Dear praying friends,
It has been an exciting start to our academic year and we are so thrilled by what the Lord has been doing in our midst. We hope you will rejoice with us at the Lord’s blessings as you read through this short report.
Annual conference
We were so pleased to see how our annual international conference has grown over the last few years. This year we had over 220 attend over the four evenings, with some travelling from around the country to attend. The theme of the conference was “Challenges for Today’s Church”, with topics covering evangelism, healthy church life, preaching, postmodernism, leadership and sexual purity. The main speaker, Pastor Otto Sánchez from the Dominican Republic, was one of five speakers who challenged those attending with his dynamic and biblical preaching. It was a privilege to get to know him over his time in the country and to be able to forge useful links for the future of our work.
Teaching on evangelism in Lima
In parallel with the conference, Evair and I co-taught a 20-hour new course on evangelism. He taught the first two days on the theology of evangelism and I taught the last two days on the practice of group and personal evangelism. We had 35 students which was really good, including the majority of HeartCry missionaries. We had many very encouraging comments from the students who had found the course useful and enlightening.
Greek in Arequipa
A week after the end of the conference I was off to Arequipa in the south of Peru to teach an introduction to biblical Greek to almost 20 students. I was surprised by their rapid progress with the language, and by the end of the week they were translating quite a number of simple Bible verses from Greek into Spanish. One of the new students had also been at the conference in Lima the week before and then travelled by plane to Iquitos in the jungle to take the Christology module with David Silva a week or so later, such was his enthusiasm for studying with us.
Christology in Iquitos
David Silva, our academic dean traveled to Iquitos at the beginning of March along with Martín Manchego, our publicity, I.T. and development manager. They spent the first week visiting churches and pastors sharing about our ministry with the aim of expanding our work in the Peruvian jungle. David Silva then spent a week teaching on the doctrine of Christ to our students there, whilst making the most of his visit to spend time with family, as he is from this city originally. It was exciting to see an increase in students as a result of their visit, with some previous students rejoining us and others new to our institution.
