After two days of unpacking, doing laundry, delivering packages, paying bills and buying groceries, we're settling back into our regular schedule. Tonight's regular schedule meant being in the Thursday night service at Iglesia Bautista Vida Nueva.
It was great to see everyone and catch up a little bit. The worship music was awesome, with some of my favorite songs. Best of all, Pastor Steve is back and is continuing his verse-by-verse series study of Revelation. Tonight he preached from Chapter 10, and although he covered Chapter 8 and 9 while we were in the states, the sermons are available on the church website. I'm looking forward to listening to them when I walk this week.
I've probably written about the church's birthday celebrations before, but decided it was time to highlight another year. Here in El Salvador it is common practice for churches to have an annual birthday celebration. Just like in the life of every individual, a birthday celebration seems to be a good way for the church to look back and see God's faithfulness over the years.
This year's celebration spanned the entire month, with interviews of individuals, couples and families who have been part of the church. Today, David Aguilar, hotel campus pastor, interviewed Pastor Julio and Pastor Steve. If you've ever seen these two together, you know just how much fun it was too watch the interview. Believe it or not, they started the church when they were 26 and 28 years old, respectively. As I said, a look back over the 24 years reveals God's plans and His faithfulness. Because no respectable birthday celebration would be without them, there were balloons, confetti, cake and also a great message from 2 Corinthians.
We are Vida Nueva!
I am more than a week behind on blog posts about the first ever campaign in Bogota. We were busy, with limited downtime, so I used my Internet access to post pictures (each afternoon and evening) on Facebook. Now that we're back in El Salvador, I am taking time to blog about the week. Today's post is about the first two days.
As my previous post indicated, we arrived after 8:30 p.m. on Saturday evening so we didn't see anyone until Sunday morning breakfast. There were teams from Valley Baptist in Bakersfield, CA, and Cooper Springs Baptist in Fresno, CA. There were five more from three other churches in Missouri and Louisiana.
The team had orientation with Pastor Steve Kern from El Salvador and Pastor David Guadron from Colombia before the service on Sunday morning. As you might imagine, it was unlike most of our orientations which focus on "how things work." This orientation was more about how we don't know what "things will work" in Bogota because this was the first time for everything. The schedule for the week included a little bit of everything: family festivals, a one-night conference, a visit to a senior citizens' home, a visit to an orphanage and one-on-one sharing on the street.
Pastor David (and family) and Pastor Alex (and family) arrived in Bogota at the beginning of September so the work is very new. With more than twenty gringos and about eight of us from El Salvador, the service on Sunday morning was full.
Because the weather is cooler in Bogota than in the other countries where we work, David and Alex decided to start the family festival at 4:00 and end before sunset, about 6:30. They contracted with a company that specializes in children's parties for the music, inflatable, face painting and other games. Most people live in high-rise apartments, which we do not have permission to enter, so we had to depend on the music and inflatable to attract the attention of the apartment dwellers. The team spread out on the streets around the apartments and shared one-on-one with everyone they met.
Monday was a holiday in Colombia so we shared all morning in Simon Bolivar Park, which was full of families enjoying their day off. The park was enormous and very beautiful. Except for the sunburn gringos, the morning was huge success--people were very receptive.
Sunday evening, Pastor Steve preached an end-times message at the hotel. We invited everyone we talked to on Sunday evening and Monday in the park. Four visitors (two from the family festival and two from the park) attended the conference--Pastors Steve, David and Alex were amazed by God's faithfulness to bring people to hear the message.
