Left To right: Eudis Vasquez (South East Peru Mission President), Ken Denslow (Lake Union President) and Carlos Delgado (Host).
We traveled to Peru to visit the South Peru Union, our sister union with which we are collaborating in Project Amigo. If you haven’t heard, Project Amigo is a collaborative mission initiative with our brothers and sisters in southern Peru.
The main event of the 12-day trip was the construction of a church in the village of Chilca, a couple hours from the city of Cusco. When we arrived, the slab-and-steel skeleton of the church was in place courtesy of Maranatha Volunteers International. Our job was to lay the cement blocks that formed the walls of this little church. Twenty-seven conference and union officers and their spouses joined hands in this project, most without having any experience in working with cement blocks and mortar. It was a wonderful bonding and learning experience! At the conclusion of each course of blocks we paused for a celebration, shouting out the words: “Maranatha, Amigo!” led by our construction site supervisor, Justin Ringstaff, Secretary of the Michigan Conference.
On our first Sabbath, before arriving at the construction site in Chilca, we had the opportunity to visit Los Uros, the Floating Islands on Lake Titicaca. We worshipped in a “floating church” that was built some years ago by a group of Maranatha volunteers, most of whom were from the Lake Union and led by Tom Slikkers , a church member from Holland, Michigan.
In the afternoon, after Sabbath lunch at the offices of the Lake Titicaca Mission, we made our way to Plateria on the shores of the lake where Adventist pioneer missionaries, Fernando and Ana Stahl, lived in the early part of the 20th century. The little home in which they lived is now a museum where the story of their work is told.
In Plateria we also participated in the dedication of a new, much needed, pastoral parsonage. The Lake Union and its conferences have funded three new parsonages in south Peru.
After the completion of our project in Chilca, we spent Sabbath in churches around the city of Cusco where several of our group preached including Mark Eaton, secretary-treasurer of the Indiana Conference; he translated a sermon and practiced the pronunciation before delivering it in Spanish. On Friday and Sunday, we got to see some of the tourist sites around Cusco, including the ancient city of Machu Picchu.
Our final day was spent visiting the Peruvian Union University campus near Lima. This university has three campuses with nearly 18,000 students, making it the second largest Adventist university in the world. It is exciting to see how this university advances the mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Peru.
We are committed to Project Amigo being a two-way street – both unions blessing the other through various types of expertise, financial resources and innovation. We have much to learn from the church in Peru relative to passion and commitment to mission. In fact, the very first mission trip under the banner of Project Amigo involved five student missionaries from their university who came to be evangelists in Hispanic churches in the Wisconsin Conference last summer and fall.
Our group returned home with a renewed appreciation for the global mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the importance of advancing together. As it has been said about the second coming of Jesus, “No one goes anywhere until the gospel goes everywhere.”
We came home with a renewed focus on our Lake Union motto: Together in Mission: I Will Go.
This is the last time I will be writing for the President’s page before my retirement in April. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve these past four years in the Lake Union – the union in which I began ministry 48 years ago. While I am retiring from full-time denominational leadership, Pat and I will continue to reside in the Lake Union. For years I have quoted a phrase that defines for me the mission in which we are engaged: “Preparing a people to meet Jesus when He comes.” May He find us all faithful in that task.
Ken Denslow is president for the Lake Union Conference
