PEtRA Mission Base Camp

My name is Terry Tibbitts and I am a semi-retired electronics engineer from North Georgia.  Each year, my wife and I enjoy visiting for a few weeks with Vann Brock and his family in Pucallpa, Peru.  Vann grew up in my wife’s hometown of Blairsville, Georgia and their families have had strong historical connections for over a generation.  Over the past few years, I have grown very close to the entire Brock family and we try to visit them when we can in the Cashibo community of Pucallpa, Peru where they now live.  Vann Brock is a missionary, but he is unlike most missionaries that you may know.  When you ask most missionaries “where is home?” they will tell you the name of the town in the US where they go when they are granted a furlough by the organization they are a part of, or the town where they maintain their permanent mailing address, or the place they long of when their time on the field is completed, their service is done, and they “go back home”.  But if you ask Vann Brock “where is home?” he answers without hesitation: “this is our home”.  

 The Brocks are what are known as Independent Missionaries.  They are not a part of a larger organization, they do not have a network of organized support or administrative assistance or a safety net to fall back on.  They are now a Peruvian family living a Christian lifestyle in a distant and strange land that they have adopted as their own. Instead of living on a mission compound or renting a place in town, the Brocks have purchased over 150 acres of land 15 KM from the center of Pucallpa at the edge of the Peruvian Rain Forest and have carved out an existence from what was nothing but dense jungle.  When you approach the Brock property, you are instantly struck by the feeling that a North Georgia homestead has been transported through time and space to the jungle and rising out of what was once a forbidden landscape is a touch of paradise.

Life here is very hard. How hard?  Hungry? Grow your own chickens for dinner.  Need a house? Start with your own sawmill to get the lumber.  Need something from town? An all-day event that begins with a muddy three mile dirt road in 4-wheel drive to where the pavement starts.  Like the outdoors?  Mosquitoes are uninvited guests to all events; and some of the other wildlife doesn’t even have names; not ones you can pronounce anyway. All the while, Vann is answering his cell phone that rings constantly, offering assistance and advice to the caller with love, patience, and graciousness; as though solving their immediate problem is the only thing he has to do this day.

To thrive here takes all the energy the human body can put forth.  Being close to the equator, the year is divided into “wet season and dry season” although honestly, it is sometimes hard to tell the two apart other than it floods in wet season and only rains like you have never seen before in dry season.  The sun comes up at 6 AM and goes down at 6 PM year round and the heat is like a hot summer day in July no matter what the calendar is trying to convince you of.  Nothing lasts very long in this environment if left alone for any amount of time and everything will revert back to its natural state in this jungle environment.

When I think of Vann Brock, I am reminded of Joseph after being sold into slavery and rising to become the administrator of all of Egypt.  Everyone in Egypt knew Joseph, but his own brothers did not recognize him.  He spoke the language of the Egyptians so perfectly, that they did not detect that he was from their own family, and he moved with the same ease among Pharaoh’s court as he did with the other slaves.  But what Joseph never gave up was his religious beliefs and his integrity.

So it is with Vann Brock.  He moves with ease in his new homeland, equally accepted by and comfortable in the presence of the indigenous Shipibo Indians who live in a village across the lake and the governmental politicians and officials with whom he must constantly deal being a landowner and homesteader in their country.  As a missionary, he is often asked to describe his ministry.  That is a little difficult because his ministry is his lifestyle.  He is not your traditional church planter, although he and his family are members of a relatively new church that they helped to plant in this community.  He is not a street evangelist, although when he walks down the streets of Pucallpa, he speaks to everyone and it seems as though everyone knows him by name and why he is here.  He is not a preacher, although he can with confidence and clarity present the gospel to anyone he comes into contact with and does so on a regular basis.  He is not a member of any organization, although it seems that every mission organization in the area (and there are many in this rugged frontier) knows that Vann Brock can solve their every problem (which he does on a regular basis).  Drop-ins are always welcome, and boy do they drop in! Sometimes families as large as 30 members come to share a meal (maybe with advanced notice, maybe not). Some are Christians, some are not but all will hear the gospel message at the most effective time.

Like Joseph in Egypt, his ministry is his lifestyle.  He is doing what he is called by our Lord to do in a place that was not his home, but to which he was directed to go.  He is here for a bigger purpose, yet one that is hard to describe.  He has adopted this new and strange land as his home and he leads a life of integrity and hard work that makes him stand out and causes those who come into contact with him to be drawn to him, providing for the many opportunities to share the gospel of Christ with them, and he does not miss any of these opportunities. "Planting seeds" is what he calls it.  Seeds everywhere to be harvested by the Holy Spirit. 

What is his ministry?  His lifestyle is his ministry.  Is it effective?  Unbelievably so.  Why do I come to visit?  Because I, like all who know him, are drawn to him for inspiration of what the Christian lifestyle is about.  Why do I leave after a few weeks?  Because I am unable to keep up with him.  I always leave totally exhausted and physically drained, but emotionally and spiritually recharged by having been in the presence of one who exemplifies the Christian existence in a strange land not his own.  And it makes me a stronger Christian in my own life.  What a ministry!

God Speed Vann Brock, and thank you for being such an example to me and to everyone else that you come into contact with!  I can’t wait until our next visit, but it will take me quite some time to recover from this one!