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Republica de Mexico |
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Latin American Christian
Ministries (LACM) is the missionary ministry in Latin America of
Cornerstone Bible Fellowship
of Sherwood, Arkansas, together with the assistance of like-minded churches.
The organization was formed in April, 1997, as a structure to provide support
and accountability for Roger and Caraleen Bynum, members of the church, and for
others who may choose to join them, to engage in gospel ministry in Latin
America, and initially in Mexico. The specific reason for the formation of
this new ministry is to preserve the biblical relationship of the missionaries
to their sending church. The only relationship that LACM will have with other
missionaries is a collaborative relationship. It will not assume authority
over them, but will insist that all who choose to work as associates with LACM
continue in reality, and not just in pretense, to be under the direction of
their local church. The ministry will provide assistance, as we have received
it from other brethren, to those who desire help in securing support, finding a
place of ministry, becoming oriented in a new culture, and finding encouraging
fellowship among brethren on the field of like precious faith.
Roger Bynum is the managing
director of the ministry and he and Caraleen are presently its only long-term
missionaries. Other members of the ministry board include: Steve Arnold, Bob
Bartholmey, Pascal "Bud" Hancock, and Rudy Thornton. These brothers
direct the affairs of the ministry with the advice and consent of the elders of
Cornerstone Bible Fellowship
. They, as well as Teaching Pastor Lee Epstein, can be contacted at:
901 E. Kiehl Avenue, Sherwood, AR 72120, telephone (501) 835-0860, or on the Web
by clicking Here
Roger and Caraleen's USA address is:
202 Dogwood Lane
Sherwood, AR 72120
Phone (501) 835-4176
Their current address in Mexico is:
Roger and Caraleen Bynum
Apartado Postal 171
36118 Silao, Gto.
MEXICO
They may be reached via e-mail at
lacmmx@yahoo.com
Roger
and Caraleen are in their
late-fifties and have been married since 1967. Caraleen has been a believer in
Christ since childhood, and Roger was converted in 1963. They have two adult
sons. In 1968 they moved from Texas, where they met in Bible school, to North
Carolina to begin a new church. In recent years Roger has worked as a
psychotherapist and marriage and family therapist. However, his authoritative
text for diagnosis and treatment has continued to be God's Word, and his work
in counseling has been the work of providing pastoral care for sinful people
struggling with the burden of living in a sin-cursed world and needing to know
the sufficiency of the Saviour. Caraleen is an elementary school teacher and
has taught in the Pulaski County, AR school district her entire career and is a
faithful partner in the ministry.
It was about 1987 that
they became aware of and came into fellowship with believers in the Bible
Church movement. Since 1991 they have been members of
Cornerstone Bible Fellowship
of Sherwood, AR, their sending church. They wear no religious label except
that of Christian. They are conservative, evangelical believers in Christ who
give great emphasis to the sovereign purposes of God in Christ to redeem and
sanctify a people for Himself through the power of His Word as it is preached,
and applied by the Holy Spirit, to produce repentance, faith, joy, worship, and
obedience in His elect.
Roger and Caraleen Bynum have
been committed to the missionary task all their christian lives, but it began
to get more personal when in 1992 the elders of
Cornerstone Bible Fellowship
asked Roger to go to Haiti and teach a pastors' conference on Marriage and
Family issues. He went a bit reluctantly but was greatly blessed by the
experience and delighted to have an opportunity to return again the next year.
It was only a couple of years later that Roger led a construction team from
Cornerstone to assist in a
church building
project in the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, and again the next year. By then
they were enthused about the idea that after years of exile in various and
sundry activities (one might say, "on the back side of the desert")
that God had at long last, and in their middle years, opened for them an
effectual door of ministry in the needy land of Mexico. So in the fall of 1996
they began conferring and praying with the elders of the church about going to
Mexico to engage full-time in a church-planting ministry. In April 1997, the
elders adopted a resolution supporting the same, and Roger began the necessary
research, organization, and planning to make it a reality. June and July 1997
were spent traveling 4,000 miles in Mexico; ministering, visiting missionaries
in
Monterrey, Chihuahua, Taxquillo
, and Irapuato; seeking God's direction for where and with whom they might
work.
Roger and Caraleen have established a relationship with David and Sandra App , missionaries with Iglesia Bautista de la Gracia in Irapuato , State of Guanajuato, Mexico. David and Sandra are supported by Heritage Baptist Church of Owensboro, Kentucky, and have been planting churches in Mexico for 38 years. They live four hours north of Mexico City in the central region of Mexico that contains approximately 60% of the nations 98 million people. Fewer than 1% of the population in this central 10 state region are professing evangelical Christians. In the summer of 1998, Roger and Caraleen spent 6 weeks in Irapuato, population 600,000, in the work of the ministry with David and Sandra and the brethren of the church there. Their activities included preaching ; doing evangelism on the streets, in the city jail, and from house-to-house ;encouraging; counseling and generally just building relationships . For the next two years they spent each summer working with the believers in Irapuato. The rest of those two years they continued working in Arkansas and raising support among U.S. churches for the work in Mexico, while Caraleen was receiving treatment for lymphoma. Finally, in March 2001 they were able to move to Irapuato, rent a home, and begin working full-time in a church-planting ministry. The first short-term team from their home church, Cornerstone Bible Fellowship, in Sherwood, AR, visited and helped in ministry for one week in July 2001.
Roger and Caraleen are currently doing outreach in Silao, a city of 100,000 pop., twenty minutes from their
home in Irapuato. They offer and provide English classes, marriage and family therapy, and a systematic in-home
Bible study course. All these are means for teaching God's Word, building trust relationships, giving a genuine
demonstration of God's love, and gaining further opportunity to teach the scripture that God may use to bring some
of these folk to salvation, whom He would then certainly build into His Church. There are currently members of
seventeen families who have indicated a desire to begin some or all of these activities.
The goal of the ministry is
to establish autonomous Mexican churches by instructing the Mexican people
in the gospel of God's grace in Christ through the use of several evangelistic
methods; one of the most prominent being the use
of in-home Bible studies
. We will then
baptize believers
, disciple them for growth in godliness and to
equip them for service
, and bring these new converts together to
set in order local churches
. The discipleship process will produce spiritual leaders who will be given
the responsibility for leading the local congregations, and who will also
assume the responsibility of the sending church, to reach out into surrounding
communities and send missionaries into other localities to evangelize.
The local church will be the
primary institution in the training of spiritual leaders, but Roger will also
collaborate with sound Bible schools to prepare their students to care for the
spiritual needs of others. Roger will also provide
consultation and counsel
to other missionaries who seek it, to assist them in dealing effectively and
biblically with difficult problems they may encounter in the ministry, and to
enable others to continue with an effective, well equipped ministry in the
country.
LACM: Who We Are