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Cohort for Hispanic Leaders Starts
Last month we launched a new initiative for training Hispanic leaders. There are four modules in this initiative – Introduction to Theology, Spiritual Formation, Contextualized Mission, and Church Planting. We have fourteen students in our first cohort on theology. Tony Campos is teaching this on Saturday mornings in person and via Zoom. Our goal with this is to equip Hispanic pastors and leaders to serve in their own churches and to plant new churches.
We have Hispanic students from the Eastern Association, NABNW, and NorCal in this cohort. Some are Kairos ESP students working on a formal degree through our partnership with Kairos, and some are informal students simply wishing to be better prepared for ministry. There are students in the Sacramento, California, area, and Dallas, Oregon, who are currently involved in starting new Hispanic ministries/churches with us. We have hopes this will be a successful model for raising up church planters from the harvest, training them as they start new ministries.
South American Initiative
In September, we will be taking a team to Argentina and Brazil to use testimonies in prisons, jails, recovery centers, and churches, with the goal of launching Christ-centered addiction recovery groups (https://www.tmewcf.org) in the churches in our networks there. Substance abuse, especially among the young, is widespread in these countries. Our goal is to start three new weekly support groups in the churches of the three networks we will be visiting (Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Salta and Porto Alegre, Brazil). We are hoping this will offer another path into the church off of the streets.
This trip is a partnership between many ministries in these places, but especially exciting is this involves Randy Schmor (Gateway) and Lyndell and Paulo Réquia (NAB Brazil). We will be bringing several of our contacts in Argentina with us to Brazil to discuss planting new churches among the Venezuelan refugees in Southern Brazil.