Lost in Translation

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.