Tag Archives: missions

Missions

Why Latin America?

Now is a critical time for missions in Latin America. The Holy Spirit is drawing men, women, and children to Christ and people are discovering the deep riches of biblical truth and the grace of the Lord Jesus as historically expressed by Reformed theology. Many of our friends in the Spanish speaking world have pointed out the need for solid churches with “sound doctrine” and passion for the full counsel of God. This is especially evident in a cultural context where many believers are captivated by a false “prosperity gospel” and are not equipped to face the certain challenges of being a follower of Christ. There is a profound need for Christ-centered expositional preaching (1 Cor. 2:1-5; Jn. 21:15-19), robust discipleship (Col. 1:28-29; 2 Tim. 4:1-5), fervent prayer (1 Thes. 5:17; 1 Tim. 2:1-8), proper administration of the sacraments (Mt. 28:19; 1 Cor. 11:23-26), biblical church government (Titus 1:5; 1 Pet. 5:1-4), and brotherly love (1 Pet. 1:22).

God is giving people a hunger to learn about His holiness, majesty, and sovereignty. There is a growing desire to know God as He has manifested Himself in the Scriptures and to approach Him in worship as He has revealed by His Word. Latin American Christians are growing in their faith, looking to plant churches locally, and are embracing God’s calling to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth as every nation needs the gospel.

While many places in Latin America have viable churches that can reach the lost, there remains a great need for laborers to come alongside our brothers and sisters throughout the Spanish speaking world. This is an important role in strengthening Christ’s Church in Latin America and aiding in missions mobilization sending out gospel workers to the unreached peoples. New laborers are needed for the harvest fields in nations where there are few or no churches able to carry on the work of evangelizing and discipling their people alone. Let’s continue to pray for the Holy Spirit to bless these efforts for the glory of the Lord!

Church planting, Evangelism, Missions

MTW Mission, Vision, Values, and Norms

This newly released infographic explains the mission, vision, values, and norms of our missions agency, MTW (Mission to the World), which is the missions agency of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Please pray for the spread of the message of the gospel to every people group, tongue, tribe, and nation and that God will call many to salvation in Christ and that the Lord will build His Church for His glory!

Church planting, Issues in MISSIONS, Prayer

Organizing Intercessory Prayer

Does God answer prayer? Absolutely, yes, as both the Bible and our experience tells us. We know from history that serious prayer often or possibly always precedes great revivals. In the Old Testament Daniel was even led to pray and fast as he saw the date approaching for the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy–God had promised to bring the people of Israel back to their land after 70 years, and even this promised event was carried out on the prayers of faithful Daniel.

We are longing to see a great work of the Holy Spirit in our ministry and to that end, we believe that prayer is the vital ingredient. Ray and I first committed to praying together each morning back in 2011, when we came to the end of ourselves in the ministry. We saw experientially that we can accomplish nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. But it wasn’t until 2018 that we actually developed a system for our intercessory prayer. Although we prayed with passion each morning, the reality was that some important matters slipped our minds, and other prayers became repetitive. Not only that, many answers to prayer that we received went unnoticed because we had forgotten what we had prayed for and in the process we lost the opportunity to thank God and strengthen our faith.

So we began using a system, and as we’ve used it these past two years, we would not want to go back. Our prayers are more focused and deeper and we love getting to write down the answers to many of them. I am going to describe what we do in this blog post, in hopes that it might inspire you, our reader, in your own prayer life.

Continue reading Organizing Intercessory Prayer →