Following a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Colombia, Send Relief is actively coordinating disaster response through International Mission Board missionaries and national partners as they come alongside churches, mobilizing them to bring practical help and gospel hope amidst this tragedy. IMB missionaries in Colombia are reported safe.
When Taylor McConnell introduced herself at an International Mission Board interview conference, she kept it simple.
“I’m Taylor. I’m from Oklahoma, and I’m a farm girl.”
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Her bold introduction led to appointed conversations with missionaries who just so happened to be looking for someone with agricultural experience. One of those conversations eventually connected McConnell with an IMB team in Colombia who had been praying for someone who knew how to work with animals. More specifically, they needed someone who knew pigs.
McConnell grew up on a pig farm, earned an animal science degree from Oklahoma State University and spent years learning skills she once assumed would lead to veterinary medicine. Instead, God used those experiences to prepare her for a ministry assignment she never could have planned.
Today, McConnell serves as an IMB Journeyman in Colombia, where she helps lead a pig-raising project designed to strengthen Indigenous churches, encourage biblical stewardship and support gospel ministry.
A calling that kept returning
McConnell grew up in church and trusted in Christ when she was eight years old. By the time she was in high school, she sensed God drawing her toward missions.
During a worship service at Falls Creek, a Southern Baptist camp in Oklahoma, McConnell looked around at thousands of students singing and began thinking about people around the world who had never heard the gospel.
“Why don’t they get to have these moments?” she remembered wondering. “They need the gospel.”
The desire to serve among the nations followed her into college. As she studied animal science, however, McConnell struggled to understand how missions fit with the career she had imagined since childhood. She first planned to become a veterinarian and later considered law school. The more she evaluated her options, the more she recognized the common thread running through each one: she wanted to serve people.
A mentor helped her see that agriculture and missions did not have to compete with one another.
“I thought I had to make a choice,” McConnell said. “I could either do agriculture or missions. The Lord showed me He could use all of it.”
God connects the pieces
McConnell’s first international mission experience came in Uganda, where she served for two months alongside an IMB team. When community members learned she had raised pigs, they began asking questions about feed, shelter and animal care. Knowledge that had always seemed ordinary to McConnell suddenly became a way to serve.
“They were asking questions about things I had grown up doing,” she said. “That was one of the moments when I realized I could share what I knew with other people.”
After returning home, McConnell explored ways to combine agricultural development with missionary service. Her experience in Uganda also strengthened her desire to serve through the IMB.
At an interview conference, she met an IMB representative who served in South America. The representative told McConnell that a missionary in Colombia had been considering an animal project but did not know who could lead it. The missionary had been praying for God to provide someone with the right experience. Then McConnell learned the proposed project involved pigs.
“It was so specific. Only the Lord could line that up,” she said.
The position hadn’t even been listed, so the missionary team wrote the job description, McConnell applied and she was selected to serve in Colombia.
A project owned by the church
The pig project currently involves eight locations connected to Indigenous churches. Each location receives three pigs and practical training in animal care, breeding and sustainable feeding practices. The goal is not for missionaries to operate the project indefinitely. Instead, local believers take ownership of the work, while McConnell and the team provide guidance and training.
“We want it to be theirs,” McConnell said. “We’re not coming in to do everything. We’re coming alongside them and supporting them.”
As the pigs reproduce, church members can keep animals, share them with other believers or sell them. The income can help churches cover practical ministry expenses, including transportation to communities where they share the gospel. The project includes four phases: preparing pens and feed sources, raising the pigs, breeding them and deciding how future generations of livestock will be distributed or sold.
McConnell is also teaching practices that can make the project more sustainable in remote areas. Transporting a boar by road, boat and river can be difficult, so she plans to teach artificial insemination techniques that communities can continue using after her term ends.
Some locations require a full day of travel. A trip may include a long bus ride, several hours in a vehicle and another four to eight hours by boat. The distance makes each visit valuable. McConnell uses those opportunities not only to discuss agriculture but also to share Bible stories and encourage believers.
Teaching biblical stewardship
Because the project serves established churches, much of McConnell’s role focuses on discipleship and equipping believers rather than initiating evangelistic outreach.
Agricultural training is paired with lessons about biblical stewardship. For some of the Indigenous languages represented in the project, there is no direct word for stewardship. McConnell and national partners explain the concept through Scripture, helping believers recognize that their animals, crops, money and time belong to God.
“These pigs are from the Lord. The crops are from the Lord. Your time is from the Lord,” McConnell teaches. “We want them to be good stewards of all of it.”
The lessons extend beyond the project itself. Church members are learning to manage limited resources carefully and use what God provides to support ministry.
McConnell has also seen local believers take responsibility for sharing the gospel. During one training, a national partner and several church members shared Christ with two men after the formal sessions ended. The following morning, the men said they had placed their faith in Jesus. For McConnell, that moment reflected the larger purpose of the project: strengthening churches so they can continue making disciples and taking the gospel to others.
Learning to serve with humility
McConnell arrived with years of agricultural experience, but she quickly learned that methods common in the United States do not always fit the Colombian context.
“American agriculture is very different,” she said. “I don’t want to come in and assume our way is automatically the right way here. I want to learn from them too.”
A Colombian national partner who raises cattle and grows plantains has become an important part of the work. He helps McConnell understand local agriculture, communicate well and adapt training to each community. McConnell said his partnership is another example of God providing exactly what she needed.
A story still growing
Currently, the first locations are preparing pens, securing local feed sources and raising the pigs they have received. McConnell hopes to see several sites complete the first breeding cycle before her Journeyman term ends. She also plans to pursue further theological education as she considers long-term missionary service.
For now, she is asking Southern Baptists to pray for the continued progress of the project, for believers to remember why they are doing the work and for churches to use the resources God provides to carry the gospel farther.
“The gospel story is the reason I’m here,” McConnell said. “If we believe it is the most wonderful news we have, why would we not share it?”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Jaclyn Mains and originally published by the International Mission Board.
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