Tim Holliday helps run a border ministry for Mission to the World, the international outreach arm of the conservative Presbyterian Church in America and a key partner with Garza’s Center for Church Planting. When he talks to churches, he tells them that daily life isn’t as bad as they’ve heard on the news.

Pastor Andres Garza had told the American evangelicals to stay away from his troubled city. The drug war made it too difficult to guarantee their safety.  But now they were back, in their golf shirts and sensible shoes and halting Spanish, happily milling around Monterrey’s new headquarters for evangelical Presbyterians.

Garza smiled at his old friends. Al Couch, 81, a retired pharmaceutical salesman from Nashville, had come here so many times in the past that he’d earned the nickname “Monterrey Jack.” But this was his first time back since Garza had warned the Americans early last year that the violence had grown too intense.

Retired pastor Rod Whited had made the trip from Jacksonville, Fla. When his church learned it was unsafe to send church groups across the border, it hosted a “reverse mission,” welcoming Mexican teenagers to the U.S.

A pastor from Guadalajara led a prayer over the coffee and chilaquiles. The visitors, about 15 of them, dug into breakfast in the small courtyard, chatting with a few missionaries and Mexican preachers, before touring the city.

The way Garza saw it, the Americans’ return on this September weekend was part of an epic spiritual battle for a city, like Babylon, that had fallen into decadence and was in need of salvation. There was also a little of Jesus’ story in their visit.

“They came from a very secure place, the way Jesus came from heaven, to a place that isn’t very secure,” he said — and they had come to save souls.

Monterrey, the wealthy business hub of northern Mexico, was once one of this country’s safer big cities, and residents still go to the movies, attend gallery openings and pack the taquerias on weekend afternoons. But murders, kidnappings, shootouts and shakedowns are also a fact of life.

Sometimes the violence falls close to home: About three years ago, Garza said, four men were shot outside his house in the middle-class neighborhood of Cumbres.

But Garza, 47, a big, fair-haired man with a broad smile and an easy demeanor, was feeling confident about protecting his guests. He had been studying the violence closely, and he believed he had a good idea where it was happening and how to avoid it.

Just as important, he and his American colleagues didn’t want the locals to think that American missionaries came only when times were good.

The visitors, many of them older men who head up their churches’ mission operations, had decided they needed to check on the progress of the churches they had been supporting financially. In the last 12 years, American donations have helped establish about a dozen new evangelical Presbyterian churches in northern Mexico. Garza’s organization, the Center for Church Planting, was hoping to organize more.

Some of the Americans were also eager to see Monterrey to decide whether it was safe to start sending back mission groups that had been fixtures in Garza’s churches.

The groups had been the indefatigable foot soldiers for the movement, popping down for a week or so at a time to pray and paint and hang drywall in the little storefront churches, with the hope of recruiting fresh troops in a majority-Catholic country that is not always so open to the Protestant message.

This new contingent of Americans had come even though the killing had not stopped. Here in the border state of Nuevo Leon, officials recorded 1,111 “intentional” homicides for the first eight months of 2012 — more than four times the total in 2009.

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