Lost in Translation

I´ve recently run across three other missionary websites of people working in Colombia. It´s interesting to see different perspectives from other parts of the country.

The Washburns in Medellín
The Morelands in Pereira
David Ford in Medellín

In a previous post (Future possibilities) I talked about statistical need in Colombia. Well, after corresponding with another missionary who lives in Pereira and thinking about it, the national registry of churches doesn´t have as much bearing on the situation as I´d thought. For one thing, many churches aren´t registered. For another thing many churches are under the coverage of a church in a different city.

So how can we get more reliable statistics? I found a national church directory of Colombia that seems to offer a better idea. Granted that not every church is listed, and unfortunately a few of the buttons in their website don´t work, so I can´t get numbers for several cities I want (Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Tunja).

All things considered, I came up with some interesting results. Based on a comparison with the number of churches listed, here are the most needy cities per person:

Florencia -- 146,249 people, 3 churches listed, 48,750 people per church listed
Buenaventura -- 339,096 people, 8 churches listed, 42,387 people per church listed
Valledupar -- 372,096 people, 16 churches listed, 23,256 people per church listed
Montería -- 393,179 people, 19 churches listed, 20,694 people per church listed
Medellín (metro area)-- 3,092,355 people, 150 churches, 20,615 per church listed

My biggest surprise was to see Medellín in this list and not see Cali, but Cali has 233 churches listed and fewer people than Medellín.

Now, all this is nice, but it´s only an estimate. What would an indepth study look like? Well, surprisely I found exactly that kind of study done for Medellín. You can find it at a site called prolades.com, in the document La pluralidad religiosa en Medellín. I only wish they´d done a study of all the major cities in Colombia, but the ground work would look very similar to what Profesor Mora has come up with for Medellín.

Uff... (as we say in Spanish), I´ve been out of the communication loop to some extent because I was at kids´camp last week. I would like to get caught up with everything this coming week (prayer letter, finances, correspondence, etc.), but I´m not so sure that will happen.

For the time being I´ll post the Alonso´s prayer letter, which gives you a basic idea about what´s been happening with the ministry here. We´ve seen some real blessings as of late. We´re also looking at renting a house in Chía in the next few weeks. We saw one that we liked today, and I have an appointment to talk to the owner tomorrow. It happens to be in Ponylandia, a residential community you can read about in the Alonso´s prayer letter.

Alonso´s December prayer letter

Something that I don´t like about the ministry is that you make friends/disciples and then either you have to leave or they do. This happened today with two people who are special to our family. Ricardo Andrés has been a good friend of mine, and I was discipling him for a while. His family moved from Chía to Bogotá, and he has decided that another church more close would be better for his family. He was my apprentice in our small group ministry, so it´s a loss on that front too.

Lorena is another person who has become a friend of our family. I met her in Cartagena, and she accepted Christ. We have been discipling her by e-mail, and she has visited us in our home a number of times while she´s been in Bogotá. She spent all day with us today, going to church, eating lunch, looking at a possible house and then being stuck 2 hours in a traffic jam on the way into Bogotá (another reason why moving to Chía will be a big blessing!). She leaves tomorrow for Cartagena, and we will miss her. It´s amazing how someone can become a family friend (Lucas and Elie love her) in so short of time. Please pray for her spiritual life and especially that God would give her wisdom to seek her fulfillment in Him and His principles.

All this to say that I feel a little sad today. On the other hand I trust that the Lord will work in this two young people´s lives.

I´ve been kicking around a question lately. Thinking about this country of Colombia, where should we go as missionaries? For example, I´ve heard that God is moving in Cali, a city of over 2 million people. But there are churches in Cali, obviously with a need for more. Is our goal to expand the work of our mission? Or of Baptists? Or should we focus on pueblos in which there are no gospel witness?

As I mentioned in a previous post Manizales seems to have a need for more churches. I wrote to a pastor who works in that city asking about the need. He said that there is more need in the pueblos of that department, especially in one called Ríosucio ("Dirty river"). This pueblo has an estimated population of 48,000 and is known for its festival dedicated to the devil. The whole town prepares itself for this festival held every two years. According to this pastor there are hardly any churches in the town.

So, where is there more need? In a city of 2 million or a town of 48,000? I think that God directs different kinds of people to different kinds of ministry. Please pray that God would lead us... the honest truth is that I am very restless here in Bogotá. (Note: photo from luis perez on www.flickr.com)

If you want to visit our church, here is our new invitation card. We´re looking forward to printing 10,000 of these to begin to invite as much of Chía as possible. I would also like this image to show up in Google when someone types in "mapa de Chia" because there really are hardly any maps out there of the city.

We´re in the praying, planning, and brainstorming stage for future ministry here in Colombia. My wife jokes that I change my mind every other day... "We´re going to Cali." "No, we´re going to Tunja." And so on.

But I have a possibly more objective way to help plan where a missionary team could go in Colombia. I found the national registry of all of the religious entities (90% are "Christian" churches) that have legal status in the country. These entities include some denominations that have different forms of government, for which there is only one name and address listed (For example Casa sobre la Roca has only one address listed but I know they have churches in 20 cities in Colombia). But, all things being equal this registry should give us an idea of how many independent, legally-recognized churches are in each city.

Here are my findings of the three most needy cities based on this calculation:

Manizales -- population 385,000; Religious entities -- 5 (1 per 77,069 people)
Pasto -- pop. 393,000; Rel. ent. -- 7 (1 per 56,240)
Sincelejo -- pop. 247,000; Rel. ent. -- 5 (1 per 49,441)

Now let´s compare Bogotá: population: 7.05 million -- Rel. ent. 468 (1 per 15,064)

As you can see the need is far greater statistically in the first three cities. Not to mention that you can easily take a bus in Bogotá from anywhere and attend a fundamental church.

At any rate, we´ll see what comes of this. On a human level I would love to live in Manizales, wouldn´t mind Pasto, but Sincelejo would be a stretch. Obviously the human factor doesn´t influence me too much though.

The next step would be to take survey trips to see things up close.

The Alonsos posted their prayer letter which can give you their perspective of the ministry in Chía.

Alonso´s Prayer Letter

We´re all fine here in Bogotá, but an historic hailstorm fell on Saturday. We ended up with about 6 inches of hail in our patio. Here are a few pictures of the event...

I usually write about the ministry here, but I thought I´d mention my newest hobby. Lately I´ve been big into cooking, and I´ve been taking a short cooking class on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I get tired of Bogotá more than anything because of the difficulty to build relationships with people in a busy city where everyone has something to do. But I also realize that the capital has some neat things to offer, like this cooking class.

Each week we´ve made a full-course meal from a different culture. We started with Arabic food, then Cantonese, and last week was Peruvian food. Below is the Cantonese dessert we made (Flan de coco y rosas) which contains edible rose petals and rose water. It was to die for!

As we left Cartagena, Scott, Alfredo and I agreed that we would write down some of the lessons we learned. Here is what sticks in my mind:

1) We could work together with a team of 3 or 4 couples in a city, and we could plant 3 churches at a time, rotating with a series of messages. For example, I prepare a 4 week series on salvation and then preach it in the three churches. That way we could spend a lot more time on evangelism and not so much on sermon prep.

2) We need to focus specifically on evangelism of men. We noticed that we were able to share the gospel with more women in Cartagena, but the key to a strong church is male leadership. We would have to compensate for the cultural tendency that men aren´t as interested in spiritual things.

3) A good bulletin each week would help with a church plant.

4) You can start a church in many different places. We did the study in a hotel. Why not start a church in one?

5) Even if we don´t have musical talent we could use CDs for the music until we were able to train musicians.

6) Mass evangelism with a team of people would well in some parts of Colombia (it appeared that it does in Cartagena).

7)Barranquilla is a possible ministry location. It´s the biggest city on the Colombian coast.

8) The focus of a new church plant should focus on strengthening areas that are weak in the culture. For example I talked to one pastor who said that in Cartagena they focus a lot of energy on teaching the importance of work because the culture tends towards laziness and unemployment.

These are some of the lessons I learned... some are more important than others, but I wanted to record a few of my thoughts.

I´m writing from an Internet café in Cartagena on the coast of Colombia. This missions trip has been a huge blessing. First, the time spent with Pastor Alfredo and Scott has been edifying, and I feel like we´ve grown a lot closer. We share the same basic philosophy of ministry and have been able to talk about how we would like to work together in the future to start other churches here in Colombia.

Second, the time with the main group of people we came to visit has gone well. We´ve been able to have a Bible study every night with a group of about 10-12 different people, many of whom are not believers.

We´ve also been able to share gospel with many other people in the city here. Today I "happened" to pass by a stand that sells ice drinks and began to talk to the girl working there. It turns out that she´s from Bogotá (I enjoyed hearing the accent from there because it´s a lot easier to understand). She "happens" to have attended a gospel preaching church in Bogotá for about a year but isn´t a believer yet. She also "happened" to be in a bad car accident last week. I was able to share the gospel with her and she was visibly moved. She said that tonight she was going to read and apply to her life the tract that I left with her. We´re also going to have lunch with her today.

Besides all of that, we´ve been able to find a group of fundamental Baptist churches here in the city that we can recommend to people we know. It was a blessing for Scott to visit one of them last night and find that they are faithfully preaching the Word of God.

Just a quick note from an Internet café here in Bogotá to say that our computer died on Sunday at church. For that reason we´ll be slightly out of the loop for a few weeks while we wait for our new one to come.

It´s actually nice to work without a computer at times. Less distractions and for some reason my ideas flow better on paper.

I haven't had many chances to write about great adventures here in Colombia, which may or may not be a good thing (sometimes "adventure" can have a bad connotation here, if we're talking about guerrillas in the jungle).

This morning I decided to jog to La Calera, a town of 25,000 people. On the map it said the distance between Bogota and La Calera was 9 km. Of course it's straight up the mountain on the east side of Bogota, but that's what attracted me in the first place. I took a bus to the road closest to the edge of the mountain and started out at 9:15 a.m. In the photo you can see the first undulating stretch up the mountain-- the first 3 km were brutal. Switch-backs straight up the mountain. I confess that I had to walk about every 300 meters. After running/walking for an hour, I finally reached the toll at the top of the mountain and figured I was almost there. Unfortunately the sign said that La Calera was another 8 kms! But I couldn't give up because I didn't go all that way to say I didn't make it.

Thankfully the 8 km were almost all downhill, so I made it to the pueblo in another hour.

Photo of the plaza en La Calera by "Diego en Bogota" from Flickr.com

I praise God for the ministry partner that I have in Chia. Jose and his family have been a great blessing, especially in language learning, cultural understanding, and friendship. This month's prayer letter from the Alonso's shows aspects of the ministry that I didn't have space to mention in our prayer letter. You can read it online at:

Alonso prayer letter (Note: there are three pages to the letter)

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to blog anything. I taught a course in our seminary here on Matthew, which was a stressful experience because I agreed to take the course with three weeks notice and without notes from another professor. That meant that I was working all day to prepare the class for that night, something that is not fun, especially when I had to continue with responsabilities in Chia. Well, I survived the Matthew class and now I'm teaching a course on biblical counseling at the Bible institute in Tenjo. It's been a lot less stressful because there are fewer students, it's more informal, and the topic is clearer in my mind (Matthew is difficult!).

Last week I started a new series with the men's Sunday school class on historical theology. They have wanted to understand better how our theology fits into the scheme of church history and why we believe what we do from a historical perspective. I have learned to really enjoy this subject, especially since I'm no expert and am learning a lot. The first week we looked at the sufficiency of the Scriptures and the contrast between the view of Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian on this topic. This week we're going to study the topic of the NT canon.

I don't know how many of you speak Spanish, but here are a few resources that I've found helpful.

Recursos para el estudio del canon, de la historia de la iglesia, etc.

El Texto Bíblico -- Nuevo Testamento
Recursos Teológicos
Apologetica.org Este sitio es católico, pero me sirvió para aprender más acerca de los padres de la iglesia.

In the online class that I'm taking on "Hermeneutics in a Postmodern World" from Pro-Meta in Costa Rica we had to read an article in Portuguese last week. I took one look at it and thought, "Nooooo.... you're kidding, right? I can't read that." But I thought I'd give it the old college try. Do you what? I think that I understand about 90% of the article with some minor help from my friends at wordreference.com! That was pretty amazing to me. I was reading it in Spanish, but the languages are close enough that it's actually not that hard. I just look up a few of the code words I couldn't get (like "no" which means "in").

Have I ever mentioned in my blog that interviews in Portuguese and Italian aren't translated here? The people can understand them well enough to make the translation unneccesary.

We were in the States for about a week (June 27th to July 3rd), and not surprisely I felt out of place. Why? That's hard to say. The overnight flight without sleep didn't help. Nor did four straight days of rain in KC with a case of bronchitis.

But perhaps the funniest experience on the trip was when I picked up our rental car. It was a brand-new Dodge Caliber with about 1,800 miles on it. As I looked at it I thought, "Wow, that's a cool car." I thought that until I sat in the driver's seat. It was pouring, and I couldn't see much because the car was so sporty that its columns blocked my visibility. I started it up and tried to pull from the parking lot I was in to building where Holly and the kids were but I couldn't figure out how to get there. I pulled back in and asked the parking attendent. "No clue," he said. I pulled out again and finally found the entrance to the other parking lot. When I pulled the car up the rain was pouring down even harder, and I couldn't open the trunk. "Is there a button? What do I do? Aarghh..." After about 10 minutes I found the latch to open the trunk.

I missed by 1993 Renault 9 back in Bogota. Sure, it doesn't look like much but at least I can open the trunk and see the roads!

Being a first-term missionary can be an interesting role. Perhaps I overanalyze things at times and for that reason often feel a bit discouraged with the ministry. Thankfully I have friends like Jose and Scott who have lifted my spirits and helped me see things in perspective.

As a first-termer, you have so many preconceived ideas about the ministry in the country to which you are going. I don't have our ministry presentation set up on my computer now, but if I could watch it again I'm sure I would laugh at a lot of the things I said in it. This problem has to do with appearances/superficial understanding and the reality. Having only visited the country before on short-term trips, I didn't understand many things. It's the difference between an answer from a book and an answer from personal experience.

As Scott helped me see, the knowledge and understanding we have gained will be invaluable in our future ministry. We haven't seen the fruit in the ministry that we want to see, but that is because we are still building the foundation. A couple of the insights I've gained in a year and a half:

• Colombians are equal partners in the ministry, but in order to truly understand them I must give myself to them in friendship, spending time with them. If they are not my friends, they will not share difficult things with me. On the other hand, if they know that I love them, they will be willing to tell me almost anything that they are thinking. This has implications because missionaries often make mistakes in the ministry and need to hear about it.
• We must be honest. I've seen the temptation in missions to make the figures look good or exaggerate slightly, or place things slightly out of context so they look better. I am trying to reject this temptation on every level in our ministry.
  

I just realized that my blog could serve as a repository for sermon illustrations, saving them under the appropiate tag. Of course the beauty of a good story is that it can be morphed to illustrate various truths.

Yesterday afternoon I went to pick up a missionary family from the airport who had come in from Leticia. There were six in total and as I went to shut the back of the mission van one of the kid's head was in the way. I waited for him to move but because he was still close I didn't slam it shut.

As we were tooling along at around 70 km/h on the Avenida El Dorado (one of the nicest in Bogota to give visitors a good first impresion I'm sure) all was well. The family was happy. I was happy. My friend Wilder was sleeping because he had been up almost all night at a retreat out at camp.

I went to pull off the inner lanes into the outer lanes and heard a whoosh, looked back, and to my horror saw that the van door had conveniently opened and it looked as if several suitcases had flown out. I slammed on the brakes, ran at full speed to grab the suitcases. Thankfully the beautiful silver Mercedes right behind us had slammed on its brakes and the driver and his wife were laughing. I apologized profusely and ran back with the escapee in hand.

It turns out that only one suitcase flew out, and the family said that it was the most beat-up one they own. I learned that even if all looks good, it's always good to double check!

A friend from college, Barry Farlow, just let me know about a site that he helped develop called Pictorb. The site provides missionary pictures from across the globe, and he wanted to know if we would contribute some photos from Colombia.

The Colombian peso has gained more against the dollar in the last year than any other currency in the world. The graph below gives you an idea of how it's value has plummeted. Yesterday it ended in 1,877 pesos per dollar. This tendency reflects the greater confidence foreign investors have in Colombia. The security situation has dramatically improved and dollars are pouring into the country, driving its value down. Importers are happy and the exporters are upset.

I was asked to preach at the 2nd annual missionary conference here in Bogota last Saturday. The pastors have now named the mission agency SIBAN, which stands for SIervos Bautistas A las Naciones (Baptist servants to the Nations). The preaching went very well, and the message reflected many insights that I have gleaned from pastors here. I'll just mentions my main points so you get the idea (the outline was nicer looking in Spanish).

Following the Compass of Paul's Strategy
Romans 15

The missions strategy of Paul consists of three tasks that we should emulate:

I. Understand the mission: vv. 7-13

• We must understand that God wants to see unity that leads to more people glorifying Him.
• Our goal is not to be comfortable, nor a social club, nor to brag about our sound doctrine but to reach more people for the glory of God.
  

• We see that Paul relied on the work of the Holy Spirit in people's lives.
  
• He fulfilled his ministry because he left strong, reproducing churches in the major cities.
• On a personal level, every pastor and missionary should be reproducing himself.
• On a practical level... Are we doing all of the preaching and teaching because we're the best at it? We need to think about who we will leave in our place and think long-range.
• We also need a reproducible model in Colombia for how we plant new churches.
  

• We're at a crucial point in the history of missions here in Colombia.
• Where do we go from here?
  
• There's a lot to do in Bogota, but what about the rest of the country?
• We does God want us to go next?
  

Last week I finished teaching my first seminary class here--General Epistles. The class went pretty well, although we weren't able to cover 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John or Jude.

We just arrived last night after our annual vacation... this time we ventured out on our longest bus ride to date of about 8 hours. The crazy thing is how close the cities and towns look on the map and then to see that those 100 km take 3 hours because it's non-stop switch-backs. Actually the bus drivers are more like professional race-car drivers than normal people.

El eje cafetero is the second biggest tourist attraction in Colombia after the Caribbean coast. I personally liked it even better than the coast because the weather was perfect (and always is), the people were very friendly (and their Spanish is easier to understand than on the coast), and the land is the most fertile country I have ever seen.

We stayed on a finca (a farm property converted to hotel) in Armenia, the capital city of the smallest department in Colombia, el Quindio. An earthquake back in 1999 destroyed much of the city, and ironically led to the resurgence of the municipality. I would say that Armenia is much more orderly than Bogota, although it's hard to compare a city of 300,000 with a city of 7 million.

As I mentioned, we were impressed with the friendliness of the people. Actually I have to say that we experienced that in every part of Colombia except in Bogota and the surrounding towns. We were able to able to share the gospel with our guide, and she was very open to listen and wants to receive some Christian literature that we are going to send her. She told us that we should consider starting churches in el Quindio because she send that there are hardly any Christian churches around except the ones that she considers fanatical (e.g. charismatic).

If we could leave tomorrow to go plant new churches in Armenia, I wouldn't think twice about doing it. But things aren't so easy to just go off and do. At least we are getting to know and love this country much more with each new experience.

I've been impressed lately by the number of challenging books being translated into Spanish. The publishing house Editorial CLIE has begun a new series in which they are translating some of the best contemporary theology books from English. For example, commentaries by Gordon Fee, Douglas Moo, F.F. Bruce, Peter Davids, etc.

I read a book on discipleship from this series by Gegory Ogden and am working through his manual for discipleship. I wanted to include a quote from this second book that has spurred my thinking (obviously it will be my translation):

"We should decide what we want our ministry to be about. Do we want to receive short-lived applause and recognition or do we want to transmit a model to the few who will continue our labor once we are gone?" This question is excellent. Pastor Jose and I have decided to begin pouring more energy into some of our men with ministry potencial here. Who cares if we build a church of 500 if we can't leave it with trained leadership?

On the short-term side of things, this means that our ministry "quality" may suffer a little bit. I don't forsee anyone preaching better than Jose in the near future, but we need to start letting other men share the preaching so that they will grow. The same goes for the music, for the teaching, etc.

It's easy to criticize models that have been used in the past that haven't produced strong, biblically-minded leaders, but the question remains: What are we doing about it?

Last Thursday I began my first course in the seminary here in Bogota--General Epistles. I have 35 students, and the class has been going well. It's definitely a challenge for me to teach from 7 to 9:30 p.m. in Spanish. The second night my brain felt scrambled by about 9 p.m. Since then I've decided to sleep in a little more so that I'm fresher at night.

It's interesting how events converge in our lives. I just got accepted to take my first master's level class from a group called Pro-META. It turns out that they use an open-source environment for distance education called Moodle. I had never heard of Moodle until this week, and lo and behold, a missionary with ABWE who is in charge of distance education with the mission came through Bogotá this weekend and explained what the future will look like for theological education around the ABWE world. Talk about exciting!

We will be using the Moodle environment to facilitate distance education. The classes are super-dynamic... so far they have one class done in Spanish, but they are working in eight different languages. With this system we will be able to offer quality theological education to people throughout Colombia. Imagine, we could be training pastors in many cities of Colombia at the same time, even while we are on furlough ministry. The ABWE school is called Horizon International Schools.

Missionaries face difficult dilemmas. One of the hardest is knowing when it's time to move on to a different ministry, or if it's better to stay on strengthening the ministry in which you are serving. I mention this because the Lord continues to burden me for other parts of Colombia. We had a meeting with the men of our field team to talk about our church planting strategy and other possible locations for ministry in Colombia. Talk about exciting to think about!

We could go to the coffee region of Colombia in the west-central part of the country. Everyone I talk to says there is a huge need there. Armenia has 315,000 people; Manizales 357,000; Ibague 421,000; and Pereira 521,000. They hardly have any sound churches. The majority of the supposedly "evangelical" churches have drifted into charismatic practices, have women pastors, etc.

On the other hand, it's not like we can just take off and leave. Important ministries remain in the Bogota area. We need to make sure the seminary has qualified teachers, and that the camp continues to function.

I've advocated that we need to lift up our eyes and look on the fields... and then send a new team out to one of these needy areas. Of course there will be challenges to continue strengthening the ministries here in Bogota, but I think that God will bless our faith and planning if we purpose to branch out. If we don't look outward, I'm a little concerned about what could happen in the future. The words of Paul still challenge us: "And so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build on another man's foundation" (Rom. 15:20).

Next Wednesday is the first night of our new small group ministry, Grupos Agape. I am very excited about this ministry. If you can believe it, the only experience I have in a small group of a church was in San Antonio, Texas back in 1995, where I attended a small group led by some students who had just gotten back from missions trip in Russia.

It was a great experience. Of course I felt lonely in San Antonio, and the group helped me feel like I had someone my age with whom to talk. I still remember something funny. One night the leader said, "Let's just say that the next 30 minutes is prayer. We're just going to chat, but we'll consider that it's prayer. Maybe we can intersperse (of course I'm sure that was the exact word he used) random thoughts for God." I still get a laugh out of that! It's almost as good as one of my roommates who said that he used the snooze button to measure how long he'd prayed in the morning (yikes, his prayer life was spectacular... from about 4:45 a.m. to about 6:45 a.m.).

At any rate, we're starting the small group ministry with two groups. Pastor Jose will lead one, and I'll lead the other. We'll both have an apprentice whom we'll prepare to lead a group in the future. The goal of this ministry is that we grew in fellowship with our brothers and sisters.

We've come up with a basic vision statement for the church along the same lines as the authors of Simple Church advocate. In other words, each purpose of your church has one ministry that corresponds to that purpose, or to put it in other words, your vision is your process. Our statement (roughly translated) would be: "Growing in commitment... to God in worship, to our brothers and sisters in fellowship, to the church in ministry, and to the world in evangelism." To God in worship corresponds to the Sunday services; to our brothers and sisters in fellowship to the small groups; to the church in ministry to ministry teams (which don't exist yet), and to the world in evangelism permeates every aspect of our church life.

The church conflict continues, and I keep learning. A concept that is very important to understand in Colombian culture is the malicia indigena. The word indigena is the word for "indigenous" or "native." Supposedly this ability comes from their Indian roots, but it's probably more from their Spanish heritage. It's a difficult concept to translate directly, so I'll try to explain the idea. The term refers to the ability (or vice) to see beyond the surface and judge the motives of another person, usually to avoid getting ripped off or to rip someone off. It's the ability to connect the dots in a situation in order to come out ahead or to tell what's really going on.

I asked my Colombian co-worker if it's ever a good thing. He said that it never is... but that sometimes we misname wisdom or precaution malicia indigena.

The malicia indigena can have terrible effects on a church. No matter what a person says, he or she can be misinterpreted under the guise of the malicia indigena. Lately I've heard comments, such as, "You just can't understand how so-and-so is manipulating because you are so pure and you don't have the malicia indigena."

How does this concept affect a reconciliation process? Wow, it can utterly derail it. "No... so-and-so doesn't want to reconcile, he just wants to manipulate." "When he asked for forgiveness he really didn't mean it." Or you ask someone, "Do you have proof of that?" "No, but I have the malicia indigena with which I can see through the smokescreen."

I've also learned some things about counseling. You have to directly ask people what they mean because they can easily use ambiguous words (obviously this happens in the U.S. too, but I think that it's more pronounced here). For example, "When you said that, did you mean A, B, or C?" This is an important lesson for me to learn so early in my missionary career here. I tend to take things at surface value (they reconciled), when in reality they carefully crafted their words to avoid confessing anything or to admit that "progress is impossible so why bother."

At any rate, I continue studying faithfully in the school of hard knocks.

I was feeling super discouraged by the church situation the other day, until I picked up The Peacemaker by Ken Sande and read the first chapter. It's amazing how God can use one chapter of a book to infuse a person with hope and change disaster into an opportunity.

Read the first chapter of the book in PDF format.

Also see the related websites: www.peacemaker.net and www.peacemakerchurch.net.

I'm almost done with a book that I received for Christmas, Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger. I recommend it to you pastors out there. There basic premise is that less is more. Churches that focus on a simply explainable discipleship process grow better than program-driven churches that try to grow by bulking up the number of programs they add.

To see one of the author's websites, which offers some interesting ideas go to:
Eric Geiger.com

Here is Colombia you'll notice extremes. What is Colombian culture? That would depend to some extent where you are and with whom you walk. I've been wanting to post on this topic for a while.

It started with our visa process. Here I don't see foreigners very often. I've read that there are only 200,000 in the whole country of more than 40 million people. That has to be one of the lowest percentage of any country in the world. But we I went to the Ministry of Foreign Relations to solicit our visas the picture was different (not much of a surprise, right?). I spent the morning talking to a student from an African country whose name I can't recall. He is a theology student at a Catholic university here. Later I met a man whose parents are English and German and his wife's parents are Colombian and French, and she was born in the U.S. Talk about identity crisis in the family! The guy spoke five languages: German, French, English, Spanish, and Chinese. We talked about NGOs and his wife's work, etc. Most of the foreigners here probably live on a level significantly higher than the average Colombian.

The ambience of that office is quite different from where I was several day later. I went with a young man from our church to share the gospel with his family. In the south--way south--part of Bogotá. We were on three different buses for about 2 hours to get there. We arrived to be greeted in a house with two small rooms. The "living room" had half of the floor missing because either the concrete had collapsed or they had never finished it. The hostess offered me one of the three chairs in the house, after I used the bathroom that had a metal outhouse-type door and water all over the concrete, almost-dirt floor. They served me a simple snack of cooked plantain banana with a sweet jelly inside.

They say that Colombia is the happiest country in the world, or maybe second after some island in the Pacific. I would dare say that between these two experiences the second is more typical of this country.

This last week or two I've started using technology even more to my advantage. When I left seminary I knew that I would miss the library. But, thanks to the Internet, it's not so bad anymore. How so?

If I don't have a top-line commentary on the book I'm teaching or preaching, I check with Google Book Search or Amazon.com, which offers a Search Inside option on many books.

For an example of what you can do, I was able to read about Ephesians 4:9, 10 in about four of the best commentaries out there. That's a blessing for a missionary who doesn't have access to a seminary library!