This past weekend I went to Paso Canoas, where I first went last month and wondered, was it worth it?

Once again, the 6 hour red-eye bus ride, a brief stay for rest at a friends house, followed, by the 90 minute bus-ride to the border town.

Pictured to the above is the actual border crossing.

We took a small bus to get up there.  I took some video of the jam-packed overcrowded bus on the way home, but the lighting was off and it didn’t work.

A small group had gathered in a very small, blue painted room, one of the few tiled areas in this structure.  They were patient with my Spanish as we talked about church planting and a biblical theology of missions.

Did I really do that?

This time, my host was the director of the school I am teaching, and he shared with me several testimonies of how our evangelism training is being used.

This group is working particularly with Muslims who are seeking Christ.  I am not an expert in this kind of evangelism, yet they are taking the principles of our teaching and applying it in their context.

Another group is applying the teaching on evangelism to how they are wanting to reach indigenous tribes accessible only by boat.

Yet another group is applying the principles to reach out to others in their neighborhood and I heard reports of new believers because of those outreaches.

I’m not an expert in any of these fields in particular, but it demonstrates how people take the training we provide and run with it in their given context.

That leaves me in awe of how God is taking this work further than we could ask or imagine.

The troubles of travel

The bus home was overcrowded and very uncomfortable 90 minute ride back from the border to the terminal.

The second bus was not entirely clean, had broken seats, and the suspension system so overworked that the 6.5 hour trip home felt like we were driving on a gravel road.

My body couldn’t relax, as it was constant jolted from the bus’s reaction to the ruts in the road, or thrown from side to side as it rounded curves.  The air conditioner was so high, that with even a sweater and a hat on, I was cold.  Sleep unfortunately was not an option.

14 hours of bus travel round trip for a 3 hour class.

Is it worth it?

The answer is still yes.

That’ll become clear when a house church gets launched among new converts out there.

About 100-125 people gathered at Centro Cristiano Filadelfia, for Live 2009, a missions congress on evangelism, church planting and leadership.

As I was leaving the last day, the pastor pulled me aside and said something like:

Pastor Walker, your teaching Saturday [on teamwork in church planting] really impacted me.

There was a moment when the Holy Spirit came upon us and called us into a deep time of prayer — to call the church into cooperating with God’s spirit.  That was a powerful moment for me, and I believe, for our church.  Powerful.

We’ve just launched a new church that is not 4 months old and already we are beginning to think about how we can get you back out here to help us nurture that church along.

The host church has a particular vision to work with the marginalized and the poor.  They dream of purchasing the land around them to setup halfway houses.

While waiting on their dream, they have also planted another church that is drawing young people from some of the dangerous areas of the city.

It is led by a young pastor in his early 20s, who served as our worship leader and conference organizer (pictured to the Right, one of the sons of the pastors).

The Holy Spirit gives a vision

During that same teaching and call to prayer, we moved into a time of prayer for Panama, crying out to God for his favor and abundance.  It was a kairos moment that snuck up on us.  I was simply teaching and when wrapping up, we closed the time in prayer.

It wasn’t just an ordinary ending prayer.  The Holy Spirit called us forth to engage in deep prayer for the needs of the community, protection for the church plant, as well as a time for the nation.

While the Lord did other work through the other presenters, it was this moment people reflected back to me as to what they remember of my teaching.  This was a powerful moment.  Those of you who know what it’s like to be called into intercession know the power of this calling and the intensity of this moment.

One elder, from a province about 6 hours away, received a vision in full color.  He never had a vision before, so he pulled me aside to talk with me about it.  It was awesome to help this Christian brother discern what God was saying in this vision.

This same elder also felt called to join our intercessory team.

The Host Church

The church itself is in a community of only about 500 people.  Pastor tells me that their biggest challenge in evangelism in their community is two fold:

• Drunk men — men who spend their entire paycheck in a weekend to get wasted.
• Overcoming a church scandal more than 12 years ago.

In a community that small with a stable population, the church had a reputation that was harmed, and people remember.  This church has wrestled with how to overcome that, by serving the neighborhood in pratical ways, praying, fasting.  Led by Pastora Diana Maxwell (pictured) and her husband Lester.

From different places

They gathered from several provinces (like states in the US) to spend the weekend receiving teaching on Missions and Evangelism.  Having lived here for two years, I know and understand the sacrifice it takes for people to give up their weekends, spend money, and travel great distances by public transportation.  The logistical challenge to overcome to get here reflects the demand for this information.  When you want something, you do something.

Themes and Presenters

I was joined by Pastor Joshua Sándigo (Phoenix Arizona), Doctor Amilkar Kraudi (Nicaragua) and Lester and Diana Maxwell (Colon, Panama).

A. Evangelism in the 21^st Century:

To learn what is evangelism in the 21^st Century and how to be effective winning souls for the kingdom and to know some methods of how to evangelize this new generation and different cultures.

B.  A strategic team for the expansion of the Kingdom of God.

“One is too small to pretend to do great things.”  What can a pastor or leader discover about how to equip a strategic team for the expansion of the vision the God has given them.  How to develop effective teamwork in planting churches, to develop a sound team for your ministry, business, or organization.

A deep word of thanks

We are grateful for you  who help us do this work.  We are unable to do it without your support.  Though we do receive an offering from events like this, it still doesn’t cover all the expenses of getting there.  That’s where we trust God to provide for our needs through His people.

How can you respond?

[download id=”3″]

You’ll need a PDF reader to view it.

Print it out and stick it with your devotional materials as a prayer reminder of what God might be calling you to do with us.

Whether you choose to donate or simply pray for us, still print this out.

You can print and distribute to mission committees and prayer groups.

2.  Donate.

• By Credit card: Automatic recurring contributions or make a special offering by visiting our support page.  I’ve put up a video screen cast to show you how.
• By Check: Mark your gift for the Mission to Americas.  Make check payable to PRMI and mail to PRMI, P.O.Box 429, Black Mountain NC 28711

We need people to join our monthly team as well as one time gifts to meet our monthly budget or $3500 minimum, $5000 comfortable for next year.

In August, I participated in a seminar about business as the means to generate revenue to support your ministry.

I shared the stage with

• A Honduran who distributes paint.
• A Costa Rican accountant
• A Panama business consultant.

All four of us spent a few hours talking about micro enterprise and how that can fund mission.

The Honduran gentleman is a pastor who is planting a church here in the city.  His business generates enough revenue and is managed by employees that he is capable of having his financial needs met here in Panama.

The accountant from Costa Rica has a professional practice that gives him enough time to freely give workshops on ministering to the physically disabled (a huge need in Latin america).

The business consultant has specialized knowledge in human resources that he’s able to work and still do ministry.

I speak for a living and sell information on-line, which partly enables our work here.  We are not yet self-supporting, but have several donors who give to us on a monthly basis to advance our work here.  The US has a developed ministry partnership concept that uses support raising.  This concept is not widely practiced or accepted here (from my limited point of view).

This session was recorded and being distributed by DVD around the country to inspire potential missionaries to think how they might fund their own work by monetizing their skills and passions.

I think more and more missionaries, particularly from developing nations like Panama, will need to think in terms of creating wealth through business, rather than relying on the shared resource system that has developed in the US.

The idea of missionary support, as practiced in the United States, is just not a common practice and in some ways may me against the cultural grain.  To fund the work of missions at this point in history needs another way, and thus we spent time thinking along these lines.

What is your skill or trade?

How can you use it to generate money?

How can you get paid to do what you love?

Ask yourself: “What specialized knowledge or skill that I have that people will gladly pay me for?”  It could be a product, photos, information, arts, cooking skills, or even ideas.

It is our hope that the DVD will inspire small business, that would generate funds for global missions.

Beginning on Tuesday morning, the pastor’s training camp began.  Our team had been invited by the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Guatemala (pictured below)  to come and share particularly on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Tuesday

Pastors began to arrive and we gathered for lunch.

We shared the teaching time with another speaker, but various circumstances prevented us from actually networking with him.

Pastors, elders, and seminary students, along with some of the wives gathered at the camp.

We met Ana (pictured in the blue blouse), who arrived just before our 4.00 session.

Chris began and spoke on the topic of who is the Holy Spirit and the four works of the Spirit as a foundational review.

In response to prayer with our intercessors, we were led to specifically talk about how presbyterian we were.

So we included time about my ordination, and some of my journey to faith.  We talked about the extremes between ignoring the Holy Spirit, and overempahsizing the Spirit and it’s resultant emotionalism.

We concluded on time.  I had them break into 3s for prayer, to leave burdens home and then generally pray for openness to what God wanted to do.

During our team meeting that night (Ana had to go home), we discerned there was some defensiveness in the audience.  We knew that we were not going to be on the same tract as the main speaker.

We prayed that God would give us wisdom to think on our feet, that minds would stay open, and we prayed through our teaching plan for the next day.

Wednesday

Sam led off with our foundational teaching on kairos moments – what are they and how do they work.

This moment of cooperation is foundational to understanding how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and how to experience the working of the Spiritual Gifts.

This was good basic reformed theology, though we could tell that the idea of cooperating with God in working in the kingdom still stirred up some defensiveness.

Do we have the privilege of cooperating with God?  Aren’t our works already an expression of what God is doing?

For some, this teaching presented theological challenges.

We took a break and then Chris moved into the function/vocational gifts teaching.

Again, we stressed how Presbyterian we were and helped connect examples of how these gifts might often be used already by our audience.  Some were skeptical, but polite.

As a group, they didn’t talk much.  They weren’t responsive with Q&A or when we asked them questions.  We were not sure how to read or interpret that.  Later we figured out that people would corner us 1-1 to ask their questions in private.  We saw a lot of spiritual thirst for this information.

The idea of cooperating with the Holy Spirit was a stretch for some of them, and there remained some confusion of the Spirit within/upon distinction that is foundational to the entire Dunamis series.  The questions that were asked turned out to be along those lines.

Wedneday afternoon – powerful prayer ministry.

The other speaker used 30 minutes of our time, so we lost some time to teach.

Sam continued to talked about the manifestational gifts and being filled with the Holy Spirit, then we moved into a time of prayer.  It appeared that those who were not open to the idea of the ongoing gifts left the room.  Those who couldn’t accept the reality of what we were teaching politely left and went outside.  That helped narrow down the group to those who were really hungering and thirsting for the work of the Spirit.

People were encouraged to break into groups, pray for each other, and then we broke up into teams for people who wanted prayer for the filling of the Spirit.

Sam and I were a team, Ana and Ben served as a team.

For some, this was a powerful ministry time.

• At least two physical healings were given testimony with evidence continuing the next day.
• One rested in the spirit (who had only been a new convert for 6 months).  We talked with her later and she described her experience as falling into a deep sleep and loosing all awareness.
• Others sought out prayer for emotional healing, which we had to postpone until later in the evening.

Unfortunately the prayer time was cut off by announcements and dinner break.  There was no time to debrief, and some who wanted prayer didn’t get it.

I wish I could share all that God did that afternoon, but those are just samples.  As people talked with us over the next 24 hours, this seemed to be a turning point in the conference.

Our ministry style is not noisy or flashy, nor full of excess emotionalism.

We were simply Presbyterian pastors who are willing to take the risk to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in kingdom work.

We tried to keep our teaching as “down to earth” as possible, as well as our personalities and behavior — being ourselves; we were not some North American superstars with TV ministries that need money.

Dinner and Evening Ministry

Over dinner, I had a brief talk with Yenner, about the spiritual history of the Presbyterian Church of Guatemala and the presbytery.

The presbytery at one point had split because of the charismata, and churches were loosing converts to the pentecostal / neo-pentecostal groups.  Outsiders were labeling the Presbyterian Church “dead” because many are missing the “avivimiento” (maybe a liveliness or spirit-filled expressiveness).  New converts would leave after discovering that other churches had more passion in their worship services.

After dinner, I took the last plenary session of Wednesday night.  The final plenary of the day.  Physical exhaustion was clear.  People were tired of information.

I used some of the time to clearly debrief the experiences before dinner and walk through the 4 tests of discernment that PRMI uses.

I felt led at the moment to describe how I became a Presbyterian pastor, and how I came under the authority of the word of God.

A lady who experienced a physical healing offered to let us use her as a case study and the 4 discernment tests.  This modeled how we could follow the tests of discernment, and keep the prayer times non-emotional.

I’m not sure how well the last teaching connected with people, they were just soooo tired.

It focused on How Does the Holy Spirit talk to us?  We looked at examples from Scriptures as we explored some of the mechanics of  HOW we might hear God’s voice.

We had another time of prayer ministry and got to do some 1-1 prayer ministry out of that.

In the case with Sam and I, we dealt with two men for some inner healing and some deep issues of forgiveness.  Some good emotional healing.  I simply served as as translator.  Sam threw me for a loop with some word choices I couldn’t translate, and I simply tried my best to explain it rather than translate it.

Ben and Ana did some prayer counseling for a young woman who received some emotional, but incomplete, healing.  The evidence was very clear the next day as we checked in with people.

Thursday, our last day.

We were scheduled to have about 1 hour of time, but the other expositor used not only his time, but all of ours .

So we didn’t have a chance to wrap anything up or debrief.

The camp schedule had some tourism time built into it before lunch, so we went to the shore of lake Amatitlan.  Unfortunately, the lake is polluted and nutrient imbalanced, so algae slime was really thick.  What was a pristine lake a few decades ago has now been ruined.  Efforts are underway to restore it, but it will take a few decades for sure.

We used the time to speak with a few of the conference participants about what the event meant for them.

One man in particiular gave us some of Guatemala history, particularly about it’s relationship with neighboring Belize, which he said a former president sold to the UK.  In ’74, Guatemala raised an army to invade Belize in an attempt to recapture it as Guatemalan territory, but a major earthquake destroyed Guatemala City and all efforts moved to relief rather than invasion.

After lunch, we traded some goodbyes and had some processing time as a team.  Praying about next steps and what should follow.

Finally, we went home on Friday on safe and uneventful flights.

See also:

• Presbyterian Pastors Conference
• Sunday Preaching at Central Presbyterian
• Travelling to Guatemala