Greetings from green Colombia! It’s been so long since I’d been here that I’d almost forgotten how lush the vegetation is.
The weather has been really nice, probably in the low 70’s during the day and maybe mid-60’s at night. A little too chilly for sleeping on the porch in the hammock, especially since it started raining on and off for the last couple of days. There haven’t been any mosquitoes or other bugs besides butterflies and moths, so you can leave the windows open.
The meals have been very Colombian and tasty. I’m eating more meat than I have in a long time as well as potatoes, yucca and plantains. A couple of mornings, we had a typical “caldo de costilla” (rib bone soup) for breakfast, but we’ve also had scrambled eggs. No cold cereal or pancakes here.
The simultaneous interpreting is going well. The bulk of it has been from Spanish to English for the 10 or 12 who don’t speak Spanish – mostly people from international leadership or from other fields, such as one of my roommates who works in Africa (in French), two field leaders from Asia Pacific nations and a guy from the leadership team in Canada.
But I’ve also interpreted to Spanish for some of the men in international leadership positions who don’t speak Spanish, though most speak another language or two.
The focus this week is on leadership development and on the primary role of the church in planting other churches (reminding us that as a mission agency, our job is to enable churches to plant churches among tribes and not bypass them). The content has really been excellent, and sometimes as I’m listening, I need to remind myself to keep interpreting… keep talking! If I don’t, the people with the headsets will be left in the dark.
I can’t tell you how much it means to me to watch our former students function in leadership roles and the other Latin American missionaries and pastors so earnestly focused on the challenges of tribal church planting. It moves me to tears sometimes. I’ve had no lack of “Macedonian Calls” and I have to say that being here makes them hard to resist.
We’ve also has some good times of worship singing It felt like a little foretaste of heaven when we sang “How Great Thou Art” and “Great is Thy Faithfulness” a capella together, each in his own language.
The Latin missionaries have been thanking us for the work we do translating resource material into Spanish. Alberto González mentioned in one session that when he graduated from the Missions Training Course, I told him that whatever ministry he took on, he should stay away from developing materials! That got a big laugh, since he’s produced all kinds of material for the work among the Guahibo people of the eastern Colombian plains. It so great to see how his experience has made him a valued consultant on church planting in this region. He’s being invited to go through a process that will result in his being a church-planting consultant for the region and probably beyond.
Thank you so much for helping make this trip possible. Wish you could be here to experience it with me.
Steve Irwin
Spanish Language Resources
SLR@ntm.org
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