Skip to main content
Church NewsMinistry Highlights

Missions Trip to the Center of the World

By August 7, 2014October 17th, 2014No Comments

BataviaNY_InlineBATAVIA, N.Y.—Grace Baptist Church traveled to the center of the world to help share the message of the gospel. Eleven members spent 10 days in Quito, Ecuador, serving alongside Jeff and Deanne Davoll, church-planting missionaries with the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism.

“We were literally at the equator and at 9,500 feet elevation!” says Associate Pastor Mark Hurlbut.

Every year Grace Baptist sends a group to minister alongside one of the missionaries the church supports. Hurlbut says, “We approach our mission trips with a partnership approach. We go where the missionaries we support are. Once there, we do whatever we can to support them and the work God has called them to. Our vision is to see a very real relationship develop between our church and the church plants we are supporting.”

On July 11–21 the team ran Vacation Bible School for children, completed work projects, participated in street evangelism, and led a two-night “Love and Respect” conference. Thanks to the generosity of supporters, conference attendees received free books. Ladies also baked cookies and shared them with businesses as a way to open the door for praying for those businesspeople.

Did baking and sharing cookies have any value? the Davolls ask. Yes, it did. After a team member prayed with a woman regarding her wayward son, that woman called the Davolls and shared great news. The Davolls say the woman and her husband “asked for help with their son who just ‘happened’ to say . . . that he needed to get to a church for help.”

The Davolls also report that two new couples visited their church after attending the “Love and Respect” conference.

“God allowed our team to be used to draw people to Christ,” Hurlbut says.

Speaking at his church on “A Partnership Approach to Short-Term Missions” after returning from Ecuador, Hurlbut said every missions trip is different because every field is different. The teams do whatever will be a help to the church’s missionary partners and “do not want to get in the way of what they’re doing.”

“We have to be careful to not transpose our American mentality onto missions trips,” he says. “Our American mentality is, ‘If we don’t build something and finish something, then it wasn’t a missions trip.’ That can be a part of missions trips, but the Biblical rationale is the spiritual refreshment that takes place between partners.”