Neither poverty, nor car bombs, nor mudslides nor loss of electricity stays a missionary from the completion of God’s assignment.
BATON ROUGE – Neither poverty, nor car bombs, nor mudslides nor loss of electricity stays a missionary from the completion of God’s assignment.
Rodrick E. (Roddy) Conerly, executive director for the Baptist Association of Greater Baton Rouge, and his family can attest to that. Stationed in Lima, Peru through the International Mission Board for 12 years, the Conerlys experienced all that and more, but never deterred in their task to spread the gospel.
“There is a lot of hardship there,” Conerly said about Peru where terrorists were part of the landscape during their time there, and where poverty consumed more than half the population. “One lady asked me to raise her son because she couldn’t provide enough food.”
Though he could have taken the child, he had to tell the woman no because so many other mothers would have asked the same thing.
While he and his family lived in Peru, two terrorist organizations, The Shining Path, and the Tupac Amaru, were very active, Conerly said.
“When we arrived in [the early 1980s] they were beginning their activities,” he said. “At first we could travel without worries. Twelve years later, we went only in caravans of missionary groups, and in Lima there were parts of the city we did not go into at night.”
Such conditions usually work their way into the fabric of a person’s day-to-day life, Conerly explained.
Once, while Conerly was driving in traffic, a car bomb exploded a mere 100 yards away from him.
“When I saw it go off, I turned my blinker on, and turned left to go around it,” he said. “You become desensitized to it.”
Another time, when it was still safe to travel the country in family groups, the Conerlys journeyed to Cajamarca, a remote village in the mountains about a 12-hour drive from Lima, to share the gospel. On the way, they encountered mudslides.
“Getting through those mudslides in a small Toyota car was a crazy experience,” he said.
“As we were going across the mountains, we got one of those very infrequent rains,” Conerly continued. “Rain causes mudslides that are slow moving. Most of the time you think you can make it.”
However, in this case, the mud had already covered about two-thirds of the two-lane road and there was a steep drop off on the other side, he said. There was no turning back. With his teen-aged son in the front seat helping to watch to make sure the car didn’t get pushed off the road, the Conerlys made it through.
“It was a strange, harrowing experience.”
“We lived with power outages and water shortages. Both were rationed,” he continued about the family’s experiences as international missionaries. “There were certain things you had to get done while the electricity was on. You adapted to deal with the situation.”
The Conerlys returned to the United States in 1993. They continued to minister to people through involvement with the North American Mission Board and with their local churches.
Born Nov. 18, 1949, Conerly is married to Caroline, a native of Franklinton. The couple’s family includes a son, Gary Wayne Conerly, his wife Kalen, and their daughter Maddie, 4; and a daughter, Julie Ann Badon, her husband Darrin, and their children, Rebeccah, 7, Sarah, 4, and Nathan, 3, and a cat named Cosmo.
Conerly, who received his B.A. from Mississippi College, and M.Div.; D.Min.; and Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has been executive director of BAGBR two and a half years, and in the ministry for 38 years.