Churchnet's Guatemala Partnership
by Gary Snowden, Churchnet Missions Mobilization Team Leader
Churchnet’s partnership with Guatemala arose
early in our organization’s life. In 2005, I was
serving on the board of WorldconneX, a
missions organization sponsored by the
Baptist General Convention of Texas. Through
those ties, I was invited to a meeting in Dallas
on October 5, 2005 to discuss with leaders of
several other interested groups the needs of
Guatemalan Baptists. Their needs seemed to
coincide with some of Churchnet’s areas of
strength, so Bob Perry and I traveled to
Guatemala City in January 2006 for a meeting
hosted by WorldconneX with the leadership
of the Convention of Baptist Churches in
Guatemala. Following several hours of reports
and meetings, Bob and I had the opportunity
to personally sit down with the convention
leaders to explore how we as a fairly new
organization might be able to enter into a partnership with them.
The result of that meeting was the formalization of a partnership with the Convention of Baptist Churches in Guatemala that our convention ratified at our Annual Gathering on March 31, 2006. We originally envisioned a three-year partnership, but have extended that to respond to the needs of our Baptist friends there, especially in the area of providing theological training. This was the area that their convention leaders asked us to address in our face-to-face meeting with them, focusing our efforts in the western part of the country around Quetzaltenango where only a couple of the many pastors had been able to attend seminary.
Our initial training trip occurred in January 2007 with Jim Hill and I providing training to 55 pastors and leaders. We were also able to help them with a good start on a theological library, supplying them with several excellent resource books that our churches had supplied through the missions offering at our Annual Gathering. We stayed after the training to participate in a strategy session that WorldconneX conducted with leaders of the Convention of Baptist Churches in Guatemala.
Since that initial trip, Churchnet has continued to offer leadership training conferences to pastors and leaders in the western region of the country each January and July. A typical conference begins with lunch on a Tuesday (following our flight and overland travel to Quetzaltenango on Monday). We offer two sessions on Tuesday afternoon, followed by dinner and then a time of worship, and another
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Gary Snowden speaking at recent training conference in Guatemala.