Mary, one of e3’s staff members, recently returned from leading an e3 mission trip to Colombia. It was one of e3’s biggest trips with 48 trip participants.
During the weeklong trip, the team worked in 20 different areas with local church plants and their members. The team was able to share the Gospel more than 2,800 times, and 2,014 people professed Jesus Christ as their Savior.
“It was amazing,” Mary said.
The team split into 10 smaller groups, and most went door to door to share the Gospel. Mary’s group, however, included an artist named Cory who creates chalk art to draw people in.
“We go to the area where there’s a church plant, and Cory does a chalk drawing of a cross or something to do with the plan of salvation,” Mary said. “He talks to people as they go by and explains the story behind it. It draws a crowd in the neighborhood of the church plant and enables us to have Gospel conversations.”
When sharing the Gospel, each trip participant would team with a local church member and a translator. If someone accepted Christ, the church member took down their information to follow up with them for discipleship. At the end of their time at each site, the team would pray over all the names on the list then hand it over to the pastor of the church plant.
“We make a big deal of handing the names over to the pastor,” Mary said. “We basically tell them, ‘These are your people to shepherd now.’”
One of the most fulfilling things to see on the trip was when the Gospel message finally clicked for one woman Mary shared with, she said.
“I started by asking her, ‘If you died, why would God allow you into heaven?’ And she said, ‘Maybe because I did more good things than bad things.’ I went through the Gospel with her and she followed along and was excited and seemed to understand. Then she prayed to receive Christ. I asked her the same question at the end and she said, ‘I’d tell God that I put my trust in Christ.’ She got it!”