Colombia Part 1: The Church in the Clouds

It’s been a few weeks since writing a blog, mainly because I’ve really been having a hard time deciding what to share about our time in Colombia this month. There has just been so much. We met so many new people, and had so many new experiences. There are sooo many different moving parts of the two ministries we were apart of and God has been doing so much work within me. I’m not even sure where to begin, so I’ve decided to write about Colombia in two parts. We spent our time in two different places in Medellin, Colombia. Our team spent one week at the top of a mountain at an Assembly’s of God Church with Pastor Willie and his wife Cristina. The last two weeks were spent at Ciudad Refugio in downtown Medellin. 

Today, I’m just going to share about our week at the Assembly of God Church or aka the church in the clouds. 

The week was incredible. When we arrived at the ministry, we weren’t sure what to expect other than that we might be working with the church’s ministries and there was a potential for prison ministry. Prison ministry ended up not happening because of COVID rules/precautions in the prison, but we did get to participate in church ministry as well as receive some much needed rest and refilling. 

First, let me introduce you to Pastor Willie and his wife Cristina. 

These guys were incredible. On our first day there, the pastor and his wife, the pastor of one of their “brother” churches and his wife, and our two translators all met with us. We all had to introduce ourselves and share part of our testimony. (They weren’t wasting any time!) Then, they gave us our plan for the week: Focus on inner healing, rest, and write a skit on the Holy Spirit to perform for the church service and youth service. 

So inner healing, skit writing, and resting is what we did. The first couple of days (and really the whole week) was a lot of sitting in scripture, lots of time in prayer, and lots of coffee from Cristina. I can’t explain to you how needed this time was. The Lord did so much work in those couple of days that I didn’t even know I needed. 

After the first couple of days, we started brainstorming our skit. We decided to mainly focus on actions rather than using words, mostly because of the language barrier. We ended up writing a story of a girl walking through life with the Holy Spirit. Each scene depicted how the Holy Spirt works in our lives. He is so many different things for different times in our lives. Sometimes he acts as our guide, our comforter, our encourager, our friend, or our convictor. We ended up performing this skit three different times. 

The first was a Friday night. We went to the “brother” church that I mentioned earlier and performed the skit at their service. Then at the end of the service, we had the opportunity to walk around and individually pray with the women in the room that we felt God leading us to pray with. The second performance was the next night at youth group, and the third time was during the service Sunday morning. During the Sunday morning service, we were able to pray with the people at the end of the service as well as hand out notecards with pictures and scripture that we made for each person. 

Also, every night the pastor would come sit with us and do a bible study, and not just any bible study. He would sit with us for two hours and talk through scripture and ask us questions. Then afterwards he would walk around the room and individually pray over each one of us. Our team was blown away by the intentionality of the amount of time the pastor and his wife took to pour into us during that week. It was also just so incredibly evident how in-tune with the Holy Spirit this pastor was. He spoke so many encouraging things over each one of us, and you could tell that he had been praying for us before we had even arrived. 

During that same week, I turned 25 (in Colombia!), prayed a demon out of a woman for the first time, and went paragliding off a mountain. I’m still so in awe that this is my real life right now. To be able to even write a blog like this and say a sentence like that. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But yes, it’s so worth it. The Lord worked so much in and through us during that short time at our church in the clouds, and I’m grateful for the time we were able to spend serving and resting at Pastor Willie and Cristina’s.