Guatemala Mission Trip 2015

Our family at Cerro de la Cruz in Antigua, Guatemala.

It’s hard for me to believe that the Guatemala mission trip was eight months ago already! For the third year in a row, God has done some awesome things while I was there. I’m so excited to share this (very late) update with you!

We arrived in Guatemala in the middle of a dramatic thunderstorm. Only one other time did rain dampen our trip, which was a tremendous blessing! At the airport, we climbed into a bus which was already half-filled with students from a church in Zone 25 of Guatemala City. We were headed for a weekend youth camp in San Raimundo! Several other groups of Guatemalan students were already at the camp, along with the Fellowship Guatemala staff and translators, and a student ministry from Little Rock, AR. Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, we had several teaching and worship sessions in addition to a lot of the usual camp activities (creating teams and chants, team competitions, skits, crud wars, a dressy dinner/banquet, and free time activities like swimming and soccer.) Four students also asked to be baptized. It was a very positive weekend of discipleship!

Baptisms in the rain at camp.

Sunday evening, we headed to the new mission house in Antigua. The setting is beautiful! The city is surrounded by volcanoes, and all of the buildings are done in colonial style. It isn’t hard to understand why it is one of the top tourist cities in Guatemala. But the city has great spiritual needs. The majority of the residents are strongly Catholic and don’t understand the GRACE God has given us through Jesus Christ. We don’t have to work to earn salvation. This was the message we preached over and over again during our four days of ministry there.

During the mornings, we went to a private high school. We split up into the different classrooms and spent time getting to know the students and then sharing the Gospel with them. In the afternoons, we hosted VBS in a small village church just outside the city of Antigua. This Christian church has faced a lot of opposition from the Catholic community. Normally, they only have 10 children attend their church. We were floored when 50 children showed up for Vacation Bible School! It was such a great privilege to share the Gospel with these children for the very first time.

Having our final assembly at the school. The Catholic church wouldn’t let us use the courtyard since we were preaching the “Christian Gospel” so we improvised.

The very last day we were in Guatemala, we had our “fun” day. We went to tour a macadamia nut farm in Sacatepequez. Only there, we discovered that we were still very much on mission. The owner of the farm was an older man from San Francisco, CA. I think we concluded that his worldview can best be described as universalism: all roads lead to God, and you can believe whatever floats your boat. It was very interesting to spend time witnessing to him!

Ministering to Lorenzo at the macadamia nut farm.

Out of all the trips I’ve taken to Guatemala, I felt that this was one of the most impactful ones. Antigua is a hard city to work in, and I enjoyed the challenge!