The Ecuadorian boy was awestruck. He couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing with what he was hearing.
The boy didn’t know that people who had African skin like his spoke anything but Spanish.
“He followed us around the little village just mesmerized that he was seeing African Americans there with the Afro-Ecuadorians,” recalled Tony Mathews, pastor of North Garland Baptist Fellowship, a predominantly African-American congregation in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Afro-Ecuadorians are descendants of slaves who formed settlements on Ecuador’s coast. The Spanish sailed the Afro-Ecuadorians’ ancestors to Ecuador in the early 16th century. Some of them escaped from shipwrecks on voyages intended to reach countries farther south. Today more than 600,000 Afro-Ecuadorians represent approximately 5 percent of Ecuador’s population.
Encouraging pastors
Mathews visited Ecuador for the first time in the fall of 2013 at the urging of Keith Jefferson, an International Mission Board (IMB) strategist who recruits and mobilizes Southern Baptist African-American congregations to deeper international missions involvement. Jefferson led the trip to Ecuador with a small group of Dallas-area African-American pastors.
His goal was to encourage the pastors and their congregations to partner with IMB missionaries Johnny and Donna Maust from Alabama and Louisiana who are sharing the gospel with Afro-Ecuadorians, an unreached people group along coastal Ecuador.
After 13 years of church planting and training others to plant churches among the Mestizo people in the Andes mountains of Ecuador, the Mausts moved to the northern coast, where there has been no Southern Baptist missionary presence for about 12 years.
After dropping his I.D. card during a riverboat ride with the Texas pastors, Johnny Maust contacted a local police officer to help him recoup his permit.
In the process Johnny Maust shared the gospel with the man. The officer asked questions about Jesus and accompanied the missions group to dinner.
Mathews recalled, “It was just a blessing to see how God used the circumstance … for us to have an opportunity to witness to this police officer.”
The visiting group of pastors discovered that African Americans have an inroad to share the gospel among Afro-Ecuadorians because of their interest in interacting with people who share their skin color but who speak a different language than they do.
“We automatically have an affinity with these Afro-Ecuadorians and people of color that otherwise we wouldn’t have and it really does in many instances open the door in ways that are unique,” Mathews said.
Billy Bell, pastor of New Creation Bible Church, Dallas, who was part of the initial vision trip, said, “It was (an) overwhelming response because we looked like them. It was easy to establish relationship.”
During his visit with the Mausts, Bell realized how churches like his “can be plugged in to the overall ministry of those missionaries because they have a large field to cover.”
Bell, also a church-planting consultant for Dallas Baptist Association, had been on missions trips before, but this was the first time he had helped missionaries establish a presence somewhere instead of conducting activities for already established ministries.
As the pastors spent time with the missionaries it gave them a glimpse into the everyday challenges of living among an under-evangelized people group.
“I saw the tribulations and the trials they had to go through as missionaries to just go in and try to establish those relationships so the seeds of the gospel could be planted and I really appreciate them a lot more than I did before,” Bell said.
To see videos about this ministry, visit vimeo.com/112266887.
To contact Keith Jefferson, email kjefferson@imb.org or call 1-800-999-3113, ext. 1422.
(BP)
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