Booyah... Achieved! (in the words of "Minus the Bear")

After quite a good bit of travel, I am finally home from my adventures in missions with NEXT Worldwide, planting two churches and five "cell groups" (future home-churches) in the Costa Rican towns of Birri and Heredia. It was an incredible trip!!!

The streets of both Birri and Heredia were ripe for the Gospel, as we saw 126 new Believers come to Christ in the four days we were amongst the people. Some of the evangelism that took place was none less than incredible, as there were numerous people who seemed to just have been waiting for someone to tell them about the Gospel. 

This brought to mind the passage of Romans 10v.14-15.

"How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.'"

One of the other Lead Missionaries with NEXT, Matt, was telling me the story of a couple of friends of his who trekked some two weeks into the jungles of Vietnam to find a specific tribe of people who had not heard the Gospel. They faced numerous obstacles to get there: malaria, suspicious Communists, and even blood-borne diseases from a certain people who enjoyed three day-old congealed goat blood (they did not partake of that "delicacy"), but they finally arrived. When they got there, they began to notice, over the course of a couple of days, that the people really didn't seem to have any sort of religious belief system. There was absolutely none... no Buddhist leanings or Shintoism, nor even Communist belief in deifying "the State." The missionaries were bewildered and began asking some of the villagers where the rain came from ("The clouds...") or who made the sun come up ("It just does..."). The people didn't even have a bit of animism or ancestral worship. When the missionaries finally asked them why they didn't believe in anything, they responded, "Because no one has come to tell us what to believe."

There is a lost world out there, and my brief sojourn in Costa Rica only amplified the dire need of a fallen people to know and embrace the Gospel! May God again and again call us to the far reaches of the world (even if that's right in our own backyards!) to bring others to worship Him and bring Him glory forever more!