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In the shadow of an active volcano in Ecuador's Andes mountains, 44-year-old Pedro Roche addresses his tiny congregation with the power of God rumbling behind him. Roche, a house contractor by day, is a spellbinding preacher at night. In his passion, he shifts from Spanish to his local Quichua dialect without missing a beat.

"This is the beginning of birth pangs," he says. "Things will grow more difficult as the end times come."

Roche's sermon is about the gurgling volcano Tungurahua, 24 miles northeast of where the church is situated in Chalan, a small village in the mountains above Riobamba, a city of 120,000. In recent months, 25,000 people have been evacuated from the foothills around the 16,475-foot mountain.

Residents of Riobamba wear masks and goggles when they go outdoors to protect them from the smoke and ash.

Roche believes Tungurahua—just one of Ecuador's 31 mostly inactive volcanoes—is a sign of God's wrath because of immorality and corruption among his people, the Quichua. With 13 million people in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the Quichua comprise the largest indigenous group in Latin America. (They are known as Quechua in Peru and Bolivia.)

But the volcano has also given members of the congregation an open door to evangelize in Riobamba. Roche tells how he has preached in the plazas and open markets of the city and found a receptive audience. "People are eager to hear under these circumstances," he says.

Vibrant growth of Protestant churches among the Quichua in Ecuador began in the 1960s. In the last 30 years, there has been a twentyfold increase among Protestants, according to Operation World. But the success of Quichua mission work did not happen overnight, demonstrating the merit of persistent outreach, the importance of Bible translation work, and the value of developing local church leaders early on.

Less than a century ago, no Protestant missionary was at work among the Quichua. Unlike most other Indian groups, the Quichua—descendants of the ancient Incas—retained their own language and culture in the four centuries following the destruction of their empire. But they survived. The Quichua, at 4.5 million, are slightly more than 40 percent of Ecuador's population.

Beginning with the sixteenth century Spanish conquest, the Quichua were pressed into service, building the colonial empire. And along with subjugation, Spanish colonists brought conversion of the Quichua to Roman Catholicism. Ecuador became one of the Catholic Church's greatest strongholds.

But starting in the 1890s, Ecuador began to loosen its official ties to the Roman church, eventually adopting explicit separation of church and state. Both the Gospel Missionary Union (GMU) of Kansas City, Missouri, and the Christian Missionary and Alliance (CMA) of Colorado Springs operated within the country by 1897. GMU concentrated on the north, and CMA work focused on Imbabura Province in the north.

For decades they had no competition from other Protestant missions groups—and, for more than half a century, no results.

Progress was slow, in part, because foreigners had long been associated with oppression. In addition, few wanted to join a new faith if it meant alienating their families and opposing the dominant Catholic culture.

Today, the Quichua work in Ecuador has become one of the most successful Protestant missionary efforts of the late twentieth century, anchored in providing Scripture in tribal languages and intensively training local church leadership.

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January 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1