A team of 13 students from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and faculty member David Sills recently witnessed firsthand the power of God’s Word as it worked to bring previously unreached people to faith in Jesus Christ.
The group traveled to Peru earlier this summer, where they spent one week learning how to do chronological Bible storying from Sills, A.P. and Faye Stone Professor of Missions and Cultural Anthropology. Then for a second week they did chronological Bible storying among a remote, Quechua-speaking people group in the city of Ancahuasi.
Chronological Bible storying is a method of explaining the Bible as a series of stories to people in pre-literate cultures who have little or no previous exposure to the Gospel.
“When you go into an area where they don’t know anything about the Bible except what folklore has told them and you just preach John 3:16, they don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sills said. “Who is Jesus? Who is God? What do you mean God has a Son? They don’t know those kinds of things.
“So you give them an understanding that there is a Creator, this Creator hates sin, this Creator will judge sin. So now when Jesus comes on the scene, they understand why He’s come. And when He dies on the cross to pay for our sin, they have a background to understand that truth.”
Each afternoon and evening the students took turns telling the chronological Bible stories and covered the entire Old Testament, the life of Jesus and several other New Testament stories by the week’s end. Because the group’s translator spoke only Quechua and Spanish, students spoke in English, had their words translated into Spanish by Sills, and then into Quechua by the local translator.
As a result, many people heard the Gospel for the first time and several trusted Christ as their Lord and Savior. Sills ended the week by summarizing the Gospel for the people.
Even after the trip, the team’s efforts continued to reap a harvest, Sills said. One woman who heard the Gospel from the Southern students did not believe it while they were on the field. But since that time, a tragedy in her family drove the woman and her husband to trust in Christ for their salvation.
Many of the students said the trip opened their eyes to the reality of the mission field, and at least one, Grant Logsdon, said going to Peru helped solidify a call to full-time foreign missions.
“(Logsdon) said it just opened up a whole new possibility for his future that he didn’t think about before,” Sills said. “It was very encouraging to me to see that kind of response, and a couple of the others that were on the trip would make comments along the way like, ‘I never knew that this existed. This is the kind of thing I want to do.’”
The trip, which took place July 14-26, allowed the students to earn academic credit for their experiences on the field. All of the trip participants were either master of divinity students on campus in Louisville or master of divinity students in the seminary’s two-plus-two program, which combines study in Louisville with two years of fulltime mission work in a foreign country.
Sills encouraged all seminary students to go on a mission trip, noting that God often uses a trip to call believers to career missions.
“God is sovereign over which trip you picked,” he said. “He might have given you that trip because that’s the place He wanted to lead you and He began to put those people in your heart.”
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