By Rob Pierce – Pastor, Latta Baptist Church
Back in 2010, one of my church members, Steve Grant, asked me to go with him on a mission trip to Honduras. I didn’t know what to say as I had never been to Honduras and actually had to go find it on a map.
Steve told me that they needed a preacher on a team and that a preacher would preach several times per day.
I certainly didn’t understand exactly what he was talking about, but I knew that the invitation was there for me to join God at work so I signed up to go on the trip.
I didn’t have the funds to go as I had two children in college at the time, but Steve asked our church to contribute.
Within a few weeks, Latta Baptist had collected enough money for me to go on the trip. What a blessing to serve a church that is mission minded and wants to join God at work around them!
I found out later that my mission team was actually an additional team that had been formed because the Dillon/Marlboro County team had become too large, so they added an additional team from the Florence area. As of now, the Dillon/Marlboro County team goes to Honduras one week, and the Florence team follows them the next week. The Florence team has folks from Conway, Latta, parts of North Carolina, Missouri, Houston, and Pennsylvania on the team.
In Honduras, we work with an organization called BMDMI, Inc. which stands for Baptist Medial Dental Missions International.
You do not have to be a Baptist to go on these trips as we’ve had many different denominations on this trip. BMDMI has a mission house in Honduras that acts as our home base on arrival.
They also have a hospital, a children’s home, a school, and a Bible Institute to train Hondurans to be pastors.
They’ve also duplicated their efforts in Nicaragua and they are working on doing the same in Guatemala and in Nepal.
On our trips, we will spend the first night in the mission house. The next morning we will head out to a village. All of the details have been arranged for us in advance with the village we are visiting. We are always housed in a local school, sleeping eight people to a room on a 4-inch foam rubber mattress.
We set up a tent with a sound system and a band that plays during the worship services. We also have a medical clinic, a dental clinic, a pharmacy, a clothes closet, an eyeglass clinic, and we give out beans and rice.
Each person that wants to go to a clinic must first go to a church service under the tent to hear the Gospel. This is why a preacher may preach several services per day.
The individual then gets their registration card stamped so they can go to a clinic.
Every person hears the Gospel message under the tent, and many times in the lines to the clinics.
In February/March of this year, these two teams gave out $10,000 worth of beans and rice, saw over 4,000 medical patients, 770 dental patients with 1,826 teeth extracted and over 20,000 prescriptions filled.
The best part? 484 new Christians, followers of Jesus Christ and 73 rededicated their lives to Jesus.
What an awesome time on the mission field! God gets all the glory for all that He has done!
If you are interested in going on a mission trip like the ones I’ve described, check out bmdmi.org for more information.