
The Baptist church in Huancayo hosted 204 pastors, pastor's wives, children's workers and other church leaders from the Monterro Valley for the four-day conference. Tolbert's team led the sessions.
Sponsoring churches in the United States paid the way for church leaders to attend the conference. The accommodations were austere. Participants slept on the church floor and simple ate meals provided by the church.
Tolbert and his team taught with the second Masterlife workbook. Leadership training, Tolbert said, is one of the most critical needs facing the church in underdeveloped nations.
"We teach them the workbook and they go back into the villages and teach it all year long," Tolbert said. "It has been really well received. The people were eager to learn."
Tolbert believes the training is being reproduced many times over as pastors return to their villages. He estimates that each pastor teaches the Masterlife workbook to between 10 and 50 people throughout the year.
The conference also included evangelism training and on the last afternoon the mission team and conference participants took to the streets to practice personal evangelism. In less than two hours, 100 people made professions of faith.
A burden for Peru
It was no accident that Tolbert led this team to Peru. The trip is part of a long-term commitment that started years earlier.
Tolbert started traveling to Peru while serving as a pastor at South Side Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark. His church was mobilized for missions, going each year on a mission trip, but Tolbert wanted to be strategic. During a mission conference in his association, Tolbert met a mission couple serving in Peru.
The couple utilized an International Mission Board strategy called REAP (Rapid Entry Advance Plan). The strategy pairs a large church or association in the United States with an unreached people group overseas. People from the church or association effectively become "the missionaries" to this unreached group. The plan is to launch and foster an indigenous, self-supporting church.
The approach requires a major, strategic commitment from the church or association. They must commit to minister among the people group four times a year for five years.
South Side Baptist, along with the association, committed to participate in the REAP strategy in Peru. The partnership was in its second year when Tolbert joined the NOBTS faculty.
Tolbert's situation had changed, but his burden for Peru had not. He continued to go, however, Tolbert shifted his focus to leadership training. He made a new three-year commitment to offer training to church leaders in Huancayo. This year's trip marked the second of that three-year commitment.
Tolbert is now pondering the future. Next year he will return to lead a conference based on the third Masterlife workbook and is contemplating a fourth trip to train leaders with the fourth Masterlife workbook.
Returning home
After days of travel and set-backs-turn-opportunities, a successful leadership conference and a phenomenal time of evangelism and "harvest," it was time for the mission team to return home.
As they prepared to leave, two team members realized they had made a mistake in booking their flight home. The airline was correct, the flight number was correct, but the date was wrong. They would be staying an extra day in Lima, Peru.
"We had to leave two of (our team members) behind," Tolbert said. "We didn't want to do that, but it was just too expensive to change the tickets. We prayed over them and made sure they had enough money and left."
This mistake turned into yet another divine appointment. The next day two were left behind had the opportunity to share the gospel with a maid at their hotel. She found and read a tract left by the team the day before. She asked the two team members to tell her more about God.
The group left New Orleans expecting to see God at work. They were not disappointed. Amazing things happened long before they reached their intended destination and continued all the way home.
Tolbert plans to return to Peru next summer with another seminary group. He hopes to develop a course to be taken in tandem with the trip so participants can earn class credit. For more information about the 2010 trip, contact Dr. Mark Tolbert at mtolbert@nobts.edu.
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