ASUNCION, Paraguay — The mission didn’t go as planned.

Twenty years ago, a team of Freed-Hardeman University graduates moved to the capital of this South American nation of 6.8 million people.

Trained by Great Cities Missions, they followed a time-tested blueprint used by the 48-year-old ministry, which seeks to establish lighthouses — strong, thriving churches — in major cities across Latin America. They chose Paraguay, a landlocked nation bordered by Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina that rarely gets a mention in travel guides.

In the east, it’s tropical and humid. Its western lands, part of an expanse called Gran Chaco, are arid and hot. In the late 1800s, the country lost more than a fourth of its territory and nearly half of its population in a disastrous war. It is one of the poorest nations in South America.

The mission team worked alongside a small Iglesia de Cristo (Church of Christ) that dates back to the 1970s, when missionaries from nearby Uruguay moved here and baptized a handful of converts. Team members made instant friendships with the Paraguayan Christians, who helped them find apartments and taught them to navigate the metro area of 2.3 million.

The teammates offered free English lessons using the Bible. Baptisms followed. Eventually, the missionaries launched a congregation in the strategic location of Sacramento, a central avenue in Asunción. They began worshiping there on Sunday afternoons alongside some of their students.

Many of the older Paraguayan Christians were there, too. Often, they would worship with their own congregation on Sunday morning and with the new church, the Iglesia de Cristo Sacramento, in the afternoon.

As time went on, maintaining two congregations felt more and more like breaking up a family.

So, the church plant became a church merger.

Now, as the last remaining members of the mission team move to the U.S., the Sacramento church is 60 members strong — and looking to plant new churches. The congregation supports two small congregations in the suburbs of Asunción and has a vision to reach souls in the country’s rural lands.

“They don’t want to be a megachurch,” former missionary Enoch Rinks said. “They want to be a family church that plants other churches.”

A mission team ‘along for the ride’

Family brought Rinks back to Asunción.

He met his wife here — Laura, an Italian native whose family moved to Paraguay when she was 11. Now they live in Tennessee, where Enoch Rinks oversees Spanish-language works for the Brentwood Hills Church of Christ in Nashville and works in development for Great Cities Missions.

During a break from school, the couple brought their two daughters to Asunción to visit their grandparents — and their church family.

Rinks was part of the mission team’s first wave, which included Ethan and Ashley Hardin, Vanessa Heady and Chris and Vickie Fry. Josh and Amanda Ketchum trained with the team but didn’t make the move to Asunción, though Rinks considers them a major influence on and supporter of the mission. Josh Ketchum now is a professor at Freed-Hardeman in Henderson, Tenn.

On a Wednesday afternoon, as temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Enoch and Laura Rinks sat at a lunch table in a boutique hotel in Asunción. Joining them were Josh and Cara Blackmer, who served on the mission team from 2009 to 2014, and Ale and Brittnea Yegros, the last remaining members of the Asunción team.

They swapped stories in their shared vernacular, a mix of English, Spanish and a smattering of words in an indigenous language, Guaraní. They laughed as they recalled peculiar souls they’ve encountered and cultural lessons they learned the hard way.

Enoch Rinks spent a couple of weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before he began his mission in Paraguay. He learned that Argentines, both men and women, greet each other with pecks on the cheek.

He arrived in Asunción and met Ale Yegros, then a teenager. When Rinks leaned in for a greeting smooch, Ale quickly informed him that “guys don’t do that here — not with other guys.”

Yegros’ parents, Ike (pronounced “EE-kay”) and Nora, became adoptive parents to the young missionaries, including Vanessa Heady, who came to the mission field as a single woman. One week after arriving in Asunción, Nora Yegros came to Heady’s door and said, “Pack your bags. You’re coming to live with us.” Heady lived with the family for two months.

“What I gained was so much more than what I gave,” the former missionary said. “In the Yegroses and their children, and in the entire church family at Sacramento, I gained the hundred-fold family God promises.”

In 2006, Heady married Josh Hardin, who moved to Asunción to join the work.

“I knew that if she were that dedicated to God,” Josh Hardin said, “then our marriage would work.”

The missionaries became role models for the Yegros’ children, including Ale, who now has two children of his own.

His wife, Brittnea, moved to Paraguay in 2007. The daughter of missionaries to Papua New Guinea, she watched Asunción team members make presentations about the work during their visits to Freed-Hardeman. After graduating from FHU, she joined the team as its first members prepared to return to the U.S.

Now Ale and Brittnea are making their final, bittersweet preparations to move to the U.S. They’ll be the final members of the mission team to say goodbye.

Although they arrived at different points in the mission’s life cycle, the missionaries share a conviction that they’ve seen tremendous spiritual growth — in the congregation and in themselves — during their time here.

As they ate, laughed and swapped memories of their years in Paraguay, Enoch Rinks thought back to his first days in Asunción — and all the work he planned to do.

“In hindsight, I realize that maybe God was working on me,” Rinks said. “And I was along for the ride to witness and to be a small player in this bigger thing that he’s doing.”

‘Yelling for help to the Lord’

That evening, another group of Christians gathered at another table, this one in the meeting place of the Sacramento church.

Seven of them were longtime believers who were part of the church before the mission team arrived. One by one, they shared stories of how they became part of the Church of Christ. Some grew up nominally Catholic or without any religious foundation. Some were frustrated by priests and pastors who couldn’t answer their questions. All were seeking answers.

Odila Lemos is the longest-tenured member of the church in Asunción — and a former missionary herself. A native of Uruguay, she remembers the day she came across a flier advertising a gospel meeting in the capital, Montevideo. She was baptized there, and she and her husband, Juan

Urriola, moved to Asunción in 1980 to work with the church.

“I felt like there was something calling me here,” Lemos said. After her husband passed away in the 1990s, she stayed.

A decade later, the U.S. mission team felt the same calling. Their plan was to get to know the established Christians and work alongside them as they prepared to plant a new congregation.

The timing was perfect, said Ike Yegros, another longtime church member and the father of Ale Yegros.

When the mission team arrived, the congregation had several families with children approaching or in their teenage years, including the five children of Yegros and his wife, Nora.

Without strong role models, “are they going to be nonbelievers?” Yegros worried. “Are they going to be atheists?”

“We were yelling for help to the Lord, really,” Ike Yegros said. The young Christian families gave the teenagers a new set of friends and mentors. Ale Yegros became part of the team, and other teens matured into strong Christians.

Through English-language studies, youth events and other activities, the team members “brought a lot of energy, high energy” to the church, Lemos said.

Mirta Vera served as the team’s secretary. She kept a calendar of their activities and helped the first team members in their transition to South American life.

Vera also studied the Bible with the team and at age 40, decided to be baptized. Her sister, a longtime Christian, told her that she had been praying for Vera to make the decision for 20 years.

“But she had never studied the Bible with me,” Vera said. “Once I opened God’s Word, it didn’t take long.”

As the final missionaries head to the U.S., the Paraguayan Christians are committed to continue their work. They know that the church building won’t be full of activity as it was in the days when team members hosted English lessons here, but “there are still a lot of people that will carry on the mission of the church,” Nora Yegros said.

Her husband added, “The mission team that came, they left a legacy of how to live the Christian faith and how to live the Christian life.”

The most valuable gift the team gave the Paraguayans “is that they didn’t abandon us, they didn’t forget about us.”

A shared, continuing vision

The mission didn’t go as planned.

Or maybe it did.

The church that the mission team planted in Asunción ended up absorbing the church that already was here.

That may seem like a net gain of zero, Ike Yegros said, but now the energized Iglesia de Cristo Sacramento seeks to plant new churches to reach their fellow 6.8 million Paraguayans with the Gospel.

About two years ago the church launched a congregation in the growing community of Mariano Roque Alonso, northeast of Asunción. The church recruited Cesar Gadea, a Nicaraguan preacher and a graduate of Baxter Institute in Honduras, to serve as the church’s minister, with support from the Sacramento church and the Austin Avenue Church of Christ in Brownwood, Texas.

Another new congregation meets in San Lorenzo, an eastern suburb of Asunción. Eliezar Perez, a native of Panama and graduate of a ministry training school in Guatemala, ministers for the church.

Kelley Grant, executive director of Great Cities Missions, told the Chronicle that the ministry’s goal goes beyond planting churches. Long-term, the ministry seeks to support Indigenous Christians as they take the lead in spreading the Gospel in their homelands.

That’s what the Sacramento church is doing, Grant said, adding that Ike Yegros now serves on Great Cities’ board of trustees.

Paraguayan church members also are beginning to focus outside their city, praying for opportunities to reach lost souls in the vast Gran Chaco region and other parts of their often-overlooked homeland.

Those are the plans, anyway. The Paraguayan Christians — and the Americans who have become part of their family in the past two decades — know that things don’t always go as planned.

During lunch with his fellow missionaries, Josh Blackmer recalled a time when he felt as if nothing was going as it should. He was overwhelmed by the challenges of the mission. He shared his frustrations with Ike Yegros.

“We came here with plans. We came here with ideas,” he told the elder Paraguayan. “But we didn’t come here with a brown bag full of answers. It feels like we’re just trying to work through it together.”

The elder Paraguayan replied, “That’s why this works.”