(May 23, 2014 - by Roger Reimer)  Remember the last exciting relay race you saw? Each time the baton was passed from one athlete to the next, you felt apprehension until the receiving runner had a firm hold of it and circled the track.

But the race wasn’t won until the last runner received the baton and crossed the finish line first. Clearly, the victory didn’t represent just one runner’s endeavors, but the combined efforts of the entire team.

On a recent training trip to Ecuador’s Chimborazo province, Américo and Kathy Saavedra, leaders of Apoyo (Spanish for “support”), Reach Beyond’s pastoral training ministry, found a discouraged church community. Much of the younger generation had left home in search of better lives in big cities without carrying the baton of faith.

“We want to move beyond just conversions to breadth and depth in discipleship,” reported the Saavedras.

That’s passing on the baton.

Overcoming generations of dominance by foreign groups has been slow among Ecuador’s rural people groups. In the first half of the 20th century, missionaries saw almost no spiritual fruit among the Quichuas, descendants of the Incas.

When veteran missionaries such as Henry and Pat Klassen of Avant Ministries arrived in Ecuador in 1953, the country had the lowest percentage of evangelicals in Latin America, according to Operation World.

The Klassens spoke of the struggles and challenges they experienced in bringing the gospel message to the people of Chimborazo province. Initially encountering skepticism and apathy, they later faced blatant opposition.

Despite the many challenges, they persevered, and after years of service, one by one Quichuas began coming to Christ. When they formed the first small Quichua church in their community, the new believers were reticent to hold positions of leadership.

By 1960 there were still only 17,000 believers nationwide, but that changed drastically in the subsequent decades. Today there are more than 1.2 million evangelical Christians in Ecuador—8.5 percent of the population.

Pastoral training, however, has lagged behind. Operation World points out the need for “improved availability and quality of pastoral training [in Ecuador]. False teaching and evangelical nominalism are otherwise inevitable.”

Manuel Chacaguasay Naula is an indigenous pastor from the highlands of Ecuador and an ethnic Quichua who is a participant in Apoyo’s efforts.

“Even as a young Christian, I held different positions in the church: deacon, youth leader and president of the church,” Chacaguasay explained. “At one point economic difficulties forced me and my family to leave my community and migrate to Quito. It was the perfect plan of God because at that time I had the opportunity to study God’s Word at the Latin American Biblical University.”

“Thanks to the brethren of my church and the ministry of Agape for the World, I was ordained as pastor in the year 2003,” Chacaguasay continued. “Since that time I have been pastor of Star of Bethlehem Church in San Bartolo. Today, along with encouraging believers to grow in maturity in Christ and bringing others to Him for salvation, I am involved in helping people in the community to build better lives for their families.”

The goal is to train competent trainers who can build strategic discipleship ministries for the strengthening of the local church.

To accomplish this, Apoyo recently launched two-year learning programs in local churches about a year ago. In previous years, staff members made significant inroads with their many seminars, “basic library” workshops and the three-year Training National Trainers (TNT) program that discipled pastors, showing them how to train their colleagues. Yet much work remains.

“The two-year training program, which we initiated a year ago in coordination with a team of three  pastors from Iñaquito Evangelical Church in Quito, focuses on leadership themes,” explained the Saavedras. “Between 30 and 40 select pastors and church leaders from the church plus affiliate churches meet at the church all day, once a month. The leadership themes are determined by the interests and needs of the group, much like the TNT model.”

Recently the Red Fraterna de Equipamiento Ministeria (REFEM or Ministry Training Network) began a similar group in Otavalo with indigenous Quichuas. The team also traveled to Chimborazo province to start a training effort with pastoral leaders selected by Chacaquasay.

Modeling Christianity in a way that is credible in the eyes of the next generation must be the goal of mission workers in Ecuador. When those of the next generation capture the essentials of the faith and incorporate those principles into their lives, one can say the baton has been passed on successfully.

Apoyo’s leaders are praying that through training efforts such as these, the baton of the faith will be passed on successfully to the next generation of Christ-followers.

Sources: Reach Beyond, Operation World