Ourselves as Servants Andrés and Angélica Guzmán
Latin American Workers in the Middle East
Andrés and Angélica Guzmán (pseudonym) are among the first generation of global workers from Latin America. They have worked in holistic relief and development work for more than 30 years and have led many efforts to take the gospel to the least reached.
During our many years of humanitarian work in the Middle East, our Latin American team had the privilege of witnessing a movement for Jesus. It took place as our closest friends and mentees taught the life and teachings of Jesus Christ to many hundreds of people within their own people group. The movement came about, not solely as a result of our relief and development work but also through Bible translation, leadership formation, and incarnational living.
Before we had finished our medical studies, and before being married, my wife and I both felt stirred by Scriptures like Isaiah 49:6, “I will also make you a light for the nations, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” It took a few years for us to realize our calling to serve the peoples of the earth because we knew no other people who were interested in this. We had never heard about unreached people groups and had no idea that God was moving throughout Latin America to mobilize His church to fulfill the Great Commission.
Immediately after our wedding, we went to another country to obtain our cross-cultural training and began asking God to take us to the place where He wanted us to serve. We knew that God was not calling us to be professional “missionaries,” but to join Him in His mission to light the world by serving the needy, while living and talking as disciples of Jesus.
The opportunity came, and a year later we arrived in the city where we would supervise a project to create a system to distribute medical supplies in coordination with two humanitarian organizations. Besides working to provide a steady supply of medicines, we set up the computer systems for the main warehouse and the large distribution pharmacies run by the government’s Ministry of Health. We created the forms and procedures to be used in the warehouse and pharmacy stores, and we trained the staff.
We provided feedback to the main pharmacies to determine appropriate drug distribution, monitored children’s growth to assess the impact of nutritional programs, and did vaccination surveys. We developed training programs for procedures in nursing, surgery, emergency medicine, dental care and for lay village health workers. Besides the medical projects, we also worked toward creating a center for widows and displaced women that educated them in important survival skills.
We did all this not simply to convert anybody or to provide an excuse for our presence. Instead, we were motivated by a love of God and a love toward our fellow human beings, based on the person and teachings of the Lord Jesus. We desired to demonstrate that the kingdom of God was already among us. We did hope that they would notice a difference in our service, but there were no strings attached to our help.
We had a team from Latin America with members from Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and a Canadian medical doctor who is married to one of the Mexicans.
We made many friends: government officials and some of their family members, business people, neighbors, language helpers, and staff members and their friends. We learned many things from them: their culture, their modesty, their respect for elders, their religious practices, their delicious food, their hospitality, their beautiful clothing, their jubilant dancing, and their creative minds.
We lived among them as disciples of Jesus—able to persevere without being paralyzed by the fear that gripped many because of instability and conflict in the region. We were able to live with joy in the midst of tension, lack of electricity, and scarcity of water. We shared with them our jokes, our unconditional friendship, our rest from the religious struggle to impress God, and our ability to hear God. We spoke to them about our confidence in God’s supernatural healing and our authority to rebuke, bind, and cast out demons. We also shared our assurance that the good news of Jesus belongs to every nation, to the people of every tribe, family, religious background, gender, and social class.
We were able to help the Bible society translate the New Testament into the language of the people of our area and encouraged the distribution of the Bible. We found that many respected leaders shared our belief that it is the right of every people to have the opportunity to read the Bible. Our Muslim friends were ready to receive the Bible because their prophet had urged them to read the holy books (the Old and New Testaments) that were written before their holy book (the Qur’an).
Through all of this, several of our friends decided to become followers of Jesus. Some (not encouraged by us) decided to follow Him, calling themselves Christians, and some (through their own choice) decided to follow Jesus while remaining religiously Muslim. Most decided to stay outside established religious institutions, simply calling themselves “believers.”
The believer movement astonished us by how quickly it multiplied in the first years. Several fellowships sprouted up. We believe that there were many important reasons for this:
1. They had the experience of seeing real disciples of Jesus firsthand; most unreached peoples in the world never do. This helped them to see the beauty of the person and teachings of Jesus, unclouded by the smoke of popular ideas about Christians as immoral, greedy, proud, and hateful toward Muslims. Our lives were not perfect, but by God’s grace we modeled how to live as disciples, including what we are supposed to do when we fail. When they met imperfect but real disciples of Jesus, they became interested to know more about Him.
2. The Lord Jesus manifested Himself to many. Again and again, the Lord Himself intervened to lead the seekers to Himself. He appeared to them in dreams and confirmed the truth they had heard. They saw instant and gradual healing as we prayed for people. They experienced visions and supernatural protection.
3. They had the opportunity to understand that commitment to Christ and cultural conversion are not the same. We were the ones who converted to their culture, not the opposite. We always encouraged them about the value of their rich traditions and culture. Even when they didn’t quite believe in themselves and in their future as a people group, we did, and we encouraged them to serve their people and their families.
4. They had the opportunity to understand that commitment to the Lord Jesus is open for people from all backgrounds. They were surprised to see that though we were from a Christian background, even we had to actively choose to follow Jesus. This helped them to understand that any person from any religious background can become a follower of Jesus by reading, believing, and applying the New Testament, asking Jesus to be their guide. They saw that, regardless of their decision to stay within their own religious community or not, they could live as followers of Jesus.
5. They were encouraged to be a blessing by remaining in their families and sharing in all the important life events like weddings and funerals. We encouraged them to eagerly help the needy, respect authorities, be good workers and good bosses and in many other ways, honor their circle of family and neighbors. Of course, they also became a blessing by sharing the grace of really knowing God among their network of relatives and good friends, thus keeping their valuable personal relationships.
6. From the beginning they followed the Lord Jesus and not us. They learned to always ask, “What does the Bible say?” We encouraged them to question our beliefs and actions and to find answers to their questions through the Holy Spirit, prayer, and study of the Bible.
7. A core group of believers made a serious commitment to share the blessings of the person and teachings of Jesus with their people. These believers became leaders of the network of small groups scattered throughout their nation.
The movement is growing steadily, but not as fast as in the beginning. The main reason for the slowdown, from our point of view, is the tendency for some workers to introduce practices and forms from Christian traditions in the Middle East and Europe. These have served to distract the new believers from the powerful, simple teachings of the New Testament. The other factor has been the influence of the rich, media-friendly Western churches and formality-inclined Oriental churches that have kept some of the best leaders occupied with other things.
This entire movement toward the Lord Jesus happened while we were very busy doing our best to provide high-quality relief and development work. We did not leverage our work to encourage conversion. We did not distribute Bibles or Christian literature with our medical supplies or blankets or show the Jesus Film after performing surgery. We served everybody in the same way, motivated by the love of our Lord Jesus toward them and following His example of feeding, healing, and blessing everyone—regardless of whether they would follow Him.
Motivated by love instead of by strategy, we were not concerned that people might change their religious faith because they hoped for benefits for themselves or their families. As a result, we were free of the problem that has developed in other contexts in which so-called “rice Christians” convert to the religious faith of their benefactors, hoping to attain increased benefits from them.
We know our approach may be controversial for some. On the one hand, some will say that our approach ignores the urgency of presenting the gospel to everyone. Our simple response is that we followed the path of the Lord Jesus who came to serve and the way of the apostle Paul who was glad to become “the servant of all.” The Great Commission does not cancel the great commandment.
On the other hand, others may blame us for mentioning Jesus at all with our friends, feeling that by doing so we compromised our humanitarian work. But no real follower of Jesus can remain silent if asked about the source of the fruit in his life, and all humanitarian work has philosophical motivations that are indirectly reflected in the way work is done. If we serve humankind and fail to acknowledge the true source of our service, we are preaching ourselves and receiving credit that does not belong to us.
We served everybody in the same way, motivated by the love of our Lord Jesus toward them and following His example of feeding, healing, and blessing everyone—regardless of whether they would follow Him.
We find the right balance in 2 Corinthians 4:5 (NIV): “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”