Lily was scared for her life but she didn’t know why. It should have been a happy time, a momentous occasion. The 25-year-old had been invited by her best friend to be inducted into a position of honor in their religion.
The initiation ritual — which some of the religion’s leaders charged as much as $10,000 to conduct at the time — was being offered to her “free” because she was told she was blessed, someone the spirits favored.
It was a rare opportunity but the very thought of it pierced Lily with dread and fear. She tossed and turned the night before the ritual, unable to pinpoint the source of an overwhelming foreboding. She couldn’t shake the sense that what was being offered wasn’t real or true.
“If there is a true God please protect me,” she thought before falling asleep.
In her dreams Lily pictured herself being offered as the sacrifice in the ritual, her life taken away if she went any deeper into this religion.
She spent the following day contemplating that dream instead of attending the ritual. When her friend came looking for her that night Lily told her she couldn’t go through with it. Her friend said bad luck and misfortune would befall her. Yet Lily stuck by her decision and the friends parted ways.
That marked the end of Lily’s participation in Santeria, whose practices are similar to voodoo.
Looking for peace
Lily didn’t experience the Latin American sect in her native country. The Colombian-born American became involved while living in Miami.
Santeria mixes tribal-based spirit worship from West Africa, South America or the Caribbean with Roman Catholicism, calling on saints to divine the future and to provide healing and good luck.
“I wanted to know what the future held,” Lily said. “I didn’t have peace in my life, so I was looking for something to provide that.
“I now know I was spiritually blind.”
Since becoming a Christian Lily Llambes has experienced the true God at work. This has been especially true as she and her husband, Carlos, serve as International Mission Board (IMB) missionaries in the Dominican Republic, which they have been doing for 10 years.
Lily’s experience with Santeria has given her insight while counseling Haitians — as well as Dominicans — who are moving from a belief in the multiple spirits of voodoo into an exclusive relationship with Jesus Christ.
“It has given me compassion for (people) and made me more aware that they need the gospel, that we need to get the gospel to them. And … it has made me fearless [in the face of voodoo] because I have Jesus and I am saved and I should not fear.”
Haitian pastor Ilme Frasier is a student in a church planting institute that Carlos began as ethnic ministries director for the Dominican Baptist Convention.
‘God has strengthened me’
Ilme started a church under a tree. The congregation now meets in a one-room building. In one year the congregation has grown to 60 adults and 20 children. But it hasn’t been easy.
“There were times when I was afraid” while sharing the gospel in the neighborhood fraught with witchcraft and voodoo “but God has strengthened me,” Ilme said.
“When problems come I tell my congregation how the Lord can handle them. Nothing is too small or too big for the Lord.”
Partnering churches from the United States help pastors such as Ilme start churches.
Teams prayerwalk and invite residents to Bible studies and worship services the institute’s church planters form in the communities.
After about a decade of planting churches in the Dominican Republic, the Llambes family relocated to Mexico City in March 2014 to start churches.
Of the capital city’s more than 4,200 neighborhoods more than 3,300 of them do not have an evangelical church, Carlos said. Neighborhoods can contain as many as 20,000 people in the city of 28 million.
Within the past seven years 100 churches have been started as part of the Dominican Baptist Convention’s ethnic ministries and church planting institute.
“All the church planters, the pastor-missionaries, they have a passion for church starting,” Carlos said. “And once they form one they don’t stop. They look for another community without an evangelical church and start another one.”
Even though he’s relocated to another area to start churches, Carlos knows “… there’s going to be a continuation of that here.”
IMB is seeking Hispanic Southern Baptists to serve as missionaries cross-culturally in Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America where their language skills and cultural affinities will provide greater access to reach others with the gospel.
The Llambes are among the approximately 90 Hispanics from Southern Baptist churches who are serving overseas as missionaries through IMB.
More Hispanic Baptist missionaries are needed to represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. evangelical community. It is estimated that the number of Hispanic Baptist churches will double to 7,000 by 2020.
How to serve
Applications to serve in the Kairos Project can be made online via going.imb.org/2to3yr/kairos.asp or hispanos.imb.org/kairos (Spanish language).
Go to hispanos.imb.org to see this and other stories in Spanish as well as a variety of church resources and missions information.
See related videos on the Llambes at vimeo.com/95753321 and vimeo.com/96916854 as well as imb.org/lmcovideo. (BP)
Share with others: