Four Way Mission was born in early 2025 on a road trip in the Ecuadorian highlands. Jerrell Ross Richer was returning from a visit to the remote mountain community of Basquitay when Julián Guamán Guallí, Secretary of the Indigenous Mennonite Church of Ecuador, made a bold suggestion to Klever Guevara and me. Why don’t we start a new organization to support university education and leadership training rooted in the Anabaptist faith for indigenous youth? The next day we met for coffee and coined a name for our new initiative.
Jerrell, along with his wife Jane and their four children, had spent the past decade engaged in Two Way Mission, connecting churches in the Global North with followers of Christ in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Cesar Moya and Patricia Urueñe, missionaries from Colombia who hosted the Ross Richers in their home in the capital city of Quito on several occasions before the family began their first term with Mennonite Mission Network in 2015, helped develop the model they soon referred to as Mision de Doble Via, a reference to two-way traffic signs posted on the busy streets near their home.
Jerrell and Julián started with this familiar image, then began developing a new one that reached up and down as well as left and right. The first version, sketched in Julian’s notebook in a coffee shop near Quito’s Bicentennial Park, featured two double-pointed arrows that crossed in the middle, with People to the left, Communities to the right, God above, and God’s Creation below. We added more arrows to link each of these elements to each other in a pattern that looked like a diamond surrounding a cross.
And Four Way Mission was born!