Colombian Christian Mission

For the last couple of weeks, mixed in with a bout of the flu, I have continued to work diligently on my translation of the theological work by Dr. Jack Cottrell, titled, Faith Once For All. The translation of this work has been tedious and difficult, both because of the technical nature of the book and a significant tendency to make points based on the specific wording of a Biblical text. So I must work in the text itself as well as in the English and Spanish Bibles to make certain I understand what is being said and what the differences are.

After finishing the writing of the Sunday school quarterly, I immediately began to work on my next project. For the past year now, as I have been able to devote time to it, I have been working on the translation of Dr. Jack Cottrell’s systematic theology, The Faith Once For All. This is a very large and thorough work that covers nearly every aspect of the church and Christian life. It is a book that should prove invaluable as Dr. Cottrell’s careful scholarship and abundant Biblical foundations will help us teach and train the preachers and local Christians here in Colombia.

As soon as I put Paul on the airplane, I began immediately with another project that has been on the back burner far too long. Together with Gordon Clifford, of Christian Mission Press, I have been working on a series of small books that can be used as personal devotions, guides for home Bible studies, or Sunday school quarterlies. The first four books were to be based on the life and teachings of Christ using the parables and events of the Gospels. I had finished the three previous books but lacked the fourth one to have one full year's worth of studies completed.

Yesterday I saw Paul Odham off at the airport. Paul is a specialist in learning difficulties and he has been very generously donating much of his vacation to coming to Colombia to help us train our own teachers and to provide much needed help to the public school system as well. His conferences have snowballed in popularity to the point where we had over 1,000 people in the different training sessions this year. Our very first one started with only the fifteen teachers at our Christian Day School.

Paul Odham, our specialist in learning difficulties, arrived in Colombia last Saturday night late. Almost immediately we put him to work. The very next morning we had him teaching our college students at the church here in Normandía. Immediately after church we loaded up the car and headed down over the Andes Mountains to Villavicencio. The road was heavily militarized and we even passed tanks as well as the heavily armed soldiers. But we arrived without difficulty in the late afternoon. We headed up to our old house there as Martin Sanders had invited us to stay with him.

God has blessed me with a physical stamina where I rarely get sick. Some pretty severe bouts of dysentery in the early years and then my treatment for Basal cell carcinoma about ten years ago now were the only things of significance. Add in a couple of cases of dengue fever and then a few colds and sore throats and that about wraps it up.

Sundays are always busy days. That is to be expected for any preacher. But that is multiplied for a missionary, because a missionary does not simply preach at one church. All of the churches like to have the missionary come for a visit and then preach. Most Sundays I will preach at two different churches. This past was a typical Sunday for me. The day began when I was up early and working to put the final touches on my sermon. We left the apartment around nine in the morning. It would be more than twelve hours before we would return.

This past week I traveled to Villavicencio to work with the students at the Christian school we operate there. Gordon Clifford, who prints many of the teaching materials that we use, arrived for a two week visit. He wanted to see the missionary work that uses between thirty and sixty percent of all of the materials that he prints, depending on the genre. So after spending the weekend here in Bogotá, where I was scheduled to preach at the Normandia church, we headed down over the mountains to Villavicencio. Immediately upon arriving I began working.

Yesterday, sandwiched between the three weeks of intensive activity with the deaf ministry and a two week visit by Gordon Clifford, the person who publishes much of what I write in Spanish translate for teaching here in the church, I taught a modular class at the Bible College. There were students who really wanted to get their required class in philosophy completed and so were asking if I could possibly fit it into my schedule. I agreed to do it in an intensive modular format.

We are wrapping up two weeks of intensive work with the deaf church here in Bogotá. Even with the purchase of ten new chairs, there have never been enough as attendance has swelled so some forty people nearly every Sunday. We borrow chairs from the hearing church, when they are available. But only so many will fit in the room we outfitted as a sanctuary for the deaf church. So a good number wind up standing for the service as there is no place to sit. But it would cost us around $1,000 to knock downa wall and buy more chairs.