3D Update: starting and strengthening churches in Argentina and India
CPW goes global "Argentina is going GREAT!" is the subject line from Paul Root's recent email. Paul, CPW's own Church Planting Director, is in Argentina with Pastor Chris Swanson from Harvest Bible Church in Paso Robles. Here is the bulk of his early report:
Its 1 am, but I thought I better get this email out while there's internet! The Argentina trip is going GREAT! After 18 hours on 3 planes, and 3 more hours in busses and taxis, I arrived in Santiago de Estero in northern Argentina where CWW missionary Paul Hill is a missionary church planter. The complaints over jet lag had to be set aside because after arriving at my destination on Sunday morning at 12:30am I had to preach in Spanish (of course) at a 10:30am service. It
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Paul Root, CPW Church Planting Direct
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went AWESOME!!!
... Paul Hill is trying to recruit and assist other church planters in his province, so it is so valuable for me to go out with him and meet pastors in the city and out in the small towns where he is working to understand the joys and challenges of what he's doing and provide some consulting on how to move forward. I will be traveling all over northern Argentina for the next 10 days meeting pastors and planters, and then we'll be doing a 3 day church planting retreat where Chris Swanson and I will be providing training in church planting systems and principles. We have been working for a year on this, and I have already received some valuable insights to help fine tune the training to meet their needs.
It has been an honor to be supporting these missionaries who battle through planting churches in an extremely secular culture with between 1/2 % to 2% of the culture being bible believing Christians and the bulk of the rest are secular humanists, with a small percentage of "cultural Catholics." The impact of the lack of Christianity on this culture has been devastating with terrible corruption in business and government, broken school systems, families destroyed by divorce and infidelity, and high drug and alcohol abuse.
Here's a quick summary of the work we're positioning ourselves to support in India; from a Mike Flinchum email (Note: Mike coordinates Converge Worldwide mission efforts in many parts of the world):
Three church planters (called outreach workers) have been assigned to a set of villages. These men will be visiting all the villages assigned to them over the period of several months. In each village, the situation will be
unique. If there are no known believers (which is quite possible), they will follow generally accepted outreach patterns: try to meet people, announce they are Christ followers and pray for sick and generally try to serve in some way, all the while developing openings to share the gospel. Once there is a believing household, that becomes the focus of ministry (discipling the family, and then through the family to neighbors). It's a slow process, and there is certainly resistance. But in the past few years we have seen conversions and baptisms taking place in increased numbers.
Through you and your investment, God is at work. Thank you for your real help in CPW 3D!
