JOHN DAY — Greg Armstrong and a group of missionaries from the John Day Church of the Nazarene are back home after a two-week trip to far-flung Nepal in South Asia to build a church and training center.

Armstrong and fellow missionaries have spent decades traveling the world to help other Church of the Nazarene members with building and other local projects.

Missionaries from the local church travel once a year, on an alternating schedule, to help other Church of the Nazarene members with projects to serve their local communities. One year will be a domestic trip to somewhere in the United States, and the next will be an international trip. The group’s last international trip was to Kenya in 2020 with 23 mission team members.

The group of about 12 mission team members were supposed to have left for Nepal in February of 2022, but COVID-19 restrictions left them grounded until this year. The ages of the members in the group ranged from 14 to 77.

Armstrong, a pharmacist at Len’s Pharmacy in John Day, said the group left town on Friday, Feb. 3, to fly out of Seattle the next day. Then it was a nearly 15-hour flight to Qatar in the Middle East. They arrived in Kathmandu on the following Sunday for a short flight to Kohalpur, Nepal, where they would meet with their Church of the Nazarene counterparts in the area to help build a district training center and a church.

The building foundations were already put in place by the locals, and the team from John Day helped erect the 24-by-50-foot building, Armstrong said.

“The (Nepalese) church itself is about 35 people and then, because of the central location of this area, this building is going to be used to house the church, a training center for pastors and an extension for the South Asian Nazarene Bible College, plus living quarters for people to come to the training center,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong has been doing church mission work since the mid-1980s, traveling to places such as Honduras, the Philippines, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The international trips, he said, build relationships and understanding.

“When you get out of your comfort zone and get to other places in the world, it opens up people’s minds and perspectives about how other people in the world live and how good we have it in the U.S.,” Armstrong said. “Despite the things going on, we’re so blessed in this country, and sometimes you have to get out to understand that and see the poverty other people live in and the tough times they go through.”

Pam Durr, another Church of the Nazarene mission member, agreed.

“What I usually get out of the trips is bringing spiritual well-being for (the local people), but I usually wind up getting it from them,” Durr said. “The people from other countries seem very appreciative of us coming over, and I thoroughly enjoy helping them find Christianity and the Lord.”

Nepal was the site of a deadly air disaster which resulted in the deaths of 72 occupants aboard Yeti Airlines Flight 691 in January. The country has a reputation for being a dangerous place to fly to because of the mountainous terrain, severe weather and the type of smaller aircraft used there.

“My way of thinking is that if something happens to me on one of these trips, it’s God’s will, not mine, and if it’s God’s will for me to pass away on one of these trips, then that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and I explained that to my family,” Durr said. “It would be doing what I love.”

The risk of danger is not new to Armstrong and the team members, who have traveled to Ukraine on a number of occasions throughout the years. He said things got dangerous during a trip there in 2014 with protests in Kyiv. A church they helped build in Mariupol, Ukraine, about 15 years ago was destroyed in the current war.

“Life is not normal in Ukraine anymore,” said Armstrong, who has friends in the Ukrainian army. “The devastation is just unreal. It’s a terrible tragedy. We also have good friends that are living in Russia.”

Armstrong said the group is looking at a 2024 domestic trip to somewhere either in Montana or Washington, and is aiming toward a possible Argentina trip in 2025. If people are interested in joining or helping the group, he said they can visit the John Day Church of the Nazarene at 521 E. Main St. in John Day or call 541-575-1895.