Last month, Madi and I had the incredible opportunity to go on a missions trip to Brazil. Our trip involved travelling by boat to several villages along the Amazon River, where our team would provide medical care on the boat while others would go into the village to share the gospel and strengthen the faith of the believers there.
Before going on this trip we knew next to nothing about the Amazon region or the people living there. On the trip, we learned that there are over 37,000 villages along the river and around 10,000 of them are considered unreached by the gospel to this day. Yet it is clear that God is moving powerfully in this region in ways that were on full display throughout this trip. Hearing the missionaries share about their work of establishing churches, I felt like I had dropped into the book of Acts with how powerfully God's word was spreading and his church was growing.
One of the missionaries shared a story about a village of around 200 people which had not been evangelized until the last decade and where the people were originally resistant to having the missionaries come in. Eventually a young man knocked on the door of the missionaries’ house asking what they were doing and he became the first believer in that village. Before long, more than one third of the village became believers and their faith spread to the neighbouring village. When the pandemic hit, the missionaries provided handwritten service guides to help these families continue to worship in their own homes. And by the time restrictions were lifted, there were no deaths in the community and the faith of each of these families endured—in fact, it was thriving. Despite having very little, the people of this village had become the most generous givers in the entire region, rivaling even churches in Manaus where people are generally wealthier. As a result, the surrounding villages began to wonder what was different about these communities, which has opened a door for the missionaries to share the gospel with these villages as well.
It was amazing to hear these stories and to witness firsthand how receptive people were to hearing the gospel as they welcomed us into their home and shared their lives with us. It was also amazing to see the way the missionaries connected with the people, living in the communities and going house to house to visit them. These are people who have left their homes and given up most of their possessions because of their conviction to share the good news of Jesus with those who have never heard it.
In our secular, western, North American context, it can be easy to feel like God's kingdom is not advancing or that God isn't all that active in our everyday lives. But this trip was a reminder to me of the incredible way God is actively drawing people to himself, not just in Brazil but in our country and city.
My hope is that others from our church can be a part of a trip like this in the future. But not only that, my hope is that what Madi and I experienced on this trip would spill out to our church family and that a missional mindset would increasingly take root in our church. May we remember that God's word is living and active in our world today and that he wants to use us to bring his good news to the people around us.
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