Stephen Plasterer
I grew up in a Christian home in Baltimore, MD. I prayed a prayer to receive Christ when I was young, but wasn’t really saved until I was sixteen and read a story that compared getting saved to getting married. That opened my eyes to the fact that I had to trust Christ like a wife trusts her husband. I said “I do” to Him and have never doubted again whether I am saved. It is exciting growing in the knowledge that it is God who works in and through me.
I was homeschooled, did some community college, worked for a contractor for several years, went to a trade school to learn machining, and then attended Ethnos 360 Bible Institute where I learned that there are still more than two thousand people groups who don’t have any part of the Bible or gospel in their languages. I wanted to help, so the elders of my church sent me to get some experience in Haiti for a summer, and I ended up serving for three and a half years at the Baptist Haiti Mission campus doing maintenance and training/discipling Haitian mission employees.
I now do maintenance and project/asset management with Mission Of Hope in the Dominican Republic where there are many Haitian immigrants. I also get to encourage and challenge short term missions groups and help them share the Gospel and understand the cultures in the DR. I often translate for them at Haitian church services and sometimes lead them in maintenance or construction projects on campus. My goal is to train a local maintenance guy or two at the Dominican Republic campus as I did in Haiti, but more importantly, I want to make people aware of the need for missionaries in unreached places. I hope short term groups leave the DR better equipped to share the Gospel in their own language, and inspired to take the Gospel to the ends of the Earth!