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.

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!