Colombian Christian Mission

The first full week in January is the meeting of the Executive Committee meeting for the National Missionary Convention. As a past president and the selected representative for missionaries in Latin America, I attended the meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of the 2008 National Missionary Convention. We met on the 8th of January in the Millennium Hotel and planned out the convention for this year.To get there, I was up at three in the morning and heading for the airport by four. I caught my plane and left Cleveland a little after five.

We recently received a very special blessing at this Christmas time. It came in the form of a call from our son Alex, who has been in Iraq on his second tour of duty there. He informed us that he had returned safely and that he was now back in Texas at Fort Hood. He had some other exciting news that we will soon share with you as we get the details.

It is the time of year to count your blessings and give thanks to God. Certainly, all of you have been a blessing to us as we work together to share the Good News in Colombia. So I want to pause together with my family to send greetings to all of you at this special time of year. I hope that you are all enjoying the special blessings that this special time brings as we share the blessings of family and fellowship in the joy of our celebration.

For the last month, I have been back up in the States as I take advantage of the semester break from teaching and preaching in Colombia. This allows me to spend time here with my family and yet permits me to teach each semester in the graduate school of our Christian College program in Colombia.

Last night, I finished my last class for this semester at the Bible College. With that, I ended my ministry commitments for this trip down and I am now busy packing and getting ready to head back up to the States to visit family and our supporting churches. In fact, as I write this, I have half packed suitcases sitting around and I am receiving a constant line of visitors as the Colombian Christians stop by to say goodbye and to wish me well on my trip.

This past week, I made my last trip over mountains to Villavicencio. As I typically do each month, I went down to work with the kids at our Christian School there. I spent Monday afternoon after my arrival visiting with a blind Christian in the nearby village of Restrepo and then returned to Villavicencio after dark to rest up a bit after the drive and to get ready for several hectic days that would be sure to start early the next morning.

A spate of headlines about the falling value of the dollar have caught many by surprise. But these recent headlines have simply confirmed the reality we have been struggling with here in Colombia for many years. Unnoticed by most Americans until recently, the dollar has been losing value for years now. Recently this trend has caught the eye of journalists and tourists and this fact has gained coverage.

This past weekend, I taught a modular class for students wishing to fulfill deficiency requirements in order to enter into the graduate school of the Christian University. Before such students simply had to take the classes and this often delayed their entrance into the actual program. In an effort to remedy that situation, we decided to offer a concentrated weekend seminar where we taught several courses in a two day period. We had fifteen students signed up and all were church leaders.

These past two weeks have seen a big step forward for the deaf ministry here in Colombia. After a year of planning and preparation, which included sign language classes for more than twenty members of the church here in Colombia, the time was ripe to take the next step. In order to accomplish that, Dewayne Liebrandt arrived here in Colombia two and a half weeks ago.

This past week I made an unusual trip to Villavicencio. On fairly short notice, I had been invited to speak at the high school in Restrepo, Meta, which is a small village about a half hour’s drive away from Villavicencio. We have attempted to establish a church there with only very limited success. The theme was traditional moral values. So when I was invited to speak to the high school there, I saw it as an opportunity to use the Bible as a way to present a defense of those values along with recent studies from the social sciences that back up those values.