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 ...