“The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
That truth in Luke 10:2 resounds in the life, the focus, the commitment of the Humphrey family—and they are answering the call. In December 2018, they will relocate to El Salvador as full-time missionaries.
The Humphreys are no strangers to missionary work. During the past ten years, Melissa, 33, and Ryan, 36, along with some of their seven children (ages 11 to 2), have traveled to El Salvador in Central America for short-term missions, working there 10 days to two weeks each trip.
Yet, how did they decide to become full-time missionaries? “It started about five years ago, and we saw the need for someone to engage with gang members (in El Salvador). We wanted to share Jesus with them . . . this will be our targeted group. In the past trips, we were mostly with at-risk students that were at risk to become part of the gang,” Ryan said. That recruitment typically happens at age 12-13. Most of them are from impoverished, broken families. Most have very little family structure; many are orphans. Although boys were once the exclusive target for gang membership, now Ryan estimates that only 6 out of 10 are boys; the rest are girls.
Do these gang members know they are being engaged by missionaries? “Well, we are not hiding who we are; we are sharing the Gospel. Gangs in El Salvador, from our understanding / communication with them, have two ways out of the gang—one is death and the other is what they call ‘being devoted to God.’ That means that they leave their old lifestyle behind. So, if you’re a gang member at 13, it’s everything you’ve known, your family, and leaving all that behind to find out something new because you’re now devoted to God. So, that is what we are sharing with them,” Ryan said.
With that devotion comes risk, incredible risk. “The risk is that all eyes are on them . . . they (the gang members) are always around them, and any slip-up of any kind could result in retaliation or death,” Melissa said.
The Humphreys will be working with a Discipleship Module that is obedience-based, with a lot of accountability and support in the process. “So, we are starting a new work. This is not something that is being done, that we are aware of in El Salvador, really anywhere that we are aware of . . . Our support is Owensboro Christian, as our sending church, and we’re connected with a group called Team Expansion (based out of Louisville). They are a sending agency; they equip and send missionaries to lots of different places,” Ryan said. “Their purpose is to reach the unreached, the unengaged people groups,” Melissa said. Team Expansion is a non-profit sending agency; they do not provide financial support. The Humphreys have a team of supportive churches and individuals to help them financially.
So, what will this look like? Where will the Humphreys go? Will they be joining other missionaries? What about their seven children?
“There are other people in El Salvador that we have built relationships with over the past 10 years that live in El Salvador. They are not with our organization. Most people that work in missions collaborate when they are working in the field. So, we will be collaborating, working with other individuals, other organizations that have been there for some time. That includes helping us find housing, assisting us getting the kids into school. They will be attending a college-prep style school there in El Salvador that teaches in English and teaches Spanish as well. They will be assisting us when we go into Language Studies for the first year; we will be doing a lot of cultural acquisition, learning to live in a new culture, learning about how they live, how Salvadorians live, and learning about what it means to live in a new culture, the different innuendos, things we do not know. We’ve learned to navigate those in our culture relatively easily, because we know what they are, we’ve grown up with them,” Ryan said. Both Melissa and Ryan speak a little Spanish, but they hope to become fluent speakers. They know they will be continuously learning the culture. They have been through several trainings that have helped equip them on how to assimilate into a culture, to learn about it. “The biggest change is that we are adults now and have kids, and we’re trying to train them in the culture they exist in today. The biggest shift for us is just being consummate learners. So from this point on, we do not know . . . we get to learn. We will always be learning,” Ryan said.
How do you come to a life-changing decision like this? It began with the short-term trips. Then, Ryan said that he felt that he wanted more. “I wanted more in the relationship that I had with the people there,” Ryan said. Initially, he did not see himself doing this full-time. About a year later, he told Melissa: “I think maybe God is changing that in my heart.” Melissa had already been praying about it. She was expecting their fourth child when they decided to take an exploratory trip in 2011—just the two of them—back to El Salvador. They had been on other mission trips to other parts of the world before this. “Our heart has always had a part of God’s desire for missions, for unreached people, for mission work in general, not just going for also sending,” Melissa said.
The process of collectively coming to a life-changing decision does not always follow simple, straight, congruent lines. Melissa knew Ryan’s heart was being changed, but Ryan did not want Melissa to feel pressured into making a decision he was feeling led to make. He knew firsthand how unfamiliar this culture would be to her and the rest of the family. Thus, they embarked on a visit to El Salvador together, followed by Ryan’s solo trip and then a 2012 family trip—including their three oldest girls—which was one of their longer trips. In among those trips, they moved to Kentucky from Pennsylvania. On the family trip, Ryan asked, “Could you let us come and experience life as though we were Salvadorians? We wanted to know about the simple things; like, how you do you go buy groceries? How do you get from Point A to Point B? What’s the language barrier really like? Is it significant or not? Can we make do with broken Spanish and speak English? What does it feel like to cook there? What do our kids think about it? How are they going to react? What about the climate?” Ryan said. Melissa interjected that sometimes it’s hotter in Owensboro than El Salvador, but the humidity, elevation and pollution are all different. Seven million populate the country of El Salvador, with 4 million living within the capital city.
“Statistics are saying that 70,000 of the population of the country is gang,” Melissa said. “There’s about a million that the gangs control. The gangs control neighborhoods and they determine what comes in and out of the neighborhoods,” Ryan added. “Those are the people that our hearts are going to be focusing on,” Melissa said.
In 1992, following a 20-year civil war there, gang members deported from the United States were released to the streets, since they really did not know what to do with them. This was an opportune time for gangs to grow and gain strength in political realms, according to Ryan. “The gangs have three words that they live by: Rape. Murder. Control. Those are their motto,” Ryan said. Most of the aggression and control are directed toward fellow Salvadorians, not U.S. citizens. The gangs are called cliques and each has a leader, de-centralized, unlike the Mafia. They come across as being civic-minded, as being concerned about the citizens and expect things of the government. Much of the murder is territorial. “The entry into the gang looks something like this: This kid lives in a community that is controlled by a gang. He is approached by a gang member, and is offered shelter, food, clothing and something to do. Typically, they give them like a cell phone, and it starts out with being a scout, sitting out on the street corner, letting them know the police are coming in . . . usually we ask for permission, we always ask for permission actually when we go into a gang community. We ask whoever we know is a contact in that community; sometimes it goes through another missionary who knows someone who lives in there, and we get permission to come in. That’s part of the good thing about them knowing what we are doing is they know why we are there,” Ryan said. The gangs do not try to subvert their presence, since they view missionaries as offering good to the community.
The Humphreys have three primary goals for their first two years in El Salvador. The first is to become fluent Salvadorian Spanish speakers; the second goal is to have more than a basic understanding of culture, to be able to navigate some of those things well; the third goal involves prayer walks, creating a spiritual map of the city. “We want to find out who is open to the Gospel, who is open to hearing this Good News. We want to go where there are openings. That’s going to determine which communities we enter into, which gangs we begin to interact with,” Ryan said. Each gang needs to be engaged separately, at least in the beginning. Their overall goal is “to communicate the Gospel as peacefully as possible.”
Ryan left the security of a six-figure job to answer God’s call. They sold everything this past January, including their home, its furnishings and one of two cars. They now live in the Lively Furlough Mission House, owned by Phil and Pat Lambert, a fully-furnished home dedicated to provide affordable housing for those who are involved with mission work.
“We want our kids to know that our faith is real. I think it would be a shame if our kids grew up and left the house and left their relationships with the Lord, because they never saw their mom and dad live out their faith . . . I believe in doing hard things, and so we teach our kids to do hard things. I wonder what would it look like if I teach them to do hard things and I never do them, what is that faith? And is that faith something God wants to duplicate? What kind of faith does God delight in reproducing? So that’s what we believe in,” said Ryan, who chose to exchange earthly security for eternal.
Although the Humphreys have downsized, they expect to downsize even more. When they leave, they plan to only take what will fit on the plane, less if possible. Each child will get to take a personal bag and one community suitcase, since two bags per person are allowed for international travel.
The discipleship module which they will be using in El Salvador has four components: Model, Assist, Watch, Leave. “We know God is preparing them. He has written His truth within their unwritten laws of the gang lifestyle—that ‘devoted to God,’ that’s a ticket. God is preparing a harvest within these communities, and we’re really excited to go in there and model for the communities and assist them as they have a desire to grow in Christ and obedience to Him. The watching is a part of encouraging them to go out and find other people that they can model for, that they can assist. That starts right away, There’s not a gauge in how much knowledge a person has, but a desire to be obedient in what they are learning, and that’s a key in being a good disciple and a good disciple-maker . . . reproducing what God is telling us to reproduce,” Melissa said.
So, how long do they expect to be in El Salvador? “We will leave at some point,” Ryan said. “Our thought is we will be there as long as it takes. Our vision would be that the gangs would have churches that are self-sustaining and self-replicating.” These are home churches, not brick and mortar buildings. “Once they become self-governing, self-reproducing and no longer need us to watch, then we will leave.”