“Don’t pray that we won’t be persecuted. Jesus told us we would be persecuted. Pray that we will be faithful when the persecution comes.” We could add to that prayer request the prayer that God raises up some godly men to lead as elders in this church.

A few years ago, two Brazilian women showed up at the church I pastor and asked to look at our archives because they were writing a book about a missionary who was sent out by our church in the 1930s. This young woman, named Ernestine Horne, sailed to Brazil in 1934. The next year, she started a training school for women that has since grown into a global ministry called Betel Brasileiro. The small training school for women grew into a Bible college and seminary for training pastors and missionaries. They have trained thousands of students in more than twenty locations across Brazil, as well as in Portugal and Japan.

From that school, they developed a denomination of 150 churches across Brazil. They have a missions organization with 52 missionary families in fifteen countries, on every continent except North America. They also have projects around the world to help those in need, working with children and widows, and so on. They also have a publishing branch, publishing Christian books in Portuguese. It’s pretty amazing. At the end of October, I got to go down to Brazil for the 90th-anniversary celebration and learn more about what God has been doing. It was an incredible experience. And a challenging one.

While I was there, I met a man named Ronaldo who is a missionary in the Amazon rainforest. He and his team of missionaries take trips down the Amazon River by boat for five days to find remote tribes and tell them about Jesus. These tribes in the Amazon don’t speak Portuguese. They’re remote, cut off from the world. They speak their own tribal languages. There are more than 300 indigenous languages spoken by Amazonian tribes. And Ronaldo and his team have reached all the villages that are accessible by the river, told them about Jesus, started establishing churches, and translating the Bible. The only tribes left are the ones that hide in the jungle. They don’t want to talk to outsiders and run from them.

So Ronaldo and his team of missionaries bushwhack through the jungle for days to find these people who don’t want to be found in an attempt to learn their languages and tell them about Jesus. Ronaldo said to me that not even their satellite phones can get signal in the jungle through the thick tree cover, and they have to be careful where they sleep so they don’t get eaten by animals. But through all of that dangerous, hard work, people who are otherwise completely cut off from the outside world and had no hope of ever knowing their Creator have heard about the grace of God through his Son Jesus and put their faith in him.

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