Bernardino Morales,...

Chilean Baptists quick to respond to quake
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 Mar 11, 2010 

TALCA, Chile – During a recent trip to Chile’s disaster zone following the Feb. 27 earthquake and subsequent tsunami , Southern Baptist relief workers teamed up with representatives from The Union of Evangelical Baptist Church in Chile to find ways Southern Baptists could join the work Chilean Baptists were already doing.

The Chilean union has been ministering to those suffering since the earthquake. Although its official social ministry organization, “Red de Testimonio Social," has been operating only four years, its leaders have been quick to respond to needs of quake survivors.

“Our people are working and giving,” said Chilean Baptist Bernadino Morales, director of Red de Testimonio Social. “We are working right now. But what you are doing is new,” he said, referring to Southern Baptist relief efforts. “That’s the idea. We are learning from you and your system.”

While visiting Chile’s hard-hit region of Maule, Morales and two other Chilean union leaders spent several days assessing needs and planning joint relief efforts with officials of the International Mission Board and Baptist Global Response, a Southern Baptist relief and development organization.

The Chilean union leaders -- who included Iván Cisternas, president of the National Baptist Youth Union, and Marcos Ardiles, student body president at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Santiago -- arranged for Chilean Baptist teams to join BGR teams in disaster relief efforts in the Maule region.

These teams are setting up field kitchens in Maule’s capital city of Talca and in the hard-hit town of Molina. Chilean Baptist students will work alongside the Centro Misionero Jovenil (Center for Young Missionaries), a group of young Chilean Baptist missionaries-in-training already ministering in Molina.

“Our working together is proving to be an opportunity to complement the disaster relief efforts of [the Chilean union] and its social ministries network, as well as to share best practices that BGR brings as a result of their experience in responding to global crisis,” said Charles Clark, a Southern Baptist worker in Chile, who was part of the assessment team.

The partnership with Chilean Baptists is precisely the kind of relationship Baptist Global Response strives for, said Jeff Palmer, BGR's executive director.

"While many times we are desiring to connect caring Southern Baptists with needs like those in Chile, we are grateful when we have excellent local partners who can help with immediate response since they are already there," Palmer said. "Local partners usually are the ones who can make the quickest impact in a tragedy like the Chile earthquake."

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Filed from Chile by Jack Caulfield, an overseas correspondent for Baptist Global Response.

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