Courageous individuals went on short-term missions trips from our church by joining other Teams in the 80’s and early 90’s. But in 1996 one of our members, Mike Reynolds organized a group of friends from our church and other places to go to Gautemala. Mike had already had an amazing experience there on six previous trips himself and he had made the contacts we needed.
So the first church sponsored missions trip was to Guatemala in 1996 in cooperation with AGROS ministries of Seattle. One of our pastors, John Haak went with his entire family, wife Kim and two sons, Seth and Daniel. Another member who went was Scott O’Brien, part of our Youth Ministry volunteers and a local school bus driver. Our goal was to work alongside Guatemalans who were victims of the 30-year civil war. AGROS had loaned 25 Guatemalan families enough money to purchase a tract of land which would allow each of them to build a simple two room home and five acres of land to farm. Our team spent a week working with some of the families in hand excavation, leveling and foundation work. The new village was named, El Paraiso and you can see how it is doing now by following the link.
The next mission team trip was in 2001 and again to Guatemala with AGROS. This time 12 members from our church went to a new village called Trapachitos. Our Youth Pastor, Mark Adams went in advance with two of our high schoolers, Sarah Hagedorn and Daniel Haak. They spent a week in Spanish school there and then two weeks with local work around Antigua with a Christian Pre-school center before the full team arrived. The full team then arrived and all the members went out to the village to help in the building process as we had done before. The additional team members were Kevin Cunningham, John, Sis and Nathan Dreesmann, Stuart and Roth Rind, Seth Haak, Katie Leman and Natalie Zink.
Thanks to a great missions program at our summer camp, Camp Victory, many of our young people were learning about the great need for missions work. It was at this camp that we met Mike and Nadine Gleaves, former missionaries to Colombia for New Tribes Mission. They were an inspiring example to us and Mike offered to lead a group on a short-term trip in 2003 So our church had nine members in the team and joined with five others to serve in Santa Cruz, Bolivia that summer. Here they are about to leave on that trip:
