Kent Marcum has lived and worked in Ecuador for fifteen years.  He and his wife, Sharla, have raised their three children in the South American nation, adopting an Ecuadorian boy to raise.  They have built a home, a ranchiera, and count Ecuador as home.  They will have made heaven home to many thousands when the final chapter will have been written.

Kent went from his home in Oklahoma to Lubbock Christian University, meeting Sharla, a daughter of a director of a children’s home in Kansas.  Sharla had already been a mission intern in Colombia.  Together they dreamed of Latin American mission work.  Eventually they went to Beliz for a short time, bringing back an adopted teenager they were later to lose in a drowning accident.  But, their real mission destiny was Ecuador.

They gathered a mission team of five families and went to Quito, the capitol city of Ecuador in 1989. The team started in a home, moved to a rented building, purchased a villa mansion on a main street and built a multi-story building on the property.  All the while they were teaching and baptizing hundreds of people in an aggressive evangelistic program.  Today there is a church of over 500 Ecuadorians meeting in the largest church building of churches of Christ in South America. There is a resident preacher training school with students from many Spanish speaking nations of the continent; there is a large, well furnished Christian Camp and Retreat Center; there is a Children’s Home now opening its first cottages; there are four new congregations growing in the nation, planted by graduates of Quito School of Biblical Studies; there are medical clinics operating in varied locations by Ecuadorians and American medical teams and a mission support base in the States that generates over $250,000 a year support.  All of these basic programs were in the original plan at the beginning of the mission.  Through a clear vision, resolute spirit and a firm and deeply seated faith in God, those goals have been achieved.  The entire program has been under the guidance of the elders in Pueblo, CO.

Now after fifteen years of work the numbers of souls rescued, churches planted, projects completed, supporters gained and people involved all point to one of the greater mission efforts of our times,  and singles out one of the great mission men and families in our times.  Other mission families have made significant contributions while staying for briefer periods in Ecuador but it’s the long term commitment, the constancy, and the passion of the Marcum family that seems most identified with the fruitfulness in Quito.

Still on the planning board of “Operation Ecuador” is the continuing of ministry training, the formation of evangelistic teams to plant churches throughout the nation and reaching out to the other eight Spanish speaking nations of South America.  With their own children back in the States in Christian education and all married, Kent and Sharla, with their adopted boy, continue their dream of making Jesus real to the millions south of the border.