The World Race Launches from Mexico

(PRWEB) January 25, 2006 -- Twenty racers accelerated across the starting line beginning the World Race™ Sunday, January, 15 at 7:44 a.m. CT. Three teams from the United States left their training camp in Matamoros, Mexico for Veracruz in used vehicles they purchased for the first few legs of the World Race™ sponsored by the Christian missions organization, Adventures In Missions.

The World Race™ will take eleven months (319 days) racing from Mexico, to Guatemala, to China to India, to Egypt, to Bosnia, to Israel, to East Africa, to Kenya, to South Africa, and back to the United States. The 2006 race will also include two teams from South Africa, which join the race in February.

The three facets to the World Race™ are: the race, cultural training, and ministry. Along the way the teams and individual racers are keeping blogs and posting video clips of the trip to the race’s website: http://www.TheWorldRace.org.

At the beginning of each month, the teams race from one location to the next. Teams are given a limited amount of money that they can use creatively to outpace other teams to the next destination. Some teams may go by bus while other teams purchase air tickets or take a train. Teams win each leg and the year-long race itself based on the shortest elapsed time.

In each new country, teams partner with a variety of local ministries for a month. In Mexico they helped plant home fellowships. In Guatemala they will help victims of the mud slides. In the future, teams will minister to child prostitutes and orphans as they progress to Asia and Africa.

Participants come from a variety of backgrounds. Sarah Cruz is a personal fitness trainer from New Jersey whose husband is in Iraq all year. Gary Weston quit his job as a consultant to Arnold Schwartznegger to join his wife on a team. Chad Mast left his lucrative career in commercial real estate in Scottsdale, Arizona. They are on the three U.S. teams competing against two South African teams.

“For too long this generation has been coddled, distracted, and under-challenged,” says Seth Barnes, Founder and Executive Director of Adventures In Missions. “The twenty World Racers who left today have abandoned everything to go to the nations ... They have the fire of God in their hearts. They are unified in spirit and purpose. They are focused on Jesus and his call to go into all the world and make disciples.”

Adventures In Missions is an interdenominational, missions organization whose purpose is to mobilize and equip Christians for missions. See www.Adventures.org or call (800) 881-2461 for more information.