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RENDEZVOUS

God's focused favor goes full circle

by Jim Carlson, Lone Rock

From where I sit I can see the distant lights of Stevensville, Montana, some ten miles to the southwest. Fort Benton’s contrary opinion notwithstanding, Stevensville claims to be the spot "where Montana began," interestingly enough through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries 150 years ago to reach the Salish tribal people. Ponder that the Salish are genetically related to our unnamed Christian friend in the Amazon... (but I digress). Stevensville is the site from which the earliest Rocky Mountain Bible missionary efforts were launched some fifty years ago.

Darrel and Betty Burch were American Sunday School Union (now American Missionary Fellowship) workers who were placed in Stevensville by the ASSU and given 62,000 square miles of rural western Montana to reach with the gospel. The Burches’ Prairie Bible Institute friends Gale and Elsie Fister and Don and Ferris Rust moved in to join them, later followed by RMBM pioneers Sam and Marge Gupton and Frank and Betty Jackson. Itinerant preaching routes were mapped and little places reached with children’s Bible clubs, youth groups, preaching points and, eventually, churches.

Early on, in the little western Montana burg of St. Regis a young man named Wes Seng came to faith through youth outreach. Wes grew in wisdom and stature, walked with God and attended Prairie Bible Institute himself, met and married Trudy, and took the gospel to South America. Over many years’ labor the Sengs helped establish Ammi Bible School, where tribal people come from many directions to be trained in the Word and returned to their homes to preach and teach. Our tribal brother is one of many among them.

While we might sometimes think that the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission’s concern for the gospel ministry is limited to "the little places of the Rocky Mountain West," that impression is not accurate. Just as it is not true that God’s Old Testament target was limited to Israel, as God’s promise to Abraham clearly included the overarching goal that "all the nations of the earth" might know His focused favor (Genesis 12.3).

We’re happy to report that the gospel that worked so well in St. Regis, Montana, does just fine in Brazil! And that’s clearly not the end of the story, for even now Mission churches are mobilizing to work together to enlist, train, and deploy teams of short-term missionaries to other places in the "uttermost parts of the world."

Not just Stevensville, where good things began . . . and continue!