Lost in Translation

I've been in "emergency mode" for the past two weeks. By that I mean I´ve had to attend a ton of emergency meetings to try to fix some major things that blew up in the church. Here´s what happenned.

Two Sundays ago, I had an inkling that things weren't going to go perfectly. We were going to have a budget meeting with the church after the service. I had thoughts of budget meetings at Campus Baptist, where the budget is presented, three or four respectful questions are asked, and then it's approved.

Not so on that day. We spent 45 minutes just debating the approval of the minutes from the previous meeting. Obviously something was brewing. And Holly said that she saw Galatians 5:15 come alive, "But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!"

Towards the end of the meeting a group of people stood up and read a letter basically sharing their desire to say "chau" to the Colombian pastor.

Of course this type of thing sends major shudders through the whole church. There was group of people who met almost every night for a week or two. Other people see the unbiblical foundations of such a tactic. Last Sunday the tension was palpable in the service.

As a church we need to work through many details of this situation. People were offended verbally. The Bible was not followed. As the interim pastor I felt like resigning on the Monday after this happened. Now I see that God needs to work through this situation to purify His church.

I´ve been mostly working on an individual or family level with this problem, slowly unraveling the knots of problems that should have been handled biblically a long time ago.

We took our first trip out of Cundinamarca (the department in which Bogota lies), crossing the border into Boyaca on our way to the city of Tunja, which has a population estimated at about 124,000. The drive of two hours is breathtaking and a good challenge for our Renault 9 (forget about running it with natural gas, it wouldn't make it).

As we arrived at Tunja, we drove by instinct to the center plaza, where I left Holly and the kids to look for our hotel. As I walked across the plaza, a man walking parallel to me made eye contact and greeted me. We talked for about five minutes about how it is to live in Tunja. In Bogota that would hardly ever happen! I was experiencing culture shock. That first impression continued for the whole time we were in Tunja. A whole group of girls on a school trip approached us to ask where we were from. Several police officers offered to help me find our hotel... the list goes on, but I was impressed with the friendliness of the people.

As far as churches in Tunja... lots of Catholic churches and few, if any sound Bible-teaching churches. We saw four evangelical churches, but probably only one would be of sound doctrine. The people are very Catholic. Lots of young people poured out of the Sunday mass. Everyone I talked to said that they were Catholic and believed very strongly in the "Virgin."

The most interesting experience was visiting a monastery where the "Virgin" had supposedly appeared hundreds of years ago. A man was sitting on the steps, reading his prayer book. I approached him and struck up a conversation. It turns out that he has two major problems: his son is into drugs and he's involved in adultery with someone. He was there to ask the "Virgin" for help with these two areas. He was very willing to listen to what I had to say about the gospel, but it is so radically different from his background and experience. The mentality of looking to the "Virgin" for everything and the idea that we have to always be "confessed up" with the priest or we're up a crick clouded his understanding. It least I was able to share the gospel with him and leave a gospel of John with him.

This trip was part of a desire that God has placed on my heart to see how we can expand our church planting out of Bogota and the surrounding towns. It may only be a dream, but I'm going to be praying that God would give us wisdom and a deeper desire to reach all of this country for Christ.

In the post below you will see some photos from our trip in the following order...border of Boyaca, Tunja from the north, central plaza from our hotel window, the cathedral outside and inside, and the last two are of the monastery.

One thing Colombian pastors and students have told me is that most students who finish our program in Bogota have a lot of great Bible knowledge but lack ministry experience. I've been pondering the possibility of promoting a 1-2 year program for that type of student.

The program would involve some classes but would major in getting practical experience in a local church.

The idea has been fleshed out in an American context by Faith Baptist Church of Lafayette, IN, which is going to begin their program in 2007.

You can visit their site for more information:

Faith Bible Seminary

I've always like the NET Bible, but the folks at www.bible.org have just upgraded to the NeXT Bible, which includes more powerful options for Bible study, quick access to articles, etc. The site offers a wealth of information for Sunday School teachers and deeper study of the Word of God.

NeXT Bible

Thanks to a co-worker back in the days at PDI, I read the Da Vinci Code when it was just getting popular. I would say it's good for Christians to read it... it has opened a number of chances for me to share the gospel with people.

I want to post a link to two excellent articles by Dr. Paul Hartog from my alma mater, Faith Baptist Theological Seminary. I was able to be his teacher's assistant in one class, and I highly respect him as both a person and a scholar. His writing challenges me to study church history more deeply.

Here are the links:

The Da Vinci Code and Early Christian History, Part 1

The Da Vinci Code and Early Christian History, Part 2

This last weekend was my first without Pastor Jose being in the country (he'd been gone before within Colombia). It was pretty wild, mostly because of my own planning or lack thereof.

Saturday morning I went to the monthly pastors' meeting from 7 a.m. to almost 10 a.m. I got home in time to catch my breath and eat lunch. Then we headed to Chia for our youth trip that we were going to start at 2 p.m. We arrived early and waited, and waited, and only one of the 19 youth who had signed up arrived by 2. Finally about 2:30 a number of youth arrived, but we were still waiting for about four. We called, and they said to meet us at a park in the middle of Chia. We got there and waited. I was driving the mission van, and Holly our car. She decided to go towards their house to pick them up. We noticed that she picked them up down the road a ways, so we headed in that direction. We passed her, and the teens yelled out the window, "We're here!" "Did she see us?" I asked. "Oh yeah, of course!" So we took off... we got about five blocks away, and she didn't appear. Now we were in trouble because it was a one-way road. We looped around the block and she was nowhere to be found. By this time it was past 3 p.m., which wasn't good because we were on our way to Bogota, which is about 40 minutes away. I started praying fervently (granted, not very profoundly..."Lord, where is she?). She finally showed up after ten more minutes, so we happily accelerated towards Bogota. The back way is beautiful, with green mountains to the west.

About a mile or two outside of Chia, I lost sight of Holly. We pulled over, and she finally caught up, telling me that the car was having some trouble. So I told her to head back to Chia while we forged on in our intrepid journey.

I decided to take the back way to the park, which is a very bumpy dirt road. I heard some groans and some laughs as we slammed through several holes (thankfully my boss doesn't read my blog). We reached the final stretch, which was a stretch of mud. It reminded me of a boyhood adventure I had had with my friend Dirk in elementary school (that time we went through the mud with our bikes and got bogged down in the middle and fell over). With that in mind, I took the high road. A Minnesota-like grass path behind a line of trees (think Camp Swampy for those who've been there). We reached a two or three foot deep crevice, and all of the teens bailed. I think they didn't realize how much experience I have on three-wheelers, so that hole didn't bother me in the least, except that there was a steep embankment to the right. But it was no problem.

We arrived at the park and had only about 90 minutes to play soccer, tennis, fly kites, etc. Then it was time to go (note to self: don't be ridiculous with the scheduling... we're in Latin America!). The teens voted to take the route through the city for fear of the "back way." Mistake. The neighborhood you have to go through to get back to the main highway, Engativa, is almost as bad as the "back way." No, it's culturally interesting. I took a wrong turn, and we ended up on a dead-end street.

Finally after 30 minutes of navigating through narrow, hole-covered roads, we made it to the highway for another 30 minutes back to Chia. Did I mention that I had a couples' meeting at 6:30? We arrived in Chia at about 6:20. I went to the Alonso's house and slapped on some clean clothes and drove to the couples' meeting. Thankfully, everyone else was "late" too, so I didn't miss anything.

I'll spare you the details of Sunday, except to say that Holly was in charge of the breakfasts for an outreach we have to a poorer neighborhood, so she wasn't with me for the choir practice. I was running around scatterbrained to get ready for teaching Sunday School, leading the music, and preaching. After the service, Holly was with Eliana in a teachers' meeting. All of a sudden I hear shrieks, "Jon, get the vehicle and go get some clothes." Eliana had vomited in Holly's face, and they were both covered with spit up.

I think something else happened, but I have a gift for forgetting negative things, so I have no idea what it was.

As I told Holly..."It can only get better next weekend."

Just a quick note on a small blessing in my life. I've always liked reading a good paper. By good I mean one that makes me think, provides insight into the world, and broadens my understanding of culture, politics, economics, literature, etc.

Up until this week I hadn't found such an animal. El Tiempo is the paper read by most executive types here. Frankly I have been very disappointed with it. It offers think pieces on topics that don't really interest me (e.g. in-depth analysis of Colombian politics), and in general just tells about the events of the country without any interesting commentaries on what has happened. I often found that I would buy the paper and end up reading only two articles because the rest made me yawn just looking at the titles.

El Espectador is a little bit better for my taste, as it comes out only once a week. For this reason, the editors have more time to find insightful articles. But again, the paper shows a surprising dearth of information about the rest of the world.

Many of the other papers of broad circulation in Bogota are not fit for Christian eyes. One, El Espacio is like a Colombian version of the National Enquirer, only worse (as a Christian I don't even look at the paper hanging on the rack because you never know what you'll see).

All this said, I finally ran across a good weekly paper, which is Tiempos del mundo. It is a sister publication to the Washinton Times. I received a free issue over the weekend and read almost every article. It included articles on the U.S., the conflict in the Middle East, the foreign policy of Hugo Chavez, migration globalization, etc.

I have stepped up my Spanish study in the last few weeks, spending some time on Tuesdays and Thursdays with building my vocab and pronunciation. This paper is going to become part of that routine.

Last week a number of missionaries and national pastors received an anonymous letter with a number of accusations against the pastor in our church here in Colombia. As discouraging as that fact may be, God has turned the sin of one person into blessings for the church.

As we sat down to evaluate our response to this letter, we were impressed by how trials like this can be used for good. The honest fact is that the church has not really functioned like a Baptist church in a number of ways. This letter really brought this clearly to light. We haven´t really had a well-defined membership and the congregation hasn´t been fully involved in some decisions that were made in the past.

When we follow the precepts laid out by the Word of God for church polity, we see less tension, more unity, and difficulties can bring us together. For example, how do we make decisions as a church? If the congregation has weighed in on every major decision and has voted on each one, they will be behind the ministry more. I think of Acts 6, where a controversy arose over the caring for widows. A controversy? In the early church? Yes, and God used it so that the church grew, precisely because the problem was handled biblically with the help of the whole congregation.

This type of controversy can become a vicious cycle. Each person begins to focus on the negative side of the problem, instead of seeing how God can use it to polish us and mold us into the image of his Son. For this reason, open communication is so vital in the local church. We´ve learned that it´s better to openly communicate with the congregation when something may appear doubtful. We´ve also learned that being in the minstry means constantly learning and constantly growing.