A New Class of Church Planters and Leaders

Amazonian Wednesdays 🌴

April – May 2003

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I invite you to join us as we dream: A thousand students mill around the busy campus, full of enthusiasm and the Spirit of God. They have come from all over the Peruvian jungle to study church leadership, and burn with the vision to take God’s word back to their villages and towns. They study their courses with hunger, eager to reach more and more of the 15,000 pockets of population scattered across the Peruvian Amazon. Every year, we are sending out over 300 trained pastors and church planters for this purpose, and we know Jesus won’t be held back from coming soon, as far as this corner of the earth is concerned!

Okay, so we are pretty far from that reality at this point. This last month, as classes began at our missions school, we had a total of sixteen students: seven returning from our first school year ever, and nine new students (eight from the jungle villages, and one from the city of Iquitos)! We also have a very rustic campus, with palm thatch roofs, open air classrooms, and wooden planks for desks! However, that doesn’t daunt us. We are thrilled to be starting our second school year, and continue to dream toward the future.

When we finished the first term in October, we sent our seven students out to put into practice what they had studied for five months. One of them stayed in the Iquitos area, and the rest went out into the jungle, mostly returning to their own home towns to strengthen the churches in those areas. Three of them didn’t want to come back for another term, because their practice was going so well! The Spirit of God was moving and stirring up the church in great ways, and so it was with reluctance that they submitted to our request to come back to school! But they did arrive, though a little after classes had already begun. Praise God for their future ministries! They are off to an amazing start.

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In other news, fifteen people from our church, two American missionaries, and one other pastor from our association took a trip this last month to the district of Pari Nari, west of Iquitos. Over 500 were saved, and believers from nine villages learned evangelism principles to take back home with them!

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“Why, Pastora, why me? Why me? Why me?” Jaquelina cried out as she reached out to fall into my arms. The moment had come in our youth retreat to give the young people individual time to come and share with us as pastors anything for which they needed healing or freedom in their lives. Jaquelina came to where I was sitting, waiting, and poured out her heart in brokenness. Her father had sexually molested her when she was four and seven years old. I led her in a prayer of expressing her wounded emotions to Jesus, receiving His comfort, and forgiving her father.  When we had finished praying, she had a new light in her face and walked with an easier step.

Jaquelina and forty-four other young people assembled eagerly at our “Encounter with God” youth retreat March 28-30th. We taught them about the importance of Bible study, about the need to be transformed by Jesus, about the healing found in forgiving those who have hurt them, about self-discipline in their sexuality, about confessing hidden sins, about freedom in Christ from the enemy’s oppression, and about being filled with the Holy Spirit. They came open with a very sincere hunger, and they left filled to overflowing! Jaquelina said to me at the end of the event, “Pastora, I feel very, very different!” She was glowing with His freedom.

The fields are ripe for the harvest in the Amazon Jungle!