Sergio Matassa isn’t your typical missionary.

He lives nearly 1,500 miles from his field. He doesn’t speak the language of the people he’s trying to reach. He visits them just a few times a year.

But God is using Sergio—and Oak View Baptist in Irving, Texas—to start multiplying churches in Chiapas, Mexico. “Multiplying churches” reproduce themselves by starting more churches.

Sergio, who is legally blind but can drive and read with corrective lenses, has a clear vision of what God wants Oak View to do in Chiapas. “We’re trying to start as many congregations as possible by giving national Christians the tools to plant churches themselves,” says Sergio, Oak View’s minister of missions.

Oak View is doing that in two areas of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state.

One area is the Chiapas highlands, where the population is mostly indigenous. There Sergio and volunteers focus on an indigenous people group called the Tzotzil. That focus is part of the Oak View’s role as a Strategy Coordinator (SC) Church of the International Mission Board’s Middle America and Caribbean region. An SC Church serves as missionaries to an unreached people group.

Evangelical religion watchers don’t consider the Tzotzil “unreached” since nearly 6 percent claims to be born-again Christians. But many of these Christians mix their faith with animistic tribal beliefs and elements of Roman Catholicism. In addition, some Tzotzil “evangelicals” are even converting to Islam, recently brought to Chiapas by Muslim immigrants from Spain.

Many Tzotzil don’t speak Spanish, Mexico’s main language. So Sergio, a native of Argentina who speaks Spanish fluently, relies on translators in teaching God’s Word to the Tzotzil.

Sergio got interested in the Tzotzil while visiting the Chiapas coast, an area where Oak View works among non-indigenous Mexicans.

“I heard about this Tzotzil guy who speaks Spanish and was trying to start churches in the mountains,” recalls Sergio. “So I asked a (coastal) pastor to take me up there to meet him.”

Sergio spent a day talking with Eufemio Bonifaz, a Tzotzil Christian leader. “He had a big vision for what God could do for his people,” says Sergio.

The two have worked in cooperation ever since.

They and Oak View volunteers use a training method practiced at the Gary Sloan Bible Institute on the Chiapas coast. Teachers from that institute—established by Mexican Baptists with the help of Oak View—conduct classes in different locations so national believers can have better access to training. The training provides hands-on church-planting experience. Last year students started 20 churches.

The institute was the dream of the late Gary Sloan, who preceded Sergio at Oak View. Gary left that church in the late 1990s to become an International Mission Board missionary. He and his wife, Gloria, were assigned to Tapachula, along the Chiapas coast.

Six months after they arrived there, Oak View planned a volunteer project with the Sloans. But just two weeks before the project, tragedy struck: Gary and their 11-year-old daughter, Carla, and two summer missionaries drowned in a swimming accident in the Pacific Ocean.

Jim Gerlach, then associate pastor at Oak View, flew to Chiapas to attend the funeral and to minister to Gloria and her three surviving children. While talking with Mexican Baptists during that trip, Jim sensed God wanted Oak View to help them carry out Gary’s dream of the institute.

As Gloria later watched that partnership unfold, she realized she and Gary had finished what God called them to do in Tapachula. “God showed me that in our short time there, we somehow not only encouraged and motivated the nationals but also motivated churches back in the States, particularly Oak View,” says Gloria, still an IMB missionary in Mexico.

“I’ve been so touched to see how Oak View picked up the ‘baton’ and ran with it. Gary and I ran our part of the way, and now they’re running their share of the race,” she adds.

Running that race has brought many blessings to Oak View.

Over the past decade, Oak View’s attendance more than doubled—from 350 to 800—even though the transitional community around the church isn’t growing. Its staff has mentored more than 30 church-planters-in-training at mission congregations Oak View started in Texas. Oak View leaders have shared their missions vision with some other area churches and involved them in the work in Chiapas. And last year Oak View marked a record global missions offering of $75,000, much of that going to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions.

“The Lord brought Sergio to us and made so many other connections that pulled all of this together,” says Jim, now the church’s pastor. “God has placed a unique calling on this church and continues to take us places we never thought we’d be.”

“Our church is being blessed not because we’re great or smart or more holy than anybody else,” adds Sergio. “We’re being blessed because we’re kingdom-minded … soley because of that.”

To learn more about Oak View’s ministry in Chiapas,
visit tzotzil.ovbc.net/.

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Chiapas, Mexico's poorest and southernmost state.