Struggles

I love working for AMOR Project, it truly is a great project. I work with great people that all work really hard and have a passion for reaching the people of Peru. Sometimes though, I feel like despite all of our work, we are barely touching the lives of the people and that concerns me greatly. I honestly am the type of person who does better with shorter interactions than long term relationships. Therefore, I am always excited when we finish a campaign and move onto another location. I love to get in, meet the locals, teach them for a bit, and then start all over again. After observing the results of our last campaigns though, I am slightly disturbed, and wonder if our methods of witnessing could be altered.

As we study the Bible with people and baptize them into the church, it is all a pretty quick process. Sometimes I feel like we are just baptizing people to add numbers, to make our stats look good. We try to start a new church really quick and then take off. If I think of this as just my job, it is easy just to work hard, see the immediate (but perhaps not lasting) results and leave without another thought of the people. But when I look at each person I am working with and think how my new Adventist friends will be affected, I am troubled. For example, the people of Tupac, the location of our last campaign. We baptized somewhere around 20-30 people, but were only there for about two months. Tupac is way in the middle of no where, with starting a new campaign we can’t go and visit much, and no pastor will come out on a weekly basis. The church is basically all new believers and new converts are not always ready to be leaders. I wonder who will take charge of these people and encourage them to grow…

What will happen to Isai, a 14 year old boy that has a strongly evangelical father who is very spiritual, but strongly disagrees with some of our doctrines....without guidance and support, will he remain Adventist or will his father’s views overpower his? What will happen to a man named Darix that we have been studying with that had a dream about us helping Him, but feels like He would like to study more before committing to a certain religion? Will he continue to study or learn or will he fall back into his own ways? What will happen to Terry, who is a local 23 year-old? Sometimes I feel like he comes to the meetings just because there are white people, but he also talked to my friend Mike about being interested in helping out with the new church. There aren´t very many young people his age attending our meetings right now, will he drop out when the pressure from his peers becomes too much without support?

Before Christmas break, Aletha, my boss visiting the first church we started in Kilometer 8, Puerto Correo. Out of the 50 people that had been baptized only about 5-10 were still regularly attending. I know church attendance numbers are not everything, it is what is in the hearts of the people, but this was also discouraging. We had 11 weeks with that church and afterwards they had one of the guys, Matt, with them until Christmas and another nearby church that somewhat tried to help and adopt them.

I talked with my boss about this a while back and she was very encouraging and had some great words of advice. She compared our work here to that of the parable of the sower and the seeds. I know inevitably that people will leave the church, but I still feel like there should be some way to have more of a harvest in the end. The hard part is that I do not know how exactly. I have always felt that in the United States Adventists are more focused on retention than evangelism and since being down here I have realized that there is a lot more emphasis on evangelism than retention. If only the two could be meshed more into a happy medium…I feel like no changes in the way we work down here will occur in the last four months that I am here…in reality there are only two campaigns left. So, for now I am just going to do my best to reach out to as many people as possible in the manner that I am contracted to, and will be praying that God blesses our efforts. But the issue itself is something that I will be continuing to pray about, because I truly believe that the time left here on earth is short and there are many that I want to accept the gift of salvation before the second coming.