Texans on Mission is not only bringing fresh water and good hygiene practices to people in the Andes Mountains of Peru, but also bringing the gospel, with 46 professions of faith recorded during an August mission trip.
“We have moved our efforts in Peru from the Amazon River basin to the mountains because of various logistical challenges that surfaced along the river,” said Mitch Chapman, director of Texans on Mission Water Impact. “Now we are seeing God really move through our work.”
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Texans on Mission drilling efforts in Peru have produced one successful well in the Andes, and the August team began work on a second well for another community with residents scattered throughout the mountainside.
The dry season lasts six to eight months in the Andes. Springs dry up, and pond water becomes “nasty,” said Julio Campos of Gateway Church in Justin, one of the Texas leaders in the work in Peru.
“The pond water is all they have to drink unless they walk or get to other water sources, in some cases two to four hours down the mountain and back during the dry season.”
Challenges in the mountains
Water Impact identified increasing opportunities in the area and began working in the region in January, but the mountains create challenges.
The mountain faces are, in places, “sheer straight up and very close to each other,” requiring multiple roadway “switchbacks all the way up the mountains,” Campos said.
Still, the first Texans on Mission well struck water at 80 meters in Capulipampa.
The August mission team divided into two groups — one to drill a new well in Llimbe and the other heading to Capulipampa to do evangelistic work.
Women receptive to the gospel
The evangelism team had planned to work with children — telling Bible stories, distributing Gold-to-Gold gospel bracelets, playing games and singing. It turned out the women of the community were open to learning through Bible study, which diverted some of the team’s efforts.
Team member Delia Lozuk of Alice “ministers like no one I’ve ever seen,” Campos said. “Ministry to women is her forte.”
On the first day, 10 to 15 mothers brought their children to be part of the activities, Campos said. By the end of the day, Lozuk “got a Bible study going on” with even more women.
Team member Rhonda Dodson said about 40 women ended up participating in the two days of Bible study led by Lozuk, and 30 of them eventually made professions of faith in Christ.
She and her husband Paul are former missionaries to Venezuela, and both speak Spanish.
“My wife Delia has an extraordinary anointing with women,” and especially with “these people that are descendants of the Inca,” Paul Lozuk said.
He explained people living in the Andes are a distinctive group.
“They are short of stature and extremely strong,” walking long distances at high altitude, he said. They also dress in traditional clothing, and “the women don’t talk too much to the men, especially foreigners,” he added.
The cultural preference for women to communicate with other women opened the door for ministry in the Andes.
Making Bibles available
“One thing I understand,” Delia Lozuk said. “There is no doubt that these people from Peru really do need Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and most do not have a Bible.”
Local pastor Alex Miranda had boxes of New Testaments, so the team handed them out. “He had enough for every single person, every woman,” she said, and copies of the complete Bible were ordered for distribution.
“The people were very hungry for the Word” of God, said Dodson, a Texans on Mission Water Impact employee who was on her first mission trip. “When we were in Capulipampa, the ladies’ request was for Bibles. So, of course, we’re going to get them Bibles.”
The Bible studies took on the form of a conversation, Delia Lozuk said. The women living in the Andes were “hungry for something, and I asked them, in the middle of just having small conversations, about the Bible, about the Word of God. I was trying to put everything I could in there so they could get a little bit of a taste of what I was trying to say.”
A ‘God-appointed time’
She saw the trip to Peru as being a “God-appointed time for me. … I didn’t know I was going to minister to women.” She went only as an interpreter, but “something happened the first day” as more and more women gathered.
“Women are very hungry, but we don’t know, because they don’t speak with the men for some reason,” she said. “They’ve heard about a Savior, but they don’t know the Bible.
“I’m thinking, ‘What the heck are you doing, Delia?’ But it’s not my show; it’s God’s show.” So she did another unexpected thing; she gave the women homework — Scripture to read so they can discuss it together sometime in the future.
With an expectation of a return trip, Lozuk promised to “literally give them a little nugget about every single book in the Bible” to whet their appetite for additional Bible study.
Six of the women attending the meetings stood up with excitement when asked if anyone had given their lives to Christ. By the end of the two days, all of the others had professed faith in Christ.
‘God just took control’
“It was my impression that God set all this up,” and the team “just walked into it,” Delia Lozuk said. “God just took control, and that’s really what happened. … God did this through us.”
The drilling of the second well and the evangelistic outreach did not occur in a vacuum of ease. Campos said he asked in his daily devotionals with the team for “God to show up.”
When luggage and a passport were lost, the group prayed. No matter the difficulty, Campos said the theme of the trip became, “just ask”— ask God for help. And each time, the prayers were answered.
With the success of the well drilling and the women’s ministry, Campos said the mission trip “went fantastic.”
Chapman said: “The well we drilled in Capulipampa laid the foundation for all that happened evangelistically on the trip. And now, with the second well in Llimbe, we are continuing to pursue our vision of bringing clean, sustainable water to as many people as possible while sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ to people in need of both.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Ferrell Foster and originally published by Baptist Standard.
