August 2015 Update

Here is our first official update from Ecuador.

Our first impressions:

Loja is a beautiful place about the size of Montgomery with friendly people and a lot of playgrounds. It is normally overcast and a little chilly. We are about 8,000 feet above sea level and are surrounded by green mountains. The food is great and normally consist of rice, beans and chicken with a soup.  

Our current ministry in Loja:

Our main purpose while we are in Loja is to prepare for the town we will be living in by: learning about the culture, about cults in their particular area, and the language. The city of Loja is only about 2% Evangelical Christian so we also spend time interacting with the locals to help strengthen the progress that has started here. 

On the weekends, we normally go and help out with local church plants or visit towns that do not have any Evangelical churches and pray for them while conversing with the locals. We have also been able to do some intentional evangelism in the city.

Our future ministry:

In late September, we will move to a small town (Balsas) where there is currently no Christians or churches. We will live in this town for the remainder of our time in Ecuador, building relationships with the locals and sharing The Good News with those that God places in our path. We want to establish a small house church through these individuals that we have built a healthy relationship with. We will continue to work along side them in helping them reach others in their community and other surrounding towns. 

Our challenge:

We have visited these towns and they are strong in their current beliefs. They have also been burdened by other cults and are cautious of any outsiders. This is why it is important to build healthy relationships before we share with them or start a church. We stayed the night in Balsas last Saturday and learned of some of the challenges that we will be facing. It is a night club town with bars and liquor stores on each street. We currently have no connections in this town so we will be looking for persons of peace to work with.

Prayer requests

• For God to continue to be the center of our life and our priorities to be in order. We have been doing a great jog at this up to this point, but believe it will get tougher as our ministry progresses.
• For Sophie as she continues to adjust to the culture. She has been amazing at being patient with all of the transitions and we pray that she continues to grow in her faith and in life. She is still nervous about playing with other kids because she can’t speak the language. We have also been traveling on busses a lot and it is exhausting. 
• Balsas: We have seen the challenges that are waiting for us here and pray that God is working through the hearts of the locals so that we can share with them.

We want to thank you for your continued prayers and support. We thank God daily for you all and want you to know how special you are to us. We are encouraged to hear from you all and what God is specifically doing in your life. We spend time praying daily for your family and include you all in our prayers. We also pray for a few of you specifically each day as we know that you all are involved in different ministries and going through different struggles.

Final note:

We are mostly overwhelmed with the idol worship by Catholics. We knew that Catholics were different here, but we did not expect this type of serious worship. We see people everyday worshipping idols. I spoke with one man Who believed that Jesus was his Lord and Savior. However, he also believed that Mary was his Savior as well. He believed that God had revealed this to him. We have to be very careful in offending people as we try to explain what scripture says.