Translating the Gospel times 4 to save a village

MIAMI (FBW)—Retelling the story of Sara, Augusto Valverde, senior pastor of Iglesia Bautista Resurreccion, and moderator of the Miami Baptist Association, said the woman was sent with her family overseas to Seoul, Korea about 18 years ago without a clue about how she would share the Gospel with people while she was there.

She knew only one language, Spanish, but her 15-year-old son knew English. Finding a group of more than 200 Vietnamese refugees living on a reservation in the care of the Red Cross and the United Nations, Sara was determined to find a way to reach them with the Gospel, Valverde said.

So she found one person in the group who spoke English. And she delivered the Gospel in Spanish with her son translating into English and the refugee translating into Vietnamese. This went on for awhile and then she learned that 50 percent of the group spoke a different language. That didn’t stop her, he said. She found a person in the other language group who could also speak Vietnamese and the other language. And so from that time on Sara spoke in Spanish and the Gospel was translated into English and then Vietnamese and the other language.

“How does the story end?” Valverde recalls.

All 250 people came to know the Lord, Valverde said, and Sara was able to lobby the United Nations to arrange for approval for them to be relocated to New Zealand. The church gave $10,000 to pay their airline fares. The man who translated from English to Vietnamese became pastor of the church the new believers formed in New Zealand.