Jungle Conference

Our recent trip to the jungle went far better than we imagined that it could go.  After the ordination in Cusco, Scott Dollar, Jack, Larry, Joe, Anthony, and I flew to Lima and then took a bus all night to a little town called Tarma.  It is about the same elevation as Cusco, but it was cold.  We arrived at 6:30am and had to find a hotel.  We later connected with a contact we had for a little house church.  We met with one of the men and then we went to their house to teach.  Scott Dollar taught and we all encouraged the little band of believers.  Their pastor, Carlos, was living in the jungle for a season so a guy named Daniel was teaching each week.

We were very encouraged by them and I think they were also encouraged.  After our meeting we went to eat the first of many plates of chaufa (Peruvian fried rice) that we would eat for the next week.

The next day Scott Dollar, Anthony, and I found a guy to take us to the jungle town of Pichanaki, which was about a 3 hour ride.  Joe, Larry, and Jack stayed in Tarma to teach on Saturday and Sunday.  The teaching went very well.  In fact, Daniel came to Satipo and attended the conference all week.  We only got delayed for a half and hour because of the often occurring mud slides the block the highways in this part of Peru for sometimes days.

We met up with another church in Pichanaki.  Roric is the pastor of this very solid church.  We had lunch with them and talked for a while.  These guys are amazingly solid and have a very healthy church.  We are looking at partnering with Roric in our work in the jungle and providing them with books.  

The leaders of the church in Pichanaki.  Roric wears green.

One of the biggest requests we get from pastors in Peru is resources.  They long to read books to continue to grow in knowledge, but there are so few good books in Spanish, and the ones that exist are hard to come by.  We are in the process of developing a pastoral library of good books we can give to many pastors that we know who need them.  If you want to help us in this area you can get free books from the Gospel Coalition HERE and someone from the States can bring them to us.  Contact me for more information.

Roric is an amazing guy.  He and a friend once hiked 30 days through the mountains preaching the gospel to unreached Quechua villages.  They lived only by faith and prayer, eating only what people provided them along the way.

After lunch and sweet fellowship with these believers, we moved on to Satipo.  We met up with Alex (a dear brother in Christ from Lima that translates for Scott Dollar), and Bryan and Brad who are from a church in Atlanta, Georgia.

On Sunday morning, Alex delivered a good message to the church.  We spent the rest of the day preparing for the conference which would start the next day.  We returned for an evening service and Brad preached a good message to a room filled with the recently arrived Ashaninka people from Chembo.

Some pretty amazing things took place during the week long conference.  I will post the next blog about the conference soon.