I sit here in my favorite spot on the couch in my apartment overlooking the incredible and vast city lights, writing this and eating my dinner of bread and avocado at 10pm at night. I am alone but on a high from a great evening of climbing with friends and I am hit with waves of emotions as my mind is flooded with so many memories from this past year. There were difficult and challenging times but also new experiences and life giving moments.
When we tried to get back to Arequipa to prepare for our HULA group’s arrival, the airport was still shut down because of the protests which had reignited. This time they had shut down food and gas supplies to the city, which led us to make the decision to start HULA 2023 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). It was an inordinate amount of work to pull that off (and made possible because of my amazing friend Jonathan Hanegan), but pull it off we did and we launched into an incredible semester with an amazing group of students, for whom we are so thankful. By the time we got to Arequipa on February 20, things were mostly back to normal and we launched into a special time of travel, learning, and connection with a place, a people, its history and culture, designed to form us interculturally and grow spiritually.
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.
We love working with students. There’s something so special about the liminal space of studying abroad: a voluntary displacement for the sake of formation. Students choose disorientation. They choose to leave the US and ask big questions about God and the world as they spend a semester looking through eyes and living through the experience of another place, people, and culture. And of course they get to travel to some pretty amazing places as well.
Getting to be in relationship with Paty as a Christian follower, leader, and servant has been one of the great joys of our 7 years in Arequipa. The last year and a half, in particular, has been a formative time of shared faith, discipleship, and formation for Jesus’s mission and partnership in the gospel. It’s as if God’s work in Paty’s life—which has included so many spiritual mentors, and in which Katie and I personally got to share for years of reading the Bible and breaking bread with Paty and Lola in their home—had all been leading up to the moment where God would call Paty to minister to a very marginalized part of Peru’s population, a group beautifully made in the image of God yet abused by society, including women involved in sex work, and men and women abandoned by their families early in life either because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
My dear friend Jonathan Hanegan, missionary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, invited me to teach the first formal course his workshop is putting on. Two weeks ago today we started with the first of eight 2-hour sessions that I get to teach on my favorite topic of all time: The Mission of God. This is a virtual course, and the students are incredible: 40 students from 14 different countries in Latin America. Men and women who are servant-leaders in their churches, some who are preachers and ministers and others who serve as leaders, always wanting to continue learning and deepening their understanding of who God is and how we can be a part of God’s mission.
In November, the church here held its third annual cookout for the children at the orphanage. We started by gathering together for singing and a time of worship. Then the kids were set free to play on the playground or the soccer field. While the kids played, several of us prepared lunch. At one point I stepped back just to watch as they laughed and served together. It was a special moment to witness and made me reflect on the Christian call to service. I could see four reasons why we serve coalesce in that one moment.
