Conferencia Corazon

Last week I had the privilege to go, as well as serve at the conference ‘Corazon atrevido, atreverte para servir’ or a heart that dares to serve. I am generally not a fan of conferences where I am just there to listen to teaching, but as normally happens God really blessed me, and I feel I have much to put into action from this conference.
I had the privilege to be looking after the pastors that came in from around Peru as well as abroad. I know have been invited to Cusco, Arequipa, Urubamba, and a place I’d never heard of in Ecuador. Watch this space. The most exciting is Urubamba as they have a conference every year, with many overseas speakers, and the pastors have a similar spirit to ourselves, and are friends with our senior pastors, Eduardo y Cecilia.

The conference was in the National Stadium
All the main sessions really blessed me and I know need to put these things into practice. I was also really touched by the extra visitors that were invited. The mayor of Lima thanked the church hosting the event ‘Camino de Vida’ or ‘Way of Life’. Also the Chancellor of the Exchequer was invited and thanked the church for the way they were involved in the earthquake of 2007, and how the work of helping continues.

Robert Barringer and The Peruvian Chancellor.
John Verrecken an American missionary in Mexico was one of the main speakers and translators and was an inspiration as he is man who preaches honestly and in a straight forward way, but only things that he has lived or is living. This is a way I try to live, and serve, and it is always an inspiration to hear someone who is ahead of me in their work, and show me how to advance.
Maria Durso from New York spoke on the fire of the Holy Spirit and how we are refined, and have power. This as something I needed to be reminded of as well. I will be listening to this again on CD.

Maria Durso translated by John Vereckken.
The speaker who most impacted me however was Dino Rizzo, a leader of a big church in the USA called ‘The Healing Place’. The reason I was impacted because he has a very similar heart to me, but again he is ahead of me in his journey and especially in his ministry.

Dino Rizzo speaking about 'Servolution' translated by Robert Barringer, the leader of Camino de Vida.

He really understands the heart of God, the heart to serve the one, in love. His church is one of serving, which then opens the doors to the church.
One of their ventures is called ‘Servolution’ which is open to any church in the world and includes serving the people of your area, wherever this may be. I plan to do this event in our church to help aid the mission focus of the church. I plan to lead the church in 2 events and am asking every cell leader to do 1 event in this week. This means as a church we are serving in over 20 events.

Sami and Mayra two of the members of Vision Vida
The very exciting thing is that the teenagers have taken this servant attitude on, and are now starting to do events every Saturday, starting by giving out water to those in their cars, and one of the cell groups that I spoke to on Friday are doing an event this week. They either misunderstood me because of my Spanish or because they didn’t understand me. Anyway they are going to a very poor area of Lima to fix the house of a single mum, who has many problems and is the neighbour of one of the members of the cell group.
I’m so encouraged. Our church is starting to become focused outside its 4 walls.

Update (not a very exciting title I know)

January is generally a month of planning here in the Peruvian churches hence the lack of postings. Planning is not that interesting to write about. After carefully consideration we felt that we were being led to put our ministry under the authority of our local church ‘Vision Vida’.
This has meant we have had a slight change of direction. We are still working with Alfredo and in Pucallpa, which is now under the mission ministry of our church and labelled as support of different ministries.

Our main focus now is increasing the amount of mission being done in the church. We are doing this in several ways; firstly, we are starting a new work in a shanty town called Pacifico de Villa in an area called Chorillos.

Some of the mums and children that we hope to work with.

This is the area where we did the kids event in December. Secondly we are visiting the cell groups of our church, and encouraging them to do more mission related things, as well as supporting them. A view of Pacifico de Villa.

Also we are planning to support those doing mission, in whatever form and help those who have ideas on what they want to do in mission but don’t have the next steps.
We are very excited about all this. More to follow in the next few days and weeks.