On the road again

LIMA — When Bob Bartlett, a traveling evangelist, visited Jon Salsbury's church looking for young people to join him on a mission trip to Haiti, Salsbury decided to go. That trip made a big impact on the then 16-year-old.

“One scary thing I remember from that first trip to Haiti,” he said, “is that some voodoo doctors held a ceremony outside of our motel to place ‘spells' on us. It didn't work, of course, but … it was “impactful, shall we say.”

Despite that experience, the following year, Salsbury went on three mission trips — back to Haiti and then to Puerto Rico with Bob Bartlett and then with his dad, Gene Salsbury, to Belgium and Holland.

After those trips, Salsbury never looked back, and he became involved in numerous mission trips over the years.

Now, as the associate pastor of Restoration Temple, 708 E. Eureka St., Salsbury leads about two mission trips per year, one to Belize in South America in the spring and another one to Belgium and Hungary in the fall. He has led these trips since 2000.

The trip to Belize usually involves a large team of 12 to 15 people.

“It is the nature of the work we do there,” Salsbury said. “It is a poor country and we do a lot of construction and building type of work.”

Restoration Temple has a preschool in Belize that is run by a missionary couple. The team, led by Salsbury, does work on the preschool. They also work in the surrounding refugee areas.

“Back in the 1980s, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras refugees went to Belize because of the wars going on in their countries,” Salsbury said. “They were given a place in the jungle and carved out a life.”

The team does a lot of practical things like digging outhouses and bringing medical supplies to the local Red Cross clinic.

“It is hard to describe the feeling one gets when we walk through the refugee villages to pass out marbles, bracelets and small pieces of candy,” he said. “The children mob you as if you were giving away free iPods.”

While the trips to Belize require a lot of hard physical labor, Salsbury said his trips to Europe are more emotionally draining.

“Europe is a totally different animal,” he said. “We mostly bring leadership people like pastors, Bible teachers, worship leaders and youth or children leaders.”

In Hungary, Salsbury's team does leadership conferences, youth conferences and church-wide retreats.

“It is emotionally intense and draining, and we have to work with a translator,” he said.

Salsbury who said he speaks enough Hungarian to get into trouble, finds the people of Hungary to be generous, kind and very intelligent.

“Preaching the Gospel there is very interesting,” he said, “because they really don't have roots in church life because the country was communist when they were kids. So when we preach, they have so many questions, it makes it hard to get through the sermon.”

In addition, while Hungary is the most advanced of the Eastern block countries that became independent of Russia in the 1990s, they are still considered a developing country.

“It isn't unusual to see a Jaguar at a stop light and a donkey with a hay wagon pull up behind it,” Salsbury said.

While the people in Hungary have a lot of questions, they are very open to the Gospel, but in Belgium that is not the case.

“The town of Gent, where we go, has 350,000 people,” Salsbury said. “The largest evangelical church, Elim Church, has 120 people.”

The primary purpose of Salsbury's trips to Belgium is to encourage the pastors and church leadership.

“It is a very wealthy, Westernized and technologically advanced country,” he said. “But spiritually it is total intellectualism, agnosticism. It's not that they don't believe there is a God, but they don't really care — it's just not a concern of theirs.”

The Christians there feel very alone as there are no Christian radio or television stations, very few Christian book stores and few Christian books or songs that are translated into the language.

While Salsbury has had a passion for missions for much of his life, he feels that God has kept him where he is at.

“I thought that by the age of 21, I would have taken my first continent for God,” Salsbury said. “But God's hand has kept me here and I am thankful for that. I have spent 20 years on the potter's wheel.”

Salsbury hopes to one day be able to do more missionary work, but isn't sure what that will look like.

“I think I'll probably always come and go, but I want to plant churches in other countries, spread God's Word and make disciples,” he said. “I don't know where God is going to lead me.”