It's sad that a month has passed with nothing new going up here, so here you go. Melissa got a new job, right down the street. Hooray Melissa.
In bigger, better news, we spent a week down in Mexico from October 11th to the 20th in some training for doing mission work. That was outstanding. I doubt I'll be able to convey all that was impressed on us during the week, but I'll try.
The speakers we had were professors or staff from Azusa Pacific University, which got me thinking, if you can go to a christian university, do it. I never thought it mattered, education is education. The thing is Melissa had teachers in college who would spend their time telling her about how fruitflys have the gay gene, I had plenty of instructors who would go out of their way to bash Christ, how much better would it have been to have professors who loved the Lord and brought that to the lecture.
We learned about the global situation of the gospel, you can see for yourself at the Joshua Project. Namely where it isn't. This was the part of the week where we learned about different missionary movements in the past several hundred years and how we're stuck on the last one. Basically meaning that there aren't very many missionaries going out, and the ones that are going out are heading to places that have already been reached.
This fed into the discussion about Mexico in particular. Ensenada, where APU has been sending short term missions groups for some twenty years, has been reached, the gospel won there, the need for American Missionaries to go down and do VBS and do outreach events for kids, teenagers, and adults, is almost non-existant, the Mexican churches there can do that themselves, and are, without our help. Central Mexico on the other had is very Mexican Catholic, not to be confused with Roman Catholic, they're heavily into witchcraft, they burn books (Bibles), and see evangelical christians as cultists. The same situation they had in Baja not twenty years ago. So the need is not for Baja, but deeper, and the people who are best equipped to go in and set up beach heads down there aren't well meaning American Churches, but well equipped Mexican churches from esablished congregations in Baja, Mexicali, and other gospel saturated places. The need those Mexican churches have isn't for VBS, or for Americans to show them how it's done, but for partnership and help equipping their own missionary teams to go to those hostile locations, devolop contacts and then start funnelling down Americans (or more evangelical Mexicans).
That said, Melissa and I are starting to collect translators from across the great state of California. We're going to try to send them down with other teams that go to Ensenada and Mexicali to start building those partnerships with the Mexican churches and do a little more fellowship and help them understand the big picture.
Read this parable, I wouldn't exactly call it subtle, but I hope it helps you understand what we're talking about. If you are at all interested in coming with us on a mission trip to Ensensada we can take you (if you're a leader in church) for free. Let us know, your eyes will be opened to what God's doing out there.
