Students get a look at missions
Mike and Trisha Goddard led a multi-national team of students to learn about church planting in Paraguay.
The students at Rio Grande Bible Institute are from Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Paraguay and the USA. They were able to learn about cross-cultural communication in missions as well as meet some needs of the missionaries in a tribal group in Paraguay.
The ministry of Mike and his co-worker, Samuel Racalde, is to promote tribal missions and mobilize Latin churches. They use short-term mission trips to help local churches understand tribal missions, and teach Firm Foundation Bible lessons both as an evangelization tool and to strengthen and establish believers. Mike also teaches courses on cross-cultural missions and partners with other mission organizations in Paraguay.
The five students spent a week with the Pai Tavy Tera people, learning the culture and helping to pour a concrete floor for the new church and dig a new outhouse. In the evening they studied worldview, animism, culture and the reason for chronological teaching. This gave the students a clearer understanding of why church-planting takes so much time.
While they were helping the Pai church, Mamila, a mature believer in the church, cooked lunch for them every day and was amazed that the students wanted to help and to become a part of her life. “”Not once did I hear a complaint out of the visitors in spite of how different things are here for them,” said Mamila.
Mike included some of the testimonies of the Pai believers.
One Pai church leader, a former shaman, had taken notes and gave a summary of everything that he had learned about our spiritual blessings and being sealed by the Holy Spirit. He also said, “We no longer have to fear the kurupiry, the evil spirit that haunts the hills or things that whistle in the night, because of the truths of Ephesians chapter one.”
Another Pai lady said that she went to visit a friend who didn’t go to the Bible study that week, and told her friend everything that she was learning and without realizing it, she quoted all of Ephesians 1 to her friend.