Lost in Translation

Last week we were in Girardot, Colombia (about 2 1/2 hours down the mountain) for the conference we have with all of the ABWE Spanish-speaking missionaries every four years. It was a great week. In my opinion the highlight was the Good Soil evangelism training that we received. ABWE has already published "The Way to Joy" discipleship book, which is for new Christians, and they are beta testing the "Story of Hope" evangelistic study. To access, go to CEIM Resources

I highly recommend these resources. The evangelistic study is especially good, as it covers the 40 most important events in the Bible so the person can capture the big picture, and also includes the Bridge to Life, which includes the six essential concepts someone needs to grasp to be saved (God, Man, Sin, Death, Christ, Cross, Faith, Life).

What really struck me is how I´ve often short-circuited the process of evangelism, skipping over key concepts or not explaining the story line of the Bible. In our culture here, you may get "decisiones" but the person may not have truly understood the message of hope.

The course was especially timely since I´m going to be teaching an evangelism course at church next week.

We´re moved in to our new house in Chía, which is a great blessing. The house is a little smaller than the one we had in Bogotá, but has some nice features. It has a big patio out back with a grill, so maybe we can have people over for a grill-out. The house also has hot water, but I´m not sure how great that will be when the electric bill comes. The neighbors have been great... in one week we´ve noticed the difference in culture from Bogotá to a smaller pueblo (okay, 100,000 people isn´t that small). The neighbors actually have a minute to chat, and we´ve been able to talk to a number of them.

One negative is that the phone line was cut because the bill wasn´t paid on time, so we don´t have a telephone nor Internet. Sorry for the lack of communication.

We´ll be in a conference next week also, so we probably won´t feel totally settled for a while.

On the church front things have been going pretty well. We´re looking at the possibility of working with Wilder, a young man from our church, full-time in the ministry. We proposed the idea to the members on Sunday and will vote on the idea next Sunday. He would be like a pastoral intern for a year, working with us in every aspect of the ministry.

Just wanted to mention that we finished our church website and you can access it at:

I just ran across a great photo of the team from our church that helped us do the couples´ retreat in October... looking back on 2007, that retreat was one of the biggest blessings of the year, as we saw teamwork, a great weekend, and a number of spiritual decisions.

I´ve recently run across three other missionary websites of people working in Colombia. It´s interesting to see different perspectives from other parts of the country.

The Washburns in Medellín
The Morelands in Pereira
David Ford in Medellín

In a previous post (Future possibilities) I talked about statistical need in Colombia. Well, after corresponding with another missionary who lives in Pereira and thinking about it, the national registry of churches doesn´t have as much bearing on the situation as I´d thought. For one thing, many churches aren´t registered. For another thing many churches are under the coverage of a church in a different city.

So how can we get more reliable statistics? I found a national church directory of Colombia that seems to offer a better idea. Granted that not every church is listed, and unfortunately a few of the buttons in their website don´t work, so I can´t get numbers for several cities I want (Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Tunja).

All things considered, I came up with some interesting results. Based on a comparison with the number of churches listed, here are the most needy cities per person:

Florencia -- 146,249 people, 3 churches listed, 48,750 people per church listed
Buenaventura -- 339,096 people, 8 churches listed, 42,387 people per church listed
Valledupar -- 372,096 people, 16 churches listed, 23,256 people per church listed
Montería -- 393,179 people, 19 churches listed, 20,694 people per church listed
Medellín (metro area)-- 3,092,355 people, 150 churches, 20,615 per church listed

My biggest surprise was to see Medellín in this list and not see Cali, but Cali has 233 churches listed and fewer people than Medellín.

Now, all this is nice, but it´s only an estimate. What would an indepth study look like? Well, surprisely I found exactly that kind of study done for Medellín. You can find it at a site called prolades.com, in the document La pluralidad religiosa en Medellín. I only wish they´d done a study of all the major cities in Colombia, but the ground work would look very similar to what Profesor Mora has come up with for Medellín.

Uff... (as we say in Spanish), I´ve been out of the communication loop to some extent because I was at kids´camp last week. I would like to get caught up with everything this coming week (prayer letter, finances, correspondence, etc.), but I´m not so sure that will happen.

For the time being I´ll post the Alonso´s prayer letter, which gives you a basic idea about what´s been happening with the ministry here. We´ve seen some real blessings as of late. We´re also looking at renting a house in Chía in the next few weeks. We saw one that we liked today, and I have an appointment to talk to the owner tomorrow. It happens to be in Ponylandia, a residential community you can read about in the Alonso´s prayer letter.

Alonso´s December prayer letter

Something that I don´t like about the ministry is that you make friends/disciples and then either you have to leave or they do. This happened today with two people who are special to our family. Ricardo Andrés has been a good friend of mine, and I was discipling him for a while. His family moved from Chía to Bogotá, and he has decided that another church more close would be better for his family. He was my apprentice in our small group ministry, so it´s a loss on that front too.

Lorena is another person who has become a friend of our family. I met her in Cartagena, and she accepted Christ. We have been discipling her by e-mail, and she has visited us in our home a number of times while she´s been in Bogotá. She spent all day with us today, going to church, eating lunch, looking at a possible house and then being stuck 2 hours in a traffic jam on the way into Bogotá (another reason why moving to Chía will be a big blessing!). She leaves tomorrow for Cartagena, and we will miss her. It´s amazing how someone can become a family friend (Lucas and Elie love her) in so short of time. Please pray for her spiritual life and especially that God would give her wisdom to seek her fulfillment in Him and His principles.

All this to say that I feel a little sad today. On the other hand I trust that the Lord will work in this two young people´s lives.

I´ve been kicking around a question lately. Thinking about this country of Colombia, where should we go as missionaries? For example, I´ve heard that God is moving in Cali, a city of over 2 million people. But there are churches in Cali, obviously with a need for more. Is our goal to expand the work of our mission? Or of Baptists? Or should we focus on pueblos in which there are no gospel witness?

As I mentioned in a previous post Manizales seems to have a need for more churches. I wrote to a pastor who works in that city asking about the need. He said that there is more need in the pueblos of that department, especially in one called Ríosucio ("Dirty river"). This pueblo has an estimated population of 48,000 and is known for its festival dedicated to the devil. The whole town prepares itself for this festival held every two years. According to this pastor there are hardly any churches in the town.

So, where is there more need? In a city of 2 million or a town of 48,000? I think that God directs different kinds of people to different kinds of ministry. Please pray that God would lead us... the honest truth is that I am very restless here in Bogotá. (Note: photo from luis perez on www.flickr.com)

If you want to visit our church, here is our new invitation card. We´re looking forward to printing 10,000 of these to begin to invite as much of Chía as possible. I would also like this image to show up in Google when someone types in "mapa de Chia" because there really are hardly any maps out there of the city.