“Five o'clock came and we heard nothing. It was all quiet.

“Nothing at five thirty. Six o'clock came, nothing. 

“Seven o'clock came and went. Nothing. All silence,” Jim (“Doc”) Bearss says.

With the coming dawn, Doc, his wife, Anna ’83, and 11 others were losing their chance for a secret helicopter rescue from Haiti.

“And now the sun’s up full at eight o’clock, and not a word.”

On February 27, 2024, Doc and Anna landed in Haiti, ready for the two-week module at Haiti Bible Institute. Everything went as planned—until February 29.

“Our host, Anderson, came into the dining room and pointed to the TV screen and said, ‘An airline has canceled,’” Anna says. Doc and Anna trusted Anderson’s judgment on Haiti’s frequent gang activity. “For Anderson to bring something up meant something was not quite right.”

Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, had traveled to Kenya to bring a deployment of police officers back home to help control the gangs. The gangs were determined to prevent the prime minister and his borrowed police force from returning.

Beginning on February 29, the gangs attacked the airport, the police station, and the prisons, releasing more than 4,000 prisoners, throwing Haiti into total chaos and possibly a civil war. Americans were advised to leave the country as soon as possible.

But Doc and the other two teachers—Steve Svendsen and Rich Powell ’82–’83—wanted to finish the module, eager to equip the pastors to teach the Bible and lead well.

“We talked to the men about it and asked them, ‘Do any of you want to go home?’” Doc says. “None of them did. They said, ‘No. Our families will be fine. We're trusting God.’”

Front L to R: Before the rescue from Haiti, Moody alumni Rich Powell, Anna Bearss, Doc Bearss, and Rev. Steve Svendsen from Wisconsin are shown with Haitian faculty and students at Haiti Bible Institute.

“What stuck out to me the most was that Doc and Anna never panicked but seemed to be resting their heads on the soft pillow of God's sovereignty.”

One helicopter pilot said he would come for $15,000 per person if he got permission. He never called back. Someone else suggested an air ambulance, but all three organizations they checked with cost $40,000 per person.

“That’s not gonna work,” Doc says. Grinning, he jokes, “People won’t pay that much to get us back.”

As days passed with no progress, Doc, Anna, Steve, and Rich did the only thing they could do—and asked their family, friends, and supporting churches to do the same.

“We continued to pray, and pray, and pray, and it was so encouraging,” says Doc, who heard about multiple churches and groups holding prayer vigils around the clock. “I estimate that there must have been a hundred thousand people praying for us to get us out of Haiti.”

Eventually, someone suggested Project DYNAMO, a veteran-led non-profit organization that performs rescue missions around the world.

On March 13, a team from Project DYNAMO agreed to come, but he called the next day with bad news.

“He said, ‘We've never run into this before, but Haiti is really making it difficult for us to get our chopper in without violating international law,’” Doc recounts. “I thought, I don't think we're ever going to get out of here, unless God does something really amazing.”

Jim “Doc” Bearss and his wife, Anna, had distinctly different upbringings. Doc, a pastor’s kid, was saved at age seven and later left his career as an actuary at an insurance company to join a traveling gospel team. Anna trusted Jesus at an evangelistic meeting—presented by Doc’s group—when she was 19.

Doc and Anna met when Doc’s group returned the next year. They began writing letters, and on New Year’s Eve 1978 they were married. They served together on evangelistic teams while Anna earned her degree from Moody Bible Institute.

“I never knew anybody more faithful,” says Doc. “She would get up at four o'clock every morning and work on her courses from four o'clock till about seven o'clock.”

In 1983, she was one of the three students to graduate from the first graduating class of the Adult Correspondence School program.

“It was a good discipline for me,” says Anna. “I enjoyed it. I was a new Christian, and I had never studied the Bible. The second class I took was just a survey of the entire Old and New Testament. I think that was the most helpful thing for me because I was able to get an overall view of God and just the history of the Bible.”

Eventually, Doc felt called to the pastorate. After serving as a pastor at churches in Colorado, Indiana, and Wisconsin and becoming an adjunct professor for Moody, he learned of the need for qualified teachers to teach the Bible overseas.

“I had already been teaching at Moody since 1990,” Doc says. “As a teacher at heart, I just really felt I could be used by God to train pastors overseas.”

In 2006, he founded On Target Ministry, a nonprofit organization that specializes in teaching the Bible and training pastors in different countries around the world.

“And then we got invited to Haiti.”

Doc and Anna Bearss.

“When we went into this ministry,” Doc says, “as I prayed about it, I prayed, ‘God, I’ll go anywhere you want me to go, but never Haiti.’ But that was where God decided to plant our ministry.”

So in 2009, he founded Haiti Bible Institute. Completely donor-sponsored and highly practical, the four-year program consists of a two-week module every spring and fall.

Doc and other pastors and professors travel to Haiti to teach the classes at a hotel they rent for the modules, where their host, Anderson, provides them with everything they need.

The Haitian pastors take 32 Bible courses and earn an associate’s degree in Biblical Studies. Since 2009, five classes have graduated.

Going into Haiti, Doc and Anna knew the risks.

“Haiti is a dangerous mission field,” Doc says. “But we could always get in and out safely if the airplanes from the airport are secure because we can always get to and from the airport quite easily.”

Until this trip.

On Saturday, March 16, after three days of radio silence, Project DYNAMO finally called back.

“He said, ‘We’ve got the choppers lined up and we're going to get you out of there tomorrow,” Doc says. “We had already heard that line over and over and I thought ‘Well, okay, we’ll see.’”

When they hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Jack Jenkins, one of their Bible teachers in the states who hadn’t come on this trip.

“He said, ‘I’ve got the office of Cory Mills on the line,’” Doc says.

Rep. Cory Mills, congressman from Florida’s 7th district, had been coordinating and funding his own rescue missions to Haiti. Many of their family and friends had reached out to him about Doc, Anna, Steve, and Rich.

As soon as Doc hung up with Jack, the phone rang again. It was the person from Cory’s office who was coordinating the rescue.

“She said, ‘We have a helicopter that’s going to be taking off at midnight tonight. If you can be there, you’ll get a seat.’”

Haiti has a strict 6:00 p.m. curfew. If caught breaking curfew by the police, offenders may be detained and possibly incarcerated. If captured by a gang, they’ll likely be robbed, kidnapped, or worse.

Doc cancelled the Project DYNAMO flight, and at 10:00 p.m., the group piled into Anderson’s truck for the 40-minute drive to the airport under cover of darkness.

“We took all these very strange back routes through the worst possible roads you can imagine,” Doc says. “But we got all the way through the city and never saw a single gang checkpoint, never saw a single police checkpoint.”

As they waited for the helicopter, they learned their pickup point was no longer viable.

They received another landing site with a 5:00 a.m. rescue time. Again violating curfew, Doc, Anna, Steve, Rich, and nine others traveled to the new rescue point.

“Five o’clock came, and we heard nothing. It was all quiet,” Doc says.

With no helicopter and no news, the sun came up and dread set in. Then, shortly after 8:00 a.m., the helicopter crew called; they’d been stuck at the border waiting for permission to enter Haiti’s airspace. They told the group to be ready at 9:20 a.m.

“Our instructions were very simple: The helicopter will land and be on the ground for two minutes,” Doc says. “You form a single-file run to the helicopter and get on, and we take off in two minutes.”

Soon, they heard the dull throb they’d all been waiting for: a helicopter. They ran across the soccer field through the dust kicked up by the blades, and in two minutes, they were off the ground in a chopper that included Rep. Mills among its crew.

The night that seemed to last forever ended with a short flight to the Dominican Republic, where they boarded a plane to Miami. They arrived back on US soil full of renewed faith.

“It became very real to me that God is in charge,” Anna says. “And He directs and He leads in whatever direction He wants to take. But whatever direction that is, He's there. He's there for us. And we need not fear.”

The Bearss run for the getaway helicopter with others who’d been stranded in Haiti due to civil unrest.

“We’re not done with Haiti,” Doc says, a far cry from his first determination never to serve there. Even if it’s impossible for them to return for a while, Haiti Bible Institute will still carry on without their presence. “We have been able to work closely with four of the men who graduated with honors and develop them into excellent teachers.”

And, though they are in Florida, Doc's and Anna’s hearts and prayers are constantly with their friends in Haiti.

“I want you to pray that God will help Haiti to stabilize and resume normal activities, so we can still go and encourage our students and be a part of their learning process,” Doc says. “But also pray that if that isn't God's will, that He’ll empower our professors that are there to teach well and to encourage the students and help them to learn truth.”

The Bearss and other relieved passengers after they landed in the Dominican Republic.