We were recently asked a number of questions, to give context for the new Central Church website, so I decided to share it here. Of course some of you have been paying attention to the Team Arequipa story way before we were in the picture. But we’re coming up on having lived here 8 years and it was instructive to me to think about how we ended here, what the mission is, how faith has evolved, and how special it is to see God at work.
Please feel free to send any questions our way. Lord willing, our family will be in the US from Christmas time through the first three weeks of January, and we plan to spend a week with Central and Cedar Lane. We’ll spend a Sunday with each: Central (January 8) and Cedar Lane (January 15). We love you and miss you. We pray for you and are so thankful for your prayers for us.
How did God lead you to your geographic location to be on mission?
How we ended up in Arequipa is a long story of God’s providence, direction, and cosmic ordering of timelines. We’ve always said that we believe to be Christian is to be on mission, and the only thing that separates us from others is that we’ve been given the opportunity to be on mission with Peruvian Christians here in Arequipa and call that our full time work. In 2009, Katie and I traveled to Peru and Bolivia together for the first time as a couple. It was a research trip, visiting a few different cities to see what would be required to live and work there. It just so happened that two families had recently moved to Arequipa and our research team got to help them do some urban research that led to what is now CUDA, our non-profit doing sustainable community development work in the city. We said goodbye to Arequipa, not imagining that we would be moving there five years later. We continued to plan for a move to Peru or Bolivia, thinking about working with small house churches and doing development work in the city. We felt a sense of calling, a desire to experience God’s presence through the lens of a different place, culture, and language, to see what God was doing in Peru and to join in where we felt we could. A few years later, those two families living in Arequipa asked us to consider moving there to be a second wave of missionaries with their work, and here we are still. You can see more of Team Arequipa’s story here.
How has that initial calling evolved or changed since being there?
Our calling and work has definitely changed as our own lives and faith have evolved. We now have two kids who are part of this with us. Having kids here has made us more approachable and permanent and has blessed our relationships with Peruvians tremendously. We no longer have the team we moved here with, rather, we partner with Peruvians in everything we do, whether with our churches, neighborhood outreach, or development work. One of our biggest life changes has been to start directing [Harding University Latin America](harding.edu/hula). We host about 30 university students for three months at the beginning of each year and are responsible for their learning experience, travel, and intercultural spiritual formation that counts as a semester of college studies for them. We try to learn alongside the student group, asking big questions about God and the world and what it means to be human. Katie and I both love teaching university classes. Getting to worship in English with the Harding group breathes life into our souls. And we love the chance to invite students into our life, ministry, and relationships. Our calling itself hasn’t changed so much: we were looking for where God was at work and wanted to join in. What has surprised us and changed the direction of our work is to see where Jesus is here at the margins of society, with those society has rejected. We’ve found in Arequipa a religious populace that often prioritizes religious ritual over and above love of neighbor. So we live to connect with people who love God and will show that love by loving other people.
Tell us about the community you serve.
Wow, how to describe the complex community that dwells in the city? The community we serve is made up of women, men, children. Rich and poor. Working middle class families and refugees who are just barely scraping by in a new place. Single mothers, college students, young professionals, children, taxi drivers and shoe shiners. We work all over the city but love when a day of ministry is over and we haven’t left our neighborhood.
Arequipa is a city of a million people, an urban center where the contrast between the richest and poorest is stark and in which the kingdom of God is breaking in and seeds of justice, wellbeing, and joy are being planted and slowly breaking through and bringing about new life. CUDA’s mission is to promote holistic wellbeing among vulnerable urban populations. CUDA networks resources and carries out programs that empower sustainable improvement in individual, family, and community quality of life. We have two main programs. 1) Through Living Libraries we train public school teachers with reading strategies to improve reading comprehension in children. 2) CUDA Microfinance gives small, no-interest loans to micro-business owners who don’t have other options for investment. They pay back the loan over 20 weeks while completing training sessions with Paty. We’re a small non-profit. We have a team of 4 Peruvians who work full-time with CUDA alongside my wife Katie and me, volunteers on the ground in Arequipa. In Microfinance we pay special attention to Arequipa’s marginalized populations—including current and former sex workers and abused minority communities. With Living Libraries we aim to serve underserved schools on the outskirts of the city.
Tell us about what God is guiding you into as you continue the mission.
Paty is a servant leader in our small house church network. She hosts one of the churches, leads our church in the service of loving our neighbor, and has worked full-time with CUDA for the last ten years. Six years after sunsetting our microlending program, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to resurrect it. Paty and my wife Katie are discipling a friend named Catalina, who was our bridge of trust to begin serving these marginalized communities. Cata has a deep desire to share her faith and has been asking questions about reading the Bible so that she can read the Bible with these people she has been serving for most of her adult life. I shared that last bit as an example of how kingdom ministry is holistic. We think about whole people—mind, body, and spirit—and God works through relationship networks so that people have the chance to experience reconciliation in their work life, family life and relationships, in their own mental and emotional wellbeing, and finally, with the God who brings shalom. Our prayer is that a new church would be born within this community and give more women and men a chance to know God and experience life, faith, and hope in community as they follow Jesus and live as part of his kingdom.
How can we be praying and advocating for you here in the US?
Please join us in praying the Lord’s prayer for Arequipa: that God’s reign would come and will be done in Arequipa as in heaven. We pray that God’s family would experience reconciliation and serve and grow, sharing that reconciliation with others. Pray for individuals and families, immigrants and marginalized communities, for neighbors who need to reconcile with other neighbors, for bridges of trust to be built and for love of God to translate into loving our neighbors. We feel most supported when we get to hear exciting stories from all of you of God’s mission and seeds of new creation and God’s kingdom breaking in. In the past, y’all have sent Christmas greetings and gift cards, you’ve taken us out for catfish and challenged us to pickle ball, and you’ve even sent families to come visit and minister to us here.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your love, support, and prayers all of these years.