Buttram continues mission work from Greenville office
When Kerry Buttram joined a missionary trip to Liberia in November 2008, he watched as Water of Life team leader Roland Bergeron tried unsuccessfully to save a 3-year-old girl who was suffering severe malaria.
The team watched helplessly as Bergeron, whose medical skills had saved the life of a child on a previous mission trip to Liberia, found this child too late.
“It was sad to be there to witness that,” says Buttram. “The other said part of it is, those deaths are not that uncommon.”
For Buttram, pastor for Global Outreach at Southside Fellowship, it served as a reminder that life is fragile. It is even more fragile in Liberia, a poor West African country where life expectancy is 44 years and the infant mortality rate is 15 percent. Civil wars of the recent past have wiped out a large segment of the adult population; more than half of the nation’s 3.4 million people are under age 18.
It is a land in desperate need, which is precisely what caught the attention of Buttram and his Southside Fellowship team. The church has partnered with Water of Life, a well-drilling ministry headed by Bergeron, to provide help.
Bergeron, a member of Brookwood Community Church, has led more than a dozen trips to Liberia, drilling water wells or repairing old ones. Buttram leads Southside teams that provide medical and educational help.
“We feel like we’re making friends,” says Buttram, who came to Southside six years ago, shortly before a committee was formed to evaluate the church’s wide range of mission work. That committee established criteria in choosing the focus of mission teams. Influenced by Bergeron and other factors, the committee voted unanimously to put Liberia at the top of the priority list.
“It is a country with great needs,” Buttram says. “We’re not trying to change the culture there. We’re just trying to give the good news of Jesus Christ.”
Just as Water of Life teams have done in the region, the Southside teams are investing in relationships.
“It’s important that people are rightly related to God, but I also feel that it’s right that they see us genuinely as friends, whether or not they’ve turned to Jesus Christ,” Buttram says. “They first need to know that you care about them.”
