
‘We brought the church with us’
ADDISON, Texas — “It’s unlike any other mission team that…
Ted Stewart (Photo via obits.dignitymemorial.com)
Ted Stewart, a member of a pioneering mission team to Brazil and a former instructor at Sunset International Bible Institute in Lubbock, Texas, died Feb. 22, according to the institute’s alumni page. He was 77.
Visitation is 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24, at Resthaven Funeral Home in Lubbock. Funeral services are from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Sunset Church of Christ in Lubbock.
During Sunset’s Feb. 23 chapel service, Ron Bontrager lauded Stewart as “a man dearly loved by faculty, our alumni, missionaries (and) Brazilian Christians.”
“There are very few people in Brazil who are Christians today that could not in some way trace their spiritual birth back to Ted and his work there,” said Bontrager, dean of Sunset’s preaching school. “And he was a great encourager of missions as well.”
Bontrager told The Christian Chronicle that Stewart encouraged him to go into the mission field and visited him while Bontrager and his family worked in Salvador, Brazil.
Stewart was instrumental in the decision that led the 31-member team from the U.S. to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1961. Another member of that team, Howard Norton, spoke about Stewart’s role in a 2011 Dialogue with The Christian Chronicle.
Our team chose three possible places of great importance: New York, Hong Kong and South America. I personally wanted to go to Hong Kong. We voted, and South America won. Continued research by teammates Ted Stewart and Ellis Long convinced us that the key country in South America was Brazil, and the leading industrial, middle-class city was Sao Paulo.
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Members of the 1961 mission team to Sao Paulo, Brazil (Photo provided by Abilene Christian University)
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