Reaching a city for Jesus!

I hope you sensed my excitement last month as I described to you the experience I had just been involved with. It was truly uplifting and so memorable. As I look back at that event, one of my fondest memories was watching the PNHI Trainers playing soccer in the park. They set aside a morning each month to play together. What a significant time of bonding and teamwork. They had the best time. The sense of camaraderie was so apparent. They enjoyed each other, they laughed, and there were moments of competitive male bluster! Does every Peruvian guy play soccer - and play it well?

I was meeting several of these guys for the first time. Mike would tell me about each one and the effective work he and his wife were already doing in the barrio. All of them were presenting Peace Treaties and baptizing people on a regular basis. In the month of March there were 36 baptisms - and many of them done by the new Trainers.

Right now we have the most Christ-like sense of community we have ever enjoyed at PNHI. It has everything to do with Mike and Danell and the credibility they have established with the team. Everyone is on the same page and understands the mission - to raise up a city of house churches started by humble leaders who in turn raise up other leaders by telling Bible stories and teaching their friends about Jesus.

What we are experiencing in Trujillo is a model I am anxious to share with church missions groups everywhere. John and I are working on approaches to churches, primarily in the West, that will give us open doors to tell the PNHI story, and the even larger story, that it is a new day in cross-cultural missions, and unless we expand our vision and become more holistic in our methods we will be spinning our wheels, accomplishing little to disciple the nations.

We have been working with some truly revolutionary tools, and we are honing them to suit our purposes and our particular effort so that what we are doing becomes truly our own. And the biggest joy is to see Latinos like Jaime and Patty, our Master Trainers who oversee the other Trainers, become so effective in using the tools that they are being looked to by others in Trujillo and beyond as equippers and facilitators of these new and effective methods of reaching communities.

This is why I continue to say that in all my years of ministry, I have not seen a more powerful approach to reaching a city for Jesus. And we have just gotten started.

By the way, John and I would count it a privilege to go anywhere to talk to people about PNHI.

Tim