Pastors' Training

Amazonian Wednesdays 🌴

Top of the morning to you! (Or afternoon, or evening… ). For your enjoyment today, a newsletter that I wrote in May 2002, containing some of the original history of our pastors’ training institute. We have now been graduating and sending out students into the jungle for nearly two decades! Our School has come a long, long way from those early days…

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Well, you have heard me mention the Missions School in almost every issue, and it has come to my attention that I need to give more of an explanation on just what this missions school is.

To our excitement, on May 15th of this year, we will be starting classes with the first set of students who have come in from different parts of the jungle to be trained and raised up as church planters.

To give you some background information, I need to give you a picture of the ripe harvest in the Peruvian Amazon that we have our eyes set on. For starters, my husband Israel estimates that there are about 15,000 villages scattered throughout what is referred to as the “High Jungle” and the “Low Jungle” of Peru, put together.

The population of the jungle area in this nation is about 2.5 million. Iquitos, the city in which we live, is the capital of the region of Loreto, also known as the “Low Jungle.” Loreto is composed of 46 districts, with a total population of around one million. Each village normally ranges anywhere from 80 people to around 500, and is composed of either Spanish-speaking agricultural workers or tribal people.

ASIEL, our association of churches, has hundreds of village churches scattered throughout the jungle. At this point about thirty percent of the villages have received the message of the gospel through the various ministries that labor in the area. We praise God for this, because even five years ago the number was considerably lower. The Lord has laid a heavy burden on our heart to plant churches in the unreached villages that remain.

This is where the Missions School comes in. Since in our lifetime we could not go individually to all the thousands of villages that still need to hear about Jesus, our strategy is to bring students in from as many villages as we can, mentor them in the Christian faith, train them in church-planting skills, and send them back into the jungle to advance the Kingdom of God in the areas from which they come.

In a country stricken with poverty as Peru is, Continue reading Presenting…The Missions School!