Chile: 2010, Day 4
Relatively speaking, this was quite a relaxed day. Ryan and I spent the morning in our hotel room working, and at 1:00 our taxi picked us up to go to the airport. Lee met us there, and we checked our bags for the 90 minute flight south to Temuco, a city roughly in the middle of the country. I told the guys that I would sleep on the plane—as I often do—so they had a long conversation about something (not quite sure what since I dozed in and out of it) until it was time to touch down.
Lisa had driven down to Temuco earlier in the day with the National President of Foursquare, Alen and Rosita Joo, as well as my young translator, David, and someone else, so she picked us up at the small regional airport where we landed. The drive to the retreat site took just a few minutes, but that’s all it took to get us into the countryside. The terrain and vegetation here look much like southern Oregon or California north of Redding. Ryan is in his element here because he grew up in southern Oregon. He kept commenting on how familiar everything felt to him, and I told him I believe God sets up those sorts of confirmation to let us know we’re on the right track.
It’s warm, but not hot like in Santiago. All I have is a light warm-up jacket, so I hope I don’t get too chilled in the evenings. That’s one of the biggest challenges to traveling as I do: on the one hand, I want to travel light (one bag that fits in the overhead storage on a typical plane); on the other, I sometimes have to navigate between vastly different temperatures or levels of formality.
THE RETREAT
Pastor Alen (pronounced a-LANE) and Lee have invited me to lead a discussion on church planting. The Foursquare church has existed in Chile for 60 years and they have about 120 churches. But according to pastor Alen, they are not growing like many other groups are. Few Foursquare churches are being planted, and the president wants to change that fact. I assured him that we’re not planting many Foursquare churches in the U.S. either. But Lee felt that I might be able to stimulate the thinking of these national leaders with my story at Coastlands.
We enjoyed a fantastic dinner, cooked by one of the ladies in Lee and Lisa’s church. I forget the name of the dish, but it’s very typical of Chilean cuisine: it’s a beef broth soup in a large bowl, along with a slab of beef, a potato, a hunk of squash and a thick cross-section of corn on the cob. The correct way to eat the dish is to finish the soup first, then proceed to the squash and potato and meat. Along the way you stab the cob with a fork and gnaw off the corn a bit at a time. Delicious!
We began with a couple worship songs, and then Lee asked each person to introduce themselves—and a bit about their ministry, especially as it related to church planting. I was delighted to have both husbands and wives at this seminar, so we got the “real” story about ministry! I am glad to report that, for the most part, the Chilean Foursquare church holds to one of our most basic, founding principles—the suitability of both men and women for active leadership within the church: pastors and pastoras!
After everyone shared, it was already 9:45pm, but Lee assured me that the Chileans could easily go until 10:30 or 11:00. Alen exclaimed, “The night is still young!” So I began to tell my story.
Curiously, I started with what happened to me my first year in college when I recognized that my childhood faith consisted only of belief and ethics; even though I wavered, I held to timeless truths about God and I had good morals. But at 17 years old, I received revelation that God had more for me than a moral code and a set of doctrines: He wanted me to be one of His agents on earth. He wanted me to minister to people in ways that would change their lives.
As I began my tale, my heart was strangely moved to share several fairly radical thoughts with my new friends (I’ll try to enumerate them for you tomorrow). About 30 minutes into my sharing, Lee asked if he could put my thoughts on the white board, taking them out of narrative (story) form and into an outline. Alen, the president, piped in too, saying, “I’m still thinking about Daniel’s first point, and he has already moved onto two others!”
Oh my! I was watching a radical paradigm shift take place before my eyes. God was shaking some of their most fundamental thoughts about ministry activity and training.
