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!

 

2024 Ministry & Financial Update

Pastoral Retreat we had in early November

Ministry Update

Ben began this year in a new role as you know. He began serving as the national coordinator for New Life Network here in the USA. His role is supporting Hispanic Pastors to fullfill the mission we have in common which is: To form and reproduce disciples of Jesus, healthy churches and faithful and prepared servant-leaders, in the Hispanic communites in the USA. 

This was and is a big learning curve for him as it is a much different context in the USA than in Guatemala. He has learned a lot and has a lot yet to learn. There are many challenges facing the Hispanic Church in the USA. (Even the term hispanic is debated if it is the propert way to describe those from Latin American origins)

But despite the challenges, we have seen the Lord begin to work among the existing churches we have as a part of the network. We have also seen a few new churches join the network and we are in process of helping a couple more churches join. One of the biggest challenges and yet big opportunities is helping Anglo churches reach hispanics and plant churches within their exsisting churches. There has been a big interest in us helping these churches with this interest. Please pray the Lord will give us wisdom in helping them. Here are a few things we celebrated with our pastors a few weeks back in our pastoral retreat. We share them so you too can celebrate and praise the Lord with us:

• 13 Commissioned Disciplers at New Life Church in Indy
• 2 Churches Joined RNV in 2024
• A Monthly Prayer Time Together was started
• A Pastoral Retreat Together (pic above)
• A New discipleship group preparing 3 churches to start discipleship in their churches (see pic below)
• 3 New churches in the process of discernment if they should be a part of New Life Network

Thanks for your prayers for us in 2024! To God be the Glory!

Financial Update

Our role with New Life Network even though we are in the USA is still a role in which we have to raise %100 of our own financial support. We began the year in a good place financially with about 3 months of support in our account but that has been slowly eaten away at and is now just over one month of support. The reason is that our monthly budget is about a $1,000 a month more than we are receiving in support each month. We would like to end this year getting out of the "red" and raise $10,000 to get our support account where it needs to be.

Would you consider a year end gift to our family to help us get to a healthy spot financially?

You can give here or mail a check to: Red Nueva Vida, 7010 E Thompson Rd, Indpls, IN 46239 (memo as Ben Kunkel Support)

Thanks as always for your prayers and support!

The Kunkel Family

"And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." 2 Timothy 2:2

New Life Network Annual Meetings

 Red Nueva Vida (New Life Network) Retreat

Part of Ben's time in Guatemala was spent in meetings with Red Nueva Vida. We meet every year in a different country to share, celebrate, plan, pray and strategize for the following year.

We started our time visiting and seeing the ministry in Guatemala. There are currently two churches and two generations of disciples and churches. There will hopefully be a third generation soon. The first service was an international service celebrating the work being done globally through New Life Network. Here are some pictures of that special time:

Disicpleship before service

Servicio Global

Our friend Yeison from Colombia was ordained as Pastor

Time and service in Santa Lucia the first daughter church in Guatemala.

We had meetings Monday through Wednesday in which we learned and shared together. Here are some of the pics from that time. We started by sharing prayer requests and praying for each other.

Praying for our first missionary being sent by Guatemala to help start a new work in Honduras.

Here are some of the things we celebrated as a network during last year of ministry:

• We planted 1 daughter church in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas
• National Convention Colombia 2023
• New Churches in Growth Cycle
• Refine creative work method

• Villa Mella Church (new group)

• Finances to hire full time coordinators  for Columbia, Chile, and Dominican Republic

• Coordinator for USA, Guatemala and Europe in place

• Discipleship DNA in 2 churches

• We have made 3 mission trips

• Completed local leadership training course

• Contact with new Pastor Elido entering the network

• We started prayer time with pastors

• New church starting

• Built relationships with pastors

• Spiritual Retreats

• Recorded and edited videos for Church Planting Certificate for Institute New Life Network

• We opened 2 new regions (Plantar CRNVC, Huasco-north, Chile Chico-South)

• Recorded Certificate for Pastoral Care lessons in New Life Institute

• We opened 2 Discipleship groups

• Introduced the network to 4 Pastors/Leaders

We set goals for the coming year as well. One big goal as a network is moving into at least one new country. Please pray for these efforts!

We of course took some time to have fun together. One evening we went to Antigua and our last day together we went to Lake Aititlan.

Visit to Chicago

 

Jennifer and Ben were able to make a trip north to visit with the two pastors and churches that we have north of Chicago. It is about a four hour drive. Both churches have services at the same time so we could only visit one of the churches, but we had dinner with the other pastor. It was great to get to know them both. We are excited about the opportunities for further ministry and growth in that area.

We had a beautiful time of worship with them

Ben got to preach at the church "El Buen Pastor" pastored by Jose Juan. He and his wife Maribel are very sweet and we were grateful for the sweet time of fellowship with them and their church.

This will be a trip we take every 3-4 months to visit and encourage these churches. Please pray for the work there. It is an area that is about 80% hispanic so there are huge opportunities to plant more churches.