We just got back from our whirlwind trip to Colombia. All we had to do was touch down so they could stamp our passports, but we tried to use the time as profitably as possible.
We ended up staying an extra night in Newark because they offered us $400/person in credit, hotel, and food for the night because the flight was overbooked. Not a bad deal.
We arrived late on Thursday night and spent Friday resting because Lucas got sick from the change in altitude.
On Sunday I preached at Grace Baptist Church in Chia... wow, my brain didn't want to work too well in Spanish, but people said it was okay. Later we ate lunch at the pastor's house. Pastor Daniel has had his share of struggles in the ministry but things are looking up.
We visited our friends Alfredo and Juana in Tenjo and had a refreshing time with them. We visited a number of other friends during our time in Chia.
Conclusion: We enjoyed our time in Colombia, but it was clear that our burden for the country has changed. We felt like visitors in Bogotá and Chía because our burden has moved to the coast. I can't believe that it's only about 5 months until we go back! I'm more excited than ever about beginning a new church plant on the Colombian coast.
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We went this week on a trip to Neiva (6 hours to the southwest of Bogotá) to rest and also investigate the possibility of church planting there. We thoroughly enjoyed the trip, and the heat actually for me wasn´t as bad as everyone says. Holly said it was hot, but in comparison to a humid Iowa July day it wasn´t bad. We were able to travel to a desert about 45 minutes northeast of Neiva which was really interesting. We also traveled to a dam about an hour to the south of Neiva. As always it was fascinating to see how different the geography of the country is. It reminded me of Arizona in some ways.
As far as church planting, the city has a need, but we found that the location is not central enough for branching out to other cities. We talked to one Baptist pastor who is serving faithfully. 
We were planning to spend most of our week in Barranquilla on our survey trip to the Colombian coast but ended up spending as much time in Santa Marta because after two days of work in Barranquilla we realized that it´s not the best place for us to start. We saw a directory of churches that listed around 800 churches in Barranquilla. Of these there are at least 35 Baptist churches. Granted most are Pentecostal now, but we decided that we don´t want to have to work in that type of environment, at least for our first church plant. In constrast, Santa Marta, a city of around 400,000 (or up to 600,000 in some estimates), has only one Baptist church. We weren´t able to talk to the pastor but asked if the pastora (lady pastor) was around. The girl told us that the pastora would be there later in the afternoon. Scott asked when their healings service was, and the girl said on Wednesdays at 7 p.m.
As you can see from this example, it´s really not that hard to figure out when a church isn´t fundamental here. That said, Santa Marta is now looking like our number one possibility for a future church plant. The three of us left enchanted with the place and the need for sound churches is evident. Please continue to pray with us!
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.
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
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.