Greetings! After two overnight bus rides, a flat tire, and a border crossing that could only be described as controlled chaos, we arrived safely in Peru! My team is working in the coastal city of Trujillo this month and so far, I have loved it here. The comfortable dry days and cool dry nights of it’s desert climate give Trujillo it’s nickname, “the city of eternal spring.” The views are great with the city sandwiched between mountains and the ocean. The environment has been a welcome change from my rainforest surroundings last month.
This month my team is working with a church plant in the small town of Miramar which means, “see the sea,” in Spanish. The city is located on the bottom of one of the mountains surrounding Trujillo about four miles from the coast and it’s slight elevation makes glimpses of the ocean possible if there is no haze. We are helping with the early stages of construction for a newly formed congregation. The expansion of the body of Christ in Latin America has a very organic in feel. You start with a church. This church is the center of the community. On Sundays, everyone from comes to the church to worship and on weeknights, different members host small groups, or cells, in their homes. The cells are spread out over the neighborhoods surrounding the communities and are essentially church services in peoples homes. As cells grow and get more people attending, they become candidates to become churches. Once a cell becomes a church, it then begins to have its own small group meetings in the neighborhoods surrounding it in hopes of one of these cells eventually becoming a church. I found this process fascinating and it reminded me of a fungus spreading rapidly and efficiently across an area. From what I hear, the growth with this model is pretty rapid. It is cool to view the work we are doing with this church as the building of a link on a chain, hoping it can support many more links in the years to come.
Specifically we are building the walls. We arrived at our church to see that it was currently just the basement and the first floor (no walls) of what will eventually become a two-story building. We were informed that our task for the weeks to come would be to build the walls for the first floor. This should entail laying bricks and maybe pouring some concrete, but I have learned to enter projects like these with very few expectations regarding process and rather enter with large doses of willingness and obedience. Last week we were unable to build the wall because the materials hadn’t arrived yet, so we planted grass, in the desert. The process involved grabbing clumps of grass out of a bag of clumps of grass and then digging a small hole and shoving them into the ground. We were instructed by a gardener who had done this many times before to place the clumps about three inches apart. After completing the task, we stepped back and admired our crude turf job. It wasn’t pretty, and it may never be pretty, but it was planted with care and will be watered and cared for as long as we are here in Trujillo.
-Jeff
