Pastoral Retreat in Waukegan with Iglesia Jesus El Buen Pastor

Ben had the chance to travel with 3 of the pastors from the Indianapolis area up to Waukegan, IL where we serve another church called Jesus El Buen Pastor or Jesus the Good Shepherd. It was fun to hang out together and serve together. See some pictures below.

Left is Manuel from Living Hope Church in Indianapolis, then myself, Harol from New Life Church in Indianapoli and Leslie from Mt. Pleasant Christian Church. In front is Maribel and Jose who serve at the church there in Waukegan.

This is the same group with some of their leaders there. This church is located in a strategic area of a town that is over 80% hispanic. We are praying for a discipleship movement in this area!

Harol preached at their service Friday evening.

We each shared "un saludo" with the church.

I love getting to serve this man (Jose Juan) and his family. 

On Saturday morning we served the church by doing some training on how to mobilize and form a ministry team and how to form a ministry plan.

It was fun to serve alongside these men.

I am grateful to get to serve churches in these types of ways!

Red Nueva Vida USA Update

 One of the things I (Ben) get to do is work with the churches we serve in helping prepare them to use the resources we have. Our goal is to help move our churches towards forming and reproducing disicples, healthy churches and leaders. We offer several resources to help them work towards this goal. Our main resources is our disicpleship route. Here are a few trainings I have done recently.

This was at Iglesia Esperanza Viva a church here in Indianapolis. I was doing training on the next few steps in the discipleship process.

This is a retreat that another church in Indy did not too long ago.

This is a leadership training I helped with at New Life Church Indy.

This is a prayer time before a disicpleship group launched with this group.

This is an evangelism training I did in a church north of Chicago.

Thanks for the continued prayers and support for our family and ministry! 

We have seen the work grow from 4 churches, 10 disciples in our disicpleship route in January 2024 when I started in this role to now having 7 churches involved, 8 disicpleship groups with 114 disciples, and 9 leaders in training. All glory to God!

 

Trip to Guatemala December 2023

 Ben was able to take a recent trip to Guatemala in which he worked with Carlos on the transition of leadership in Guatemala, helped install a new Pastor at New Life Church, Magdalena, Guatemala. He was also able to participate in the Love Guatemala graduation. See some pics and more info about this trip below.

Got to hang out with kids in the feeding center. Still going strong with over 50 kids!

My friends and fellow pastors Josymar and Eswin. Josymar on right was the one we installed as pastor, Eswin planted a church in June in Santa Lucia

Carlos sister who worked with us is just recovering from major surgery to remove a tumor from her stomach. Please pray for her!

One of the graduates who has opened her own beauty salon.

Coffee with friends, Jose and Norita!

My friend Will graduating from the English School

Rous and Mayra who work for LG.

More friends who are graduating!

This is Milton who has been part of the ministry for a long time. He graduate from the Carpentry School years ago and continued to get his middle and high school finished. We are so proud of him!

So fun to spend time with the Lopez family!

Volcano fuego still very active!

The service to install Josymar.

My friend Cesar who has an amazing testimony!

Our church plant in Santa Lucia!

The views are still incredible there!

Got to meet this beautiful baby who belongs to Rous the LG secretary and has been like a daughter for many years!

Ben was grateful for this time in Guatemala to celebrate with LG and NLN Guatemala!

Developing and Comissioning Leaders

This has been an amazing time to see how the Lord is raising up new leaders, pastors, disciplers etc to lead this next phase of ministry at both Love Guatemala and New Life Church. Check a few "commissioning" times we have had over the last few weeks recognizing the leaders and pastors God has called and raised up.

A little over a week ago we finished what has been 2-3 year process for some of these guys who were commissioned as pastors. They will serve as the board of elders leading New Life Church along with Carlos Lopez. Check out some pictures from this historic day. Please pray for Josh, Eswin and Yosimar!

We also had a good meeting with our new leadership team locally here at Love Guatemala. This team will support Katy Lopez the new General Director. We shared the history of Lg, shared some things we hoped that they would carry forward in this new season and we finishe our time praying over them and empowering them for the work of leading LG in this new season.