Thank you so much for your generous support of our team and the Venezuelans God calls us to serve. Your faithful intercession and sacrificial giving provide for the most vulnerable Venezuelans’ overwhelming physical and spiritual needs, offering tangible aid through food distribution, medical care, trauma healing, infrastructure development, and ongoing gospel advance and missions training.

Opportunities Abound. Feeding programs here open lots of doors otherwise closed to the gospel. As a result, many are coming to faith and being baptized.

Recently national partners in a church-based outreach ministered to a family of six experiencing health issues, economic crisis, and struggling relationship issues. Through this ministry, the entire family accepted Jesus as their Savior.

Your generosity supports over 330 churches located all over Venezuela. Because of your support, more communities are open to hearing the gospel than ever before. Meeting physical needs has helped build relationships and led to changed lives.

Please Join Us in Prayer:

• Pray for the Venezuelan elderly, as many of them have been left with the responsibility of grandchildren as many young parents have left to find jobs in other countries. Many of these elderly do not have any income and rely on other family members or churches to feed them.
• Pray for the Venezuelans trying to find work in other countries. Obtaining correct paperwork is challenging and lengthy, yet they cannot legally work without papers.
• Please pray for churches in Venezuela, helping to feed and minister to those in need. As a result of their faithfulness, many are becoming believers and being baptized.

Thank you for your generosity and prayers. Your sacrificial gifts and intercession are truly transforming lives as we partner together to solve the world’s greatest problem, lostness.

It’s tough to overstate the trauma the Venezuelan people have experienced over the last decade. The price of the country’s chief export, oil, cratered. Hyperinflation at one point hit 10 million percent. The country’s power grid failed, leading to massive power shortages. An unpopular dictator defied an election. More than 4.6 million people fled the country from 2016 to 2019.

Then came COVID-19.

For the nearly 2 million Venezuelans, like Omer and Vanessa Fuentes and their three children, who left for nearby Colombia, life didn’t improve this year in their new country. COVID-19 hammered Colombia, completely shuttering the area where many Venezuelan refugees worked. Despite the hardships they had just left, some returned to their Venezuelan homeland.

International Mission Board missionaries in Colombia are helping families like the Fuentes deal with the trauma of the last few years—and helping them start churches in their neighborhoods.

Before leaving Venezuela, Omer and Vanessa had a growing ministry, and Omer had a good job as a computer programmer. As a youth minister, he had seen 23 youth baptized and had 100 youth attending the church in just three years. Yet nationwide blackouts cost Omer his technology clients, making it impossible for him to feed his family.

“It was getting tougher and tougher in Venezuela,” Omer said. “We had only rice to eat. It came to a point that we had to make the decision to go or we wouldn’t have enough money to leave.”

In early 2019, Omer and Vanessa along with their three children left for Colombia. Last summer, they met IMB missionary Matthew Fisher, who helped the family deal with the traumatic events that forced them to leave Venezuela, and partnered with them to start a church in their home.

Fisher used American Bible Society’s Trauma Healing Institute (THI) curriculum to help Venezuelans like the Fuentes deal with trauma in their lives. The curriculum teaches “basic biblical and mental health principles that help people respond to emotional trauma,” according to the program website. THI teaches these principles using Bible stories, such as creation, the fall, and Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In describing the impact of the THI program, Vanessa pointed to the chapter on bringing their pain to the cross.

“Bringing our pain to the cross was very beautiful,” Vanessa said. “It gave us peace with ourselves, to be okay with why we came here.”

During this lesson, the couple wrote down their hurts and then burned them to symbolize that they had taken those hurts to the cross. The Fuentes’ move to Colombia had been traumatic and caused family upheaval. The THI workshop helped them overcome several painful family events.

For Fisher, THI provided an avenue to use his background in counseling to start churches in the Bogotá area. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology, a master of divinity degree and a master’s degree in pastoral counseling.

As a church planting catalyst, Fisher often struggled to gather groups in the city.

“It was the hardest thing to get people into groups because everyone was super busy,” said Fisher, who is from Houston. “Everyone is trying to survive in the city. It was hard to find something interesting enough for them to come.”

But in THI Fisher finally found a ministry that garnered enough interest to be a gathering opportunity. Since Venezuelan refugees had been through significant trauma in recent years—even the move itself traumatized many—they were open to a THI workshop. Plus, the workshops helped people process personal traumatic events like the death of family members, childhood abuse and other violent acts committed against them.

“I love it because I am able to see their hurts being healed as they bring them to the cross, understanding that God isn’t causing the situation,” Fisher said. “It’s really the will of man and Satan. Everyone blames God, but he isn’t the one to blame. People come into the workshops blaming God, but they leave feeling relief because they see the Bible verses that show the biblical truth about dealing with sin.”

Fisher held 16 workshops throughout Colombia. At the end of the workshops, he asked participants if they wanted to continue meeting. Four of them, including Omer’s group, decided to do so. Fisher led two of the groups himself.

Thanks to provision by Send Relief, Fisher was able to give the Fuentes 100 bags of rice, along with other dietary staples, over two weeks as dramatic COVID-19 lockdowns kept many of their neighbors out of work. The food helped the Fuentes support their neighbors and share Christ in the process. In total, the Fuentes engaged 50 families (giving each a bag of rice per week). Fifteen people became followers of Jesus through the effort.

Fisher notes that many of the people they gave the food to were Colombians who had not treated the Venezuelan refugees well at first. The gift of food was able to soften their hearts toward the Fuentes, their church and ultimately the gospel.

“The people who were able to donate the money so we, as missionaries, were able to go out and buy the food and be able to provide it for the church that we helped plant—this was such a blessing,” Fisher said. “I see this totally as a God thing. Because the Colombians had been so closed off and heart-hearted, some were even racists [toward the Venezuelans], and they were able to receive food, because they were suffering as well, from this church. They are opening up to the gospel.”

Frida Robles, an IMB missionary who leads the missions department at Baptist International Theological Seminary in Cali, Colombia, has been training leaders throughout the country to use THI in their ministry contexts. She also helped train volunteers, both believers and non-believers, throughout the country who are engaging Venezuelan refugees.

“There were a lot of people who were psychologists, who were professionals in the government here in Cali, but they were not believers,” said Robles, who is a master trainer for THI. “But when they received a little bit of the trauma training, they really liked it. They said, ‘This is what we need. We’re doing the psychology part, but we’re not touching the spiritual. We didn’t even have it.’ After that opportunity, we were having psychologists interested in spiritual matters, because they were dealing with psychology, but it wasn’t answering all the needs of the people.”

Robles believes that tools like THI help missionaries and other ministry leaders to start new groups and reach non-believers without people feeling like they’re being trapped in a religious group.

“This is a very strong tool for us, as believers, because this is a tool to open new work for people who are suffering,” Robles said. “Even people who know God deal with trauma, but they have God on their side. But the people who don’t know the Lord, it’s worse for them because they don’t have the holy presence of God to strengthen them and to give them the peace that only God can give. Also, it allows us to open up a new Bible study or a new group in a community without people feeling trapped in something religious.”

Venezuela is a nation swiftly plummeting to collapse. Hyperinflation continues to keep the cost of food out of reach of the majority of the population; very little medical care is available in the country; schools are closed, and violent crimes are more prevalent each day. Our IMB team continues to use the gifts from generous Southern Baptists to provide for those caught in the maelstrom of this humanitarian crisis.

• We provide food through 11 distribution centers throughout the country. Venezuelan churches receive the food and, in turn, provide meals through church feeding centers in the communities. We purchase the food in Venezuela and then distribute it in the regions around the distribution centers. Food is available in-country, but the prices are above what any Venezuelan can afford to purchase.
• We provide basic medicines that we distribute through a network of trusted medical clinics in Venezuela. This ministry will be more difficult with the closing of the Colombian border due to COVID-19.
• We offer care for Venezuelan refugees as they enter Colombia. They have an opportunity to receive basic medical care, take a shower to restore human dignity, and wash their clothes. For some who have no shoes or shoes that are not suitable for walking the mountain pass as they set out across Colombia, we provide sturdy walking shoes and socks.
• We provide meals for pastors and their wives at pastor-and-missionary conferences once a year, so pastors who are continually giving to their congregations and the people they are trying to reach have a couple of days of retreat at the Baptist camp. They receive basic medical and dental care, eat a few good meals, gain encouragement through times of worship and teaching from God’s Word. The training they receive helps them return, refreshed, to their churches and ministry to people in the country.
• We offer trauma-healing training to pastors and lay leaders so they can lead small groups enabling people to work through the trauma they are experiencing as their country declines.

We support projects that train people to grow high-yield gardens to raise their own food at a local level.

The refuge center at the border town of Cucuta, Colombia, is currently closed due to the border closing by the Colombian government as well as rules against gathering groups. The entire country of Colombia is sequestered in home-quarantine for 30 days, which affects our ministry to displaced people in Colombia. That important ministry is temporarily on hold until the quarantine is lifted.

Experts predict that there will be another significant wave of refugees fleeing Venezuela on the backside of this pandemic when the Venezuelan government fails to take care of its people. Through your generosity, we will respond with the ongoing provision of food, shelter and medicines for those choosing to stay in the country. We will continue to support local Baptist churches in Venezuela and their ministries, as well as reaching out to the refugees who are fleeing the country.

Amid the chaos and heartbreak, we know that God is still enthroned above economic collapse and global pandemics. His timing is perfect, as he showed some American who volunteered with us recently. Read their story of God’s provision for Venezuelan refugees and here: https://www.imb.org/2019/10/25/hope-for-weary-souls/.

All of these ministries are platforms to share the gospel. Those who receive food, medical care, or help for their trauma also hear a gospel message about the hope we have in Jesus. Many Venezuelans have come to know the Lord this past year through these ministries, and new churches have been planted. The gospel continues to bring healing and hope to the people of Venezuela as we demonstrate the love of Jesus in a practical way. Thank you for your prayers and generous support of these critical ministries. You are the hands and feet of Christ, offering a lifeline to an overwhelmed and traumatized people who desperately need hope.