Young Christians from a river community in the Amazon have been baptised and are now training to be pastors thanks to UK charity BMS World Mission.
Hear two of their testimonies and watch their baptisms in the Amazon in this beautiful two-minute video.
Llino, one of the Christians who recently got baptised, says that after becoming a Christian he felt abandoned. "In my community, a Peruvian missionary came and evangelised my village, and that is when I accepted Christ. But then that person carried on up the river and left us behind and we felt like we had been left on our own."
The way Llino felt is not unusual. Many Christians living in Peru's Amazon region feel extremely isolated – with a lot of them living in river communities only accessible by boat. Most of these Christians have never had any formal theological training and many of them did not even get the chance to complete primary education.
Everything changed for Llino when another pastor visited his village and told him about the Nauta Integral Mission Training Centre, set up with support from BMS World Mission to meet the need for training and fellowship these isolated pastors and Christians were experiencing.
Through training at the centre – studying the Bible, practising preaching and learning about administration, nutrition and basic health and hygiene – Llino and five other young Christians recently decided to publicly commit their lives to Christ through baptism.
"By getting baptised I was taking a step of obedience, as Jesus taught that we should be baptised," says Llino. "My dream is to reach the rest of my community and get them all in the church. And then I want us to reach out to the surrounding communities, some of which don't have the gospel yet."
Llino's passion for spreading the good news is shared by all those who were baptised – and the many other pastors and Christians who have come to the residential training courses at the Nauta Integral Mission Training Centre since it opened in 2012. "For me, this centre is very important," says Llino, "because what we are learning here we can teach others."
To find out more about BMS and opportunities to join their work overseas, click here.
