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FREEPORT HARBOR?For 36 years volunteers with the Texas Port Ministry (TPM) have endeavored to meet the spiritual needs of the seafarers who make port here. But when TPM Director Bobby Fuller realized 200,000 trucks annually make their way in and out of the harbor, he knew his mission field had to expand and more workers would be required.
Each year 900 ships from 50 countries enter this harbor. The Texas Port Ministry Center, just beyond the port authority security perimeter, offers an onshore respite for the ships’ crews. Those ships, Fuller noted, transport cargo that must be hauled over land to its final destination. The truckers who make those trips are in need of a “touch” from Jesus just as much as their mariner cohorts.
Whether on land or sea Fuller said those in his mission field live very isolated lives. The TPM Center, an SBTC partnering ministry, and its volunteers seek to reconnect these travelers with their family and friends while sharing the love of Christ.
For Joel Quijano, a Filipino crew member of the Vliet Trader, the services of the TPM allowed him to call home to wish his 6-year-old daughter happy birthday. The Vliet Trader makes a weekly call to port and unloads its cargo of produce acquired in Honduras and Guatemala. The ship’s captain, Mykhaylo Kondretsky, said the TPM center is one of the best he has seen.
“We are lucky. It is very good,” he added in his heavily accented English.
Quijano said he didn’t know of any other port center like TPM. “All of us are very thankful for the Texas Port Ministry.”
“We think it’s very important for seafarers to stay in touch with their families,” said Fuller, who noted that some mariners are at sea for many weeks.
The TPM serves more than 10,000 seafarers annually. The Texas-themed great room provides visitors with computer and Internet access, discount long-distance calling cards, pool and air hockey tables, a big-screen TV, and bookcases filled with reading material that includes multi-lingual Bibles and biblical literature, and the “Jesus” film in multiple languages.
The center also supplies clothes and essential travel items free of charge. However, Fuller said money is usually not an issue for the seamen, but the free gifts afford the opportunity to share “the greatest gift of all.”
And that’s why the ministry exists, Fuller said. The gifts and services provided at the center come with the kindness and love of Jesus as expressed by the TPM’s volunteers, who have the opportunity to be witnesses to the “uttermost part of the earth” without leaving Freeport.
And as he and the center’s volunteers enter the port each day to greet the crews of arriving ships, Fuller sees an entire community in need of the gospel.
“There are two types of people in the world,” he said, “those who know Christ and those who need to know Christ.”
That desire to share the gospel with the entire network of people working the port has expanded the work of the TPM and its need for more volunteers. Currently, 14 people regularly visit the ships and four more meet the truckers as they wait in the queue to load cargo.
Fuller said the truckers can feel especially isolated as his conversations with them have revealed. Simply asking how he can pray for them has opened up opportunities to share the love of God.
“Monday meals” is the latest effort to reach those who work within the port. Each Monday a different area church provides lunch served at the center. As the Monday meals program has grown since its March inception, Fuller has added prayer and Scripture reading to the menu. Praying for the recovery of a longshoreman recently injured on the docks is a tangible way the ministry can show its care and concern for all who work at the port.
“It has opened the doors of conversation that we would have never been able to do. It has established a lot of good will.”
Fuller said asking churches to provide meals is a way of drawing those congregations into the work of the ministry and, in turn, affords the opportunity to recommend those churches to harbor employees.
Each of these ministries allows the TPM volunteers to share the gospel and provide a “touch” from Jesus. Fuller defines a “touch” as any time a ministry volunteer engages someone in the harbor community with the gospel either in word or deed. “And those touches are essential,” he said.
Fuller recalled one visitor from Myanmar (formerly Burma), a country hostile to evangelism and Christianity. The man saw a Bible on the shelf published in Burmese. “That’s my language!” Fuller recalled the man exclaiming. He gladly took the free Bible. “I find it very satisfying that God will bring Burmese people here, and they will go home with a Bible,” Fuller said.
A Muslim mariner from Bangladesh visiting the TPM center told a ministry volunteer that Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the same God. The volunteer quoted John 14:6 which says, “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Stymied, the man responded by asking for a New Testament and a printed study of the Gospel of John.
“I’ve never seen him again,” Fuller said, “but I know God brought a Muslim from Bangladesh here” to hear this witness and receive the biblical reading material. Fuller likes to believe that the information made its way around the vessel and into the hands of other Muslims on the other side of the world.
It’s not only the words and deeds of ministry volunteers that send the gospel message out onto the seas and, hopefully, to other ports around the world, said Fuller, noting that scores of foreign-language Bibles and Jesus films have left the U.S. on countless ships. There’s also a Christian mariner from Costa Rica who regularly asks Fuller for Spanish-language Bibles and tracts to share on the docks of Columbia and Costa Rica.
More volunteers, resources needed
Since the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, mariners no longer enjoy easy access to port cities, but are required to remain within 18 feet of their ships’ gangplanks. However, if accompanied by properly credentialed ministry volunteers, seafarers can be chauffeured to the TPM Center and into town for shopping, dining, and other errands. Without the services provided by TPM volunteers, crews would either stay on board their ships or pay a secular company for the same services provided free by the TPM.
Each volunteer must have a Transportation Worker Identification Credential badge, which is administered by the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard. The badge allows the volunteers access to the ports and its vessels and permits them to escort crew members to the ministry center and points beyond. The ministry pays the $132.50 fee for the badge, a significant line item in the TPM budget.
Ministry to more than mariners
When TPM was first conceived by the Gulf Coast Baptist Association more than three decades ago, the mission was to reach seamen as they entered this port. The ministry’s former name?Seaman’s Center?revealed as much. But that mission has expanded. No longer do TPM volunteers pass the gate attendants, the truckers, the longshoremen, and port tenets to reach the mariners alone with the gospel. Reaching everyone within the harbor community with the gospel of Christ is the new mandate, Fuller said. The center’s name was changed in 2007 to reflect broadened ministry.
With an expanded mission field comes the need for more workers in the field. Fuller said there is little training required, just a desire to share Christ in tangible ways. New volunteers are paired with experienced ones in order to learn the rules and regulations of working within the port a
