Panta ta ethne has been echoing so much in mission publications that one might believe that the phrase has been adopted into the English language. While our focus on every ethnicity and people group is certainly needed for the earth to be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, what about our poreuthentes to obey the Great Commission? Poreuthentes is the Greek verb at the beginning of Jesus’s commission to his followers in Matthew 28:19 that in English would say, “having gone” or “as you are going.” Jesus expected his disciples to be in movement to other places so they could make more disciples everywhere among every people.

Moving isn’t easy and it’s often not preferred. Yet it’s an implied activity for followers of Jesus to obediently be and make disciples. Having worked and lived in and out of Ecuador over the past decade, we encountered many people in movement from one place to another in the Andean nation nicknamed “the middle of the world.” Most of the human mobility in the region is catalyzed by economic and security issues in Colombia and Venezuela and even Ecuador itself. One interesting example of a people in motion is the Quichua community in the Ecuadorian highland city of Riobamba. Their migration story cycles from Ecuador to Venezuela and back again. Now they are exploring how to send workers to unreached peoples around the world.
Much of their “going” began with Ecuador’s Agrarian Reform Law of 1964. The reform was meant to distribute land so that it would be utilized for agricultural production, not just lying fallow in the hands of wealthy families who inherited it since colonization. However, the redistribution meant that many of the indigenous farmers in the Andes were allotted small plots of infertile mountainous ground. Their farmland could produce only enough to provide for their family’s nutritional needs for four to six months out of the year. This led many of the men and eventually entire families to migrate from Chimborazo Province to the cities of Guayaquil and Quito to find work in construction or as porters in the markets. Others developed small businesses and became successful in commerce due to their tight–knit indigenous social structure.1
Some indigenous Quichuas migrated beyond Ecuador to Colombia and eventually Venezuela. In 1972, an Ecuadorian Quichua believer suffered a car accident while traveling between the cities of Riohacha and Maicao, Colombia, and he ended up crossing the border into Venezuela to seek refuge in the city of Maracaibo. Two months later, he and his family moved to the capital city of Caracas, where they established themselves and began gathering with an evangelical church there. Within four years, several Quichua families from Ecuador had moved to Caracas and they all started to gather in a home for worship and Bible study. By 1980, their fellowship had grown to about 45 people and they officially founded the “International Evangelical Quichua Church Jesus the Good Shepherd.”
In 1983, the Gospel Missionary Union in Ecuador sent a missionary from Ecuador to Caracas to focus on leadership development for the new congregation. As members of the Caracas church continued to migrate to other cities in Venezuela, they planted more evangelical Quichua churches in San Mateo, Cagua, and Ciudad Bolívar. By 1985, the Quichua churches in Venezuela gathered with 22 Quichua churches in Colombia to form the “Fraternity of Quichua Churches.” Collectively, they worked together to encourage each other and plant new churches in both countries. This cooperation continued between all three Andean nations and in 1992 the “mother church” in Colta, Ecuador, sent a pastor to the church in Caracas and the Caracas congregation sent two leaders to the Ecuador church to strengthen the work there.
By the late 1990s, the “Jesus the Good Shepherd” church in Caracas had grown to about 325 people and they started construction for the multistory building where they continue to meet to this day. In the early 2000s their church developed tutoring and literacy development projects for children and youth in their church and community. During that time, they also sent several young leaders to seminaries in Central and South America. When the seminarians returned, they started working with a local missionary to make disciples of all nations and they made their first trip to the Amazon region of Venezuela in 2009. They continued working with local leaders in the jungle for several years and in 2014 planted the “Jesus the Good Shepherd” church in the “La Primavera” community. In April of 2016, they also planted a new church in Petare, the largest slum in Caracas and in all of South America.2
In the following years, the economic and political environment in Venezuela became extremely difficult to navigate as inflation spiraled to 80,000% in 2018.3 This economic instability led to the mass exodus of about 7.7 million Venezuelans who migrated throughout all the Americas and Europe. Among them, several Quichua families from “Jesus the Good Shepherd” church in Caracas migrated back to their homeland of Ecuador, where they resettled in the rural communities around Lake Colta and in the city of Riobamba. The church members eventually started meeting in a living room for worship and Bible study. Soon after that, they rented a small space in Riobamba where, with the support of their pastor from Caracas, they officially started the “Evangelical Missionary Church Jesus the Good Shepherd” in July of 2017. Two missionaries from the Caracas congregation were commissioned to return to Ecuador to give leadership to this fledgling fellowship.
The church in Riobamba continued to grow and moved from one rented space to another as the congregation got bigger. As they grew internally, they also expanded in mission, reaching out to those who lived in their city as well as numerous Venezuelan refugees who arrived in Riobamba or were passing through on their way to Guayaquil or Perú. Then in 2020, when the pandemic forced them to stop gathering together, they gave up their rented space and weren’t sure what would happen next. When the quarantine ended, a brother from the church invited the congregation to meet outdoors in his empty lot. After gathering there for several weeks, he offered to sell the land to the church in interest– free payments. The congregation pooled their resources and manpower to buy the lot and begin construction of their own church building.

“Jesus the Good Shepherd” church in Riobamba has kept growing locally, regionally, and globally. They’ve sent missionary teams to the Ecuadorian jungle as well as a short-term worker to serve in the Middle East. In August, my wife and I were blessed to join in their seventh–anniversary celebration, which looked back to commemorate how the church has developed and cast a vision for global missions in the future. The theme of the weekend was “Sowing 10/40–From Riobamba to the Ends of the Earth.”4 The missionary pastor from the church invited several missionaries and mission mobilizers to lead workshops for the congregation to learn what it means to engage in God’s global mission and take the gospel to animistic, atheistic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim contexts.
The missional impulse cultivated among those involved during the three days in Riobamba has led to the development of a team dedicated to sending workers “from the Quichuas to the unreached.” We’ve begun to accompany this group by meeting biweekly online for spiritual friendship, strategic processing, and intercessory prayer. The team leader is working with other Quichua pastors and leaders in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to hold a mission mobilization gathering there in February 2025. Their goal is to continue developing vision and resources to send a small team to explore business and mission opportunities in South Asia in the second half of 2025.
Poreuthentes, as you are going, make disciples. Going from Ecuador to South Asia isn’t quite the same as regional migration, but we wonder if the ongoing movement and migration of our Quichua brothers and sisters from the Chimborazo province of Ecuador haven’t prepared and equipped them to keep going to make disciples of panta ta ethne. Could it be that the “involuntary going” of one generation might be the spark for “voluntary going”5 of the next generation?5