​This is one of those stories that gives me goosebumps every time I tell it, and it clearly demonstrates the need for pastor training in the Amazon, so I thought I would share it on the blog today.

We went to Peru in April to distribute school supplies to schools along the Amazon and Napo Rivers who are in a program whereby people can sponsor a village and their donation helps cover the cost of supplies and participation in the program. While we were there, we met with pastors and conducted children's services in a couple of churches and prayed for God's direction.

In June, Pachita (the wonderful woman who introduced us to the beautiful people of Peru) would be taking a group from Pennsylvania on a mission trip to Peru, and among them was a family from Blairsville, PA who, along with their church, were sponsoring the village of Nuevo Esperanza.  They had been raising money to purchase Bibles for the village, and had already sent the money to Manuel, our Field Ministry Coordinator, and two cases of Bibles were sitting in his house, waiting for their arrival.  They were planning to visit the village and take the Bibles to them and give a study Bible to their pastor.

Mike and I had just been to the village of Nuevo Esperanza to deliver their school supplies, but because the Amazon was experiencing record high water levels, their village was flooded, and they had to come out to the large boat we were on to get their supplies.  While they were on the boat, we took pictures of the people from the village to send to our friends who were their sponsors.

When we got back to the city after the school supply distribution in the jungle, we went to Belen, an area of Iquitos, to visit some pastors and tell them about the vision God was giving us to train pastors in the villages.

The first church we went to, we sat down and began telling the pastor our story. We told him that God was calling us to begin training pastors in the jungle, and he listened intently, without saying a word.

When we had laid out our mission, he said, "It is no accident that you are here.  One week ago, a man came to my church from the jungle.  He had traveled many hours by boat to get here.  He asked me to teach him the Bible and train him to be a pastor to his people.  I told him I would train him, but he is many hours away, and does not have money for gas to get to the city very often."

I said, "Really? Do you know the name of the village he was from?"  The Pastor replied, "Yes. He was from a village called Nuevo Esperanza on the Napo River."

This was the first time the name of the village had been spoken there.  He had no idea of any of the history you have just read.  I'm sure Mike and Manuel and I were all sitting there with our mouths open in awe, because we DID know the history.

Mike took out the camera and opened a picture of the men from Nuevo Esperanza and showed it to him.  "Is the man who came here in this photo?", He asked.

"Yes. This is the man right here.", He said, pointing to one of the men in the picture.

We then shared with him the story of Nuevo Esperanza, including the fact that Manuel had Bibles sitting in his home destined for that village!

If anyone ever tells me that we do not have a personal God - one who cares about the details of our lives, I would beg to differ with them.  I serve a God who heard the prayers of a man in the jungle, hours from the nearest city.  God called this man to ministry, and led him to take a journey, seeking help.  He also led him to the very church, we would be sitting in one week later.

THE REST OF THE STORY...

In June, Pachita and our friends arrived in the village of Nuevo Esperanza.  They went into the school and were greeting the people of the village and began passing out Bibles.  They asked, "Where is the pastor?" and they were told, "We have no pastor."

This generated some confusion, as we had shared this story with them and had even pointed out in the pictures which man had gone to Belen.  Someone told them the man in the picture wasn't from their village, so they weren't sure what to think.

MEANWHILE...

Outside in the village, a friend of ours who was the guide and translator for the group, was talking to the man in the picture.  Mike had also sent the picture to him and told him the story.  He recognized the man and started talking to him.  When they had asked "Where is the pastor?", he didn't respond. He said he was not confident in that role yet, until he had training to be a pastor.  He hadn't even told the people in the village that he felt called to do this.  He told our friend that he was hoping to get back to the city for training, but he didn't have money for gas yet to make the trip.  Our friend gave him some money to help him. We asked Manuel to take a study Bible to the church in Belen to give to him when he returns.  

We are hoping on this next trip to organize a network of pastors to begin providing pastor training near his village so he and others can receive training and materials.  One goal for this trip is to spend 4 days on the Napo River beginning this work.  We would love to be there when God writes the next chapter in this man's life!  ​Please pray for him and his village.

In the United States, the path to becoming a pastor usually involves 4 years of college, followed by 4 years of seminary.  Upon completion of 8 years of preparation to preach the Gospel, many continue their education, working toward a Masters of Divinity degree.  In the jungle, that looks quite a bit different. 

As I said in an earlier blog post, Mike and I began this journey by taking short term mission trips to Peru with some of our kids.  Those trips centered around taking Bibles to villages on the Amazon and Napo Rivers.  In many of those villages, we would ask, "Who is the Pastor?" and often the reply was, "We have no church and no pastor." The people were eager to receive a Bible, and would immediately open it and begin reading it, but there was no one to disciple them in their faith.

Each trip, we would come home more burdened for the people in the Peruvian Amazon, who had a hunger for the Word of God, but many had no shepherd.  At one point, we were even trying to figure out the logistics of going to villages and building a building for them to have church in, but one night in April, while we sat in Panama City, waiting for our connecting flight to Iquitos, Peru, God clearly put in Mike's heart the message - "Church is not a building, it is people."

We spent that trip meeting with pastors in Iquitos and in villages in the jungle and talking to them about what we were beginning to see as the need God was asking us to address... the need for pastors in the villages to shepherd their people.

On that "fact finding mission", we learned that:

• Pastors from the city will not go to the jungle to pastor a church unless they are called to the "mission field", as that's how they view the jungle;
• Men in the jungle have the primary goal of providing for their family, so leaving for any extended length of time to attend college (if one were even available, and if they could afford it) is not a viable option;
• If a village is going to have a pastor, most likely he will have been born and raised there, with the calling and desire to bring the Good News to his own people;
• Religion classes are taught in the public schools, so there is a basic understanding of the Bible, but that is very different from applying its principles to everyday life.

We concluded, then, that the most viable option for pastor training in the jungle, is taking the training to them - right where they live.

So first, God started laying out the vision, but we had no idea how to make that a reality. While I have many years of experience teaching the Bible, we have no practical experience training pastors - we're not even pastors!  But, for some reason, God was sharing this vision with us and we assumed He wanted us to do something with it, so we just started praying that God would show us what that "something" was.

Meanwhile, our daughter Tori introduced us to Train & Multiply.  She was ministering in Japan and was being trained to use T&M in evangelism there.  We had just gotten our donor packet from OMS (One Mission Society) when we sent a financial gift to help Tori get to Japan, and in that packet was the report from ECC (Every Community for Christ) sharing the results that were being seen in various places around the world using T&M.

I vividly remember sitting at the dining room table having breakfast with Mike, reading through that booklet out loud and seeing report after report of how God was moving - particularly in South America.  I cried as I suddenly felt equipped to do what we were being asked to do!  That night, Tori sent us a message from Japan saying, "Train & Multiply is exactly what you guys need in Peru!"  (With every message we've heard from God regarding ministry, He has confirmed it through someone else.)

We agreed to call OMS and talk to them about using T&M in Peru and how we could be equipped to do that.  Larry Freed, Assistant Director for Church Multiplication at ECC, returned our call and was excited about what God was doing in Peru, and agreed that T&M seemed to be a good fit for the ministry there.  He invited us to attend a Train & Multiply training at OMS in August.

Long story short, we did attend the training and we are both now Licensed Organizers with Train & Multiply, and we are about to begin training our first group of men to be pastors in Peru in a couple weeks.

Train and Multiply uses simple New Testament methods to train church leaders. It combines pastoral and leadership training with church planting and development, to train leaders in such a way that churches and cells will multiply naturally. 

Our prayer is that God will begin raising up men in the jungle and calling them to be spiritual leaders in their own villages and that through the training they receive, churches will be planted and many will accept Christ as their Lord and Savior.

Please pray with us as we seek to make that vision a reality through the ministry God has called us to.  To God be all Glory!

Coming up next...The Story of Nueva Esperanza...One man's calling.

Almost 25 years ago, I put on a white dress and walked down a long aisle in a beautiful old church and said "I do" to the man God had been preparing for 24 years to be my life partner.  A couple years later, we became three and a couple years after that, we became four, etc. etc. etc.  At the end of the day, we were wrapped up in raising nine kids, going to baseball practice, drilling them on their Awana verses and cutting out Grand Prix cars, sewing patches on Brownie vests, making and changing lots of diapers, braiding lots of braids, washing lots (and LOTS) of clothes and cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning. Somewhere in there, we found or made time to serve in our local church and organizations. Before we knew it, two of the kids had grown and gone and the rest of us were caught up in the day to day homeschooling, farming, middle America, Christian conservative lifestyle.

On May 18, 1991, if God had joined me for coffee that morning and told me a quick summary of my life - especially the 9 kids part - I may have hesitated before taking those steps down the aisle.  If He had told me that there would be a day that I would be camping in a tent in the Amazon Rainforest and riding boats up and down the river visiting villages and training men to be pastors, I probably would have laughed like Sarah! (Genesis 18:12-13)

Friday was my birthday.  The kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I smiled and said, "A trip to Peru."  I honestly had no hope as I said that that I would be able to return this year.  As you can imagine, our grocery budget would feed a village in Peru. (Seriously!) So there's not much left at the end of the month.  In fact, usually there's month left at the end of the money.  But, we know that God is the one who has put this ministry in place and as my Daddy says, "He owns the hills, and all the cows on the hills, and all the taters in the hills.", so what "we" have is pretty much irrelevant when God starts putting a plan in motion.

Saturday morning over coffee, I said to Mike, "I wish there was a way I could be at Santa Maria in October for the pastor training.  Even if I didn't help with the training, how awesome would it be to just sit back and watch God work?!"  Having already spent 3 weeks in Peru in April and a week at Train & Multiply training in August, Mike's vacation from work is done for the year, but he agreed to pray about it and see what God wanted to do. We went to prayer and asked God to make it clear if it was His will and make a way, financially, if I was to go.  Libby, our 15 year old daughter, who went to Peru with me last October and completely fell in love with the people, had already been working all Summer, shoveling out goat pens and stacking hay for a neighbor, and had saved almost enough money for a plane ticket.

Some generous friends had made some donations and some generous relatives had given me money for my birthday, and when we looked at the cost of tickets (which are currently lower than I have ever paid for tickets to Peru!), we were only $500 shy of what we needed to get to Lima.  Saturday night we prayed for God to show us what to do.  Sunday night we went to bed with the money for the tickets!

We still need tickets from Lima to Iquitos and back ($100 each way/per person), but we're trusting that God wants us there and He'll provide!

Let me just say, again, that we are NOT missionaries.  We're just regular people who have surrendered everything to God and said, "Here we are. Send us. If you want us to move our family to the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, just say the word.  If you want us to stay put and work with ministry partners in the Amazon, we'll do that, too.  You're writing this story, Lord."

And let me say, we have never seen blessings before like we are seeing now since the day we said, "We are available to do whatever you want us to do, Lord!"  The story of how we started out going on a short term mission trip to see if we could do something to bless the people of Peru, and came home with our hearts so full of blessings from them... to where we are now, would be more than you would want to read in a single blog post.  It's an amazing story.  Just incredible. Wow.  All the things we have seen God do, and then things we heard Him say to us that were confirmed by many others is just mind-blowing!

I was talking to a friend this morning about mission ministries we are both involved in, and we agreed that being in the center of God's will is the absolute best and most comfortable place to be.  God saw fit to reach down into Pennsylvania and lift us out of our mundane lives and say, "I have something different in mind for you now."  

To think that all those days when I was working at the law firm or chasing toddlers, and loose cows that had broken through the fence, and finishing our homeschool day at 9 o'clock at night, God was smiling and saying, "Hang on. I know something you don't know. One of these days, I'm going to call you to something totally different...For all things work together for good to those who love me and are called according to my purpose." 

We are so blessed and so honored to be allowed to be involved in this work.  I can't wait to see what God is going to do in Peru in October!!! -- Vicki

In April, Mike and I visited the village of Santa Maria del Ojeal on the Amazon River. We went there because we had seen a house for sale in the newspaper in Iquitos that we thought might work for our family, and we wanted to see it as we were praying about the possibility of moving to Peru. (We are still praying about that.)

While we were there, we met many people in the village.  The word got out that Missionaries were looking at property, and suddenly everything was for sale. Several people came to tell us they had property for sale or knew someone who had property for sale.  Every time someone else came to convince us to buy their property, the price was less than the last property we were offered.  I asked our tour guide, Alex, why they were offering us property at such a low price.  He told me, "They want you to bring Jesus to their people."  God gave us a burden for the people of Santa Maria that day.  We knew God wanted to do something special there.

A few months later, Manuel, our Field Ministry Coordinator told us that some of the pastors were feeling led to minister in the village of Santa Maria, and a team was being assembled to go to the village to preach.  We had been told that there was no pastor in Santa Maria, and we were excited that the people there would have an opportunity to hear the gospel and respond to the message of Hope.

Manuel felt God leading him to work with the Mission Team from the Good Samaritan Church in Iquitos.  Pastor Ramiro has a vision to "Make Disciples" and he is discipling a group of five men in his church, ranging in age from 15 to 80.  He believes that if people won't come to church to hear the Word of God, we must take the Word of God to the people. This team is actively involved in ministry in the city.

Manuel went to the village to meet with the community leaders and share the plan for coming to minister. The leaders were happy to have them come and a date was set.

On August 16th, Manuel, Pastor Ramiro and the Mission Team arrived in Santa Maria.  As they were going door to door sharing the gospel, they met a man who said he was the only pastor in the village and he had been praying that God would send someone to help him! He said that his Son-in-Law wanted to be a pastor so he could work with him in ministry, but he had no training and no way to receive training.

The men told him they would be happy to come back to the village regularly to train him. They made arrangements to return to Santa Maria in a couple weeks to begin the training. The next time Manuel talked to Pastor Raul by phone, he was told that there was now a group of 6 - 10 men coming to be trained as pastors.  Four were from the village of Santa Maria, and the rest were from neighboring villages who wanted to be trained so they could go back to their villages and plant churches!  Ironically, Mike and I were at Train & Multiply Training at OMS (One Mission Society) in Greewood, IN while this was transpiring, learning how to train pastors to preach the gospel!

Friday, Manuel and Pastor Ramiro returned to Santa Maria and met with Pastor Raul, his Son-in-Law, and three other men who are interested in training to be pastors.  Pastor Ramiro has an event coming up at his church September 21st that will go through the beginning of October, (Please pray for that!) so a tentative date was set to begin pastor training the middle of October.

Please be in prayer as this is exactly what we feel God is calling this ministry to do!  We are SO humbled that He is allowing us to be a part of His work in the Amazon!

Please pray...

• That the word will spread to the neighboring villages that pastor training will be available, and that God will call men to the role of shepherding their communities in the gospel of Christ;
• For a hedge of protection around the Mission Team and the pastor trainees as they prepare to begin this work;
• For financial provision to pay for Study Bibles for those beginning training, copying costs for the training materials and meals for those attending the training;
• That we may have ears to hear God's leading and that He will work behind the scenes, working all things together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28)

To GOD be the glory!!

If you had told us 5 years ago - even a year ago - that we would one day be ministering in the Amazon Rainforest, we never would have believed you.  You see, we aren't missionaries.  We are just parents, farmers, teachers, a software engineer and a graphic designer, living a pretty mundane life in Northwest Pennsylvania in the United States of America.  We awake to the alarm clock in the morning, get the kids up and ready for school and go about our days, just like most of America.  We love the Lord and have been serving Him in our local churches for many years, but the Amazon?!? Really?!?

There is a saying - "God doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called."  That should be our theme.  Moody was cut out to be a Missionary.  Jim Elliott was cut out to be a Missionary.  My great uncle, Edward C. Oney, one of the early missionaries with Oriental Mission Society, who wore out the soles of his shoes in a day, going door to door sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in Japan - he was cut out to be a missionary.  Me? Not so much.

One thing's for sure.  On a short term mission trip to Peru in 2012, God began changing our family.  Mike and Tori came home from that trip talking about the people.  Yes, they talked about the canopy walk, piranha fishing, poison dart frogs and monkeys, but they kept going back to the people.

The next year, I wanted to go see what they were talking about. Our two oldest sons were my travel companions as we joined the Peru Crew led by Pachita (Nancy Kopf).  Our quiet, laid back, introverted boys fell in love with the people.  They danced with the children, played with them in the school yard, hugged Moms and gave Bibles to Dads.  They came home changed, as did I.

After our daughter, Libby, accompanied me in 2014, she changed all the goals she had set for herself and announced that she was going back to the Amazon to raise goats and play with the children.  :)  She loved the people - especially the children.  When we got on the plane that day to come home, I left my heart in the Amazon.

This year, Mike and I decided to go together and see what God was up to.  One thing we had noticed on our trips, was that the people were hungry for God.  They were eager to get a Bible. They immediately opened and started reading them when we handed them one. Many of the villages lacked churches and pastors. Who would disciple them? Who would teach them?  Our hearts were burdened for the flocks without a shepherd.  As sheep farmers, that was real to us.

At night we would lie awake, talking about the logistics of building churches in villages.  It wasn't until the night before we arrived in Iquitos that God made it abundantly clear that a church is not about a building - it's about the people.  Something we had known all along.

Almost three weeks in the Amazon led to a lot of answers, and even more questions.  We watched God work in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.  We were blown away by how determined He was for us to "get it".  Piece by piece, He laid down puzzle pieces until a picture began to materialize.  We met with pastors and ministries and random people God put in our path, and by the time we were on the plane home, we "got it".  I'm not going to kid you. It took awhile to get from "we see the need, but we're not sure what to do about it" to "Here I am, send me".  

Four months after our trip, Mike and I sat in Greenwood, Indiana in a Train & Multiply Training class at OMS.  (How we ended up there is another great story!)  We learned how to effectively share the gospel and plant churches - through people.  We learned that we needed to rethink the definition of church.  We also realized that what we think of as church is actually pretty far removed from the church that Paul and Barnabus and Silas and Timothy were establishing in the book of Acts.  We saw how Jesus engaged people in conversation rather than preaching at them.  He invited them to discover the answers for themselves.  He sent the Holy Spirit to teach and give wisdom.  

As we drove home, we talked about how it would be awhile before we could get to Peru, rent a church or school, have a pastor's conference, train them to use Train & Multiply and then start implementing it in the villages.  We know now that God had a smile on His face listening to that conversation, because within a week of the training, we were training a group of men through Skype from 3000 miles away, to go out and start training pastors in the jungle.  Seven men in the first group planning to train 10 men in the next group.  We can only imagine where this will go...

We have said that it seems like God is building the road he wants us to take, one brick at a time. As we take the next step, He lays down another brick.  We have no idea where the road will end up, but He never promised to tell us that.  The Bible says, "Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We only need enough light to see where to place our next step.  So, at this point in the journey, we're just taking a step at a time.

Please pray with us. We know he has called us to this work.  We have made ourselves available to be used of Him.  He has equipped us and provided partners to work in the field with us. The Harvest is plentiful, and we are SO excited to see what God will do!