Allianceness: Carlos Gomez

Hello, my name is Carlos Gomez and I am the director of a Latin mission agency whose focus is to reach unreached communities in the world.

We work with the help of missionaries, we support ourselves mainly through donations and we reach people through projects focused on giving access to the Scriptures, sharing the Gospel, and promoting the well-being of communities.

We thought we were doing well until the pandemic hit and the Lord led us through questions like How we do missions when everything we know doesn't work? How do we recruit workers when the temples are closed? How do we support ourselves financially when donors are losing their income? And how do we reach communities when all the workers are quarantined and locked in their homes?

That was the beginning of a journey as a ministry to understand what God was teaching us, that we don't know God is all we need, until He is all we have.

I asked Bob, a Bible translation missionary: How we do missions in a time of crisis? And his answer was very simple, he said to me: what does the Bible say?

With his answer we began a journey through Scripture to find answers to our questions. To the first question, how do we recruit more workers? We found that the answer in Scripture is prayer.

While programs, marketing and church visits are good, they were not the starting point for recruitment, prayer is. So we started praying as a team every morning for thirty minutes, praying for a new generation of missionaries. 

Amazingly enough, in 2020 against all odds, we saw more candidates applying to become missionaries than in the previous years all together. 

It was not our doing, it was God´s. We simply obeyed. Then we asked ourselves, how do we finance the ministry in times of financial difficulties? God helped us remember that generosity makes us grow in His grace and righteousness.

In being generous we bring Glory to God. We understood then that it was not a time to ask, but a time to give. The question was what could we give? We discovered that we could give time, prayer and presence to our donors who were going through difficult times.

Even though many stopped their giving because of financial challenges, God moved others to give above and beyond all the needs of staff and workers, making the pandemic year the most plentiful year in the ministry's history.

But we still had one more question, how do we reach people in the communities amidst quarantine? And we were reminded that God is almighty and that he had promised to be with us along the way. So we can go confidently in obedience leaving the results in God´s hands.

During those weeks we heard the story of one of our missionaries who was serving in West Africa. She had travelled to the capital city for a meeting with the rest of the team to decide whether or not to stay or leave.

As she arrived in the capital her cell phone ran out of battery. She went to the gate of a hotel and asked a Muslim security guard to allow her to charge her phone.  As she waited, the guard asked her, are you a Christian? She replied yes. Do you have time? Of course I do, she said.

He proceeded to tell her about a dream he had had where Jesus was calling out to him. The missionary went on to confirm that Jesus indeed was pursuing him. It was truly amazing to see that despite COVID was closing doors, God was opening them.

This does not mean that programs, conferences or fundraising campaigns are not valid. In fact, in the ministry of PAM we do that. What I want to emphasize is that God was giving us a lesson that we don't want to forget, that we are the people of the book, not the people of the temple.

We are not guided by buildings, or programs, or financial resources or circumstances. We are guided by his words, we are guided by his principles that remain the same in spite of changes and crises.

This has changed the course of the entire ministry and has given us the conviction that we want to follow Jesus in mission, remembering that He is all we need for life and mission, because the future of mission is not at risk,  the future of the mission is secure in the hands of the one who writes the future, Jesus Christ.

 We can keep moving forward by trusting Him.