Where We Come From

In the year 1960 in a comfortable suburb of Minneapolis, young 4-year-old Russell Martin prayed a peculiar prayer.  His father, prominent civil engineer Chad Stendal, had brought home that evening a picture book about the Indigenous peoples in the high Andes mountains of South America. The purpose had been to  encourage the boy’s interest towards missions. But the pictures, inappropriately graphic for a young child,  depicted in detail the poverty, the violence and the hopelessness, showing the horrific reality lived by many needy people. Upset by the urgency and the gravity of their need, young Russell compelled his father to leave immediately with their family to help them. Explaining the grave responsibility of missionary work, Chad told his son that God had to call people to help the needy. God had to provide the time, the money and the resources. And if little Russell really wanted to, he could ask God to allow him to be a missionary to help those people when he grew up. Without further hesitation, the child got off his father’s lap where he had been sitting the whole time and prayed that God would call his parents to be missionaries so that he would not have to wait till he grew up!

Only four years after that prayer, in 1964 Chad and Pat Stendal were on a plane traveling from the comfort of upper middle class Minneapolis to live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Colombia with the Kogi Indian Tribe. A tribe very similar to the ones Russell had seen in his picture book. Chad and Pat raised their four small children among the pygmy, malnourished, illiterate people they went to serve. Their extensive work in nutrition, education and Bible translation into the Kogi language remains to this today as a life changing platform that has allowed many to become thriving, successful individuals that continue to work for the well-being of their people.

Russell Becomes a Missionary Pilot

As a young adult, Russell Stendal became a missionary pilot in Colombia. During this time, he began to pray that the Gospel would reach the Marxist guerrilla rebels. As the drug trade and terrorist activities began to unfold in the country, Russell made an effort to continue his missionary endeavors alongside his Colombian wife, Marina, and his nine-month daughter, Lisa. In 1983, he was kidnapped by the very rebels he prayed for. During his five months in captivity, while tied to a tree deep in the jungle, he wrote his first book, “Rescue the Captors”, a memoir of his early life and the story of his ordeal. He came to see his kidnapping as God’s answer to his prayer and a way in which he could more effectively minister and share the Gospel with his captors. 

Radio, Books and Bibles

Upon his miraculous release im January of 1984, Russell returned to the U.S. to warn about the marihuana and cocaine drug trade funding terrorism in Colombia. He shared his story in schools, churches, and prisons across the country, emphasizing how drug-use fuels violence in South America.

Back in Colombia, he joined peace initiatives and spoke in hundreds of churches and radio programs urging a message of personal transformation and reconciliation with God. 

In 1998, he obtained his first FM radio license and launched a network of AM, FM, and Shortwave stations targeted to the areas most affected by violence. He began producing sermons and audiobooks and saw a need for an accurate Spanish Bible. Using ancient Hebrew-Spanish translations and the Tyndale Bible he created the Biblia del Jubileo which he freely distributes across rural Colombia and Venezuela. 

Russell has authored more than 60 books, including translating the Jubilee Bible into English and Spanish. He has produced over 1,000 radio broadcast programs on all chapters of the Bible. He is a veteran mountain aviation pilot and has used planes to parachute hundreds of thousands of Bibles and Christian materials into restricted and hostile areas of Colombia. Russell has also obtained his captain’s certificate and has used boats to smuggle Bibles and spread the Gospel through various countries in Latin America via ocean and rivers. 

Film Productions

Russell and Marina along with their two daughters and their husbands, Lisa & Sammy and Alethia & Stevie, have produced two motion pictures: La Montaña, a true story feature depicting aspects of their work in Colombia, and The Parish of the Pines, set in Minnesota’s late 1800’s which recounts the real life adventures of Frank Higgins, a missionary to the forgotten lumberjacks of the Northern woods. 

Russell and Marina have four children and nine grandchildren, many of whom are involved in the ministry. They continue to spread the Gospel throughout Colombia and Venezuela through radio, literature, and in-person ministry, devoted to spiritual transformation in areas affected by violence and poverty.