Parkside missionaries Kep and Debbie James, in Cleveland for a 4-month home assignment, visited Pastor Jonathan Cameron’s Sunday morning Life Group on Dec. 6th to catch up and answer questions about their work in Bolivia. Here are some excerpts from that recent conversation:

How Did You Come to Faith?

Kep: When I was seven years old, my parents had been involved in a church that started fighting literally over the color of the carpet. They decided that it would really be better to be in a different church setting, and so they drove about half an hour over the mountain to Hagerstown, Maryland. The very first Sunday we were there, a Wycliffe missionary talked about the need for educators to go to Peru, so my dad and mom went to Peru. I grew up there from about seven years old until I was about 17 and went to college. It was an amazing place to grow up because I was surrounded by missionaries who had dedicated their lives to translating the Bible and being in these incredibly remote areas. But what was most attractive to me as a kid at that time, was not the neat example of all these other parents that I was surrounded by. It was being with the other 180 children from K through 12 who were at the [missionary] center. We just had a ball. My life was focused on fun and relationships and Christian Service Brigade -- it was an amazing place to grow up.

Even though I heard the gospel all the time, I knew that I really needed to make a commitment of faith. But I was having so much fun, and I was so focused on that, that it wasn’t until in my early teen years when my best friend died in a plane accident. I won’t go into details here because of time, but that’s what God used to bring me to faith in Christ to confront me with my sin and my need for a Saviour. The Lord did a work of grace in my life and from that point on the only thing I really wanted to do was to tell people about Jesus.

Deb: I did not grow up in a Christian family. My parents always took us to church, but it was a very liberal Protestant denomination. I went to church every single Sunday, but I never once heard the gospel. They talked a lot about the war in Vietnam. They talked a lot about social issues. They talked a little bit about God even, but I never understood why Jesus came to earth.

When I was about 14 years old, my family went through a really difficult time. It was during that time that my second oldest sister started going to a Bible study with a friend of hers and she started inviting me and my twin sister. It was the first time I ever heard that you could have a relationship with God. My first impression, actually, was that these Christians were really kind of weird because they talked about God all the time and I just didn’t know how to relate to them. But I was also partly attracted to them and just didn’t know what to make of it. So for a long time, I would go to these meetings, but I didn’t give my life completely to Christ. I had one foot in the world with my friends at school and one foot in the church. I was like a chameleon. Wherever I was, I tried to act like that.

I didn’t really have a firm faith in Christ until one day a visiting pastor from India gave a very clear message of the gospel and also talked about communion. He said that if you don’t know Jesus you shouldn’t take communion because it’s taking judgment on yourself. That [statement] really impacted my life. I felt like it was just me and God in the room and He was saying, “You can’t live with a foot in both worlds. You have to decide. Either one way or the other.” I felt like God was really pursuing me, and after I left that meeting I went home and kneeled beside my bed and prayed to receive Christ. I remember thinking after I got up from praying -- and this just shows that we have to repent even of our repentance -- “Gee, I hope that doesn’t mean that God’s going to ask me to be like a missionary or anything.”  

How Did the Lord Bring the Mission Field Onto Your Minds?

Deb: I eventually ended up at Wheaton College where I met Kep. I asked him what he wanted to do with his life and with his major, Christian Education and Biblical Studies. Kep said he wanted to be a missionary behind the Iron Curtain because they didn’t know about Jesus there. I just thought, “You are nuts! They kill Christians there. Why would you ever want to do that?” At the time, I was trying to memorize through the book of Philippians. One of the verses that really struck my heart was where Paul says, “for me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” I thought I really can’t say that. It made me think about why Kep would want to do that. Kep had a friend from Wycliffe coming to the campus to talk about missions and [through that man’s talk], I felt like God had really given me a clear calling to be a missionary.

After that we got married and came to Cleveland. Kep worked as a youth pastor and we got really involved in Parkside, at that time it was called The Chapel. I just really loved our life here. We lived here for about six years. We bought a little house in Solon. Our first two children were born here. I loved working with the girls in the youth ministry, and I was kind of hoping at that point that maybe God would be okay if we were just willing to be missionaries and not actually have to go. That changed when Kep went to Urbana with Alistair and Jeff Robinson. When Kep came home, I’ll never forget it -- he dropped his bags, gave me a big hug, and said, “Deb, we have to go now. God, He spoke to me. We have to go now.”

And I was like, “Are you sure? I didn’t hear God speak to me.” I remember struggling with that. That night I prayed, “God, if this really is of you, just make it really clear to me, too, that this really is your calling on our life. Obviously, if you’ve called Kep, I’ll go, but could you just call me, too. Make it clear that this really is your will for me.” The very next day was Sunday and Alistair started a series on the book of Jonah and it was really clear. God, just every single week, hammered away. He really showed me that this was definitely the call for us and really spoke through those messages to speak to my heart and made it very clear that the call was also for me.



What Is Equipping Servants?

Kep: In 2002, I started a ministry called Equipping Servants, which is a three-year training process for pastors to come to honor Christ by being true to the Scriptures -- to really understand how to think biblically, how to live biblically, and how to teach and preach and counsel the Word. I took a group of 15 pastors through that process in 2002. When we finished, I picked three of the guys who really got what we were doing and asked them if we would be interested in starting their own [group of] 15 pastors and the thing has just grown from there.

We have about 1,800 pastors, church leaders, and people involved in ministry who have completed the three-year process. We’ve expanded into Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru. We also have people working fulltime in Santa Cruz and different places around [Bolivia]. It’s really amazing to see what God has been doing in raising up national leadership to go out and do the work of helping other pastors come into a place where they are starting to study the Word.

We’re at the phase right now where we’ve gotten requests from pretty much all over the world -- Nigeria, Brazil, and a couple of other places in Africa and Asia, and even just this morning in Honduras. Parkside Church has been amazing in terms of the [financial] commitment that they have made to the ministry to the tune of $250,000 a year to buy the book set (around $300 per set) that we put into the hands of every participant, but as we look at expanding we have to figure out some way to come up with the additional resources. I’ve worked over the past two years trying to do that, but I’m not a fundraiser. But the mission that we work with, SIM, does that -- going and talking to donors and that kind of stuff and they think that this could be a major project with SIM. Also, I’ve got to find an administrative assistant to help me with the paperwork of a project like this. It’s one of the big things at this point.

What I really desire is to see the church come back to focus on Jesus and build on the basis of God’s Word. I believe that the way to do that is to help pastors to come into a real encounter with Christ which is what we’ve discovered [happens] through the study, Equipping Servants. We take two full years and go through the book of Romans. There’s a lot of homework every week and people come together and talk about what they’ve learned and what they’ve experienced. After two years, a lot of the pastors tell us that they have come to the realization that they had been basing so much of their Christian life on their own work of salvation trying to earn God’s approval. Through the book of Romans, they’re really confronted with Christ and His righteousness, and that that is sufficient. Many, many pastors tell us that they’ve come to faith in Christ as a result of studying Romans with us and that’s really encouraging.

How Can You Pray?

Kep: So the thing that I’d like to ask you to pray for is that as we continue to seek God’s will about the possibility of making Equipping Servants a component of SIM Ministry that the Lord would help me find someone who is an administrative assistant that could help do all the paperwork that’s involved in an international project of that scope.

Deb: You can pray for our kids, always, that God would lead and guide them. And pray for all of the different areas that we’re involved in in ministry and life and for our grandkids. Personally, I feel a real need in my life to grow in the area of counseling and so I’ve been talking to Jonathan [Holmes] a little bit about that and so that’s one thing that you can pray about, too.

Kep: If you could also pray for the church that we planted in La Paz -- that God would really work in the relationships there and the whole direction being true to Christ. There are always changes and challenges that take place when you transfer something off. They’re doing a good job, but there’s always that struggle with your personal walk with Christ and if you could pray for my relationship with Pepe Rocha. It would just really help us keep things going in the right direction.