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An early breakthrough in the Latin-American missionary movement took place in 1971 in a Mexico City Presbyterian church. Pablo Carrillo, a 22-year-old university student, and Roberto Dominguez, a young furniture maker, began meeting each day at 5 a.m. to pray for the evangelization of China. Three months into their vigil, Dominguez told Carrillo he had acquired a passport, "because I believe God is going to send me as a missionary to India."

Carrillo laughed at his friend's announcement. He thought Dominguez, who had failed to complete elementary school and just recently had learned to locate India on the map, was joking. "Little by little, I stopped laughing when I saw the Lord was in this," Carrillo recalls.

Soon afterward—and despite the objections of their families and pastor—the two young men attended a conference of Operation Mobilization (OM) volunteers in Milwaukee. They were the only Latin Americans there.

OM sent them to work short-term in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Dominguez went on to spend four years in India. In 1974, Carrillo returned to Mexico to complete his degree in industrial engineering and married Jane Cornwaithe, another OM volunteer. In 1978, the Carrillos sailed back to Europe on an OM ship, this time with 70 other Latin Americans, to work short-term in Spain.

The Carrillos remained in Spain and in 1984 founded PM International, which today has 40 career missionaries from 10 Latin-American nations deployed in three strategic regions of the Muslim world. Many PM International staff work as bivocational "tentmakers" in countries off-limits to traditional Christian missionaries.

PM International is one of hundreds of mission organizations that have sprung up recently in the Latin world. Latin America, an evangelical mission field in the early 1900s, is fast becoming an important missionary-sending region at the close of the century.

EXPLOSIVE GROWTH: The Second Ibero-American Missionary Congress, known by its Spanish acronym COMIBAM '97, met in Acapulco, Mexico, October 27-31. The event brought 2,200 missionaries, missionary candidates, and missions-minded pastors together to gauge the progress of the Latin missions movement and promote its development.

"There has been a notable growth in the missionary consciousness of the church," Guatemalan Rudy Girn, COMIBAM '97 president, told CT. "I remember ten years ago, it was quite rare to hear of a theological institution or local church in my city that was having a mission conference. Today in Guatemala you can find ten conferences going on simultaneously. The church is waking up."

Girn, who is moving to Moscow to direct the Eurasian School of Christian Ministry, helped organize the first COMIBAM, held in 1987 in So Paulo, Brazil. That event attracted nearly 1,000 more participants than this year's meeting. Organizers believe Hurricane Pauline, which struck Acapulco 17 days before COMIBAM, dissuaded some delegates from attending.

However, a quota system that limited the number of delegates from each of the 31 participating countries appeared to be the primary reason for lower attendance. COMIBAM '97 registration rules required attendees to study three missions books and attend national forums before coming to Acapulco. The process aimed to develop local networks to promote mission. COMIBAM leaders recognize that the future of the movement ultimately depends on what happens at the national and local levels.

"The national movements are in different phases, some more developed, some just now beginning," Bertil Ekstrom, COMIBAM's new president, told CT. "We want to support these movements by developing [sending] churches, training centers, and missionary agencies."

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14