Baptist missionaries from other nations share gospel in Alabama, U.S.

Baptist missionaries from other nations share gospel in Alabama, U.S.

Seventeen-year-old Samuel Torres and his parents arrived in Alabama from Venezuela eight months ago with nothing in hand but a suitcase of clothes and a letter calling them to a Birmingham-area church.
   
“My father, Eduardo Torres, was a pastor in Venezuela for 20 years,” Torres said. “About 10 months ago, we got a letter from Carlos Gomez (pastor of the Hispanic congregation at First Baptist Church, Center Point) asking him to come serve as co-pastor at the church. We knew God was moving, and we started to find a way to come.”
   
His family, he said, felt God’s hand on everything that happened.
   
Gomez readily agreed. “The Lord brought him (Eduardo Torres) to help me because for the last five and a half years, (the Hispanics) have been one of the biggest groups in the area,” he said. “We have about 150 each Sunday, and most of the time, they are first-generation Christians. We are trying to teach them to reach their own people.”
   
Arriving in Alabama on individual “callings” as they did, Gomez and the Torres family are part of a sporadic arrival of missionaries from around the world. 
   
It’s a movement from the international front that Tony Cupit, director of the divisions of evangelism and education and study and research for Baptist World Alliance (BWA), said is not necessarily sponsored or sent in a united effort the way Baptists in the United States send missionaries elsewhere.
   
“The reason you do not hear about missionaries being ‘sent’ to the United States is, in my view, because they are not usually sent,” Cupit said. “They arrive of their own accord or sometimes are invited by U.S. churches or institutions to come minister to their own people.”
   
It is an informal path that leads missionaries from other countries to trickle into the United States for the purpose of forwarding the gospel message. Cubans, Argentines and Liberians are some of the people groups with missionaries Cupit said he has either crossed paths with or caught wind of.
Denton Lotz, BWA general secretary, added more to that tally.
   
“Many countries send missionaries to the United States but mainly to work with ethnic groups or their émigrés,” Lotz said. “For example, Brazilian Baptists send missionaries to the Boston area, where there are many immigrants from Portugal. Nigerian Baptists send missionaries to work among Africans in Texas. Perhaps we do not look at them as missionaries but in reality, they are.”
   
Hungarians and Germans, too, are here for that purpose, and the third world is also sending out missionaries in full force, he said. “That is the wave of the future — the south will begin to re-evangelize the north.”
   
It’s happening in Alabama, too, said Reggie Quimby, director of global partnerships and volunteers in missions for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM). “Venezuela and Spain, also Ukraine and Brazil, have sent many missionaries here,” Quimby said.
   
They sent them here, yes — but there’s no central list of who is where or who is supporting whom, he noted. 
   
“Those are the only ones I know of specifically, but I know there may be more. The only way you find out is by running into them and finding out they are supported and sent by Baptists in their own country,” Quimby said.
   
Marty King, spokesman for the North American Mission Board (NAMB), said hearsay is also how NAMB finds out international missionaries — even some student summer missionaries — are in our midst on American soil.
   
“We know there are some, but we have nothing more than anecdotal information,” King said. “How many, where they are — we don’t know. But we think it’s wonderful.”