HOWARD AND TINA BURKHART | BENICIA, CALIFORNIA


PASSAGE TO HOPE I


By Mickey Noah


f California were a country, it would be the 34th largest nation in the world. More than 200 lan- guages are spoken in the Golden State. About 40 percent of the population speaks another language or are bilingual at home. “In several cases, California is home to a nation’s largest ethnic population outside its home country,” says Howard Burkhart, a church plant- ing strategist and NAMB missionary. “In other cases, we may have more peo- ple living here from a country than who actually live back in that country.” Howard strat- egizes and works with other church planters to start churches in the San Francisco and San Diego metro areas targeting a number of people groups— Indonesians, Roma-


nians, Mongolians, Burmese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Russians and Brazilians. He also coordinates and leads 10 basic training events a year for 60 California church planting teams.


But it’s the sad plight of the refugees from Burma (Myanmar)—the “Karen” people—that especially tugs at Howard’s heart and chokes him up. “San Diego and the Bay area are entry points for a lot of people coming to America,” he says. “They have been severely persecuted in their countries. When you hear their stories, it’s hard to fathom


when they say, ‘we woke up to hear bombs and bul- lets and we fled with nothing.’”


Burma’s Karen people—evangelized by Adoniram Judson, the “father of Baptist missionaries,” in the


Everybody needs Jesus. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you speak, where you came from or where you live. It’s our job to communicate that in a language they can understand.”


ON MISSION • Spring 2011 33


PHOTOS BY GREG SCHNEIDER


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