Houston Baptists transform lives in Peru

HOUSTON (ABP)—What people can imagine is one thing, Houston cardiologist Luis Campos insists, and what God can do is altogether different.

Cardiologist Luis Campos, a member of South Main Baptist Church, has been involved about 10 years with ministries through Peru-based Operación San Andrés. (PHOTOS/Courtesy of South Main Baptist Church in Houston)

Campos, a 67-year-old member of South Main Baptist Church, said he has witnessed that repeatedly in almost a decade of ministry with Peru-based Operación San Andrés.

"At the beginning, we were totally ignorant of what it meant to create a ministry to people in extreme poverty," Campos said. "I thought we were going to go in there and have a little medical clinic and help people."

That's what Campos and 15 other short-term medical missionaries did in 2003 during their first visit to Collique, a shantytown located outside Lima.

But a subsequent decision to keep returning to that community transformed the ministry into a base of operations supported by hundreds of visiting and full-time missionaries from Texas, other states and parts of Europe.

"And little by little," Campos said, "this community has been transformed."

Vince Smith, a friend of Campos and member of the South Main Sunday school class that created the ministry, recalled an early conversation about whether to return to Collique.

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"I think it was providential that the decision was made to keep going back to this place to establish relationships," he said.  

The Texas Baptist Offering for World Hunger supports the ministry. So does the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which has two missionaries serving at the ministry's base in Collique.

The ministry has expanded its offerings. Besides making two medical trips a year, it has a team of social workers and psychologists and offers feeding, marriage counseling, construction, athletic and other programs year-round.

That consistency benefits volunteers like Smith, who left for his eighth mission trip to Peru Oct. 5.

 "There are several people I would identify as real friends," he said.

The benefit of making repeated trips to the same place is seeing spiritual and physical seeds blossom, said Susan Moore, South Main's ministry coordinator.

Susan Moore, ministry coordinator at South Main Baptist Church in Houston, has seen children she began working with on her first trip grow into Christian maturity.

Moore, who left for her 11th visit Oct. 5, said it's especially powerful to see children she began working with on her first trip become teens and adults.

"When I first started going and working with the children, they were malnourished," she said. "Now we can see such a difference in the children and how they've grown and flourished."

It's a similar story in regard to faith. Many in Collique either are not Christians or have very tenuous connections to any religious groups.

She leads Vacation Bible School and helps with home Bible studies to provide children and families a biblical foundation for their faith.

"Are we trying to make these children good little Baptists? Certainly not," she said. "But everything we do is permeated by a strong desire to introduce them to Christ."

Campos shares that motive because he was helped by European missionaries as a boy growing up in Peru. But he's also driven now by the knowledge that the ministry can become much more than it is now.

Plans for the next decade include preventative health care programs, a ministry for unwed teens, education programs and helping local residents better run existing businesses, or start new ones.

Combined with religious education, such programs can convince those living under the oppression of poverty God cares about them.

"That changes the way they live," Campos said. "That's transformation."