“For as many as have not seen my face in the flesh.” Col 2:1b

CC Flower Mound, Texas was amazing!  God really showed us how close we are to those who pray for us and we for them, even if we have never met in person!  From the moment, we met everyone, it was like seeing a best friend you hadn’t seen in sometime and need to catch up. Like Paul says in Philippians, true companions. Encouraging each other in Christ, sharing the amazing things He has done and is doing.  What a beautiful family we have in Christ!  Please never cease to pray for those you have not met!  We are knit together in God’s Spirit!  

Heading Home

Finally, we are getting ready to head back home!  We leave April 9^thbut do not reach Midigo until Palm Sunday.  Please pray as the spiritual warfare is getting strong.  We praise God we still have 2 times to share and encourage the body of Christ before we leave.  This time in America has been so amazing.  God has kept us busy for sure which was our prayer.  Encouraging our American brothers and sisters to be bold in the faith, sharing the gospel, for the days are dark.  Zachary was able to grow, reaching goals quickly through the therapies he had.  Zachary shares how he is excited to go back home and serve God helping the crying babies. Ian made friends and learned how to work through being bullied.  Ian has turned to prayer for everything!  His faith amazes me!  Can’t wait to see how God will use them!  Vincent was poured into by many pastors and given things to equip all the ministries! God also sent so many people to pour into me too!  From weekly discipleship, women’s ministry, Bible College (so far, I am getting A’s!), Children’s Ministry trainings and conferences for both missions and children’s ministry! 

Luke 12:48 “To whom much is given, from him much is expected.” With all that was given to our whole family these months, we are expecting big things from God for each of us!  Excited, yet sober minded, knowing the enemy is like a lion.  Please continue to pray for us!  

Prayer Requests

• Please pray for our last teachings.  One of my fillings has just fallen out.  Pray they can fix it before we head back.  
• Please pray for our packing, travels, health and adjustments.  We will be hitting the ground running for sure! We are going back with Destiny who will be serving alongside us.  Please remember to pray for her!  This will be her first time to Uganda.
• Continue to pray for our Ugandan Children, Ministries and the church!  
• Please pray for my parents!  I’m sure it will be quiet with all of us out of their house.

Praise Reports

• God has supplied the money to start construction on the Library and community center!!!! Pray God continues to go before us and pave the way!   We don’t want to put God in a bubble and we don’t want to veer off His path in any way! 
• We were able to get all our goals done and then some!  My friend Diane spent a whole day helping me look up recourses.  It is possible that we went a little laminating crazy.  I feel equip, at peace and blessed!  All I can say is WOW God, thank you!  All God has taught me, especially about His mysteries has blown my mind!   

Hello Friends!

Who knew that one missions trip would require three updates for me to scratch the surface of everything God did with our team in South America! But alas, here we are at update #3 to talk about my time in Brazil, the final leg of our South America trip.

While some of my greatest spiritual warfare happened in Peru, Brazil was the toughest portion of the trip for me both physically and emotionally, despite the fact that (praise God!) my sickness did not follow me into the Amazon jungle. Physically, the pounding heat and humidity of the jungle wore on me over the first two days there, and emotionally, due to the length of the trip, I was really missing my family the most in Brazil, especially in the jungle where I had zero contact with them.

But we’ll start with the good… the Miller family, our missionaries in Brazil, are amazing! The four of us pastors quickly bonded with their kids, and good thing, because we would all be in close quarters for our five days in the jungle! The Millers were super hospitable upon our arrival in their home city of Manaus, which is a sort of hub for missionaries who serve in the Amazon jungle of Brazil. We spent a day in Manaus just getting to know the Millers, and doing some shopping with Brad Miller in the city in preparation for our trip, which was an adventure in itself.

The next day, we took a 2 hour drive to Manacapuru (say that 10 times fast…), the port city where we boarded our speedboat. That little speedboat would take the nine of us to the Apurina people, the tribe that the Millers minister to, in 11 hours down the Amazon river. The view was beautiful, but between that and the return trip, I’m not looking to board any more boats any time soon…

The Apurina people are amazing, and the Lord is doing great things among them through the Miller family. Brad typically stays there in the village for three weeks at a time, sometimes alone and sometimes with his whole family, before going back to Manaus for a few weeks, and then doing it all over again. While there, he does a church service every evening on top of Sunday mornings, as well as Bible classes for a few of the men every morning, and a children’s ministry program on Saturdays. But perhaps the coolest thing is that some of the leaders Brad is raising up, who take over services for him while he is not in the jungle, are now preparing to go to other tribes to be missionaries there. It was amazing to watch God’s plans for unreached people groups unfolding before our eyes!

The brutal jungle environment did wear on me physically and mentally. Praise God He sent lots of rain while we were there, which did have the effect of cooling things down slightly, though the humidity was still overwhelming. One night, as I lay in the pitch black in my hammock, missing my family as all of the jungle noises made their best effort to lull me to sleep, the words of Martin Luther’s hymn played on repeat through my mind…

Let goods and kindred go
This mortal life also
The body they may kill
God’s truth will triumph still
His kingdom is forever

While I certainly wasn’t facing death, I realized in a deeper way than ever all of the comforts of home and family and friends and hot water and A/C and the English language, etc., that missionaries give up, because they count lost souls as worth that sacrifice. They care so much about God’s glory, about the eternal state of the souls of the lost and unreached, that they are willing to leave everything familiar to them. And believe me, in the jungle, there is very little that is familiar to us! I praise God for this insight, and that night in my hammock, He began the process of dealing with some of the idols in my own heart.

As seems to be typical in foreign countries, the locals love English worship, so I played plenty of songs for them. I also had the privilege of teaching their children’s program Saturday afternoon, as well as teaching their Sunday morning service! I will always treasure those special blessings.

When our time in the jungle was over, we went back to Manaus, where Pastor Trent got to share some ministry vision with Brad, and we got to bless the kids with some fun times, including a trip to see pink dolphins!

All in all, this whole trip was an amazing experience. I was so happy to go home to be with my family again, but I also came home a changed person, with the many things the Lord taught me and ways He showed me I need to grow. Most of all, I saw the importance of trips like these. SGWM is committed to not just making decisions from a desk in Yorba Linda about what is going on in the nations, but actually being willing to get our hands dirty, so to speak, and actually connect with the work the Lord is doing through our missionaries. That way, our partnership with them is more informed, our fellowship with them is all the sweeter, and we can carry back the great news of how the Lord is using them in order to stir up the church in America for missions. And that was more than worth it for a few days of me letting goods and kindred go.

Hello Friends!

I’m excited to bring you all part two of my South America trip update. Our time with the Tippie family in Huacho, Peru, was the shortest of the trip, only covering a couple of days. But boy, were they packed days!

Upon arriving back in Lima via a short flight out of Cajamarca with the Tippies, we took a three hour drive that got us into Huacho (pronounced “Watch-Oh”) near 11pm. I observed that Peruvians seem to be night-owls, and they eat late! We were tired, but Pastor Craig didn’t want to send us to bed with empty bellies. I was glad for that after a delicious meal of roasted chicken, aji sauce (think Chick-Fil-A sauce with a little south-of-the-border kick), and french fries. Peru LOVES their french fries, with their almost 4,000 varieties of potatoes that grow there! I could definitely have gotten used to that.

The four of us stayed at a hotel in the city just a couple of blocks from Pastor Craig’s house. Accommodations were so cheap that we each got our own room and bathroom! This should have made for some good sleep, but Huacho was where I experienced some of my greatest spiritual warfare of the trip, including some spiritually dark dreams and a pretty bad stomach bug that plagued me the entire time there. Huacho is the witchcraft capitol of Peru, and we were there to do some work for God’s kingdom, so these kinds of things are to be expected, especially after our focus on the armor of God at our prayer retreat in Cajamarca!

Our first morning in Huacho consisted of a four-hour meeting planning our upcoming youth group trip to Huacho in June, on which Pastor Mike, Pastor Tim, and myself will return to Huacho with 40 people for various outreaches including a surf camp, VBS, music, soccer, and more! It was eye-opening to see the necessity of traveling so far for such planning, as all that we accomplished could never have been done over phone or Skype. I gained valuable experience for planning future trips as Pastor Mike led the way with his expertise in this area.

That night, I was radically blessed with the opportunity to preach the gospel to a few dozen youth at a youth outreach at Pastor Craig’s church! I taught on the woman at the well from John 4, and showed them that Christ is the only one who can fulfill our longing for joy and satisfaction in life.

The next morning I had another amazing opportunity to lead a little “Gringo Worship” (as Pastor Craig calls it) for his church’s Sunday morning service! (You can check out video of that here on Facebook) One of my favorite parts of international travel is to worship with people of other cultures and languages. English worship was cool for them, but I really love the fun, lively, community-driven worship of the Peruvian people!

In the midst of all this activity, we also had the opportunity to check out a beach similar to the one we’ll run our surf camp at in June, as well as tour around and work through some other logistics for the trip in Pastor Craig’s super cool bright orange VW Bus! The trip ended with a sweet get-together at the Tippies’ house, a surprise party for Pastor Craig where seemingly the whole community came out to celebrate the life of this man who’s done so much for the Gospel in Huacho.

Huacho may have not been the hardest part of our trip, but between the spiritual warfare and my stomach illness, I really wanted to give up and go home, especially when I considered the possibility of carrying my stomach illness into the jungle. But the Lord was really teaching me a lesson on endurance, and the fact that missionaries endure this kind of spiritual warfare on a regular basis. Part of being a missionary is learning to endure through that and fight the good fight of bringing the Gospel to the nations. The Lord was teaching me what our missionaries go through, and was preparing me for a deeper level of that on the next leg of our journey in Brazil…

Greetings Friends!

As many of you know, I (Joel) just returned a few days ago from an 18-day trip to South America. Two countries, eight airplanes, over 24 hours’ worth of boat rides, dozens of new friends, three new languages, weird foods (cow heart, anyone?), weird animals (pink dolphins, anyone?), rain, hail, heatwave, and real RAIN… Joy, lots of laughing, lots of tears, lots of worship, lots of prayer, lots of Bible, lots of missing my family, lots of physical ailments, lots of sights and sounds and tastes and… This was a PACKED 18 days. Our bodies, minds, and souls went through a lot, more than I’m used to, and while it was hard, my calling to be a part of this movement of God amongst the nations was only confirmed all the more.

And so, because this trip, which really felt like 4 totally different missions experiences rolled into a three-week period, was such a massive undertaking, I’ve decided to roll out my update in three installments over the next month or so (which is probably about the time it will take for me to somewhat process all of it anyway!). I pray you’re encouraged along the way 🙂

With such a big trip, there were multiple purposes for myself and three other SGWM pastors to head to South America and see our five missionary families there. For this installment, I’ll focus on our time at the Calvary Chapel Bible College located in the Andes Mountains in Cajamarca, Peru.

We really had one goal in Cajamarca: to bless our four missionary families in Peru with a prayer retreat. I discovered firsthand the fact that missionaries do not get the fellowship and community with other believers that we often take for granted here in the U.S. They are called to lead, to teach, and to pastor, and while they love the nationals of the countries in which they serve with all their hearts, it is so refreshing for them to get to share their joys and struggles with people from their own culture and language. We got to hear about the triumphs and trials of our missionaries’ lives and families and ministries, and perhaps the sweetest time was when each family took their turn having hands laid upon their shoulders and prayers spoken over them on their behalf.

I was extremely blessed to be able to use my gift of leading worship to lead these sweet saints in singing to Jesus. Live English worship is a rarity for them, so it was a huge joy for me to be able to serve them in this way, and a privilege to worship with these men and women I look up to greatly. On top of this, we were able to teach some short devotions through the armor of God in Ephesians 6, to pray over them, and to pastor them in ways that simply don’t happen over the phone or Skype. Our hearts are now connected in a deeper way to those we serve in Peru, and we feel that our ministry alongside them will be all the sweeter and more effective as a result.

As is typical, while God used me and His gifts through me to bless our missionary families, I feel that I received more than I was able to give, that I was more blessed and challenged through this experience than I could have imagined, and that my calling to be a missionary serving long-term missionaries was all the more deeply confirmed. Praise God for His grace!

Culturally and mentally, this was the “easiest” portion of the trip, as we were surrounded by other Americans and I wasn’t missing my family too badly this early in the trip. It was with bittersweet sorrow that we left three of our missionary families in Peru to head to Huacho with the Tippies, but we are praying for and will continue to fellowship and serve with the Kilgus family as they seek God’s will for them with Venezuelan refugees, the Bueschers as they teach and disciple young students at the Bible College, and the Gundersons as John pastors a local church and they open their home and hearts to the people of Cajamarca. Look out for the next two installments of the trip with adventures in Huacho, Peru; Manaus, Brazil; and the deep Amazon jungle!

Love in Christ,
Joel, Amy, Maggie, Harrison, Jude, and Clara Garcia