Making a Run for the Border! Mexico Mission Trip

Yesterday thirty-eight of us loaded up in three church vans, a mini van, and a pickup truck pulling a trailer headed for the Texas border town of Fabens. We are on a mission trip comprised of individuals from various different churches in the North Canadian Baptist Association of Oklahoma. Our plans are to take the gospel to the people of three separate communities just across the border in Mexico. We will be participating in Bible Schools, evangelistic revivals, and various other ministry endeavours in the local baptist church of each of these three communities.What anticipation there is regarding what the Lord plans to do!

Right now as I write I am sitting in the hotel lobby of the La Quinta Inn in Sweetwater, Texas. Sweetwater is about halfway between Henryetta, Oklahoma (our departing point) and Fabens, Texas (our destination). Soon we will be having breakfast, a time of devotion, and hitting the road again to make the final half of the trip. Thus far the trip has been relatively uneventful, except for the two flat tires we experienced on the trailer yesterday. This was a minor setback that caused five of us to arrive at the hotel a few hours later than the rest of the group. However, no real damage was done. In fact, we are just "pressing on"!

In addition to keeping everyone informed of the inns-and-outs of the trip and offering a few photos to illustrate them, I want to offer an interesting thought that has been on my mind thus far on the trip. You see we are a group of Christians from America headed to a foreign country to take the gospel to people in need of a Savior. This sort of activity is certainly not unusual practice for American churches. In fact, it has become as common an item dawning church summer calendars these days as Vacation Bible School and Camp. I am quite confident that this sort of activity is not at all uncommon for our foreign neighbors to receive as well. After all, American churches have been taking mission teams to foreign soil for decades. So the thought that has regularly been infiltrating my mind stems from this question, how long will it be until it becomes common practice for churches of foreign countries to send mission teams to our American communities on a regular basis?

I am aware there are already foreign mission teams that regularly come to the U.S. However, though the number of these groups is growing annually, most of these endeavors remain so few that we Americans hardly notice. To the contrary, what I am envisioning is a day when our communities are inundated with various foreign mission teams here on our soil simply to share the gospel. To think about this occurring in the Unites States seems ridiculous. After all, we are the mighty US. We are the one's who are considered the most dominant Christian nation in all the world. We are the one's who, for all intents and purposes, created the modern short-term mission trip. How could this ever happen here?

It is sad to consider such possibilities. Some may even consider it far fetched. To those who doubt, allow me just to remind you that there was once a day when our British neighbors "across the pond" considered it absurd to think that they would one day be so dominated by Secularism and Islam that American church mission teams would turn their focus toward the British Isles as a hotbed for gospel preaching. All signs point to a U.S. that is headed for the same sad predicament. It may still be several years or even decades before we see this come to fruition. Regardless, the day is coming. Let's just hope that our Christian neighbors around the globe care as much or more about the souls of Americans as we have about theirs through the yeas.