Construction: A Tool for the Gospel

Spring Creek Bible Church has been sending short-term missions and interns through SEPE International since 2015. In this feature, Mark Lind provides insight into the impact of their involvement on both his church and the local church in Central America, as he reflects on his experience coming to Honduras for the first time.


One of the reasons Spring Creek Bible Church loves to send short-term missions through SEPE International is because of the mutual focus on the essentiality of the gospel.

Mark Lind, the leader of the small but mighty team they sent in the summer of 2024, says that as a church, they want to send their members to “ministries that have sound doctrine and gospel centrality at their core.”

SCBC has partnered with SEPE International for almost a decade, inspired by connections with alumni from The Master’s Seminary (TMS) and the relationship with The Master’s Academy International (TMAI). Since the first team they sent in 2015, the church knew this was the type of ministry that they wanted their “prospective missionaries or current missionaries [to] watch…in action,” Mark says.

A member of SCBC’s missions committee, Mark has been a part of sending many people from his church through SEPE International, including two of his own children as interns, but the 2024 trip was the first time he was able to see the ministry for himself.

As he poured concrete alongside his team members to create a space for church events and community outreach, it was encouraging for him to see a like-minded Christian community focused not solely on providing for people’s physical needs but primarily on proclaiming the gospel.

He saw firsthand, how within the culture of the Honduran local church, “truth combined with warmth and relationship is really effective,” he says.

“You can see how just being in a neighborhood and sharing meals and reaching out when there’s some need…could be a quick bridge to get to the heart if you can communicate effectively in Spanish.”

Despite the undeniable economic disparity in a third-world country, it was evident that Honduran believers had “a passion for Christ, a passion for the lost, [and] an understanding that the answers are really found in the gospel,” he says.

“The heart of sacrifice and desire for the gospel is really motivating [for us] to keep the main things the main things.”

The practical and spiritual benefits of the team’s efforts and encouragement to this fledgling church plant were compounded by the knowledge that even the funds raised by the team to come to Honduras were being directly used to train pastors, setting a foundation greater than concrete for the future.

“We talk about cement, … but it’s very clearly centered around strengthening churches or getting graduates to be trained up,” Mark says.

“It’s so great to see where students are actually ministering in their churches, …and to see the impact of having someone that would eventually really be able to preach and teach well and offer biblical counseling and the real stuff of ministry makes [our participation] so worthwhile.”

From the perspective of sending churches, short-term missions are “a great initial exposure to the gospel at work in other cultures,” he says, “especially for people who are not sure yet how the Lord is directing them.”

As team members sing out with gusto to the Lord in a language most of them could not even speak, Mark observes, “It’s just super motivating for any believer to be worshipping with someone of another culture when it’s the true gospel that we have in common, and that binds us together when there’s not any question of the authority and sufficiency and inerrancy of Scripture.”

The beauty of this commonality is that, at the root, the approach to missions is no different in one country than in another.

“The recipe for missions is just like the recipe in the United States – to bring glory to Christ through the local church,” he says.

And in Honduras, “there’s a hunger,” he says. “I think people that we are seeing have been fed the word of God faithfully, and they’ve built an appetite for even more that makes them better theologians. Of course, the human heart is the human heart, so it’s always going to be a work of the Spirit, but it’s exciting to see the potential in Honduras and in Central America.”

With God’s living and active Word at the forefront, local churches in the Americas and beyond can be an immense encouragement to each other to keep pursuing Christ and making disciples all over the world.

“There’s nothing more powerful than God’s plan. Christ loves the church. The local church is His design, and that’s what SEPE International is all centered on,” Mark says.


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