Mission to the Americas

October is always busy.  For the last five Octobers, it has been a series of conferences in 3 different countries, and this one is no different.

The Wesleyan Seminary of Venezuela (founded by a United Methodist Church in Georgia) has established a ministry school in the central Venezuelan city of Barquismeto.

It provides continuing academic training for current pastors, church planters and those who are working towards becoming pastors.

Named after John Wesley (vs the denominational tradition), the 10 year old school is non-denominational in approach and our class had several students from different denominations.

Without this school, students have said there is no other place to get this kind of training.

In terms of our family’s calling, and my calling in particular, – this school is the sweet spot of our calling — helping pastors wrestle and grow with how to lead evangelism in a congregation.

Focus of the pastor’s class

This particular course focused on pastors themselves as evangelists, active witnesses in sharing their faith as pastors and church planters.

My co teacher, Dan Dunn, and I organized our material around 7 axioms of evangelism

1. Abundance
2. Prayer
3. Eternal
4. Love
5. Preparation
6. Process
7. Proximity.

We covered all 7 during the 32 hour class.  Most of the time was spent on evangelism axioms 5, 6, and 7, with a lot of time to pray through the implications of the material.

We touched on many models, methods, manners, and how to mix them all up to help create a vibrant evangelism plan in the congregation.

Each student created their own plan of action to set out to accomplish at their churches in the next few months.

The impact

I’ll share more in related posts, but here is one testimony that stood out (I paraphrase):

“This class has helped me see that I’ve been too busy with the church to have any relationships with non believers. That will now change.”

Statements like this were repeated by others.

As evangelism trainers, Dan and I are convinced that unless pastors

• personally involve themselves in the lives of irreligious people and
• do the hard work of evangelism themselves,

they will lack the ability to lead evangelism training in the congregation.

These students saw that they needed to start making some new friendships with unbelievers and strengthen existing ones.

They know they don’t need to “get out of the church” (as in leave their duties behind), but get out of the church more regularly to do the personal work of evangelism.  Some of what qualifies as church work can be set aside, delegated, or ignored. . .  🙂

The very first class in the recent pastor’s training class at the Wesleyan Seminary of Venezuela centered on the motive of God in reaching people.

Towards the end of the class, we sensed a kairos moment of God’s activity which moved us into prayer.

These are approximate translations of verbal testimonies given during a time of sharing and debriefing about a prayer session at the end of a class teaching.

These are all pastors pursuing an academic degree in the seminary where I taught last week.

“Yesterday’s time of prayer was like spiritual surgery for me. . I had forgotten how important the lost sheep is to the pastor, the lost coin to the widow, and the lost son to the Father (Luke 15). That prayer time re-awakened me to the search for them.” Pastor Josue

“I had a vision while we were praying for the harvest field. I saw a plaza in a town about 45 minutes from where we are. I’m thinking that is the next place we are to plant a church.” Pastor Franklin

“I realized that I had let my relationship with Jesus get dry and shallow. Your teaching helped me surrender once again to pursue Jesus with all my mind and heart and strength so that I may share out of the overflow of my life with Him.”

“I have learned a lot that I can use in my church. God is really using you in our country.” Pastor Jesus