Carnival began last night.

The whole nation shuts down for a party until Tuesday night before Ash Wednesday. 

The news programs have been full of stories on "how to survive carnival" (as in don’t get drunk and then go swimming in the ocean), people who pawn their electronics to raise money to spend, how there are no rental cars or hotel rooms in the entire country available, and man on the street interviews with people saying what they will do for Carnival.

For example:  How to get ready for Carnival

The national bus terminal was a jammed as O’Hare or Atlanta airport on the Wednesday before thanksgiving.

This celebration is bigger than Christmas.

People gather in the streets during the day, fire trucks hosing people down with water.  They stay up all night partying.  Various towns have parades with floats like the Rose Bowl parade.

Beauty pageants around the country have been selecting "queens" and all the barrio queens competed last night for the title of Queen de Carnival.  (photo from La Prensa, Carlos Lemos).

Curfews have been suspended, the President has gone on vacation, the National Guard has been activated, and the Health Ministry has been restaging medical supplies around the country to hospitals.  (Source: Panama-Guide.com, a great source of information for English Speakers about panama — I’ve met Don and have appreciated his help here).

I’ve returned from the Annual Meeting of the Dunamis Fellowship of Presbyterian Reformed Ministries International in Black Mountain NC. 

I have been part of this organization since at least 1997, and have been a faculty member of the Fellowship.  This means that I am called upon to teach their courses, particularly the Evangelism Dunamis Tract, at various locations in the country.

I attend the annual meeting every year since it is a chance to reconnect with "family" friends that perhaps I only get to see once a year.  It is also my annual prayer retreat.

This year, I had the privilege of leading the morning Bible study.  The theme that the Lord had put on my heart was the "Father’s Heart for the nations."  We are called into the kingdom of God, not only so that we’ll have eternal life, but so that we can participate in God’s plan to gather the nations to worship Christ.

Another rather significant development took place.

I was set apart as "Pioneer Faculty for Missions and Evangelism in the Americas."  I received commissioning prayer in this role. 

I will become their point person for training and teaching on Missions and Evangelism, in both English Speaking and Spanish speaking congregations in the Western Hemisphere.  That’s a broad territory!  

PRMI doesn’t have much inroad yet into the Hispanic churches and so the need is pioneer that work.  How this will all work logistically (funding, developing more leaders, for example), we are still sorting out, but we both sense that this is God’s doing as our ministry unfolds. 

There is so much crossover between the work of PRMI and the work of EvangelismCoach.org that there is a natural synthesis of the two.

The January Newsletter for EvangelismCoach has been released.

If you haven’t received it via email, visit on the Newsletter Signup page at EvangelismCoach.  You’ll find the link to the archive there.

January’s newsletter has a free resource: the power point presentation given at the Dunamis Fellowship for PRMI about God’s Heart for the Nations. 

Articles in January include a discussion on the definition of Evangelism and a 4 part series on God’s Heart for the nations.

Willow Creek Leadership Summit

In early January, Willow Creek Community Church sent their advance planning team for the Global Leadership Summit. 

It is a leadership development conference held every August in Chicago at the Willow Creek Campus, and broadcast via Satellite to multiple locations throughout the country. 

The videos are then edited, dubbed into Spanish, and then we in Panama would have a leadership summit held at our church for pastors around the country, and perhaps from neighboring countries like Costa Rica and Colombia.

In 2006 alone (Source):

• 85,000 leaders were trained
• 176 cities in 18 countries hosted events
• 10,000 volunteers participated
• 8,000 churches were represented

We met the Willow Creek team at our church, together with about 20 pastors from various different denominations.   When each pastor was introduced, most every one was also a supervisor of some kind in their denominational tradition.  I had the chance to speak with several of them, and invitations are beginning to come for evangelism workshops.

The group did decide that they would form the local planning team and I will be a part of that team, offering the administrative gifts as necessary.

Foursquare Church Pastors

Also that week, we had a visiting Foursquare pastor from the US who brought us the Word in church, and he invited me to dinner with nearly 15 other visiting pastors from the United States.  It was a good dinner at an ocean front restaurant.  We ate outdoors to enjoy the breeze. 

The pastors were here in Panama to learn about the History of the Foursquare’s work in Panama.  Panama was the first country that Foursquare missionaries went to when the denomination was in it’s infancy.

That same weekend, I also met people from the Foursquare Press who are in town working on some youth material – they have not yet made contact with Vida Joven (young life) to get their input and I will put them together.

Brenda and I leave to the interior of Panama to teach at an annual conference of Children’s ministers and leaders.  Brenda will be teaching a workshop on crafts, and I’ll be teaching two workshops on leadership.

It’s an annual conference, sponsored by our church, and this year, it will be held at a denominational camp about 3 hours outside of the city.

We look forward to the fresh air, being in the mountains, and trust that God will use us.

Pray for our safe travel, pray for divine appointments as we continue to seek clarity in our call here.

We will spend Sunday resting at a beach on the pacific before returning to the hustle of the city on Monday.