Lord, we thank you for this opportunity to
focus on Brazil.
We thank you for what you're doing there.
We just thank you especially for Humberto and
Silvia and Destio and Elba.
We thank you for their lives as they
have been recently married.
We ask you, Father, to give them the
strength and the grace to lay that solid
foundation in their marriage.
We thank you for José Feliciano.
We praise you, God, for the team you've
raised up there in Petropolis and the lineup
team, Lucy up there in Recife and the
Hendricks in Rio de Janeiro.
We thank you for the team also laboring
in Santos and São Paulo, David Fern and
others.
Lord, we ask you for major breakthroughs for
the ship along us to visit to Brazil.
We thank you for the spirit of expectation
that's building up.
And we ask, Lord, as this tape goes
out to our prayer groups and prayer partners
and OM teams, that there may be a
great stirring of intercession for Latin America for
the ship visit, but even more for the
ongoing work.
We thank you for every Latin American that's
now out working with OM in some part
of the world.
We thank you, Lord, for the church's vision
in some cases to want to send out
workers.
We thank you for Latin American sending churches
and we're looking to you for far more
to happen in the months and years to
come.
Strengthen us now, Lord, that this burden we
receive today may stay with us and that
we may be serious intercessors for Latin America.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Well, as most of you know, I just
recently returned from Brazil.
I would have liked to have gone to
other Latin American countries and originally wanted to
go to Argentina since I speak Spanish, not
Portuguese.
But it did seem that for this visit,
and already my next visit is starting to
be planned, that I should go to Brazil.
However, I was able to meet people from
other parts of Latin America, especially some OMers
there at Petropolis in our training center, and
also have considerable time with Frank Dietz, who's
the field leader for the Latin American field.
I'm not going to attempt to speak on
a lot of different Latin American countries in
this very short presentation, but rather focus more
on Brazil since that's where I've just come
from.
My main burden really is to share prayer
requests and prayer burdens because they really do
need our prayers.
I feel as so much the church can
learn from Brazil.
It's true also of Chile, of Argentina, and
other Latin American countries, but I'll focus perhaps
on Brazil.
I think Brazil can be such a great
encouragement to us because we are laboring in
countries where we're not seeing huge response often.
In fact, one of the main things I
spoke about in Brazil was the 100 million
Muslims of India.
Many, many Brazilians, even those in missionary-minded
churches, and they have some phenomenal sending churches.
They are not a majority, but they have
them.
We can learn something from those churches.
Many of them had not heard of the
challenge of 100 million Muslims in India.
They are gearing in as they think of
Muslims to the Arab world, which is great,
but we know the whole Muslim thing stretches
right across the whole of that great zone
of North Africa and Asia.
When we compare 100 million Muslims of India
with 147, Encyclopedia Britannica Annual, which I have
actually in front of me, gave the population
for 89, as 147,404,000 in 1989
for Brazil.
The interesting thing is that the population of
Brazil in the year 2010 will probably be
487 million people.
Phenomenal population growth.
A country of just an enormous range of
people.
Remember, this is a country as big as
the United States.
I have a proper kind of projection map
on my wall in my office back in
my home that shows countries, as you look
at them, more the size they actually are.
You can clearly see on that map, more
than on this map, that Brazil is as
big as the United States, excluding Alaska.
The variety in Brazil, my exposure to Brazil,
let me just clearly say, I am no
expert on Latin America.
There are thousands of other people who could
report on Brazil better than I could, but
it's a country of huge resources, natural resources,
people resources, financial resources, business resources.
It's just quite staggering.
It's a great mistake if we think of
Brazil as sort of just a poor country.
We hear these statistics about huge amounts of
poor people.
We also have those statistics from the United
States, actually.
There are poor people, as in every country
in the world, there's tremendous suffering, and drugs
is a big problem.
Matthew shared the other day how he went
down into Sao Paulo and met little children
who were getting high, sniffing glue.
All these problems that we find all over
the world can perhaps be magnified in Brazil
because it's a huge country of 147 million
people, and there are plenty of poor people.
But there is a giant middle class in
Brazil, and there is also considerable wealth, considerable
wealth.
This is why some of us don't any
longer like the third world terminology, because where
do you put countries like Brazil?
What does this third world mean?
I think it was Joseph D'Souza that reminded
us once in an India meeting or a
general meeting that maybe we should think of
it as the two-thirds world because of
the importance, the size of the population.
Some of the greatest prayer burdens we have,
of course, are in connection with Lagos too,
but I think before I get to that,
I have the greatest prayer burden of all,
and it's based on Matthew chapter 9, that
the Lord of the harvest would send forth
laborers.
The Brazilian church is ready to send out
workers into the harvest.
They are, contrary to some stories going around,
they are able to get money out of
the country.
There are Brazilians working in many different parts
of the world, not huge numbers at this
present time.
One of the meetings I took was in
an outstanding missionary-minded church in Sao Paulo,
in the suburbs of Sao Paulo.
Sao Paulo has about 24 million people.
I guess there's different ways of measuring a
population, but that's what I was told.
I seem to spend a lot of my
time traveling around to get from one end
of Sao Paulo to the other, and then
I went outside the city to visit Andrew
and Gaynor Saunders and do pray for them.
As they are living out in a farm
about an hour out of the city, beautiful,
lush sort of jungle, forest area, and that
was a real sort of change of pace,
and they are taking children and adopting them.
They have adopted two more, I believe.
Matthew, do you remember?
The Swiss man down the road has adopted
a number, but their burden is to sort
of launch and see a movement in which
Brazilians will more readily adopt children.
Apparently this doesn't happen very much at present.
Americans fly down there.
We met some people in California adopting.
That's complex, but it happens.
It's also controversial.
So remember Andrew and Gaynor Saunders in this
new ministry, and they certainly sent their greetings.
But back to this church in Sao Paulo,
I can honestly say ministering Sunday night, there
must have been 2,000 in the meeting,
that that church is as much a sending
missionary church as any church I've been in
the world.
I have been in a few churches, including
United States or Great Britain, and it was
really overwhelming.
Now they are one of the pace-setting
churches, so don't judge all of Brazil and
all the churches by this one church.
On the Monday night, and generally missionary speakers,
we don't take meetings on Monday night because
people don't come.
But on Monday night, they must have still
had.
Certainly the lower part of the church was
packed.
It seemed like there must have been 800,
700, maybe more people.
I am told in Brazil that I tend
to understate things.
I thought I was speaking of 500 pastors
in a big meeting in Sao Paulo, and
Desio corrected me that he thought it was
1,500.
I've now gone back to the 1,000
figure.
Perhaps we should have stood and counted them.
When I gave an invitation at the end,
we also have meetings on Tuesday night and
Wednesday night there.
Many stood voluntarily to go.
In fact, very clearly, and I told them
this in my meetings in Brazil, there are
more Brazilians who want to go than you
have sending churches and finances in the hand
ready to send them.
So that's another major prayer request, and I
praise God that Desio and Humberto and our
board members, I spent my last night in
the home of the president of the board,
they want to see this money coming from
Brazil.
But I believe there are ways that we
can help even our own team here, not
with huge amounts of money, but sometimes smaller
amounts of money to just help certain things
get started.
Because they've been under enormous financial pressure, they
haven't purchased all the books in Portuguese that
perhaps they'd like to have for meetings, for
missions conferences.
Again, there's an amazing range of books in
Portuguese.
The average Brazilian Christian has not seen many
of these books.
Many Brazilian Christians are not big into reading
books.
Someone said to me, I don't know if
this is true, that Brazil has gone, and
it's a great generalization, from a nation of
largely verbal communication years ago when many people,
of course, were unable to read and write
in some areas, and we're going back some
years, but they've gone from verbal communication immediately
into the video age.
And you'd be amazed, video recorders, television, the
video shops, that quite a few Brazilians are
not readers.
Now that's what someone told me, I'm not
sure if it's true.
Certainly our meetings did not prove that because
they went for our books like we were
giving them away.
Desio was very encouraged with a couple thousand
dollars of book sales since total sales all
last year was about ten thousand dollars.
I immediately sent a fax to Vera to
put a couple thousand dollars in the Brazil
account over in our bank in Belgium to
go out to other parts of the world,
and in turn I bought some more books
there in Sao Paulo, most of which we
already sold.
I am convinced that one of our ministries
in Latin America is going to be the
ministry of getting out powerful books.
They don't know Calvary Road.
They don't know some of the other great
books that could be such a blessing to
the church.
In Spanish we have Priority One coming off
the press soon.
We have Grace Awakening coming off the press
soon.
I don't think they're in Portuguese yet, though
my knowledge is not complete Portuguese books.
Brazil is a country of a tremendous variety
of churches.
Here again we hear generalizations and perhaps one
of the strongest messages of my little sharing
about Brazil is that in my mind the
road we took to be open to what
God is doing in the charismatic movement and
among Pentecostal people, even though that's not our
original OM roots, was probably the wisest decision,
one of the wisest decisions in the history
of OM.
I remember Billy Graham 10 years ago saying
something very positive about what God was doing
through the charismatic movement.
I'm sure that frightened a few anti-charismatic
people and people who tend to go around
criticizing, and I just felt so happy when
Billy Graham made that statement.
I carried it in my Bible for some
years and surely in Brazil 75% of
everything that's happening, 75% comes from that
side of what God is doing in the
world today.
Now people who attack this, they find some
extreme group, and there are some very extreme
groups, and a lot of people in your
major Pentecostal denominations and more balanced charismatic fellowships,
they are actually speaking against and opposing some
of this really raw extremism.
And yet it's so easy when you have
such a range of different kinds of people
that come under the charismatic or Pentecostal umbrella
to just say something that isn't true.
And I praise God that I believe through
my own visit and hopefully through the ship
visit that our heart linking with the biggest
denomination of Brazilian assembly of God will really
grow.
Now the assembly of God in Brazil isn't
the same as the assembly of God in
England, I can assure you.
They are far more conservative.
I don't need to go into details, but
Brother Desio with his beard is not able
or allowed to interpret in the meeting.
And I think as we work together with
different fellowships, we have to accept that different
people have different convictions on these issues.
It's easy to belittle people who have something
that we feel is legalistic.
Do we not have any legalisms in our
land?
Any judgmentalism in our land?
Any phariseeism?
In fact, you name any sin and we
can find it in Operation Mobilization where we're
supposed to be in the midst of a
grace awakening.
And I praise God for the assembly of
God there in Brazil.
The Lord opened the door.
They told me I was going to speak
to 50 pastors of the assembly of God.
There were over a thousand in this meeting.
And the heads of the denomination who were
up on the platform trying to figure out
exactly who I was, it was an amazing
thing how I got in there.
And I did have a very good interpreter.
It was just an exciting time.
They were not just pastors, but elders.
And then later on, and I was wrestling
with the fact that my time there got
extended.
I really felt I couldn't afford three more
days in Brazil when I was on my
way there, looking at my schedule.
But that was partly because Matthew and I
went on a two-for-one ticket, and
that had to be 14 days.
The last three days were the key days,
really, of the whole trip.
It was all great.
The last three days, that big meeting with
those assembly of God pastors and all the
ramifications of that.
We had our ship people there with all
the posters, back to all those churches, and
a lot of other things connected with that.
The next morning, we had a little problem.
They booked me to speak in Sao Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro on the same morning.
I was seven hours away by bus.
We were dealing with very big distances.
And somehow we managed to get me to
speak in Sao Paulo early in the morning,
and we moved the Rio de Janeiro meeting
back to one, and they sat there for
an hour and waited for me to arrive.
It was a big lunch.
It was a much bigger affair than I
thought.
I thought they'd eat lunch while I was
on my way.
And we took the shuttle service.
These cities had two airports, one outside the
city, one in the city.
We took the shuttle service, even though we
missed one.
We were an hour late.
But those two meetings, as I look back,
as far as contact with leaders, as far
as contact with people who can really help
the ship, it was great.
Pray for the Year 2000 movement.
The meeting I spoke at in Sao Paulo
on that morning, just before I left Brazil,
was the first meeting, the first meeting of
the Year 2000 movement in Brazil, at least
in Sao Paulo, and they came from all
over the country.
Jonathan Santos is a key man to pray
for, the head of the Antioch mission.
And when a ship comes into a country
the size of Brazil, it's no small matter
making it even known a ship is coming.
When I talked to Jonathan Santos, a man
of considerable leadership, he didn't even know that
Lagos II was on its way to Brazil.
Certainly, I was able to incorporate a few
announcements in the ship line of people.
David Fern was always there with the posters.
And it just dovetailed together, because my visit
to Brazil was in cement before the schedule
for Lagos II to Brazil, because later on
we thought maybe I should go when the
ship was there, but that could not be
worked out.
I think I helped more by being there
ahead of the ship.
I really had freedom in that meeting.
And I will tell you, Desio is one
of the greatest interpreters I have ever spoken
to in 29 years of preaching to interpreters.
I hardly knew he was there.
He's like a machine gun, and we are
similar in our size and temperament.
I tell you, it was great.
And he and his wife, though they have
a lot of responsibility, traveled with me to
every single meeting, almost every meeting during those
14 days.
So I just had an exciting time with
those leaders, and a number of them were
heads of denominations.
And I really would appreciate your praying that
we can follow up on this, because we're
still, OM in Brazil is a pioneer situation.
I believe that's one of the reasons sometimes
there have been misunderstandings in connection with the
situation there.
And they all remember in Brazil, the first
time Brazil was presented to the field leaders
to be accepted, it was turned down.
They will never forget that in Brazil.
And I was able to use that actually
to explain some of the problems that we
have in OM International, and show that that's
not a vote against Brazil, and how the
next year there was this consensus that Brazil
should become full members of Operation Mobilization.
And that was something I shared later in
the morning when I got to Rio de
Janeiro.
All these pastors, some of them had come
in from Brasilia and from other parts of
the country.
This is amazing, because that meeting was only
lined up 10 days before.
A few came to hear me in Rio
de Janeiro when I first arrived on a
Monday night after a big weekend.
They got excited about what I had to
say, especially the chairman of the board and
the chairman of the longest committee.
They said, we got to get a big
leaders meeting here 10 days from now.
That's how we ended up colliding, because we
didn't know about Sao Paulo meeting when we
said, yeah, let's go for a Wednesday lunch
just before I go back to England.
So they got on the phone, and they
got these leaders together in an institution that
is run also by the man who is
the chairman of the longest two committee.
A man of significant Christian leadership ability and
importance in Brazil.
I'm sorry I can't throw out all the
wonderful Brazilian names.
That meeting also went very well.
It had to be short.
We sat down and had tremendous lunch together.
Then I started to see this man move
into action.
He had a radio studio, and he started
to get the key men.
I don't think he asked them.
It seemed to me he was moving them
into this radio studio.
He moved me into the radio studio.
You don't get a lot of choice on
some of these things once you commit yourself
to a place like Brazil.
You just move along where you're told.
Of course, it's great.
He made a tape that would go out
over all Brazil and got these heads of
denominations and very respected leaders to say how
important they believed the Lagos II visit was
to Brazil.
They were on the spot, and they came
up with the goods.
I don't know what they thought of Lagos
II before that radio broadcast, but certainly it's
clear after the radio broadcast that these men
were committed to Lagos II.
I want us to continue to follow up
in prayer the Lagos II visit of Recife,
Rio de Janeiro, Santos, and what's the last
port?
Down there in the south.
I don't know, but we'll have to focus
on that fourth port since I forgot which
one it was.
It could be Porto Alegre.
Santos, just to say a word about Santos,
is a very key port because it's one
hour down the road from Sao Paulo.
My main missions conference, perhaps the biggest missions
conference of the whole trip, was in Santos.
What I'm about to tell you about Santos
I think is going to encourage you for
many years to come.
Dulas went into Santos in 1979 and changed
the course of the Church of Jesus Christ
in that city and to some degree began
to change the course of the Church in
Brazil.
Now let's first of all make it clear
God was doing other things at the same
time.
It's not just our ship that changed the
mentality of the Brazilian Church to begin to
think world missions, but certainly Christian leaders in
Brazil, not me, would say the ship visit
was a major factor in this.
There's a man named Edson Queiroz.
Again the pronunciation every time will be at
risk.
He is the pastor of that church I
referred to in Sao Paulo where they had
that tremendous missions conference Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
I wish, why didn't anybody introduce this man
to me years ago?
I know it's my own fault.
I wish I could have met this man
years ago.
I just like cement.
I mean this man.
I said to Desio, hey how many of
these do you have around Brazil?
He whispered, well not too many.
He actually was the leader, wasn't he, chairman
of Comibom, so obviously he's an outstanding man
when it comes to missions.
He's off to South Africa I think to
minister within the next few weeks.
I just mentioned that because God has given
us a bonding with some of these Latin
American leaders.
And you know when I'm there in Brazil
I just, forgive my English friends who are
here, don't misunderstand this, I wonder what did
God ever do putting me in England?
I'm sure I've continued to offend English people
for the last 29 years.
Too loud, too aggressive, very un-English.
Brazil is my kind of place.
We discussed moving this entire international coordinating team
to Petropolis and we can help with some
of the building repairs with our finance or
at least but I think we will settle
on the Holy Spirit's guidance to be here
in London at least for a while.
There's a lot of energy in Brazilian people.
There's a lot of emotion but there is
also keen intellect.
There's also a tremendous history.
It's a very cosmopolitan country where people of
different racial backgrounds function well.
Now one man frowned when I said that
down there.
So I read from that frown that maybe
there are racial tensions, that would be true
in any nation in the world, but you
go in a church.
I'm in the Presbyterian Cathedral in Rio.
I'm in one of the main Methodist churches.
These are the old traditional churches in Sao
Paulo.
I look out at the audience and there's
people of all different backgrounds and races and
this is to me also a factor in
enabling Brazil to be ready for a movement
like OM, to be ready to launch out
into cross-cultural situations.
We know of course there will be difficulties
and struggles and weaknesses as well.
Let me just tell you a little more
about Santos.
Santos organized a Vancouver-type missions conference.
I'm sure they never heard of what God's
doing in Vancouver, Canada, but you know I've
been there a few times.
And in Vancouver, Canada, a number of churches
come together to sponsor a really top-level
event.
Seldom happens in Britain, by the way.
Seldom happens in the United States.
I've been to the Grand Rapids one just
a few weeks ago.
Very few churches really give it.
When you consider the number of churches, only
a few really get behind it, though it
is encouraging.
In Santos, I think we had 12 churches
that officially sponsored this.
They hired a top public hall in the
center of the city.
They had the music, they had the banners,
they had the flags, the fireworks.
I mean that was a missions conference.
And I just praise God.
Again, there seem to be more people who
want to go and finding the finance for
these people is not going to be easy.
Now that can give a little bit of
a distortion because I can assure you there
are plenty of churches in Santos that are
not necessarily moving in this direction.
There's quite a bit of tokenism.
You have that in any situation, but people
who know now, yes, Brazil must send missionaries.
Yes, OM, well that's a nice group.
Oh yeah, Lagos too.
But I think Daniel Bianchi, who's here with
us this morning, can testify that in most
countries of the world, and it's true in
Latin America, people can be involved in world
missions in a token way.
And we need to pray that this visit
of the ship, the ministry of our teams
in Brazil, help some of these churches move
into a more total commitment.
You know, it would be ridiculous to go
to a place like Latin America.
I really believe this with our old financial
policy.
And it was Latin America helped us change
our financial policy.
Because if we're going to see it happen
in places like Brazil, the way these people
think and their background, we've got to talk
honestly, openly, and clearly about finance.
My entire air ticket was paid by the
Brazilians.
They don't want fraternalism.
They don't want necessarily donations from us.
They want to fight to see the money
coming from their own people and their people
have money.
One of my big prayer burdens, and I
talk to Desio about this about every third
day, was how are we going to impact
the wealthy?
We're not very much in tune with people
of wealth.
I had very little contact, perhaps one of
my failures, with people of wealth during my
time in Brazil.
These people live in their own world.
We are not in that world.
But if we're going to see missionaries go
out from Latin America, somehow we've got to
be willing to have contact with people of
wealth.
I'm talking about Christians.
I'm talking about business people.
We're going to have to meet them where
they are.
We're going to have to learn their language.
And they know when I go back again
next time, it's not just going to be
missions conference meetings and church meetings and meetings
with a team in Petropolis, but hopefully some
meetings with business people and people who could
help resource the work of God.
The tendency is to see that the money
has to come through the churches.
I still believe that's priority one.
But the history of world missions shows that
it's not either or.
That God uses firstly the churches, but God
uses also people of wealth who have a
vision for resourcing the work of God.
Some of their money, of course, they will
give through their churches.
But there are people who also like to
send their money direct.
We're under considerable pressure in Brazil.
The prayer letter has only gone out twice
in the whole year.
So our prayer partners don't actually know what's
going on.
It's not easy to get a prayer letter
launched.
Praise God for that missions conference there in
Santos.
Another one of the highlights was the time
in Petropolis.
I spent a couple of days in the
training center in Petropolis.
This is a short-term training program, six
months of intensive cross-cultural missiological training.
A number of amazing people have gone down
there to teach.
Then they go out on teams around Brazil
and other parts of Latin America.
Keep in mind that the training center there
is not just for Brazil.
It's for all of Latin America.
The staff is from all of Latin America.
By the way, it's a bit of a
myth that in Brazil you can just preach
Spanish and you're really going to get through
to their hearts.
So I never did that except in Petropolis
because in Petropolis half the people were other
parts of Latin America.
So I just let loose in my terrible
Spanish and taught a number of courses, especially
one on, I think I taught them something
about finance and finding finance in that side
of world missions.
Praise God, the place in Petropolis is paid
off.
The building we have there and the land,
one hour out of Rio de Janeiro, phenomenal
road.
One-way road going up the mountain and
a one-way road going down.
I love to go up mountains if it's
a one-way road.
I always find it more difficult, especially when
it's a motorway, when you've got them going
up and down the same railroad.
So I love that mountain road up to
Petropolis.
I had some great time.
I purposely took the bus.
The property and the building they have there
for so low a price.
Many people pay that much for a house,
yet we know the terrific battle it has
been to pay that off.
There are going to be some repairs.
There's got to be more things done there.
Desio lives up in the center of the
city in Petropolis.
It was great to have time with him
and Elba.
I hope that you'll make a commitment to
pray for that training base.
I believe in the next few years what
Desio and Humberto and the team are doing
there is going to continue to have an
important, I want to state it carefully, an
important influence on the Church of Jesus Christ
in Brazil.
And I felt, as I talked to so
many leaders, that in Brazil they really want
us in OM to be involved there.
They really want the ship to come.
There's a great spirit of expectation building up
concerning the ship.
We want to go and continue with much
humility, and we want to especially pray for
the huge complexity connected with sending people out,
especially long-term career missionaries from Brazil.
And I think one of the biggest problems
is just the sheer distance.
Our ticket, two-for-one ticket, was 900
pound sterling.
That's not small money in my book.
That was paid for by the churches.
If I'd gone alone, something other than the
two-for-one deal, I could have gotten
the price down.
But realize every time we send a couple
or a family out of Brazil to the
Middle East or even further afield, you're talking
about a lot of money.
One pastor came to Desio.
He said, this Brazilian couple's out with OM
is getting as much money as I get
as a salary as a pastor.
That's always an interesting question.
I wasn't there to hear how Desio handled
that particular situation.
There would be other pastors, I'm sure, who
might get a little larger salary.
But I think we've got to pray the
Brazilian church understands that for world evangelism, which
they're going to be such a vital part
of, there's no cheap way.
It's going to cost.
And I reminded them that one of the
first Brazilians that ever came with Operation Mobilization
died of cancer in India.
And God used that illustration powerfully among the
people.
It's going to cost.
I look forward to going back there in
Latin America as soon as the Lord shows
the way and opens the door.
I can visit Lagos too at the same
time.
Things are jumping off the rails in Chile.
Sigfrid Plaza was up from Uruguay.
That thing seems to be growing.
Daniel shared a little bit earlier this morning
what's happening in Argentina.
I'm sure he could share also just what
a battle it's been.
After the Lagos goes and the big fanfare
and a few full-time staff are battling
hard.
Denominations is where it's at in Latin America,
not interdenominational.
Anything interdenominational will be uphill all the way.
But I believe there is a change coming
on the 2000 movement, visit of the ship,
and especially our own testimonies, which is so
incredibly important, I believe is going to help
increase unity and ability for denominations and different
groups to work together in world evangelism.
Praise God for the privilege we have even
on this team, every other team in OM,
to be a part of what God is
doing in Brazil and Latin America.
Frank Dietz has had a phenomenal impact there,
has tremendous respect as a man of the
word and a man who represents what God
is doing in world missions.
And pray for Frank and Emily and the
little team there in Sacramento as they just
really quite gently try to oversee what the
Holy Spirit is doing in Brazil.
And pray for financial breakthroughs for them as
well.
Elba's actually from Puerto Rico.
And when we think of Latin America, I
think we've got to remember Puerto Rico as
well as the other Latin American countries and
Central America.
None of these countries, sooner or later, want
to be left out of the action.
That's big.
That's a big challenge for us right here.
It's not an easy challenge.
God's timing, finances, coordination, dealing with whatever Satan
may try to throw at us in the
midst of this.
Let's pray.
Lord, we thank you for what you're doing
again in Latin America.
We feel our part is so small.
We feel intimidated in some ways by the
greatness of what you've done as we think
even supposedly the number of believers in Brazil
may be over 25 million.
It's just staggering.
And the other countries with in some cases
similar huge numbers of believers.
We know some of these are bigs.
We know the enemy's trying to bring in
extremism.
We know there's always such a lack of
deep Bible teaching when so many respond so
quickly to the gospel and your church grows
so big.
And Lord, we ask for wisdom and discernment
and grace as we attempt to move with
what your Holy Spirit is doing in Latin
America.
You know our own financial situation that we
want to reach out more.
We want to help do more and yet
so often we can't even pay our own
bills, which we face even at this very
moment.
Lord, raise up more intercessors for the whole
work.
Raise up those who would be willing to
financially support Latin Americans, at least perhaps in
early stages of their launch into world missions.
And we trust you.
We look to you to give the unity,
the grace, and the wisdom to keep this
work, the work of OM in Latin America
on track for your glory.
As there's such a range of challenges and
complexities as we will face disappointments and discouragements
and heartbreaks as some people get back from
the field to Brazil and find it difficult
to readjust to life in Brazil, to readjust
to life in their church.
Give a grace awakening in these things and
strengthen us as we as a team and
other teams who've got this vision labor together
for world evangelism.
We ask this in Jesus name.
Amen.