Evangelism Updates

The day after Christmas our family drove eight hours to the coast to Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador. Our District Superintendent there, Eduardo Meza, had invited our family to spend the holiday with them as well as do training in evangelism. Sherri and the kids went back on the 30th, while I stayed two weeks to work with the DS and local pastors. The Meza children are pictured here with our kids.

While my family was with me, we were able to take in a lot of things in the HOT city of Guayaquil, including going to the beach and walking along the beautiful boardwalk.

We visited a park called Iguana Park. Guess what was there? Yep, a lot of iguanas.

The custom is to celebrate the New Year buy purchasing and burning dolls representing the old year. In Guayaquil, the making of muñecos is an art form where they create life-size characters from paper mache. The best of these are sold about four blocks from the district center, where we stayed. Walking along the crowded street on December 30th was quite the cultural experience. The amazing thing is that there are thousands of these for sale (some for several hundred dollars) in all kinds of styles and designs. The first morning of the New Year these are all burnt and the road is completely cleaned up. This is because there is a large fine if there is trash in the road in front of your house.

Guayaquil is a more modern city than Quito, with lots of changes in the last five years. Besides two beautiful boardwalks areas, the city has created works of art from many of the pillars which support the bridges and overpasses. These are made from mosaic tile. There are also areas of incredible poverty called invasion communities.

We visited one new church plant. They have purchased a lot and made a temporary structure of bamboo. They are applying to have a Work & Witness team come and help them build their church. Pictured here are the Pastor, District Superintendent Eduardo Meza and his wife, Rocio.

On the Saturday after New Years, I did a Ministerial Ethics workshop for around forty pastors from the district. This is a shorter version of a class I’ve taught at our seminary in Quito. In seven days, we did evangelism training four times for nine different churches with around 200 people attending.

Our training always includes going to the streets for practical training. Around 100 people were able to go to three different sites to do street evangelism.

Besides some forty people who accepted Christ, I had the privilege of praying with one man during the evangelism training. Previously, he wouldn’t allow his wife to attend the church. He was checking out the church when he came under conviction. You can imagine how excited the church was when we concluded the evangelism training with the testimony of a new child of God. Pray for Napoleon in his new walk of faith.