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Today's Featured Biography
Myron Loss
I was born on a farm in central Pennsylvania on June 17, 1945. My parents were Christians and very faithful in church attendance and participation in other Christian activities. Since I grew up hearing God’s Word, I knew the Gospel at an early age, and assumed that I was a Christian because I believed in the Bible and was a pretty good person. At the age of 13, however, my grandfather made me realize that I was just fooling myself, and that I needed to repent and receive Christ as my Savior. That happened in a revival campaign on November 28th, 1958. I was soon telling lots of people about Christ, but then I discover that after the revival most people didn’t talk much about the Lord. I cooled off and fell in with the crowd. Though I read a few verse in the Bible most every day and prayed in some form or another, I was a lukewarm Christian for the next seven years. After studying at Penn State University for two years, and attending church and youth group faithfully the whole time, I came to realize that I was a failure as a Christian, and gave my heart completely to the Lord. I became active in inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and also Campus Crusade for Christ when it came to campus. I was on associate military staff with Campus Crusade for about 3 years (1968-1971), and while attending seminary, was on Inter-Varsity Missions’ staff part-time helping to promote student outreach (1979-1982).
After graduating from Penn State in Industrial Engineering, I was commissioned in the Air Force and went to pilot training in Del Rio, Texas. After five months, I was married to Janet Beaston from Havertown, PA. We had gotten to know each other at Inter-Varsity and fallen in love the last semester of college. Nine months after our marriage, I graduated from pilot training and was assigned to Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas. A month later, Janet and I were involved in an auto accident caused by three drunken men, and she went to be with the Lord the following day.
About ten months later, the Lord gave me peace and faith to ask him for another partner, which I did, and that He would bring her to meet me at Founder’s Week conference at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. There, Alice Owen and I met and were married nine months later in Saigon, Viet Nam. I was a pilot doing Psychological warfare, and Alice worked in the office of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
After returning from Viet Nam, we spent a year as an instructor pilot in Florida, and then went to Moody Bible Institute where Alice finished her last year and I took a year of Bible in the Advanced Studies Program. After six months of maintenance training in Tennessee, we went to Bolivia with the Andes Evangelical Mission in January 1974 to work in aviation and other support ministries. After three years, we had planted a church, organized and led several weekly Bible studies, served in various capacities, and had a very active and fruitful term. The Mission asked us to recruit more workers, so we worked in the USA for three years visiting churches, Bible Schools, camps, etc. to find more laborers for the harvest field in Bolivia. I have spoken in hundreds of churches and Bible schools across the country.
Since I only had one year of Bible, and had educational benefits under the GI bill, we decided to do graduate studies at Columbia Biblical Seminary (now Columbia International University), where I received two masters degrees (Master of Arts in Cross-Cultural Communication, and a Master of Divinity degree with North American emphasis), and wrote a thesis which later became a book entitled Culture Shock, Dealing with Stress in Cross-cultural Living.
After a year raising support again, we were able to return to Bolivia with SIM (AEM had merged with SIM partly due to my initiative) and work in church-planting and other related ministries. The Lord enabled us to plant three churches as well as lead some weekly Bible studies, help in administration and many other things.
In 1987, we began SIM’s work in Paraguay which had the second lowest percentage of Evangelicals in the Western Hemisphere (1.8%). There, we mostly did administration and leadership, helping to plant one church, and working closely with many national leaders. I was president of CONAMI, the national missions promotion committee for three years, and an advisor to the national pastors and leaders association. Our missionary team grew from 2 to 25 in six years, and we were involved in additional ministries such as being house parents, many construction projects, and area leadership.
After seven years (1995), we were asked and felt led to move to Uruguay and begin the SIM work in that country which had the lowest percentage of evangelicals of all of the Americas (1.5%). We were involved in Administration, a bookset project for national church leaders, church planting, Marriage Encounter Ministries which we began in the country, Latin missions promotion (again I was National Coordinator of the movement for three years), evangelism, and service to many churches and people. In recent years, I gave more and more time to helping the Latin church in the sending of missionaries to the rest of the world. I also started a small radio station and operated it for 6 years before our retirement. I also started and planned and supervised the construction of a retreat center and camp which was donated to the Armenian Church denomination just before we left Uruguay.
We have two children, Vincent born in Bolivia May 12th 1976, and Veronica born in New Jersey August 20th 1978. Veronica is married to Jonathan Coombs, whose parents work as translators with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Peru. Veronica and Jonathan have one daughter, Lydia, born 27 October, 2003, and they have been serving in Indonesia and the Philippines for 8 years.
We retired in June of 2013 because it was time to find a smaller cart for the old horses. We moved to Ocala because we had some friends here who helped us buy a house which we could afford. For about a year we attended Living Hope Community church, but I decided to look for something else because we were having no ministry there, and I felt the church was stagnant. We also have been attending for over a year a small Spanish Pentecostal church and teaching the youth weekly. We also recently began a ministry for married couples.
I have written five books: Culture Shock, Dealing with Stress in Cross-cultural Living (1983), The Reward of the Righteous, (1994).
God is With Us (2015), The world is up-side-down (2015), and Letters from Heaven (2015). I am working on a book entitled, "Why Believe in God?", and another "What Happens When you die?"
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