“We need to penetrate the culture through church planting. We need more churches, not less.”
Missionaries Danny and Karina Egipciaco, are based in Hialeah, Fla., and supported by the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. They are the parents of three children— Daniel Jr., Elyse and Brianna—with one on the way.


 


Long-time church planting missionary Al Fernandez, now director of the Florida Baptist Convention’s “Urban Impact Ministries” and a 2009 Week of Prayer missionary himself, offered advice and counsel to young Egipciaco, eventually becoming his mentor, coach and boss.


Fernandez said he and Egipciaco face many challenges as they attempt to plant a yearly average of about 34 new churches in South Florida. Miamians who use Spanish as their first language make up 67 percent of the population. But a total of some 180 languages are spoken in South Florida public schools.


Up until his appointment by NAMB as a national missionary in 2009, Egipiciaco was the first and only pastor of Relevant Church, which he helped plant in 2006 and was running 120 weekly attendees when he left it six months ago.


At Relevant Church, he never took a salary. He was not merely a bivocational pastor, he was a “tri-vocational” pastor, holding down as many as three jobs at a time to support his family—working on the side in real estate, substitute teaching and selling computers and copiers.


Counter-intuitively, Egipciaco believes the real future of church planting in South Florida is the second-generation, English-speaking Hispanics—not the first-generation, Spanish-speaking older adults.


40 Spring 2012 • onmission.com

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