Hanging out in Medellin

This week I have been in Medellin, Colombia to spend time with our ministry leaders and get to know what God is doing there. The ministry has exploded there with 23 ministry centers in the city/state and thousands of people involved. The commitment to evangelism and discipleship is very strong with lots of new people in every meeting. People are coming to know the Lord!

This week Medellin hosted the South American Games. Saturday morning at 7 am I met with 100 students from one region of the city who gatherered to pray before heading over to the games to share Christ with the students. Although sharing Christ was officially banned on the site of the games, the students led 130 athletes to Christ - all off site, in the streets and restaurant areas surrounding the games.

This is the view from my hotel room. Medellin is a large, very modern city. What a contrast with the small community we live in in Bolivia!

Ministries around the world struggle to win adult men to Christ and see them mature in their faith. In this photo I am with a group of guys who are involved with our ministry. There are groups of men like this that meet all over the city at all hours of the day, starting at 6am. They are involved in a very intentional discipleship process. I have really never seen anything like it. The curriculum they use requires four years to complete.

God is doing great things here and we are learning how we can apply the lessons learned here to ministries in other countries.

Blessings,

Ron

Now that's what I'm talking about!

At lunch today a young man named Mario came for perhaps the third time to our pizza lunch/bible study. I had to ask his name again, as I had forgotten it. There were around 20 who came today, perhaps 30-35 will join us tomorrow.

Since it had been a while since I had seen Mario, I asked him to come with me over to the pizza place in the food court and help me order the pizza. As we were talking, he shared that his father had died two weeks ago. I told him how sorry I was and then we re-joined the group. We studied Matthew 5:10-16, the passage where Jesus encourages His followers to be salt and light. Mario had some great comments that really added to the conversation, comments that came from personal experience. He shared that his parents spoke Quechua and that he did not begin to learn Spanish until first grade.

After the study I learned that Mario had received Christ about three years ago, and that as a result of prayer, his father trusted Christ as Savior a mere hour before his death. His mother still lives in a small village outside of Potosi, Bolivia. She is struggling with the loss of her husband and is not yet a follower of Christ.

I invited Mario to come to my office so I could give him a copy of the Bolivian version of JESUS Film. The DVD includes eight languages, including Quechua. I put the DVD into my laptop to show Mario how the menu worked. As he listened to the Quechua version with Spanish subtitles, his eyes welled up with gratitude, "My mother will understand about Jesus!".

I gave him three copies of the DVD and a charge: Share it with your mom and others back home in the village. I asked him if they had a DVD player up there in her highland village. He assured me that they did and that in only three weeks, he will be going back home to visit his mom. "I want to be a missionary of God's love". Will you pray with me for Mario and his mom?

Church Led Movements in Bolivia

On Friday and Saturday I met with our Church Led Movements team with Campus Crusade in Bolivia. They were joined by a pastor from Venezuela who is implementing similar strategies there. We spent the time reviewing our philosophy of ministry, vision, mission and plan for 2010. In the photo at left, I am sharing a devotional on the life of Paul.

These guys are great theoreticians and even better practitioners. They have a heart to see a viral movement of church planting in South America.

The Grandchildren

Just a quick post to say we're back in Bolivia after a great time in the US. Here's a photo of Jeanie and me with 75% of our grandchildren: Anna Kate Tolbert, Wesley Paul Hanks and Cooper Andrew Hanks. (Leah Rose Burgin visited Grandma Jeanie in NC the weekend before)