If you read through the book of Acts (as we’re currently doing in one of our discipleship reading groups), you can’t help but notice the incredible things that the Holy Spirit moves the young, small house churches to do in their communities. One of my greatest joys (and part of what gives me constant hope) is seeing the small house churches here serve. At the end of August, they came up with the idea for, led, and implemented a service-oriented fundraiser in order to be able to give food and personal hygiene products for an orphanage with 60 kids.
Funds are generally raised in Arequipa with food. Paty and Lola prepared one of our favorite Arequipeño dishes: adobo. It’s a Sunday morning soup made from the concentrate of the ancient Inca drink—chicha—with a big pork chop in the middle of it. You eat it by dipping fresh bread into the soupy goodness.
The whole church sold plates ahead of time, so that when the day came all we had to do was make deliveries. This gave us a chance to interact with our neighbors on a different level, to tell them about our church and why we were raising funds to bless the orphanage. All in all ten different families from our neighborhood bought adobo from us, and as a church we were able to sell about 80 portions. At 12 soles ($4) a pop, we were able to make about 500 soles (~$150). It may not seem like much, but for an orphanage that doesn’t do outside fundraising it was an incredible gift. We gave them enough rice for a couple of months and enough soap and shampoo to last through the end of the year. Paty, Katie, Lola, Isa, and Danessa went out the next week and bought these things for the orphanage and delivered them.
The church gathers for worship, prayer, and communion on Sundays. And the Spirit moves in the gathered community to reach toward those who are vulnerable. In a city where there are ample signs of an inward focused religiosity, our church was able to practice true religion: taking care of orphans.
Please pray for our house churches. There’s a group of ten Peruvians that Katie and I meet with once a month that meets every week in Paty and Lola’s house. And on our street here in Hunter, we meet with 8-12 on any given Sunday, but from a group of about 20 Peruvians that we’re close to and still working on relationship building and discipleship.
