REMOTE, RISKY BUSINESS

Drug Wars, Rebels Hard On Missions

NEW YORK--The recent missionary deaths in Peru underscore the escalating
risks that confront Protestant missionaries in remote areas of Latin
America beset by guerrilla warfare and drug trafficking.

Veronica "Roni" Bowers and her infant daughter Charity were killed April
20, not by criminals but by military forces targeting criminals that
mistakenly shot down a missionary airplane.

Most experts agree that security is an increasing concern for the 10,700
U.S. Protestant missionaries working in Latin America. Particularly
since World War II, Protestants have moved into remote terrain where the
main danger used to be medical problems.

'Missionary work has always been hazardous," said Ralph Winter of the
U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, Calif., "But now, especially
in southern Colombia, it's utterly unthinkable."

Winter called the wider region, including parts of Venezuela, Brazil,
Peru and Ecuador, "an astounding last frontier."

"There's more danger in the area of radical groups rising up and
grabbing missionaries. We're way out in the jungle and have no defenses,
no arms," said Scott Ross, staff attorney for New Tribes Mission of
Sanford, Ha., whose 3,500 missionaries work with indigenous people to
put churches in remote areas.

"We're a soft target if somebody wants to grab our people."

Wilbert Shenk, professor of missions history at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said one factor in the rising tension is
the changing geography of Latin American work.

While Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant expatriates worked largely
in cities, energetic evangelical groups like New Tribes dispatched
sizable numbers into the hinterlands where few foreigners had ventured
before.

"It takes something of the heroic spirit to pursue this kind of
missionary work," Shenk said. "They are going into areas where there are
no roads, transportation is a problem and all the obstacles are there.

"In the Protestant imagination, the idea of frontiers, the 'regions
beyond' or 'unreached peoples,' is an embedded impulse," Shenk said.

New Tribes -- which says its goal of putting an indigenous church in
every tribe on earth within a generation "is a cause worth living for,
even dying for" -- has been especially conscious of security since 1993.

That year; guerrillas kidnapped staffers Dave Mankins, Mark Rich and
Rick. Tenenoff in Panama, took them into Colombia and demanded a $5
million ransom.

Contact with the guerrillas ceased a year later. Since then there have
been reports and rumors -- and innumerable prayers -- but no hard
information.

The three are still missing. On Monday, New Tribes sent an official into
Colombia in the latest attempt to get information. "The families really
need closure on this," Ross said.

It is one of at least eight incidents since 1985 in which guerrillas or
drug traffickers have killed or abducted U.S. Protestant missionaries in
Latin America.

The New Tribes kidnappings increased caution for the 300 other
U.S.-based Protestant mission boards working in Latin America, said
Michael Loftis, president of the Association of Baptists for World
Evangelism in New Cumberland, Pa., the group that Bowers represented.

Loftis said his group advises missionaries that "you should know your
neighbors."

Missionaries continually check the State Department's Web page and other
sources for warnings on terrorist activity he said.

"We basically advise our people to do what they're told and offer no
resistance," Loftis said. "Normally, that kind of advice has saved
lives."

Before the Bowers' airplane was shot down in Peru, the association's
most recent death involved Harold Davis, who was gunned down in his
Bogota, Colombia, neighborhood in 1993 in an apparent mugging.

Like New Tribes, Wycliffe Bible Translators of Orlando, Ha, works in
remote areas. Its 6,000 missionaries live with indigenous groups that
lack the Bible and learn local languages to produce translations.

Unlike other mission executives, Wydliffe's public affairs director,
Kent Hirschelman, said his board is no more conscious of Latin American
security in recent years than before.

"We always try to be aware of what's around us and act wisely," he said.