When the Bread Runs Out
There is a kind of hunger that will make a person eat almost anything.
You have felt a version of it. The afternoon you skipped lunch and dinner ran late, and by seven o’clock you were standing at the counter eating crackers over the sink — not because you wanted crackers, but because your body had stopped being particular. Hunger does that. It lowers the standard. It takes what it can get.
Now imagine that hunger is not for food but for God, and it has gone on not for an afternoon but for a generation. That is much of Latin America.
For centuries the region has been soaked in religion. Cathedrals on every plaza. Processions in the streets. A crucifix over the door of homes where no one has ever opened a Bible. The hunger for God is enormous there — it always has been. What has been scarce is the true bread.
So the people eat what shows up.
In some places that has meant a folk Catholicism where the gospel is buried under saints and superstition. In others it has meant a prosperity Charismatic movement that promises God will make you rich if your faith is strong enough — a message that preys on the poor by telling them their poverty is their own small faith’s fault.
It is easy, from where most of us sit, to look at all that and shake our heads at the bad theology.
Resist that.
The bad theology is not the disease. It is the symptom. Counterfeit bread sells because people are starving and no one has handed them the real loaf. The tragedy of Latin America is not mainly that false teachers are loud. It is that hungry people have so rarely been offered anything better.
This is where church planting comes in — and why it is so much more than starting a Sunday service.
Through Mission to the World and others, God is raising up pastors and planters across the region, and in El Salvador especially. They are not merely holding meetings. They are translating the true bread into the language of the street. Making disciples. Training local leaders who will still be feeding that flock long after the missionary has gone home. Caring for families. Teaching, patiently, that God’s grace is not for sale.
It is slow work. It is often dangerous work. It is exactly the work Jesus commissioned.
Here is what I want you to see, though — because it changes how we pray.
We are tempted to pray as if the goal were to make Latin America’s churches less wrong. To correct the errors. To swap bad doctrine for good, the way you’d return a faulty appliance. That is too small. The goal is not correction. It is Christ.
Every one of those errors — the saints, the superstition, the promises of prosperity — is a hungry hand reaching for bread and closing on a stone. The answer to a stone is not a lecture about stones. It is bread. The bread is a person. He said so himself. I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger (John 6:35).
The reason we send church planters into dangerous places, the reason we translate and train and disciple, is not to improve the region’s religious hygiene. It is because there is a Savior who fed five thousand on a hillside and then told them the loaves were only a picture — that he himself was the meal. He is not scarce. He does not run out. There is enough of him for every hungry plaza in every country south of us.
That is why we pray.
Not because good churches are better than bad ones — though they are. We pray because a man in San Salvador is standing at the counter of his soul, eating crackers over the sink, and somewhere nearby God is putting a table in the wilderness and setting a place for him.
So pray with us this month:
· Pray for wisdom and endurance for the planters.
· Pray for hearts opened to receive the true bread.
· Pray for local leaders raised up with solid doctrine and pastoral care.
· Pray for the gospel to keep spreading.
· Pray for the safety of brothers and sisters serving in places where this work is dangerous.
The hunger is real. It always has been.
The bread has come. His name is Jesus, and he is enough.