Northpinellas: Missionaries are resolute amid string of attacks

As warring tribes clashed outside their home in Papua New Guinea, surrounding them with the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, Harley and Sandy Schrock lay on the hallway floor and prayed.

The Florida missionaries did not leave the war-torn country even after marauders dragged five bodies past their front door.

They finally evacuated last June -- and already, they have purchased tickets in hopes of going back.

"You always teach that God is going to protect you and take care of you," said Harley Schrock, 63, who is sponsored by Thirtieth Avenue Baptist Church in St. Petersburg. "If you run away the minute someone fires a gun, what are you teaching these people?"

Schrock's determination is shared by local evangelicals, who say that despite a recent string of fatal attacks on Christian missionaries working abroad, they will intensify their efforts to spread Christianity throughout the world.

In the Tampa Bay area, dozens of evangelical churches continue to raise millions of dollars to send missionaries to the far corners of the globe. It is a part of their faith as essential as Sunday morning services.

Of all denominations, perhaps the most active in sending missionaries are the Southern Baptists. With a $263-million budget, the International Mission Board, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has sent more than 1,000 new missionaries abroad in each of the past two years.

Some have paid the ultimate price. The three missionaries killed in Yemen on Dec. 30 were Baptists. So was the missionary murdered in November in Lebanon.

Although Baptists are not the only churches to send missionaries abroad, they and other evangelical Christian denominations have become a lightning rod for criticism because of their zealous efforts to convert the "unchurched."

"It is in many ways a sense of competition for the religious souls and bodies of the community," said Vernon Robbins, a professor of religion at Emory University who specializes in early Christianity. "It is considered to be essential to bring all of the 'unchurched' to the 'true' Christian faith."

* * *

In the hallway of the Countryside Christian Center, an evangelical, nondenominational church in Clearwater, this calling is palpable. A bright red line forms a rectangle around a patch on a small world map. This region, encompassing the Middle East, North Africa, India and Southeast Asia, is what evangelicals call the "10/40 window" for its latitude coordinates between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north of the equator.

It comprises about two-thirds of the world's people, more than 90 percent of them not Christian. A photo above the map depicts a woman from Senegal wearing traditional dress and carrying a bucket on her head.

On a bulletin board farther down the hall, naked tribal children gaze at the camera, a poignant image amid abject poverty.

This hallway, the church's "gallery of the unreached peoples," reminds members of the congregation that "there are nearly 3-billion people who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ."

Countryside Christian Center raised more than $900,000 last year to support missionary work at home and abroad.

Nationally, observers say the ranks of American evangelical missionaries overseas have ballooned.

In e-mails to the St. Petersburg Times this month from South Africa, Russia, Chile and elsewhere, Florida Baptist missionaries overwhelmingly reported that they feel just as safe abroad as they do in the United States. The world is dangerous, they acknowledge, but if Jesus was willing to die for them, then they should be willing to die for others.

"For us and the vast majority of missionaries in the world, we do not live in fear of world events, because God has not given us a spirit of fear," wrote Alan Andrews and his wife, Melissa, from Santiago, Chile. Melissa Andrews is from Fort Walton Beach.

Thirtieth Avenue Baptist in St. Petersburg, which sponsors the Schrocks in Papua New Guinea, also supports a clandestine missionary in China who disguises himself as an English language instructor. China bans missionaries.

In his classroom in China's Shandong province, the missionary explains his religious beliefs to students through sharing "American culture," said Robert Aligood, the church's pastor.

When students ask about Christmas, the missionary shares the miracle of Jesus' birth. On Thanksgiving, the missionary teaches students to thank the Lord.

"They don't make a big fanfare of doing mission work -- the Chinese government won't stand for that," Aligood said. "They simply share the truth with (students) as they understand it."

Although missionary work has been central to the spread of Christianity since Jesus' death, critics say religious fundamentalists in the United States are more concerned with soul winning than more immediate needs, such as building roads and schools.

But evangelical leaders dispute that claim, saying most missionaries give the community equal doses of aid and gospel.

"People who think that missions are about going to another country to convince them to change their religion don't understand what Christian missionaries are about," said Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the International Mission Board. "Christian missions are about my experience of God's love and my sense that God wants me to share that love with the people."

In fact, most local missionaries join peaceful communities, which welcome them -- and their message of the Lord's salvation -- with open arms.

* * *

To an outsider, the rural village of La Palm Merita in Nicaragua does not look like much: a smattering of black plastic shacks with tin roofs, one shallow well and a lifetime of poverty.

In November, hope arrived. Nineteen missionaries from Countryside Christian Center stepped off a yellow school bus and spent a week rebuilding the village.

They drilled wells, mixed cement for the foundation of a community center and built the walls of a small schoolhouse.

For the village children, they brought candy, toys and hand-sewn teddy bears. For their parents, they brought shoes and auto parts -- and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Throughout the week, the missionaries would speak in gestures and broken Spanish, telling the villagers about Jesus. Then, at the celebration on the missionaries' final day in the village, Pastor Dan Reidy gathered the villagers around him, speaking through a translator about the Lord.

When he had finished, he asked the villagers to raise their hands if they had accepted Jesus into their hearts. Fifteen did.

"It's not an intellectual thing," Reidy said. "It's a heart thing. We saw the impact all that week we were there, showing the love of the Lord, not just speaking it."

Countryside Christian Center's trip to Nicaragua illustrates some of the clear positives of missionary work. Without the missionaries, the village would not have a school, shoes to wear or even fresh water to drink.

Some children might have died. Families would have scattered.

But with the good work comes a cost: Accept the Lord. Become a Christian. Renounce your faith and accept ours.

In the Middle East and in countries hostile to missionaries, that price gets higher.

Charlotte Ford worked in a Baptist hospital in the Gaza Strip similar to the one attacked in Yemen. When she convinced Palestinian refugees to accept Jesus Christ, the new Christians had to practice in secret. Their Muslim families would have disowned them.

Ford, 73, traveled to Gaza three times from 1973 to 1977 to work in a Baptist hospital that ministered to Palestinian refugees. On her fourth trip, she brought her husband, Jack, who had just retired from the St. Petersburg Fire Department.

In Gaza, the Baptist hospital mandated that the Muslim nursing students take Bible classes.

Many eventually converted, and they attended secret services on the fenced-in hospital compound.

Even in Israel, Ford said she felt safe. Still, behind the hospital lies the grave of another young missionary nurse, who was killed by a terrorist the year before Ford got there.

The couple stayed in Gaza until 1980, when Jack Ford had a stroke.

"I was never fearful when I was there," she said. "I would go back now."

Some attacks on U.S. missionaries abroad:

Dec. 30, 2002: Bill Koehn, 60, Kathleen A. Gariety, 53, and Dr. Martha C. Myers, 57, are killed by a man with an assault rifle in a Southern Baptist missionary hospital in rural Yemen. Donald W. Caswell, 49, is wounded. Nov. 21, 2002: Bonnie Penner, 31, is shot and killed at the Unity Center in Sidon, southern Lebanon.

June 7, 2002: Martin Burnham, 42, is killed during a rescue mission to save him along with other hostages, including his wife, held by Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines.

April 20, 2001: Missionary Roni Bowers, 35, and her 6-month-old daughter, Charity, are killed when the plane they were in is accidentally shot down by a Peruvian air force jet in the Amazon jungle region. The pilot of the Peruvian jet thought that it was an airplane transporting contraband drugs.

Nov. 2, 1992: Joseph Deering, 35, is shot and killed in Thika, Kenya. Deering, a Jehovah's Witness, was trying to stop an assault on his wife.

June 11, 1991: The Rev. John Speers, 42, is shot to death by a suspected drug addict in the Philippines.

March 27, 1991: Lynda Bethea, 42, is killed in a roadside attack near Kijabe, Kenya. Her husband, American missionary Ralph Bethea, is beaten in the same attack.

Aug. 18, 1990: The body of Baptist missionary Clark Alan Jacobsen, 42, is handed over to the U.S. Embassy. He had been arrested by government troops in Liberia two days earlier and died in custody.

May 24, 1989: Todd Ray Wilson and Jeffrey Brent Ball, both 20-year-old Mormon missionaries from Utah, are cut down by machine-gun fire in La Paz, Bolivia. The Zarate Willka Armed Liberation Front, a guerrilla group, claimed responsibility.

November 1986: Elizabeth Senter and her 10-year-old daughter, Janet, are murdered during an attempted rape at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, by a student at the Liberia Baptist Seminary.

May 4, 1985: Thomas Brown, a Baptist Bible Church missionary from Illinois, is shot and killed by gunmen at his home in Puente Piedra, a suburb of Lima, Peru.

Feb. 13, 1982: American Catholic missionary Brother James Alfred Miller, 37, is murdered in Guatemala.

Sept. 13, 1981: American Mennonite missionary John David Troyer, 28, is killed in Palama, Guatemala.

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