Colombian Christian Mission

In the last three weeks of July, I made a quick trip up to the States. This trip had been planned for more than two years, as I had been invited to be the primary missionary speaker at Lake James School of Missions. As the time neared, the short trip began to have extra activities added in. The first and most exciting was when Wendy informed us in January that our fourth grand child was to be born, precisely during the time I was to be in the States. So I traveled up to the States on the 9th of July with an extra measure of excitement.

Right before my short trip up to the States for Lake James School of Missions, I had the privilege of receiving two interns here in Colombia. The first person to express interest was Sasha Gilson, a second cousin of mine, who is finishing up a Master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language). She has inquired about coming down and teaching for the summer. We had actually been praying for this and I had written to other people and to schools that offer this program to no avail. Then one day, out of the blue, Sasha wrote and expressed her interest.

The call came about two weeks ago from a large public school in the Suba section of Bogotá, where we have a church. This school of more than 3,000 students was having all sorts of problems with their kids and the teachers had no where to go for help. The person calling me was in charge of such issues and also did not know where to turn for help. Someone who had heard me speak at a different school recommended they call me, and so the phone rang late one afternoon. I spoke with this teacher about the nature of the problems and exactly what they were interested in me teaching them.

Today, Sunday, we witnessed a historic event in the Normandía Christian Church. The deaf church that we planted there one year ago has been growing steadily. They have increased in numbers and now form one of the more significant deaf works in the entire country. But today, they went beyond that and became the very first church where a deaf preacher baptized new deaf believers that had been won to the Lord exclusively by the preaching and testimony delivered wholly in sign language.

A rather pleasant problem has been cropping up in there church here in Normandía. For the past several weeks, it has been standing room only in the deaf church. As more than forty people crowd into what used to be the living room of the old house that forms the front of the church building, the hearing church, where the sanctuary comfortably holds one hundred and twenty five, still had room to spare.

Once each month, I make a trip to Villavicencio to work with the school and the church there. I just returned from my monthly trip yesterday evening. Now for the next couple of days, I will be recovering and resting up as I wash clothes and answer email here in the apartment in Bogotá. These trips are exhausting, but I enjoy them very much. I always return with a sense of satisfaction in having accomplished the many things I set as goals for myself on these trips.

Over the last year, in every free moment I had, whenever I was not committed to other ministry activities, I have been hunched over my computer keyboard translating the theological opus magnum de of Dr. Jack Cottrell; Faith Once For All. This significant work is a compendium of Biblical theology that covers nearly every theme of significance with a clear and well reasoned logic based on massive Biblical evidence.

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.