Our Brethren in Latin America

Certainly inspiring music. Music is a very important part of worship of God, and certainly brings a spirit of special blessing on the Sabbath service.

Well, today I was a little bit torn about what to speak about. My wife and I just returned from Latin America on a most unusual and unusual standpoint of we came back totally different feeling about what our impression was of Latin America. We had one impression, and I know a lot of places in the world. I've been to a lot of places, but what we saw exceeded our expectations many, many times over. I thought, well, I'll say a few things here in services about our visit to Latin America. I'll take 10 minutes. No, I'll take 15 minutes. Well, I just don't want to give a travelogue. I don't want to show slides in a Sabbath service. So I'll give a half an hour, then just go with a sermon after that. Then I thought, no, I can't. There are just too many things that we have learned and we have experienced that are truly very, very landmark things as far as how God is working with people. And we saw quite a variety of things that God is doing with the United Church of God and also brothers who are Sabbath keepers as well. So I want to talk about what God is doing in the lives of people that he's called in this world today.

What can we learn? I'm keying off a statement that Sabbath keepers in Ukraine once told me that still burns in me all the time. And that is that when they had us come by a few times, they said, we really want to learn from you. We really want to learn from you. We've learned a lot of things from you. But I hope that you can also learn from us. And I hope that we can have the humility to be able to see what other people who have God's Holy Spirit do and how they live, how they conduct themselves, how they behave, how they treat one another, and learn from them as well. I have wanted to go to Chile for many, many years. We have done a scholarship program in Latin America, actually starting in Central America in 2001. And that program grew to Chile and Columbia and other places in South America, including Chile. And I had wanted to visit that area. In fact, one time almost had a trip all planned to go, but it never has materialized. Well, this time I knew about the wedding of Garrett Nicole, Garrett Fentral and Nicole Royg there. So I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity to take advantage of that. And I told Lisa Fentral, I said, Lisa, I think there's a 5% chance that I'll be able to go. When is that wedding? And there was no real set date at first, and it was the 21st. Well, of all of the dates, that was a date that was available.

And then it kind of grew and grew and grew where it was possible because there were three other events connected with this. There was a visit to the Santiago Church.

Also, there was a special leadership and ministerial conference that Mario Siegel organized for all Spanish-speaking ministers that ranged all the way from Scott Hofker in Alabama to Mr. Robledo in Guatemala to Bolivia to Chile. And we were able to connect a few of them by WebEx, but we had a number who were there, plus Gabriel Garcia, who came from Mexico City. So that conference was on for two days. So we had that planned and a whole program established for that. Plus, a visit to the Missiones Province of Argentina. How many of you have heard of the Missiones Province of Argentina planned a trip there? Okay, hardly anybody. I had not planned a trip there. It sounded like just a remote place, an interesting place, but boy did we find out a lot that was fascinating about that area in many different ways. There is a group of Sabbath keepers that have established a friendship with us. And I hadn't even realized, but the Council of Elders, well I did realize, but didn't think much of it, established a relationship by writing them a letter stating that we would like to work with them, we would like to help them, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why a little bit later, but then we would send two of our ministers to help them in their organization. We had not had any contact and not even known about these people before 2015. And then, of course, last but not least, the wedding of Garrett Fentchel and Nicole Roy, which was really a really wonderful event. So we put all this together, just amazingly, came together. Plus, we were able to spend 11 days with Mario and Kati Seagly. We spent hours and hours with them, sometimes spending five, six hours at an airport and yet continuing conversation, and just really enjoying getting to know one another. Well, our first stop was Santiago.

I've heard so much about Santiago, but did not realize just how beautiful an area of the world that is. Very similar to California. If you would say that what is Chile like? Well, it's like Santa Barbara. What the fee said is the mountains, the ocean. Of course, it's not Santiago's not on the ocean, but the weather is exactly like Southern California. Dry, heat, and very, very pleasant.

Of course, we were there in the middle of summer, and the temperature tended to push towards 88, sometimes 90, while we were there. It has some of the tallest mountains just to the east. In fact, Mount Anacagua is the tallest peak in the whole Andes-Rockies mountains that is taller than Mount McKinley. It's only 4,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest. Truly a big mountain. In fact, when we flew into Santiago, coming in at 35,000 feet, the mountains were just like below us, you know, in their elevation. The city is a congested city. Eight million people. Eight-lane freeway right through the middle of town. I would not consider it to be a poor country. There's a lot of people there, but it was just a very bustling city. I thought it was just an amazingly bustling city, far more than I had thought. We arrived a day late because we had our flight cancelled to Atlanta because of a winter storm the day before, so we were almost a day late. But we got there still in plenty of time for all the activities. We came to Sabbath Services in Santiago and found that to be a dynamic church. I mean, you could hear the noise before you even, you know, came into services.

Music, instruments, playing, people talking, and so forth. They have a very, very beautiful meeting location. They have a long-term lease on a property that includes a storefront place where they have literature set out, a beautiful lobby, a meeting place, a radio and TV studio, and a garage, because when people out there in this part, different parts of the world, don't leave their cars on the street, vandalism, theft, and so forth, they put all these cars in the church, and a lot of people had cars into this garage area. And then there's the pastor's home. It's a very, very nice complex. The church, we had over 100 people that day, and the church is usually about 80 people, but this was a very, very special weekend for on a number of counts. Peter Eddington and I gave split sermons. Peter went down to, and Terry went to the wedding. Their children have grown up with the potential children, and it was just wonderful to share this event. I felt that I have known some of the people in the congregation in Chile through the Royg and Seagly families, just because of other people that I have known. And I feel like I've known through Jaime Gallardo, who is the pastor, and then the associate pastor Jaime Diaz, who cares for the church in the south in Temuco, 400 miles south. And I have known them and known about the church. But it's not until you actually come there and be with them do you really feel the full impact of that area. Chile has an unusual geography. The country is 3,000 miles long. It's huge. It's almost as north to south as the United States is from east to west, and about 100 to 150 miles wide, with a huge mountain range to the east.

I was amazed that the Santiago church has its own Good Works program, which I was very, very pleased with, so that Good Works and the things that we do on the humanitarian outreach side is not something that's just based and established from the United States to go out to the world. And people just expect us to help all the time. But the churches in Chile have established their own Good Works program and have actually exported it to Argentina, which now, that group has a Good Works program going as well. And they have Good Works t-shirts with Spanish lettering on it, blue and yellow, blue and white, I should say, that was very, very impressive. But they're very, very proud of that.

We've had Good Works, we've had Youth Corps projects, and we've had Life Net projects in these parts of the world. And it was just wonderful to see fruits, more than just people who are benefiting, but also people that have passed on the benefit. That's a big part of the reason why we do some of the programs, is for people to become self-sufficient, but also rise to another level of being able to help others themselves, which we were very pleased to see. They have organized projects such as replacing, in one case, a widow's roof, teaching English, and helping people with school supplies and with food at the Feast of Tabernacles. One thing that struck me about Santiago, and maybe there's other places in the world like this, it is the graffiti capital of the world. I've never seen so much graffiti, but it's not ugly graffiti. It's not a lot of writing on walls that has political slogans or vulgarities. It's beautiful art, and if you have a wall, if you have a wall that faces the street, that's become public property for artists. And they did have laws against drawing things like that, and they put people into prison for one or two days, but the artists have won out, you know, and now the whole city's painted with actually some very, very creative drawings, including the church property where our own people have put graffiti on it. In fact, what they did is there's a wall down the street of our church, and every segment of the wall has a picture depicting a certain part of the story of the Bible. The very first one has creation, then you have Adam and Eve, the creation of Adam and Eve, you have Daniel and the lion's den, you've got David, you've got Babylon, you've got the whole story of the Bible that kind of fits in with the whole city way of doing things, and I thought that was most interesting. I have a lot of these drawings, a lot of these things on my blog, which I've not completed yet, but I've put probably 50 pictures of the various graffiti images on my travel art blog. You can go to cubic.org and just click on the map of South America, and you can get to it very, very quickly.

After services, you know, basically we didn't really know what's going to be happening to us, so we were kind of just led from this place to the other. We knew the wedding was the next day, but we were said that a member had a barbecue that he was inviting us to. Now, believe me, barbecues are the thing in South America. We had so many barbecues and so much beef that it's just amazing how much they have. Argentina, for example, has a population of 45 million people. They have 90 million cows. I mean, just like sheep is to New Zealand and Australia, cows, you know, and beef is to Chile, Argentina, in those countries. But we went to the home of a gentleman called Marcos Medina and his wife, Isabella, and probably a third to half the church, you know, came there. Here's a course in his yard. It's a huge barbecue. I'm told that when a home is built, when a building is built, the first thing is built is the barbecue, and then everything else is built around. We've not seen a place there that did not have a barbecue pit, you know, with bricks and the whole thing. But that was a nice pre-wedding event where, you know, all of us were made to feel welcome and got acquainted with one another. A very beautiful afternoon, whether it was perfect in his yard. He had peaches and apples and a lot of fellowship and socializing. It was just very wonderful. There's a lot of family intertwinings. The church is very intermarried, I feel like, with the roigs and other families. It's like the Phelps' Creek thing in this church, you know. You just have certain families, you know, that you better be careful what you say to whom because you're going to talk about one of them very, very, very quickly because they're married to one another and will tell on you. On Sunday was the day of the wedding, and it was in the foothills of the Andes in kind of a canyon, a beautiful area, outdoor wedding, very California like outdoor wedding. It was conducted by Matt Finchel and by Mario Siegle. Just very happy for the couple. Just very, very happy for them and just very happy that they are here.

The wedding continued on. It was a very nice way. It was organized for socializing. There's a dinner afterwards for everyone and then a dance at the end. Monday and Tuesday, a leadership and ministerial conference was held. This was, I understand, one of the first of its kind that they've had to include all the ministry of Latin America. On the first day, it was for anyone who wanted to come. It was a leadership conference. I would say about a third of the church came. It was Monday, a workday, so probably more people would have come. But we had four presentations on that day. I had two, and Mario had two. And we had a question and answer session that was really quite energetic. We had questions about practical Christian challenges and about how questions such as, how do you know that God is working in your life? How do we know that God's Spirit is in us? I had questions about minister's wife's role in counseling. When I was able to speak very, very openly about women, about their role, how important it is, I spoke about my wife, who is very much a part of my ministry, one who I rely heavily on. I'm not sure exactly why that question was asked, but I said that she very much is involved with me. She talks to ladies without me having to be there. Certainly, I don't want to be there. But she is able to be very, very helpful to me and very perceptive as a part of my work. As we work with ministerial trainees and those who are part of the ministry, we choose them based on not only the man and his skills, but also on the wife and what support she will be to him and how mature she would be in helping him in the work that he has. Had a good discussion. I was surprised that some of the questions that they asked would have been questions that we would have asked anywhere in the world. They asked them about the millennial generation. I thought, did they even know what millennial generation is? Oh, yeah, very much. They have the same type of dynamics in these countries as they have, you know, I call the Western world that we live in. They asked about the viability of the millennial generation in leading the church forward. And I told them that I was very positive about the millennial generation, that I look at the good. I look at the good things that the millennials do, how project-oriented, how mission-oriented they are. And they can be focused on doing things that perhaps others don't do in that exact way, because they are the ones who will be taking the church forward. They bring a special desire to become involved, as perhaps other generations have not shown as strongly. I was very impressed by one person that I met. Most of us don't know him. He's the pastor of Bolivia. His name is Raul Machicao, Raul Machicao of La Paz, Bolivia. He came down. He came in person to the conference, and it was just a wonderful gentleman. He's been a pastor of a church of 25 in La Paz, plus a smaller church in La Cruz, Santa Cruz, I should say, and he visits people in Peru. He's been pastor there since about 2011. Most of his life, he's been an architect, an engineer, and has helped in the design of some of the largest and tallest buildings in La Paz, Bolivia. And now he's retired. He has a three-level kind of a terrorist home in the very top terrace. It is where the church hall is. He's made a church hall there, and the church has been meeting there for about seven years. We spent a lot of time in talking to him. He has produced a church calendar, which has the Roman calendar and also the sacred calendar, side by side, that show the dates, and he has it in Spanish and in English.

On Tuesday, we had the ministerial conference. It was only for ministers where we all talked about the various area aspects of our churches. In fact, we had one of the best sessions ever that I have experienced in a ministerial conference because each pastor gave a report, you know, starting with, well, all the way from Mexico, all the way down to Chile. They gave a report about their churches, statistics, and the usual things. But then they went and talked about the challenges in their church area, and they brought up different things that they face as far as obstacles, challenges, areas of having to overcome, areas of special interest. And then, while we were talking about these things, and we stopped, and then we said, well, how would we solve this problem? Then we had everybody join in in finding solutions to some of the challenges that they had. Once again, some of the challenges that they have would be no different than some of the things that we might have in our congregations. One of them was modesty in church services. I thought, oh, that was an American problem. No, it's also a problem in other places, you know, in the world. And different pastors had, you know, suggestions about, you know, how to approach the subject, because it is one of the most sometimes controversial subjects. If you bring it up to some people, it's like kicking a beehive. You know, they just people have a hard time listening to, you know, what people have to say about the subject. But that was one thing that brought up a number of times about modesty in church services, not only among the younger people, but also among the older people, you know, and properly appearing before God on the Sabbath day.

One of the other subjects that was brought up by the ministers was the need to be properly mentored. One of the challenges is the fact that they speak Spanish, and we only have so much material in the Spanish language. Most of everything that we have is in the English language, and they really need to be trained. We think of having to be challenged in the United States with the having to cover our churches all across the country and find the proper training. And I feel like we're getting ahead of the game with our ministerial education team and having the various ways in which we have conferences, the way we have labor in the word program, the way we have online training and so forth, but they don't have some of these things, and they miss a lot of things. And they were saying we really do need to have some type of training program that's designed just for the Spanish-speaking ministers to be able to do their jobs. This was brought up by just about everybody that they wanted to have more materials that we had. One of the solutions was to take certain programs that we've had that have been very effective for our ministry, such as labor in the word, and get a transcript of it in English, and then have it translated into Spanish.

But that's one thing that was very, very, very much needed. Another area of challenge, another thing that was a critical success factor, if you want to put it, was the fact that how do we evangelize? How can we do our job better in spreading the word of God? In some of these countries, they don't have huge circulations. In some of them, they have circulations. There are only three, four hundred copies of the Buena Noticias. They still call it the good news because it translates better into Spanish. But what's the way that we could maximize being able to take the resources that we have to be able to reach people? Oftentimes, the way we reach people is to advertise it in a very, very large way, where people who do respond are scattered all over the place. And one suggestion was that, well, if you only have 400 copies of the Buena Noticias, why not have it within a 10-mile range where we pass them out, where we try to reach people, where we try to present in businesses or to work with family, to be closer someplace to where there is a congregation where they can come to? I mean, people can be called anywhere. And that was one suggestion that was brought out. So many of the churches that do grow in those areas do grow through families, like the churches in Chile. They are extended families where the word gets out. The same was true when we will talk about the churches in Argentina. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with the phelps and cretias. They're all great, you know. Well, why not extend that even further? Work with our families of those who know us, know us very, very well, and be able to pass on the knowledge to them. Also, in not spreading the word only by just giving a magazine to somebody with no context, but be able to talk about the subject that you have. If somebody is interested, and somebody's asking questions, or somebody's wondering about world events, why not take a magazine, open it by page by page, you know, to an article that they may be interested in, or that might be applicable and practical for them, and discuss it with them. So a lot of those things were discussed in our meeting. Some have felt a need for doctrinal reinforcement. One thing about the Church. You know, we always have something that is an issue in the Church. Sometimes it's people, sometimes it's people doing ugly things, and sometimes it's people who want to change their doctrines, or people who infiltrate, so to speak, with their own ideas. There was also a very strong desire to have doctoral reinforcement through more educational venues that was brought out.

But I would say the most, the biggest thing was the need to mentor the people who would become the future leaders. As we take a look at those who are now the leaders, such as Jaime Sélec and Gabriel Garcia in Mexico City, who is the assistant or associate pastor under Mario Sigli, or the two Jaimes in Chile, one is pastor and one is the associate pastor, you know, I see very, I am very, very happy to see what is happening there. But in order to bring on new people, we have to teach them in the Spanish language. 30 out of the 36 booklets that the United Church of God offers have been translated into the Spanish language. Aruld Machikao said that one of the things that really is troublesome to him is the isolation that he senses in La Paz, Bolivia, which more people could be interested in coming to La Paz for the feast, but they're just hungry for fellowship. He said we're even disconnected, we're even isolated from the other Spanish-speaking churches, and brought that up a number of times.

Scott Hofker travels to Colombia on a regular basis from the United States with his wife, Gail, and they serve five churches there. Really a massive job and does a very good job, not only in watching over and caring for those churches along with Jaime Select, but there's five churches and one that is very much in the interior. The Santa Rosa Church, which is actually the biggest church of all of 37 people. There's churches in Bogota, Cucuta, Medellin, Monterey, and Santa Rosa. Every single one of the pastors expressed gratitude for the support that's come from the United States in every way for the Feast of Tabernacles, for the support of our ministry, for the projects that we've had in Good Works, also for our very, very viable life-ness project of scholarships. We have helped many, many students over time with scholarships, but we saw what they have to pay now for tuition. Some of these countries, their standard of living is growing rapidly that, not the standard of living, but the costs have been up to where scholarships have increased by a very, very high factor here over the last several years. We wish we could help out more.

One of the largest churches, areas, is Guatemala, and the pastor, Israel Robledo, was online. He gave a very good report along with his wife Thelma. He takes care of not only churches in Guatemala, and he has, I would say, the largest churches, and the largest Feast of Tabernacles with 250 people, excluding Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. But he pastors people in Panama, and I visited in Panama just several months ago with George de Campos and met those 10 people. It's the Figueroa family, primarily, but there's also a few people in Costa Rica, San Salvador, and yeah, Costa Rica and Salvador. They have a viable program in doing the webcast.

One of the biggest things now on February 28th is that a new website will be launched for the Spanish-speaking people. They were very excited about that and showed us a view of that. But the greatest challenges are doctrinal integrity, doctrinal sloppiness, you might say, the need for mentoring, distances, and church buildings where they meet, and evangelism. But in this conference, we were able to have good discussion with good suggestions being brought to the ministry. When the meeting was over with, afterwards, people were really commented about how much that they were benefited, not by somebody just talking at them and giving them solutions, but everyone adding to the whole of suggestions. After the two-day conference, the next day, Wednesday, we went on to the feast site, which was about an hour and a half north of Santiago in a very beautiful area called Ome way, and they expect about 120 to 140 people coming for the feast. Again, it's very similar, I would say, if any place that I've been on the earth is to California, like in the Santa Barbara area. We had a Bible study that evening back in Santiago. Probably half the church came on a Wednesday evening, and I spoke about the book of Ephesians, God's plan being all-encompassing in just the first chapter of Ephesians. On Thursday, we traveled to Argentina. This was second part of our trip. Traveled to Argentina, we had a six-hour layover in Buenos Aires, and our lone member, our lone member, Susanna Carrasco, came and spent the afternoon with us. This is the only contact that she has through, you know, months and months outside of the Feast of Tabernacles.

There is one member in Buenos Aires that's United Church of God, and one member across the Rio de La Plata in Uruguay, named by the name of Estelle. Then, part two of our trip, the most interesting part of our trip, in visiting the Sabbath keepers that we have just made contact with since 2015. Who are these people? How did they find this? Why is the relationship the way it is?

I really wasn't sure myself, and we're seeing this developing relationship as to how God can work with different groups. But how do we work? What is our relationship to be? How will we get along? We were met by a man and his wife, called Mario Ritter and his wife Rosanna, a man who's 36 years old. He picked us up at the airport, and we drove our things yet another hour and a half from there, right there on the border of Paraguay, to the city of Obera. And that's where this group meets. This is a province called Missiones. I'd never heard of Missiones before.

It's nestled in in a little narrow bit of land between Paraguay and Brazil. And it's probably no more than 30-40 miles wide, Brazil on one side and Paraguay on the other. Mario Ritter is one of the leaders of a group that keeps the Holy Days. And the reason that they came to us is because they have not been able to be with another group that keeps the Holy Days in the way that they believe they should be keeping them. They have come to a strong commitment about why we keep the Holy Days and their purpose, and no one else seems to want to keep it that way. In fact, in 2013, the group that they were a part of expelled them because they made so much, so many questions about the Holy Days, the need to keep them, that they said, I think it'd be better if you just left.

And pretty much this group of several families was asked to leave. They were given a letter, said, please leave us. They still feel very hurt and very damaged by this because this was a group that was a part of their life for many years. In fact, they keep their letter of being expelled in their Bibles, and they showed it to us. This is so painful to them that they said we were expelled, but we feel it's so important to keep the Holy Days that we decided to separate ourselves in 2013.

They earlier learned about the Holy Days through worldwide Church of God literature, and they came to understanding them. They also met with another group called the Israel Church of the New Covenant that kept the Holy Days, but they said they never explained them really too well.

But the explanation that we have of the Holy Days was the one that really made sense to them.

And so they found us on the Internet and said, this is what we want. And so they made contact with the Spanish church, Spanish-speaking church in Chile, and the first visit by Jaime Gallardo was in October of 2015 when they had asked him to come. There are two congregations now of 75 people that meet. They're the same church, but they're just too distant apart. But they met together when Mario and I were just there last week. In fact, last Sabbath, both of us spoke at their church.

They have no leader to this day, and all their leaders are young people. I was telling Aaron Booth, I said, everybody saw there there was a leader. It was like Aaron Booth. Just young people of that age, you know, the Rudy's, the Aaron Booth, you know, young people that the older people said, please, you know, take on the mantle of doing something about the viability of this church. Very serious young families with children, families, and they really wanted to move forward. Mario Ritter and another one by the name of Ariel Berger. All these people had German names. In fact, the German language was spoken quite a bit in the area. In fact, we had, on Friday afternoon, Friday for lunch, we had other big barbecue, but what else, you know, huge platters of meat, at the home of Mario Ritter's father and mother, and they had some of their other kids there. They had a table, probably seating about 15 or 16 people, where we had a meal and we talked, and the father's kind of the patriarch of this group, and we talked about their origins and about their desires and needs, and they said, this is a very German area. They said, Martin Borman, the Nazi war criminal, lived 10 miles away from here. He wanted to take you to their house.

And we almost kind of felt, almost, well, it'd be kind of interesting to see that, but he says, it's 10 miles, but it's a very hard last few miles up into the hideaway areas. There was even rumors that Hitler himself, you know, had gone there, but this is where the Nazi criminals hung out in this Missionis area, because they were under the protection of Peron, the dictator of Argentina. It was right close to the Paraguay border. Then when Peron went out of power, they fled to Paraguay, which was just crossing the river, where Strassner, of all names for a leader, took care of these people that had come from post-war Germany. That was very, very interesting to hear that story.

The church had grown, we found, from just a few families that had left to 12 more people that were baptized through one of the members who owned a radio station. And his name was Esteban Freiberger, another German name. These are all German people. They're all very tall German, German-Dutch people that had settled from Europe a couple hundred years ago in the 1800s.

Esteban, which is Steven Freiberger, runs a radio station, which is a UCG radio station. He says, I'm United Church of God. In fact, when we ask these people, what church are you now? I said, how do you say who you are? We are the United Church of God. I said, okay, that's very, very interesting. And then the next day, the big question was, how do you become part of the United Church of God? But they have regular visits because the only ministers that they know are ministers. Not one of them is a deacon or an elder or even aspires to be one. This was most interesting. It's not a group by some leader that's being brought to us. It's a group of people that really believe in the Holy Days. Well, believe in our fundamental beliefs.

Again, back to our big lunch. On Friday, a week ago Friday, we talked about these things. Then we went and saw their new feast site that they're building. Nothing's there now. They just bought the land. But they went ahead, these families, they bought this property, and they're putting up 13 cottages on it at a little hall there for services. And I said, when do you plan to have this? Well, maybe you could have something this fall. I thought, wow, there's nothing there now. But anyway, they have plans to make this into a festival site. Then that evening, Friday evening, we were invited to Ariel Berger's home, Ariel and Sylvia. Now, Ariel and Rosanna, the wife of Mario, our brother and sister. So we come to their house. He owns a sawmill, very upscale home, just very nice. And we were invited for 7.30 p.m., so we thought it was after dinner.

So we come there, and they have a table of hors d'oeuvres and everything. We're talking for two hours, you know, two hours. Well, we figure, this is dinner here, you know, this must be the dinner part, you know. In fact, we're kind of thinking, well, we kind of covered everything we needed to, and it's 9.30, getting on to 10 o'clock, it's time to go home. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, the big table that he had in his living room is covered with a big cloth.

She's there, and a big barbecue meal, sort of huge platters of meat, you know, of ribs and different things, you know, were brought there. And we were there till 11.30 at night. In Latin America, they don't eat till 10 o'clock at night. In fact, their schedule is really kind of different from ours. It's 10 o'clock, they eat. I don't know when they go to bed. They work through the mornings, they have a 12 to 4 siesta, and then they kind of open up and work in the evening and eat late.

That's kind of the schedule, the very general schedule that they run. But we found Ariel to be a very deep thinker, and he talked about how he came to the Holy Days. It was just interesting just to hear his timeline of how he tested and how he meditated about the Holy Days and how he was wondering why in the world does God have these extra days and what is the purpose of them.

Then he said that he started keeping them, and then he really began to see the purpose of them, and they were so important to him and are a very, very central part of what they believe and teach, which is so different from even other Sabbath-keeping churches. We went home. Church was next morning at 9 o'clock in the morning. This is live Sabbath, 9 o'clock in the morning. So we all come there for church, and Mario is the first speaker, and then I speak.

Of course, it's more complicated with me because he has to translate for me, and that kind of complicated rhythm, but anyway, that got through real fine. And we thought that one person in that group was Ukrainian. He had been born there. His father came from Ukraine, but as part of all the European immigrants, there was hardly anybody who was what I call to be an indigenous person from Latin America. These were all people who had immigrated from Europe in this messianus area.

Beautiful. And then, after services, I'm not even sure what's happening or what we're going to do. There's a meal. Guess what? Huge barbecue. Just in fact, you know, at our end of the table, they just put a whole platter of steaks and different things, sausages and this kind of thing, you know, right there in front of Bev and me and Mario, you know, and for us.

You go ahead and eat all this, okay? So then, after the meal, they said, let's have a Bible study. So that went on for another two hours, and I covered what I did the Wednesday before. Mario did the same thing, too. We talked, and then that evening, they wanted Mario and me to be on the radio station, to be on their three-hour program. They have an evening program, three hours, from 8 to 11 p.m., where Esteban does a radio program. He plays Mario's tapes, he plays high-maze tapes, he plays anything he possibly can. Members come in to kind of give sermonettes and talks, and he just has all kinds of things happening, and we said, you could have the whole three hours here to talk.

And I'm saying, what in the world am I going to say, you know, in this program? Well, Mario starts talking, and we're in the studio there, and I see the playlist of songs. What they did is they warm up with a few songs. They're all German songs, by the way, all German songs. I told him I had some Ukrainian songs. He says, oh, please, send them to me, and put them on Google Drive for him.

And so Mario gives his talk. He goes for about 10 minutes, and then they play a song or two, you know, they kind of interludes. Actually, a very good way to run the program to keep it interesting, you know. Mario speaks, and then you have a song, and then he kind of goes back into his sermon. You know, talks for about 10-15 minutes, and then they play another song. And then it's time for Victor Kubik, you know, president of the Church of God.

I said, what do you want me to say? Are you going to interview me? Are you going to ask me about the church? What are you going to do? I said, oh, do whatever you want, you know. So then, you know, they kind of introduced me a little bit, so then I introduced myself a little bit, and then I said, I launched into the sermon that I had given that afternoon. It was about the kingdom of God.

I want to tell you, I want to share with you, that this was really a moving moment for me, because it wasn't just answering questions. It wasn't just talking about the church.

He was telling me to preach the gospel. Just say what you need to say. Say whatever you need to say.

And so I started talking about my subject, which was the gospel of the kingdom of God, the central aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I spoke about that. Then I knew, after about 10 minutes, it kind of stopped. And then, you know, he went and played a song or two, and then I just felt very natural. Kind of got right back into the rhythm of what I was saying.

And I felt a certain freedom that I hadn't felt before. I wasn't looking at a crowd of people.

I didn't have to worry about eye contact at all. I had this microphone, you know, with a big spit guard on it and everything. And I had my Bible, had two sets of notes, and I really felt free. I felt comfortable. And I even thought of myself not just in a monotone, but just getting excited about what I was talking about. I had never experienced it just that way. And so I went on for about half an hour with a couple musical interludes. And finally, Mario and I kind of said that, well, we probably need to be going. So then he went on and just continued on playing. But it's a radio station right there in the middle of Missy Onus. It's a nonprofit station that he owns. And he says, this is UCG radio, United Church of God radio.

He gives priority to all of us who are the United Church of God. He still has others on there, but only if it's compatible with what we do. It's amazing that he can keep a program running.

The station is in a trailer, and he kind of lives right next to it. He's got the tower behind him. He says, we're licensed right now. It's only operated at 600 watts, nonprofit. We can't advertise. But we reach 50 miles out. We have 80 mile radius, and we reach into Brazil on one side, into Paraguay on the other. And we get a number of requests and things from Brazil. But this radio station has been responsible for adding 12 families to the church. They said that's been their number one source of evangelism.

A regular daily program on a station where people are getting used to listening to it.

And he, one of the members that I talked to, he says he also has a program on there, which he basically reads things and was asking Mario, could you send me any kind of notes? Could you send me any kinds of things to talk about? These people are so turned on by being able to have a radio station like that. So we help that radio station. We pay them a small amount every month. In fact, it's pitifully small, and I gave them a little bit of money as well. But the church also supports that with their tithes to keep that radio station afloat. I was telling Peter here, I said, you know, if we want to get the studio built, and I'm so happy to see the digging and everything going on outside there in this process, we need to have some kind of a streaming, regular thing where we can just have where at drive time or the middle of the day or something, we have a group of people, we have a talk that leads to another discussion the next day. I think of how I listened to the World Tomorrow program the very first time, and I kind of didn't pay attention to it first, listened to it out of the side of my head, not really pretending I wasn't listening, afraid to listen to it in a way, but then I got attached to it, I got attached to the voice, the subject, and so forth. And then, after a while, I was hooked, and I wanted to hear what he had to say, and he always, the speaker, had a tease for the next day. Well, tomorrow I'll tell you about this, or he wouldn't finish what he said and said, you'll hear the rest of it tomorrow. And I would like to see us build up some type of a streaming audience. I know that when we have television right now, which is fabulous, I would like to see the streaming television, but we need something very, very regular. And when I see this radio station run by these people who are so dedicated with a purpose in mind, and especially they did a whole series on the Holy Days to be able to bring in 12 families into the church.

In fact, the problem with them was they couldn't baptize them because they weren't ministers.

So they had to have Jaime come from Chile to baptize these people. Now, I don't, maybe, I'm not sure exactly the timeline and everything, but they did not have the right to do so. So it's a very, very interesting dynamic, is that we're working with people who say, please help us, and please help us become established as a church. So that was the radio experience. I mean, I left the radio station. It was a long day, believe me, starting from the night before barbecue to the next day's barbecue and two services and the radio program. But we drove home. It was about 45 minutes back to the hotel, just on a real high from that experience, both for Mario and me. Mario has been on that radio station before. The next day, Sunday, they wanted to have a picnic, and they had it back at the same place where the church services were the day before. And guess what they had? Big barbecue. Huge barbecue. The grand finale. And socializing with the people. And we talked individually with the people. I talked a lot with a person named Roberto, the bricklayer, the guy who does the radio program Wednesday nights, who said, I need help. I really need support. And he went to Mario and, um, arranging to have notes, sermon notes. I'm not sure what Mario's going to give him. So he can go through these things on the air in Spanish in a regular way. And this Esteban, who's a real believer in the Holy Days, you know, is the one who's putting all this together. It's amazing how he runs that radio station, how he automates it, how he's got it programmed, how he's got the playlist. He can leave for the whole day. The radio station kind of runs itself with a playlist and so forth. It's just amazing what he does.

I talked about a Ukrainian person that day. And interesting is, this Ukrainian person, his brother was the leader of the group that they had come from.

Now, when I went to Ukraine, and I've worked with other Sabbath-keeping groups, and I told him about a previous trip that I had taken to Uruguay, which is back in 1993 and again in 1994, that I had gone to Uruguay and I had gone to Argentina as well, this gentleman also said, I want to go to Argentina. And he went there in 1996. I didn't even know about him going.

He's my friend, but he took another fellow with him. The two of them went to Argentina. And where did they go to? They went to Obera. And I called him a few months ago and said, you know, I'm going to Obera. What did you go to when you went to Argentina? I said, I went to Obera. I said, well, who were the people that you saw? Well, he sent me some photos. And Malchefsky was one of the people there and so forth. And I posted these pictures in a web story that I did. And I told Mario, who there were a lot of these? There can't be that many Sabbatarians who don't know each other, you know, in Obera. And so he finally got in touch with these people. And sure enough, this was a group that they had come from. And Malchefsky, his brother, was there at services on this day. So that was just very interesting to be able to experience all that. On the Sunday picnic, the highlight of the Sunday picnic was that the two fellows, actually more than that, Ariel, Mario Ritter, and the radio station man, and another leader of the church, got together with Mario and me. And their big question is, how do we become part of the United Church of God? We want to know. We've had a relationship now for two and a half years.

What's the next step to become part of the United Church of God? And let me just tell you some of the things that are part of this dynamic. Now, I've worked with, like I said, different churches that have different traditions, but doctrinally we are very, very similar. So where do you draw the line and how do you manage things? You know, how do you do things? Because these people actually have held the Feast of Tabernacles by themselves this last year. And actually, Jaime Gallardo came for part of the Feast to Obera, where they kept it. Well, we told them that legally, there's two different ways. One is through an association. You be associated with, you accept our Constitution, which is different from our bylaws. The Constitution, which basically states our fundamental beliefs, that's the big thing, plus other ways in which the overall church relates to all areas of the world. But really, they have nothing to really associate with us, just individuals.

I said, here's the better way. We have the other route, which is through a senior pastor.

A senior pastor, which now is Mario, or it could be someone that he deputizes, like Jaime Gallardo, become the senior pastor of that area. And that he could supervise the selection of new pastors and new leaders from that area. They seemed very, very open to that, and come to the point of being able to be one church, which in many ways we are. But here are a few things that are of interest that I want to share with you. One was that their services are a little bit different.

And I don't think that we should tinker too much with the way they do things.

First of all, when we started the services, by the way, when you walked in, you should see all the music that was there. A harp playing. I thought I was in heaven. You know, this huge harp that was being played. Then they had an accordion, you know. They had two rows of guitarists, and they had a trumpet player who was the radio station manager. You know, they had all that going, you know, before services started. It was all normal. None of it was what I call to be something that wasn't we'd be comfortable with. But this time for the opening prayer, we all kneel down.

I don't think they're going to do away with that. They just feel very humble before God, very thankful to all kneel down. And we had the opening prayer, and that's the way services were concluded. We also kneel down. Otherwise, for the service, most everything was quite similar. There were, of course, me and Mario spoke, so I don't know how they do their services, but they basically said they had messages, and they had music, and so forth. The other is music. They had a songbook, and it's a songbook that they've had probably for, who knows, 20-30 years.

Songbooks look pretty worn. Notes weren't in there. They were just music. But that's the music that they're used to. It's the music that they like. That's the music that they've grown up with.

Are we going to tinker with that? Are we going to give them the blue songbook and say, we want you to learn these Dwight Armstrong songs, or else you're not part of us?

I don't think that's fair. They have come all this way, singing psalms and singing music in the way that they have all these years, and we should allow them to be able to have the freedom to be able to do the things that maybe are different to us, as our things are different to them.

But I'd hate to see the things that are common with us when we told them, and they have known the 20 fundamental beliefs because we said you have to accept them as the Constitution. They said, we're with you 100 percent on the Constitution. We're with you 100 percent on the fundamental beliefs. And on the big things, the big things were right there with them. It's going to be working out some of the other things that may be a question. Now, I've worked with other Sabbatarian groups where they don't drink at all. Well, these do have wine, so we're going to survive that one. But there's other things that may be different from what we do. One thing I noticed that they have a decorum. They set the finest example in dress for Sabbath services, especially the ladies. To me, that's modesty. They look beautiful, they look wonderful, they looked feminine. But they weren't making a fashion statement in church. They were there to honor God and to serve Him. But I feel like when we get to discussing about how we work together with other groups, we're going to have to discuss these subjects among ourselves so that we're on board with this kind of thing. Like I said, I opened my sermon with people from other groups saying, we want to learn from you, but I hope that you can learn from us.

And I'll have to say that what I learned from these people was a devotion and dedication and a single-mindedness for finding that pearl of great price, which they have found in our beliefs and doctrines as that narrow path to eternal life that they want to have. And I want to walk with them in those certain similar beliefs that they have. I want to be able to work with their leadership. I'd like to work with their families. I'd like to work with their structure to build as a church.

I'd like to learn from their evangelism. I'd like to learn from their earnestness in doing things that, to me, were most impressive. But again, the question was, how do we become part of the United Church of God? So we explained all these things, and they're still going to think about them.

We kind of left it for further discussion. Jaime Guiardo's there, and Mario will continue that discussion. Finally, they took us, this group, took us to Posadas, and Bev and I flew home, spent six hours with Mario at the airport in Buenos Aires. This was on Monday. Most of Monday, we sat there at the airport. I'm saying I'm processing so much of this information, which was just absolutely wonderful. And I wanted to share it with you. It's more than a travelog. It's more of trying to share with you my deep personal feelings of a brotherhood with people that's more than just a ticking off of doctrinal things, but of heart and spirit and nationality and cultures and how we make all these things work together. So that's my message today. I wanted to share with you, to me, one of the most wonderful experiences that I've had in going to Latin America. It was far more, both from the Chile side and our brethren and our churches there, to the experience of the Misionis area, with people that are new to us, that want to become part of the United Church of God.