god

I grew up as an MK in Asia going to church and my idea of Christianity and following Jesus was pretty simple…just don’t do the things that God hates.  In other words, try not to cuss, try not to drink too much, don’t have sex outside of marriage, go to church every Sunday etc…My view of God and following Him was pretty narrow. And things began to change when I started reading the Bible for myself and I would read the way that God would describe Himself.  I would get these images of God that I would go no way…no one ever told me how huge He was. Once I got this high view of God it changed everything in my life. It changed the way I prayed to Him, it changed the way I sang to Him, it changed the way I lived everyday life.  My hope is that I will help every person that I meet gain this big view of God because a huge view of God changes everything.  We start to realize that this is the God that sent his Son to die  for me…that’s insane!  And when you realize that He did that for me shouldn’t my response be just as crazy.  Shouldn’t I respond with this amazing crazy love where I would do anything for Him.

friendship

For everyone that is reading our blog, thank you!  Good to know that a few people including family are reading it occasionally. Paula and I just got back from a day with some new friends. We are beginning to develop initial friendships with two families. Octavio and Olga are from Columbia and they have a 3 year old daughter named Daniela who Ezie has so much fun with. Ernesto is from Argentina and is married to Kelli who is from Peru. They have two children Gustavo (3 years) and Sophia who just turned 1. We had lunch together and then walked around Puerto Madero….kind of like a river walk with a bunch of quaint restaurants.  The weather was absolutely awesome. Not hot or humid at all. Tomorrow we are invited over to Ernesto and Kelli’s place for lunch. I think Octavio and Olga will be there as well. This will be only the 2nd time someone here in Argentina has invited us over to their place for dinner. Usually, we are the ones who have to take the initiative.  Also, tomorrow we will be having church in our home for the first time. For those of you who are praying for us, thank you! We are beginning to feel the power of God like never before. What we are doing is absolutely impossible without the power of the Holy Spirit.

our call

First of all I’d like to say that I am kinda envious of the fact that Jayne (my mother-in-love) is getting to spend 7 weeks in Hong Kong and the Philippines.  She mentioned many of the absolutely delicious foods that she has already eaten and my mouth seriously began watering. Just saying “Dim Sum” makes me long for the food of my youth. By far, Asia has the most diverse cuisine in the world. I had wanted Jayne and her sister to swing down to Singapore & Malaysia to visit where I grew up and am kinda bummed that that will not be able too.  Anyways, I am stoked that she is able to travel and experience other cultures and people completely different than herself.

All of us missionaries have “a call” given to us by God. This “call” keeps us where we are despite all the difficulties with a new language and culture.  It really has helped Paula and I here lately to revisit our specific call to work among university students here in Buenos Aires. Like I mentioned in a previous blog there has been no tangible fruit in our ministry up to this point.  The ministry across the board has been slow and pretty tough.  Paula and I long for a movement of God’s Spirit among the universities here in this city. With this in mind, Paula and I have found supernatural peace over the last couple days despite our situation. God’s Spirit is moving in our hearts and giving us a peace that Jesus is completely enough, even if nothing happens in our ministry.

I have seen that many times when we talk about our “call” to missions it is kind of depressing, especially if the people group you are serving among are not responding to Jesus. It’s true, “our call” by God is what keeps us persevering for along time despite nothing tangible happening. It keeps us where we are for the long haul.  Many times when we talk about our “call” we do so in a somber / sad way. Kind of like we hate what we are doing but because of the “call” we are sacrificing what we really would like to be doing with our lives. PHOOEY! No doubt that we are sacrificing some things like being away from family but come on…the “call” we have to be where we are is absolutely awesome! We need to see our “call” as something beautiful given to us by God to glorify Him. It is a privilege and an honor to be where we are not a burden. Our “call” should give us an intense passion and joy!

planting jesus

God is really in the process of working on our hearts in a very powerful way.  Paula and I just got back from our monthly mentoring meeting where we talked about all the in and outs of discipling new believers. This monthly discussion is part of the structured mentoring “program” the IMB putting us through. I was kind of frustrated because I felt that our conversation was putting the cart before the horse.  Again it was all talk and no actual “demonstration” or “modeling.” Paula and I have not seen a single nonbeliever come to Christ since we arrived in Buenos Aires and neither has most of our teammates. God is working but we have not found where.  It’s not like we work in an Islamic context or anything. Every student that I talk with here has heard of Jesus.  They walk by all the huge churches everyday but Jesus is completely irrelevant.  Our purpose here is to communicate Christ in a way that clicks for them. We obviously have not done that yet.  The actual believers that we have encountered in the local Baptist churches have not had the desire to be discipled on the deeper level either.  No missional communities have formed etc….I tried to voice my current frustration about not really making any inroads with the lost.  I tried to do so in a positive way.  My teammates looked at me like I was completely insane.  Nevertheless, Jesus wanted me to passionately speak and I did. I was obedient. Just wanted to just be real and authentic. Glad I am given the opportunity to be myself. What a blessing to have a team to vent with.  It’s OK not to have all the answers right? I know that what I just expressed is very common and nothing new but I had to get it out.  Paula and I are sick and tired of playing like everything is OK when it isn’t.  We have such a burden for the lost here and it is intensifying.  One of my missionary colleagues said to me that my passion will gradually fade as time goes by. Man, I hope that is not true. I hope that I do not become cynical over time.  Nevertheless, what we are doing now is not working.  There needs to be less talk and more action.  We need to rely more on the power of God and less on our slick strategies. We have made the decision to completely be vulnerable with our teammates and actually everyone that we meet. God…wake us up from our apathy.  We want to see the lost come to saving faith in you.  Please do whatever it takes to make this happen! We want so bad to truly experience an authentic missional community. It’s my prayer that God would break down everyone on our BA team so that we would just fall flat on our faces and worship him as a community. Until this happens we will not make any significant inroads with the lost here in BA. Argentine Baptist churches will not be mobilized either. God, wake us up! Give us more of a passion to make it all about glorifying you. Last night Paula and I had a spiritual breakthrough. You remember I shared that we were going through a rough time spiritually? Well, last night it occurred to us that we have been putting our ministry with university students before our Savior. Didn’t do this on purpose but this is what had taken place. We both broke down in tears.  Our situation kind of relates with the church in Ephesus that Jesus talks to in Revelation 2.  Jesus said that you guys have done 5 really awesome things: he knew how hard they had been working; how patient they were; he knew their desire not to associate with evil; and their desire to have Godly leadership; and how they did not want to water down the gospel message.  But Jesus also said that they needed to repent because they had abandoned their first love. Apparently, Jesus had removed their lampstand (or his presence) from them. This is exactly what has happened to us (and perhaps our team) over the past year and a half. Immediately Paula and I repented and asked forgiveness for placing our mission to reach lost students above our Savior.  From here on out we just want to go about planting Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit and let the church grow out of it.

passion

We want more passion. Paula and I want more of a passion to love, trust and believe Jesus so much that what God does through us, we can’t take any type of credit.

About one & a half years ago, our family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We came directly here from a year of Spanish language study in Costa Rica.  God had called us to this huge city to work with university students. We immediately got discouraged because we just never felt like we were making any type of inroads. “Start Bible studies! Use Pioneer Evangelism methods! Use the Purpose Driven model!” Everyone had the answers. One colleague basically argued with me saying I needed to get out and just plant churches around every campus in Buenos Aires. Okay, fine. 700,000 college students, over 100 campuses. I’m on it! Whatever. But I did start up Bible studies. I’ve made great acquanitances with students and some leaders. The thing is, for the most part, all I found was that only Christians were coming to the Bible studies. Also, they had absolutely no interest in reaching out to their lost friends. This was tough for me to accept. I began to ask myself, if I didn’t know Jesus, would I come to this thing? Why would I? It’s just church at Starbucks.

Right now Paula and I are really struggling. Hard to connect with any students because they are all on vacation. Perhaps we are too old for this assignment.  Maybe we just don’t have a clue what we are doing and needed to have more experience in the States before accepting this assignment. We don’t know. God has been really silent here lately. It has been hard.  In the car today going out to our team meeting it occurred to me that God is really wanting us to focus more on Him and quit trying to do things that don’t work. Over the next few weeks Paula and I hope to really dig and study asking God to open our eyes.

We can’t find that Jesus went to a market place and started Bible studies. He taught in the temple but no studies per se. Wait a minute. He was in the people business. He got one-on-one. He got in their world. He didn’t invite them to His until He found the opportunity after He had won their trust and confidence.

But that seems to go contrary to what we’ve been doing. I mean, let’s cast the net! Let’s reap the harvest in one big cast! You see no one, almost no one will say “no” to Jesus. Argentina is a very religious, very Catholic nation. So if you cast the net, you’ll get some fish, just not the fish you think you’ve “saved”. The message we have to get through is that salvation is “only” Jesus.

Paula and I believe that God is beginning to deal with us in the way we’re doing university ministry. God is laying on our heart to start a church in our home.  Instead of trying to begin Bible studies, we want to be all about students, where they are; in bars, on campus, on the bus, at concerts, at parks. We just want to go. This will involve sacrificing much of our personal family time together.  Nocturnal university ministry with two toddlers is a lot to juggle. Now, if Bible studies happen, we’ll do that. But they aren’t a focus. The student is our focus. And when God gives opportunities, we follow. To him be the glory!

We are finally stepping aside and wanting God to do His thing, the impossible. We believe that he will do that.

prayer partners

Paula and I will be trying to do a better job this year in building up our network of prayer partners. Please pray that we will be able to find 5 Baptist churches in the States and 2 Argentine Baptist churches who might want to begin developing an initial relationship with us. Our goal is to find 5 prayer partners from each church by September 2010.  This year we also hope to develop a more consistent working relationship with at least 5 of the 35 Argentine Baptist churches here in Capital Federal. Since we see our ministry here moving more towards mobilization we hope to get to know existing university ministries and then help them facilitate disciple-making / planting churches.

where we serve…please pray

By the way…Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

its your choice

this is from some seminary friends

it’s your decision

December is the traditional month in Southern Baptist church life to collect the Lottie Moon Offering or international missions. Click here to see how the offering provides for Southern Baptist missionaries around the world.

“Every penny given to Lottie Moon is used to support Southern Baptist missionaries as they share the Gospel overseas. The offering represents 54 percent of the International Mission Board’s total income.”

THE FACTS:

International Mission Board vital stats
• 5,618 missionaries (as of 4/20/09)
• 26,970 new churches*
• 565,967 baptisms*
• 562,091 new believers in discipleship*
*As reported in the 2008 Annual Statistical Report

Status of World Evangelization
• 11,599 people groups worldwide; 6.6 billion people
• 6,454 unreached* people groups; 3.8 billion people
• 5,850 Last Frontier** people groups; 1.6 billion people
*Less than 2 percent evangelical
**Less than 2 percent evangelical, no active church planting

Lottie Moon past and present
• 2009 goal: $175 million
• 2008 goal: $170 million
• 2008 receipts: $141.3 million

please give!

learning

Paula and I have always wanted to be where God is working and to be on mission with Him. One of the things we like to do is get back to the Word of God and ask tons of questions like: If Jesus were in bodily form now in the Buenos Aires, where would he be? To who would He minister? And how would he spend his time? What would it look like to take Luke 15’s Lost Parables seriously? Would Jesus really leave the 99 for the one lost sheep, or was he just being hyperbolic? Did he really come to “seek and save the lost”? We are slowly learning that our primary role is not so much teaching, preaching, and TELLING people how they should live but, instead, living out, modeling and SHOWING people the way of Jesus.  Incarnating the very thing we are asking them to do.