A common question I am asked is “Why Argentina?”  What a great question!  There are almost 200 countries in the world (196 to be exact).  Out of all the countries in the world, why Argentina?  This is the question I will attempt to answer for this post.  This question is not directly addressing why the foreign mission field.  That is for another post (I might add, another post I have already published.  Click Here for that post).

Jesus tells us to “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” Matthew 28:19.  Argentina certainly qualifies as part of the “all nations”.  This may be quite obvious to some but it is good to remember.  The Great Commission Jesus gave is a global commission.  It is to all nations!

God never spoke audibly to me.  I never heard “Go to Argentina.”  I have a friend that explains it best. He will tell you that it all starts with an interest.  An interest becomes a burden.  That burden, when explored and considered may then become a “call”.  I think he is right.  For me, I had 3-4 countries that I had (and have) an interest in.  I had been praying for some of those countries each week for years.  Argentina was actually not my first “choice”.  The interest for one country became a burden that drove my wife and I to take a “survey trip”.  We went to two countries, one of them being Argentina.  I can tell you that the majority of my time was to be spent in another country, but the plane we were supposed to take never took off, causing us to miss a connecting flight, causing us to spend almost all of our time in Argentina.  This is not at all what we planned.  It seems God may have stopped my plans to take us on another route.

Seeing the incredible amount of need and the astonishing lack of laborers took me back.  I remember being in the back of a car after seeing some of the things God has done and driving past places with millions of people with little or no Gospel preaching churches.  It laid heavy on me.  I couldn’t get passed it.

I knew that Argentina is where we were going.  I was about to speak Leslie about it but didn’t need to. She saw what I saw.  She knew Argentina was where will plant churches and train men.  We were both excited about it (we both still are!).

This is how we came to surrender as church-planting missionaries to Argentina.