ESCANABA — Lighthouse Church of the Nazarene will be hosting missionaries Steve and Debbie Baker Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. The presentation will be followed with a Mexican-themed dinner.

The Bakers have invested most of their lives in missionary work. Their first assignment after finishing their seminary studies at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City in 1977, was the planting of a new church in Northwest Ohio. Five years later they were appointed as global missionaries to the jungles of Peru to work with the Aguaruna Indians. They later went on to pioneer a new district in southern Peru.

Next, they served as Mission Directors in Colombia, and the Field Strategy Coordinators for Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina. They returned to the States because of Debbie’s health, but that did not stop them from living out their call. They started an African American Church in southern Georgia. They moved to Alabama and directed the district’s Spanish work, where they transitioned a church from white to black.

Steve and Debbie and their three boys moved to California in 1996. They became the District Missionaries to the Hispanic work of the Central California District. Their work grew from 1998 to 2008 from three Spanish works to over 30 Spanish works on

the district.

May 1, 2008 the Bakers received a new assignment to Northern Mexico as global missionaries and began directing the Border Initiative. The Border Initiative had the goal of planting new churches on both sides of the 2,000 plus miles of border between Mexico and the USA. They gave opportunity to many volunteer missionaries to help in the work on the border.