Mission group heads to El Salvador

Eight members of Faith Alliance Church in Kalispell headed down to San Salvador on Friday for a week-long trip to do mission work.

They are going to El Salvador’s capital city to assist with the Broken Campaign, an initiative sponsored by the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

“We’ll go down and do community outreach and construction, anything from hanging doors to building walls and painting at the ministry complex or at one of the other churches they’re working on down there,” church member Chad Graham said.

It will be Graham’s second mission trip to San Salvador. He also made previous mission trips to Rio Chico and Guacaivo, Mexico.

Faith Alliance Church and Christian and Missionary Alliance are raising money from donations and coffee sales for phase one of the Broken Campaign to become an official ministry in El Salvador and buy property for a ministry complex.

The broader Broken Campaign is for “broken people to rescue broken people, so they can turn around their lives and rescue broken people.” It targets helping abandoned infants, at-risk and impoverished families, drug addicts, sex trade workers, gang members and ex-convicts.

Bob Bumke and his 18-year-old daughter, Haley, also are going to El Salvador.  

“I’m really excited that we’re going down,” Bob Bumke said. “It’s the first time Haley and I have ever done anything like this.”

Others making the trip are Doug Kalvig, Charles Pesola, Mary Jensen, Faith Alliance youth pastor Todd Hart and Faith Alliance pastor Jim Davey.

Faith Alliance Church sent its first mission group abroad in 1996, when six church members went to Gabon, Africa, Davey said.

Today, the church runs one-week mission trips to El Salvador and two-week mission trips to Rio Chico and Guacaivo. It offers four-day mission trips to Hays, Mont., where people are working to rehabilitate a flooded church. It also runs a community kitchen out of the back of the church to serve the homeless.

The aim, Davey said, is to make sure the church has a way for any of its roughly 140 members to give back and help. “We believe people grow through serving,” he said.

For more information, call Faith Alliance Church at 257-9199.