Grace Amazes Leaders in Huaraz

Mike and Paco Laos (our Peruvian coordinator) traveled overnight by bus to the mountain city of Huaraz in Ancash. They taught a mini-course about salvation over the weekend for pastors and church leaders.

Imagine that you are a church leader, responsible for teaching other Christians. You know that you are an evangelical Christian, but that just means you go to church and it’s not a Catholic church. How would you explain salvation? How do you get it? How do you keep it? What does it even mean?

That confused and powerless feeling is normal for a lot of the pastors in the Ancash department where our ministry for pastoral training, Recursos para Capacitación Pastoral (RCP), presented a conference May 5th-8th.

Mike and Paco Laos (our Peruvian coordinator) traveled overnight by bus to the mountain city of Huaraz in Ancash. They taught a mini-course over the weekend for pastors and church leaders. Missionary Russ Fleetwood, an IMB missionary and the local coordinator, got leaders together for the study. A few direct contacts of our ministry also came to learn. The men stayed, studied, and shared fellowship at a mission house that belongs to the International Mission Board, of the Southern Baptist convention.

Soteriology--the doctrine of salvation--was the conference theme. Salvation is a super-basic and important doctrine, but misunderstandings about it abound. For example, about half of the Quechua believers we meet think that salvation is free but only offered to people who have cleaned up their act and are behaving themselves.

Most of the believers at the conference believed that you are not getting eternal life unless you are attending church, giving to the church, and not drinking, smoking, or going to parties.

Conference attendees were delighted to learn what the Bible says. They loved the doctrine of justification, realizing that God has declared the believer “not guilty.” He’s not weighing up our good points and bad points, he’s counting us as righteous with the righteousness of Christ.

They found grace truly amazing. They were surprised that we have received God’s riches at Christ’s expense--it’s not at all the do-it-yourself project they had been thinking it was.

RCP will be teaching conferences regularly in Ancash. This trip was postponed from the end of March, when massive flooding all over Peru made it impossible to travel. We wound up improvising a Holy Spirit conference using the internet instead.

We are working in Ancash with the Ancash Quechua team of the International Mission Board, as they seek to disciple Quechua believers from various Peruvian denominations.