As the ministry of Overseas Instruction in Counseling (OIC) continues to expand to the far corners of the globe, Bryan and Susan Nevin have the opportunity of ministering to Christian brothers and sisters in Mexico, just to the south of the border with the U.S. Bryan comes to the OIC team with previous missions experience, especially within the Hispanic community. His story displays a deep and abiding passion to see the nations not only hear the gospel and come to Christ as Savior, but also to develop deep and personal relationships with the Lord that bleed into local church communities and beyond.
Bryan’s story is deeply rooted in the Christian faith as he recognized at a very young age that he was a sinner rightly under God’s just wrath and so in desperate need of a reconciliation with Him. His heart and eyes were opened to the truth of the gospel around the age of four when he received Christ as Savior. By God’s providence, his father was a pastor, so his upbringing was soaked with gospel truth. As he grew into a young man, he had no intention of undertaking cross-cultural missions or Christian ministry, yet the Lord began planting seeds in his heart during his first ever mission trip, which was to Honduras. He continued to plan on pursuing a very different career path following this trip, as he went on to college to study Math Education.
However, during his time in college, he visited Honduras a second time and the Lord changed his heart. He decided when he came back to the U.S. to switch his major to a Bible degree, pursuing a Master’s in Ministry at the Baptist Bible Seminary in Clarks Summit, PA. Attaining his master’s degree was a slow and steady process as both Bryan and Susan began their life in formal ministry during that time. They moved overseas in 1997 to help in different ministries in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Then in 2002, the family moved to Mexico and lived there for the next eighteen years, continuing to plant churches in various places in the Mexico City area.
Bryan first was introduced to Biblical counseling in 2000 when his mission agency at the time required him to attend a Biblical counseling training conference. This conference opened his eyes to something he had never heard of before. He started to use Biblical counseling after this, but the first several years it wasn’t always Biblical, and it wasn’t always very good. Counseling wasn’t a central part of his ministry until starting a new church plant on the North side of Mexico City in 2012. There, they started a community center which included Biblical counseling with the goal of starting a church through this ministry. People would think that Bryan was a psychologist, but he states he would let them know that he is not, but that God’s Word has the answer for all of life’s problems. He would just begin with the gospel, in evangelism, and then move into ongoing, purposeful discipleship. He knew that it is only by the Spirit of God working in the hearts of the people through His Word, the Bible, that true and lasting change happens.
In 2016, while on a trip back to the United States, Bryan attended a counseling conference where he met a very influential pastor working in Mexico, Kike Torres, who was just starting to bring Biblical counseling training to Mexico. Because of Bryan’s desire to be a part of this movement in Mexico, he decided to pursue further training through certification with the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC). As he pursued viable means for offering this type of training and certification in Mexico, he came across Overseas Instruction in Counseling during an Internet search on how he could establish counseling certification in another country and culture. After attending an OIC conference in 2018, he committed to one trip to Honduras where he fell in love with the ministry’s vision for and commitment to building up local churches. Bryan believes a highly effective part of OIC’s training is the “Projects for Growth” that each participant must complete in order to graduate to the next module. These components put the information and theory the students are learning into practice, including through the fifteen hours of counseling they must do before finishing the program. It is this kind of practicality that Bryan knew would be advantageous for church leaders.
After prayer and consideration, Bryan committed to becoming OIC’s Coordinator for Mexico. The first Church Leadership Training (CLT) module he scheduled was to be held in October of 2020, however it had to be postponed until the fall of 2021, due to the Covid pandemic. Even with the delay, Bryan determined it would be necessary to conduct it online. And along with this online module, Bryan has had the opportunity to help serve with several other CLT modules in Honduras and Costa Rica in the past few years as well as an in person CLT module in Ciudad Juarez in December. However, he is highly excited to lead his first in-person CLT module in the Mexico City area in the fall of 2022.
In 2020, after almost twenty years in Mexico, Bryan and Susan moved back to Pennsylvania where he now serves as the Director of Missions Mobilization with Fellowship International Mission. His job with this ministry is to work to inspire the next generation to go to the mission field as well as to help churches understand their responsibility to send and care for their missionaries. As such, Bryan provides significant support to churches as they prepare new missionaries to go cross-culturally, as well as in their ongoing care for these families and individuals while they are serving.
As Bryan brings biblical counseling training into Mexico, he is eager to see how the Lord will use this to get encourage more people, beyond church leaders, to become involved with the process of discipleship. In certain parts of Mexico, converting to Christianity would the equivalent of abandoning your country, as Catholicism is so deeply ingrained into their family heritage and culture. Interestingly, in this context in Mexico, one of the most effective methods for evangelism is counseling. As such, a substantial benefit of the OIC vision in Mexico is the development of lay church members into effective counselors for personal sanctification, for deeper fellowship within the church body, and for evangelism. He states that one of his favorite aspects of teaching biblical counseling in different places is seeing firsthand the “light bulb moment”—the moment when gospel truths click and a person sees how the sufficiency of Scripture speaks to an individual’s experience.
Ultimately, Bryan longs to see people saved and churches built up around the world, including through the Lord’s gracious hand seen in OIC’s work to grow and develop teachers who are from and live in the communities in which they plant seeds. He notes that persistence is vital to counseling ministry and so Bryan’s vision for OIC is to continue to train up permanent, long-term trainers who will continually pass along tools to leaders and lay people in local churches so that discipleship and evangelism spread throughout their communities. Bryan could not stress enough the importance of being a constant learner of the Bible and challenging yourself as a counselor and disciplemaker by being involved in the life of the local church.
And, whether you stay or whether you go, you can support Bryan and Susan in their ministry to people in Mexico by becoming a prayer partner with OIC. You can also encourage and further their ministry of discipleship through biblical counseling by providing a financial gift. Ultimately, the Lord has promised to build His church across the world and Bryan and Susan Nevin are wonderful, faithful, excited servants of His in this vital work. As you support them through a variety of means, you are also having an impact on biblical discipleship as people in communities around the world are taught and encouraged in how to be more compassionate, truthful, and loving in both discipleship and evangelism.
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