Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Chinandega, Arkansas, Interns, Hope, and the Holy Spirit

The IBAC Bible Institute in Chinandega (June 17-20) was filled with God's goodness and power.  
Fellowship Bible Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas, led by pastor Chris Moore, 
brought a great team of teachers.  
During this week, we taught The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 
There is a wide variety of theological diversity on the Holy Spirit - and Nicaragua is no different.
 We intentionally focused our attention on the areas where believers are in agreement 
in regard to the Holy Spirit.
We also made a deliberate effort to teach and answer questions with clarity and humility 
when we encountered points of controversy.
The Holy Spirit, Himself, was present and empowering us and by the end of the week
we left with people from both pentecostal and non-pentecostal traditions excited about the course.

We were blessed to have two interns working with ReachGlobal on this trip.  
Kim Gomez, a recent graduate from Biola University and Kalli Thommen, a current student at Biola
are both Journalism majors and spent six weeks with our team in Costa Rica.  
They travelled with us to Chinandega to write some stories on the work of IBAC.  
The story on the Bible Institute in Chinandega can be found here:  
http://reachglobalnews.org/bible-training-strengthens-churches/

Another blessing was that our daughter, Hope, 
was visiting us during this time and she made the trip to Chinandega.  
Here's a picture of Hope and one of her new friends.

We've Got A Name

The ministry of training pastors and church leaders began 
with an exploratory trip to Corinto, Nicaragua in 1998.  
Since that beginning 15 years ago, God has blessed and expanded our work 
in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. 
During all these years, we referred to our network of training centers as "the Bible Institutes."  
Now we have an official name - IBAC.
Thanks go to Dave Ziel, a member of our San Jose City Team, who designed the logo.
We're using the logo to identify our training materials, and we also have IBAC shirts and caps.