Pastor Glen Pitts
heads up the Barnabas project for LAMb International. He has conducted several “Pastor’s Time Out” sessions and other life changing events in the countries of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Barnabas introduced the following:
1. A “Principles of Life Study Bible” to be given to each pastor attending the time out sessions as an ongoing resource tool for their ministry.
2. Gift paks given to each pastor’s wife to somehow honor them as “workers together with God.”
3. Support for Nueva Vida School & Church in the slums of Managua such as the project to paint the exterior of the church and school.
4. An “A to Z Scripture Memorization” Program for kids ages 4 to 8. It is called “Words of Life.” We are producing and printing it ourselves through contacts in El Salvador. Our goal is 1,000 kids learning 26 key verses of scripture.
5. Building seven churches in remote areas of Nicaragua.
6. In partnership with Dr. Charles Stanley and local pastors, we are launching “The Mountain Messenger Project” – an evangelistic plan to strategically reach 1,200 families in remote Nicaragua with the Gospel. We will be using a solar-powered devise containing 35 messages by Dr. Stanley and the entire New Testament in Spanish.
7. A camera has been purchased to help our brothers on the ground chronicle these efforts and keep us updated.
8. A Daily Vitamin program for the 150+ kids at the Nueva Vida School.
Why do we do all this? Because Scripture instructs us to “keep on encouraging each other to be thoughtful and do helpful things …and so much the more as we see the day of Christ’s return approaching.” (Hebrews 10:24-25)
Some things to think about – thoughts from Pastor Glen:
“On the evening of September 29, 1904, a young twenty-six year old coal miner named Evan Roberts, sat in the front pew of a small chapel in the tiny Welsh village of Blaenannerch. Shaking and sweating, he fell on his knees and cried out to God, “Bend me! Bend me, O Lord! Bend me!” He was asking God to give him the burden to pray for the lost in his nation.
Roberts was an unlikely candidate to spark national revival. But that’s exactly how God used him. God has shown a distinct bent for choosing “the foolish things to shame the wise and the weak things to shame the strong” (I Cor. 1:27). A bumbling 26 year old coal miner – with little education – with a tendency for gloomy introspection – yet God used him to spark the 1904 Welsh Revival, one of the most spectacular moves of the Spirit in history. Within months, the revival took the nation in a floodtide and then swept the world.
Clearly, God values every man. But the fact is, in our way of measuring, not all men “appear” useable. In Nicaragua we are working with 23 pastors. The average size of their church may be 40 to 50. Only two have any formal theological education, and all we would regard as “poor.” …BUT GOD! But God! That’s the defining factor that makes all the difference.
At our first Pastor’s Time Out in February, I shared this quote by A. W. Tozer. We read it over and over and spoke to it frequently in our days together.
“Anything that God has ever done, He can do now.
Anything that God has done anywhere else, He can do here.
Anything that God has done for anyone else, He can do for you.”
Powerful! And it applies in your situations too. You see – it is not about credentials, social status, and many other things we think as important. It’s about the heart. God sees the heart. In a simple act of heart surrender, Evan Roberts went from a timid, fretful, unlikely wimp, to a bold and joyful prophet of the Lord that saw heaven come down! I find myself calling out to God from deep within me, “Do it again Lord!” Do we still need your generous financial support? Yes. But more than anything we need your commitment to pray. In the great revival text of the Old Testament, II Chronicles 7:14, God says, “If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray… …then will I hear from heaven and heal their land.”