Lost in Translation

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.