Spring 2007 | Volume 65, No. 3

Southwestern's Mission Mexico

by Benjamin Hawkins

The Apostle Paul is known, among other things, for his faithful proclamation of the gospel wherever God told him to go. Preaching from door to door, in market places and even from prison cells, Paul carried the message of Christ throughout the Roman Empire.

Recently, an 11-member team from Southwestern Seminary and The College at Southwestern discovered the effectiveness of Paul’s evangelism methods. Traveling to the Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuña for an international missions practicum, Jan. 6-13, the team shared the gospel door to door, in marketplaces and even in a Mexican prison. The results: 3,832 Mexicans were contacted in some way by the team; more than 3,800 gospel tracts were handed out; the gospel was personally shared with 527 individuals;
108 Mexicans accepted Jesus Christ as Savior.

We are not called to be to be a 21st-century church,” said Nelson Fonseca, the Spanish translator on Southwestern’s mission team. “We are a first-century church impacting the 21st century.” His statement is a paraphrase of what College Dean Emir Caner says is the college’s “guiding principle.”

For team leader Cky Carrigan, adjunctive professor of evangelism and missions at Southwestern Seminary and the College at Southwestern, trip participants are stewards of a sacred promise contained in the Great Commission: the obligation each Christian has to take the gospel into the whole world. Jesus Christ entrusted this sacred promise to the apostles after his resurrection. The apostles obeyed this commission, entrusting it to those who followed them, and teaching them to tell others.

“And now it is our job to keep that sacred promise to follow Jesus and tell others about him as well,” Carrigan said. The primary method the students used for sharing the gospel was simple: They knocked on people’s doors.

“There are some people who say that door-to-door evangelism doesn’t work anymore,” Carrigan said. “But I can tell you with absolute certainty that it works here … Of course, it is not the only way, not the only strategy, not the only technique. But going from house to house, going from neighborhood to neighborhood, is really going from one heart to another heart. Evangelism is communicating the gospel from one heart to another heart.”

According to Fonseca, who is also a student in The College at Southwestern, even new Christians should be active in testifying to their belief in Christ. For this reason, he would lead new believers in Ciudad Acuña, as they stood at their doorways, to place their hands on their hearts and pledge allegiance to Christ.
“This was important because it was done in public where a neighbor … would see their public profession of faith,” Fonseca said. “I reminded them that as Jesus has died for each one of us on the cross, so we have to take a step of faith to confess Him in front of everyone.”

In one instance, Fonseca saw a new believer, named Moses, take on the task of evangelism. Another man walked up to Fonseca a moment after Moses came to a saving knowledge of Christ.

“I said to Moses, the new convert, ‘I want you to tell him what you just did,’” Fonseca recounted. “He said, ‘I just became a Christian … I was a sinner, but now I am saved.’ So Moses was sharing what he had experienced at that moment.”
“Gloria á Dios,” Fonseca said in Spanish, his own first language: “Glory to God.” For Fonseca, new converts such as Moses, and time-tested Mexican believers and pastors, are crucial to the story of what God is doing in Ciudad Acuña.
Russell Bryan, a seminary student and Carrigan’s assistant, was moved by one Mexican believer’s passion for evangelism. Bryan accompanied this man, Fernando, on several occasions in practicing door-to-door evangelism. He described Fernando as a “solid, godly man for the Lord.”

“I just stood in awe at times,” Bryan said. “It was amazing to see the passion, the persuasiveness of his voice, even his mannerisms … No matter what languages or what country, every human being who has a personal relationship with the Lord has an understanding of evangelism ... A person that has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and is walking with Him on a daily basis, and is in the Word — they are going to have a passion for lost people … It will be there … These men really had a desire.”

On the final day of the trip, the Southwestern team went to a Mexican supermarket comparable to Wal-Mart in the United States. They passed out hundreds of tracts to shoppers as they walked through the parking lot.
“People stopped,” Bryan said. “They literally stopped right there in the parking lot to read the tracts.”

But before leaving Ciudad Acuña, the team took up a different platform for proclaiming the gospel. They went to a state prison where Fernando had been ministering on a weekly basis. Bryan described the prison as the size of a football field, with bare cement walls, nearly 40 feet tall, topped with barbed wire.
According to Bryan, guards at the prison allowed the Southwestern team members to go in three at a time. They were led past open cells packed with eight to 14 people. They were allowed to share the gospel with prisoners who were assembled in an open-air “recreation area” consisting of bare walls, a cement floor and no roof. Then the prisoners were told to line up against the walls. Fonseca gave a final challenge to the inmates.

Drawing an imaginary line across the cement floor with his foot, Fonseca called those who desired to be a role model for their families to walk up to the line. He also called those who wanted to accept Christ as Savior to make their decisions known. He challenged the inmates to be real men.

“And in Spanish culture, just to say, ‘Be a man!’ can be offensive in a sense,” Fonseca said. However, he said that after the invitation was given “there was a group that accepted Jesus on the left side” of the room, and “and on the right side, there were people that wanted to be role models.”

Certainly the Apostle Paul would be proud of the Southwestern mission team as they honored their precious promise to preach the gospel. As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 4:5, “Be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

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