Where the Action Isn’t

Although still relatively young (forty), Bruce Bell already has several fruitful Christian ministries behind him. He is now confronting what he feels is the neediest area in the world today. Bell became a Christian at the age of nineteen while a student at Phillips University, Enid, Oklahoma. He was baptized at a Baptist church in Atlanta and worked for a time with Youth for Christ before becoming a missionary. He was interviewed by the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

QUESTION. How did you become a missionary?

ANSWER. I was working with Youth for Christ, and after marrying I was called to pastor a Baptist church in Marietta, Georgia. I was ordained there. I organized a missionary conference, and we prayed earnestly that God would call some young couple out of our church. The first night of the conference my wife and I surrendered to go to the mission field, and six weeks later we went. We were greatly influenced by Hudson Taylor’s life and believed—perhaps foolishly, although that’s debatable—that all we needed to do was explain our needs to God, who would provide them. He has now for sixteen years.

Q. You went first to Mexico. Why there?

A. We had been burdened for Mexico for some time. We had made an exploratory trip down there, and we felt that this was the place.

Q. Did you speak Spanish?

A. No. The first thing we did in Mexico was to enroll in a language school.

Q. How did your ministry get started?

A. We worked for a time in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and had thought about working with primitive Indians. We made some exploratory trips into the mountains. Meanwhile, we were invited to preach an evangelistic campaign in a very small Baptist church in southern Mexico. After the campaign they asked if I would consider pastoring for a while. I accepted for a period of six months, as I recall, to help them in a sort of extended crusade. That turned into six years. It became one of the largest Baptist Sunday schools in the country, about 450 attendance by the time we left. A great number of young people went out from the church into full-time Christian service. One of them returned, after training to be a minister, and worked with me for a while. Then we turned the work over to him entirely.

Q. Did the church continue to prosper?

A. Not long after, they held a vacation Bible school which attracted two to three thousand youngsters—a total attendance of 10,000 in three weeks. The next year it was 17,000 in a town of 70,000.

Q. Where did you go from there?

A. I had three burdens at the time—planting churches, training local preachers, accepting invitations to conduct evangelistic crusades. So I tried to combine the three by organizing a traveling Bible school. I taught the young people in the morning. They went out evangelizing in the afternoon, and we had crusades at night. We started several churches in Mexico in that way and turned them over to national workers. During this time our family lived in a twenty-three-foot travel trailer. There were six of us, and that was quite an experience. We did it for two years. We were invited to Guatemala and started a church there that continues to function. We were also invited to San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, and we went there in July, 1970. We went into a middle-class area.

Q. What’s the point?

A. Most missionaries in South America realize that they are not reaching the professional class. Our work went quite slowly at first. In four months we were ready to organize with thirty-eight charter members. We felt we had to “discriminate” because the Gospel has such a reputation for being for the low-class people. In seeking members we visited only middle-class people; however, we did not discriminate in the church itself. After about two years we became known as the middle-class church in El Salvador.

Q. Were you able to do that and still preserve the universality of the Gospel?

A. Certainly.

Q. What has been the attitude of the Latin governments toward the churches you were involved in?

A. Very good. This is true even in what are termed dictatorships. I know of no official persecutions at the present time in Latin America.

Q. How about “unofficial”?

A. Well, I can tell you about a personal problem. When I returned to El Salvador last June, I was told I no longer had permission to reside there. It was a tremendous surprise. I can’t go into detail, but it was not a government decision. The long and short of it was that we had to leave, and it has been very hard for me to get back in, even to visit.

Q. Whatever became of the traveling Bible school in Mexico?

A. We turned it into a permanent institution. It is a Bible school on a high academic level.

Q. What kind of missionary vision is there among Latin American believers?

A. This has been a problem. The Latin American churches are not accustomed to supporting missionaries. One of the things I have been trying to do is to establish a Latin America-based mission board. It’s tough. The denominational lines are very clearly drawn there, much more so than here in the States.

Q. You have mentioned that some of your students have been inclined toward missionary service in the Arab world. Why there?

A. My burden. I have shared my burden with the church. The Muslims in the Arab world are not being reached. We traveled in eleven countries from Spain through North Africa to Turkey, surveying outreach. We interviewed many people. My companion had served as a missionary in the Middle East for eleven years, so he had many contacts. Among 40 million people, the most liberal estimate we could come up with was 160 visible Christians in North Africa at the time, excluding the Spanish-speaking area. We were not able to find anyone who knows a single Christian in Libya! We learned of only one evangelical congregation in all of Turkey. It’s the neediest area in the world today, and I personally feel burdened to do something about it.

Q. How many missionaries are there in those countries?

A. There are more than you might believe. They have been run out of Morocco time and time again. They get back in. They are great people; they bless my heart. But they are people with their hands tied. It’s against the law to witness. It’s against the law to pass out literature. Something new has to be done.

Q. What do you have in mind?

A. My crazy idea, if I had the finances and everything else that was necessary, would be to recruit young Christians who would be willing to go to the universities of the Arab world to get their degrees. These would be committed, Bible-trained young people who would live Spirit-filled lives, identifying with the Arabs in every possible way and making friends. A student after two years ought to have 400 friends. The people are amazingly hospitable. The idea is that the Christian’s life is so different that the people are going to begin to ask questions. There is nothing in the law against sharing your faith in that way.

Q. Would there be any difference in acceptability between North and Latin Americans?

A. The Latin would be more readily received.

Q. Are you convincing mission-minded people that this idea of yours is worth trying?

A. Well, I have been told, “Bruce, you’re all mixed up. The harvest today is in Latin America.” One “expert” told me we should pull out what missionaries we have in the Arab world and put them where the harvest is. The people of Latin America are ready to be saved, he said, and there are not enough laborers. I say, however, that this harvest is taking place only because some daring souls sowed the seed in days gone by when things were a lot tougher and when it took a lot of courage and when results were not being seen. Those early pioneers were persistent and daring in the face of adversity. That’s the way we have to be now in the Arab world. We’ve got to start sowing the seed if there is ever going to be any harvest, and you can’t do that with just twenty missionaries among 110 million Arabs. We need to have hundreds of people who are ready to go over there. It means literally being willing to give your life. That’s why you can’t get the Arab Christians to return. There are all kinds who have been converted in the States and in France. Try to get them to go back. Many will laugh in your face, no matter how consecrated they are. They know it means giving their lives.

Q. What evidence is there that what you propose would work?

A. In the interviews we had in the Arab world we learned that virtually every Muslim won to Christianity was won because he was able to observe the life of a Christian over a prolonged period of time. This is verified in an excellent little book by Charles Marsh on how to share your faith with a Muslim. It’s essential reading, incidentally, for anyone interested in the Muslim world.

Q. Would it lay the groundwork for what you envision if some Arabic were taught here in the States among people who had an inclination toward ministry among Muslims?

A. Undoubtedly. It would also help a great deal to be very sound emotionally and to be very patient, realizing you’re working maybe a thirty-year plan.

Q. What are you staking your hopes on? That new Arab Christians can be supported economically from the outside, or that there will be changes in Arab society that will make them more acceptable in the future?

A. I say that a professional trained in what his country needs will not have the problem that an impoverished Muslim who is won to Christ has.

Q. But the first generation of Christians will be persecuted to some extent, right?

A. No doubt about it. We may have to support them.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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