One could often find the young girl out on the lawn with a picture Bible, excitedly sharing the gospel with her neighbors. Because her father was a pastor, missionaries frequently stayed in Christa’s home and visited her church.
“These seeds produced a love for culture, language, and peoples in me,” said Christa. “Combined with my passion for telling people about Jesus, I knew the Lord was calling me into missions by elementary school.”
Although Christa felt the confirmation of this calling during her teenage years, she didn’t know the timing. So, she leaned into her passions until the Lord opened a door, studying Spanish in college and befriending international students.
After her college graduation, Christa worked in mobilization at a missions agency in Atlanta and met Alejandro at church. Like Christa, he too sensed a calling into missions, but his journey took a very different route than hers.
Born and raised in Colombia, Alejandro became a believer as a teenager. After college, he joined a church-planting team in Bogota, where Alejandro quickly found himself underprepared for the task. Determined to fix this problem, he decided to pursue formal ministry and Bible training.
However, his preparation was cut short by his job, which required him to relocate to the US and then the Middle East.
Before leaving Colombia, he told God, “I will come back and train others so that they don’t have to go through the same struggles I had to while church planting.”
But as Alejandro climbed the business ladder, his commitments to the Lord fell by the wayside. It wasn’t until ten years later that God reminded Alejandro of his promise, prompting him to return to Atlanta in search of God’s direction. As he started attending Christa’s church, they began dating and Alejandro shared his vision of returning to his home country as a missionary.
For the next three years, Alejandro studied at Moody Bible Institute, while he and Christa led a Spanish-speaking ministry.
Today, they have recently eclipsed the four-month mark in Colombia, where Alejandro serves as an administrator and teacher at Seminario Bautista de Colombia (Baptist Seminary), and Christa helps in church-planting efforts.
