Guest Bloggers Jason & Norah Skipper
My wife & I have been missionaries in Bolivia for 15 years, and have planted various churches there. After several unsuccessful tries, in 2003 we planted a church in Sucre that grew to over 700 people in just three years. We also had moderate success in a church that we planted in Santa Cruz in 2009.
This year we are moving back to the USA to plant in a small to mid-sized city, and I am taking the Cultivate course to prepare ourselves better generally as church planters and to understand how to reach this culture that is so much different than what we have worked with in Bolivia.
We’ve touched; understanding and reaching the “emerging generations”, creating a unique vision for your unique situation, and how to raise up the core team who will carry out that vision with you.
The “vision” part of the course has been especially helpful, because it helped us understand why some things did and didn’t work in Bolivia. Ex. After several years of intense growth in our Sucre church, we realized that we still had weak areas. We tried cutting and pasting ideas from other ministries, but instead of helping us, they actually caused the church to stagnate. This part of the course helped me understand why. Even cutting and pasting from our Sucre church to our Santa Cruz plant didn’t work.
We have much more to go, but I feel that God is truly doing a transformation in our hearts and understanding through this course, and we feel confident that He is setting us up for success in a great way.
Jason & Norah Skipper
http://www.hohnet.com
