Concord delivers training to San Vicente church

By Allen Palmeri

Associate Editor

SAN VICENTE, El Salvador—The partnership between Missouri Baptists and El Salvadorian Baptists is alive and well in this city of some 72,000 people.

The work between the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) and the Baptist Association of El Salvador is in its second year, with the agreement extending to 2009. There are 54 Baptist churches in El Salvador, including First Baptist Church, San Vicente, which was visited by The Pathway as part of a four-man team of missionaries who traveled to the Central American nation April 30 through May 6.

Several specialists from the MBC along with members of the MBC Executive Board have made “vision trips” to El Salvador in 2007 and on into the first few months of 2008. Some partnerships have sprouted. Now the hard work of executing the various church-to-church agreements begins.

Concord Baptist Church of Jefferson City, which sent two pairs of short-term missionaries to San Vicente to do training on marriage principles and recovery ministry, is determined in the months to come to make good on its commitment to its sister Salvadorian congregation.

The Concord team consisted of two pastors and two laymen. They traveled to El Salvador to help the church celebrate its 44th anniversary, and they also reached out to pastors and lay leaders in the region.

“With our trip we sought to give churches a fighting direction to help them push back their culture which continues to lead folks away from God,” said Concord Executive Pastor Pete Livingston.

With a heart to equip the local church, Concord is planning to send various teams of short-term missionaries in the months to come, including youth bent on working in evangelism, a car care clinic meant to take care of the vehicles of pastors, and builders who are wired to take on the assorted construction projects required to restore a sanctuary that was ruined by a major earthquake and subsequent tremor in 2001. Senior Pastor Monte Shinkle, a past president of the MBC, intends to be part of one of the teams preparing to go.

“We have come here this weekend to celebrate with you the work of this church,” Livingston said in his opening remarks May 1 on “Testimony Night” at First San Vicente.

“You sit here in a wonderful corner of this community, and we are here to come alongside and help you reach your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, your family members—all those who need to know Jesus Christ.”

David Ayala, pastor, First Baptist Church, San Vicente, was touched by the show of support.

“Concord Baptist Church has come at a timely moment,” he said through an interpreter. “This is the Lord’s timing.”

The goal by the time the MBC partnership ends in 2009 is to double the number of Salvadorian churches, according to Norm Howell, MBC partnership missions specialist. A church planting movement like that, should it be successful, would create a spiritual landscape consisting of more than 100 churches in a nation that is about the size of Massachusetts.

It is happening one by one. The Concord partnership with First San Vicente is proceeding along the lines of equality and mutual respect. Watching how the Salvadorians plant their various “mission points” with compassion and kindness in the midst of abject poverty may even rise to the level of instructing Concord and other Missouri Baptist churches who may be apathetic, ignorant, or both when it comes to planting churches on their native soil.

“We will learn from you,” Livingston told the San Vicente congregation, “and you will learn from us. And together we will glorify God.”