God’s Faithfulness, Twenty Years Ago and Forever

Amazonian Wednesdays 🌴

A refreshing way to start out the new year: looking back on God’s faithfulness since our early days. I wrote the following year-end reflection at the end of 2004, two decades ago!

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It has been our best year yet! As 2004 draws to a close, we want to give thanks to the Lord for all He has done in our midst this year. We give Him all the glory for the many wonderful things He has accomplished! Here is a summary of those things:

• Through the work our missions school students have done so far, three new churches have been planted in the jungle!
• We had our first native student at our missions school this year, from the Aguarunas tribe in the Amazon Jungle. He is planning on evangelizing his whole tribe when he finishes his course of study, a goal which encompasses several thousand people.
• We had our biggest ever freshman class at the missions school, a total of twelve new stu- dents.
• We graduated the class of ‘04, our first graduating class! This consisted of three students, who are planning on being a pastor, a church planter, and a youth pastor.
• The missions school students’ practicum reached five rivers of the region, for a total of seven jungle locations.
• The students have increased their level of prayer and Bible reading this year. They are praying for three or four hours a day, and spending several more hours a day reading the Word. This has meant a greatly increased prayer cov- ering for us and for the ministry here in Peru, as well as for many of you in the United States!
• God enabled us to open up many new youth-led cell groups. We are up to a total of thirty-eight! Our Saturday night youth church attendance, as a result, has gone up to over four hundred.
• As a result of all this growth, it was necessary to go to two youth services on Saturday nights.
• The women’s ministry began opening women-led cell groups this year. So far, they have nine, and many more to come! This has brought quite a lot of both numerical and spiritual growth in their ministry as well.
• Between youth meetings, the missions school students’ practicum, and school/street evangelism with visiting groups, we had a total of 3365 new salvations this year.
• God has much deepened the sense of unity flowing among our G-12 discipleship/core leadership group in 2004.
• We had three Encounter weekends with our youth this year, allowing us to help around 40 new young people get plugged into our discipleship program.
• God helped our Iquitos church break free of a poverty mentality this year far more than ever before. This was manifested in the construction of a new roof valued at $24,000 USD, which reaches over previously unused land that we owned. As a result, we have a much bigger space to work with for the church’s sanctuary.
• We also were able to build two new buildings at the missions school which are being used as dorms.

Isn’t God good?!!