Sowing Seeds For the Kingdom

Ministry this month was amazing. We spent a total of 2 weeks working in a small community in Lima Peru called Canta and 1 week in a small village in the jungle called Chuiquibambilla. We spent the first week in Lima helping a new Pastor, Pastor Jorge build relationships in his community visiting people in marketplaces, sharing the love of Jesus with them and inviting them to his church, and playing soccer with kids every afternoon followed . After our work in that community we transitioned over to ministry in the jungle where we did a lot of construction work and painting as well as playing with children and teaching them bible lessons. The bulk of our ministry, however, was helping Pastor Jorge build relationships with the local vendors in our community. The ministry was supposed to be us working in a school for two weeks cleaning and making it look nice as a way to open the door for the Pastor to be invited into the school.

However, the principal met him with a lot of resistance when it came to working in the school. So Pastor Jorge shifted gears for us and had us go to the local markets and hand out tracks. This was pretty awkward for me at first. I didn’t really know what the tracks. This was really awkward at first. I didn’t really know what the tracks said so I was sort of just handing them out and telling people Jesus loved them. It felt even more awkward because of the language barrier, I was the only one on my team that was really saying much and I wanted to include all of my team. So I took a pause and shared my concern with my team. Immediately, Michael gave me some words of encouragement and told me that though it seems ineffective, we are just here being obedient and planting seeds and it is God’s job is to make them grow. Just as it says in 1 Corinthians 3:6 “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave it growth.”  I believe that is the perfect summary of our ministry in Canta with Pastor Jorge. We were there to plant seeds of love and Hope, Pastor Jorge will be there to water those seeds and God will make them grow but those words of encouragement stuck with me for the rest of our time there. After his words of encouragement, him, being the relational wizard that he is, led the next interaction. We met this guy named Robert who was a candy vendor. We asked him about his family and how we could pray for him and we invited him to the church. Already I can tell the difference between how I approached the previous people and how Michael did. This gave me a model for building relationships with these people and sharing the love of Jesus with them. Over the course of that week we met a lot of people and prayed over so many of them.

Perhaps the coolest part of that week, was that we had the privilege and opportunity to go back and say hello to a lot of the same people we talked to earlier in the week. Many of them were really excited to see us and several called us back to pray for them some more. The people that stood out the most to me was this couple called Jimmy and Delia. We met them the second day of ministry. The second day of ministry was discouraging for me. I spent the whole day talking to people who seemed apathetic to anything I had to say. I tried to build people up and be relational, but it just seemed like people were super resistant. So we all stopped to pray and not long after we ran into Jimmy and Delia. Immediately, I saw how inviting they were to us. Of all the people in the whole market, they were the only ones who offered us somewhere to sit. They had stopped going to church for a while because of their busy schedule, however, their hearts overflowed with love. They saw I had a nasty cough and gave me a tea from their business to help open up my lungs. They gave my teammates some healthy coffee and we just sat there for like 30 minutes talking to them about the word and encouraging them. I was walking around that day, exhausted and I found energy and encouragement from their hospitality. We visited them two more times after that and we saw them come to our goodbye church service. Seeing them and the lasting relationship that they built with Pastor Jorge was just a taste of the fruit of all the work we did those two weeks in Canta.

In addition to all the wonderful relationships we built, Pastor Jorge’s vision to get into the school was finally accomplished on the second to last day of ministry. Our team had the opportunity to serve the school by cleaning out the front of the school and they had the wonderful opportunity to play with the kids during their recess. I was not able to make it because I was sick, however, the teachers and staff loved what our team did and the principal told the Pastor that he would be willing to open up the school in the future for him to run classes for the parents about various topics like, drugs and alcohol, sexuality and many more topics like this. Overall, we really had the opportunity to help a brand new church and Pastor effect a whole community for the kingdom of God. The seeds of a thriving church community have been planted and I think I can speak for my whole team as to how excited we are to here about the wonderful things the Lord does in this amazing community of Canta.