YL Training in Latin America

The best two lane bowling alley ever.....   Dear Friends, Thanks for your prayers for my recent trips to Cuba and Nicaragua. Nicaragua was an amazing time of reflection and training with over 40 key staff from Central America. It was great time and these are amazing leaders I’m proud to work alongside--I may share some of their stories at a later time but I’m going to focus here on our newest ministry in Latin America—Cuba.  Gisela Maria (L), Evry, and Wilder (R ) Wilder and Gisela Maria are our first Cuban staff and have spent several months now recruiting and training our first team of leaders and it was exciting to get to visit them. Cuba is a very interesting and a very challenging place — highly educated and yet its economy has developed very little in the last 50 years, almost everyone is employed by the government but paid less than a livable wage, and most people feel there are big changes coming politically, but no one is quite sure when or what that will look like

Want to see what YL looks like in places like Colombia?  Here's a short video from a recent adventure trip from our team in Bogota.

    You may have heard of the 10/40 window -- it’s a geographic descriptor that represents most of the world’s poorest people groups, many of whom are considered unreached by the gospel. However, some people have begun to refer to the 10/30 window now as well. This “window” isn’t geographic, but is based on age, referring to the 2.4 billion youth in the world between ages 10-30. A large percentage of this age group is not involved in any church and professes no faith. Jonathan Taylor calls this 10-30 age group "the largest unreached people group in human history, larger than the 100 largest geographically defined unreached people groups combined."     Our South American key leaders      There is a huge need among teens worldwide.   Mexico, for example, has very few teens involved in the church. In the midst of the crime wave that Mexico has been suffering in recent years a Mexican mayor said "Ask yourself who is doing all this killing. It is our young people. W

Dear Friends,          Thanks for your prayers. Jenn and I had a wonderful time in Peru with key leaders from all over South America. We had 25 leaders with us ( all staying together in one house! ) outside of Lima representing ministries from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. It was a fantastic time of sharing together, listening to the Lord and equipping leaders with the tools they need to live out the vision growing the ministry to teens God has called us to.   Jenn and I were blessed to be there, privileged to help train these leaders and very encouraged by what God’s doing in and through the ministry of Young Life in South America.         I’ll write you more about this time in our next newsletter, but if you’d like to get a short glimpse of what this meant to the leaders you can see a couple quick videos of Fabian and  Enrique.           Fabian Bruzzone heads our work in Paraguay and Enrique Vargas is the new regional director for

Dear Friends,          Thanks for your prayers for Jenn and I and our family during our trip to the Dominican Republic last week. It was an amazing time of seeing how God is working through Vida Joven there. Camp capacity is about 160 people when packed full and we had 203(!) leaders there for the weekend-- sleeping in bunk beds, mattresses on the floor and pretty much anywhere we could find space.          It was a beautiful first step towards a vision Vida Joven has— Doble-Doble ( double-double ). The goal is to double the number of leaders involved and the number kids coming to know Christ in the next 6 years.   It’s a goal they feel God has called them to and know is too big for them in so many ways—but not for Him.   The first step has been to raise up more leaders who can work with teens. Of the 203 at the camp, 90 were first year leaders, still young Christians who want to learn how to reach out to others with the love they’ve found in Jesus.   It was great to see their exci

Dear Friends,      Thanks for your prayers for my trip last week. It was great to be with the team in Colombia and see how they’ve been growing.    Here’s a very short video where you can meet Alejandro Maldonado, our team leader in Colombia--    Alejandro Maldonado - Area Director of Bogota from yllatinamerica on Vimeo .        A quick snapshot of the ministry in Bogota by the numbers--- ·          Three years ago we had 7 leaders starting the ministry in one neighborhood in Bogota, now we have a team of 16 leaders doing ministry in 4 neighborhoods. ·          8 of those leaders met the Lord through the ministry of Young Life and are now discipling others just as they were. ·          They’ll be holding a training camp for new leaders in April and hope to bring 12-15 potential new leaders along. ·          Their third outreach camp will be held in July. Last year they took 22 students, this year they hope to take at least 40 students. ·          In 2013 we hope to start YL in

http://vimeo.com/35043233 ( Click on this link if you'd like to see a great photo tour of some of the leaders and teens we work with in our division of Young Life-- Africa, Asia and Latin America.    Our newest blog post is below.....

Dear Friends,                    It’s been a busy January and February, but in very good ways. I’d love to tell you a little about all the friends we’ve been getting to see. Leaders from the 2nd camp The first opportunity to see a lot of friends was at our Leader training camps for Central America which took place in Nicaragua in mid-January.   Thanks for your prayers—those camps were a huge success.   We had over 400 leaders there (!) over the course of our two camps, many from Nicaragua, but also others from Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. I’ve been thinking recently about a discussion with a good friend talking about our focus in Young Life of equipping leaders. He said: “ If you focus on building Young Life into a bigger ministry, you will hurt your leaders and likely fail.   But if you build up leaders in Christ, you will build YL.”   There is a LOT of wisdom in that phrase. One of my senior leaders classes            The reality is we do want to see Yo