Dr. Bob Dayton has been used of God to make a difference in Central America. He brought a single light to a region and saw it multiplied over and over again.

Born in 1937 in Johnson City, New York, Bob Dayton was saved at the Trinity Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1956 at the age of nineteen. A few weeks later, after preaching at a rest home and seeing two nurses come to Christ, Bob began to sense God’s call to full-time Gospel ministry.

Several years later, he completed his Bible college education at Tennessee Temple University. In 1961, he began serving the Lord as a missionary to Nicaragua with a biblical passion to plant local churches.

It was a humble beginning. In fact, for some of the first years Dr. Bob Dayton lived with his family in a chicken house converted into a makeshift home. For the past forty-seven years, Dr. Dayton has expended his life in an extraordinary way for the furtherance of the Gospel in Central America—especially Nicaragua.

In his lifetime of labor, Dr. Dayton has been used of God to establish, to date, 188 independent Baptist churches in Nicaragua with a combined weekly attendance of 20,000 people. During the past forty-seven years, 47,000 people have been baptized through this man’s ministry. Dr. Dayton has personally trained national pastors in starting new churches, and more than 600 pastors and missionaries have been trained at his Bible school in Nicaragua. Since 1976, Dr. Dayton has also served as the Central America Director for Baptist International Missions, Inc.

This work has not been done without obstacles. In 1972, a major earthquake shook the capital city of Managua, killing thousands and leaving an estimated 250,000 people homeless, including the Daytons. The quake damaged most of the firefighting equipment in the city, and fires burned unchecked for days. The beds in the main hospital were unserviceable. For six months following the quake, workers pulled dead bodies from the debris.

The city was eventually rebuilt, but the country faced a new challenge with a drawn out civil war that began in 1979. Marxist Sandinista revolutionaries took over the government and faced opposition from the Contras. The fighting finally stopped when the Sandinista government was voted out in 1990 under an internationally monitored election.

Yet despite the hardships, God still blessed. Dr. Dayton said, “More churches were started during the time of trials than any other time in our ministry.”