The Assemblea

Feb. 5th.  This was the day of the Assemblea, a time when the leaders of the Methodist church from throughout Paraguay met together for business, sharing how God has been at work, worship, prayer, and more.
It started off in a very interesting way.  Bishop Pablo is the first bishop of Paraguay.  He has been the leader of the church in the past but was bestowed the authority of a bishop only in the last couple of years.  And last year was a particularly hard year for him. 

Korean missionaries have been activity in Paraguay and they have one of the larger churches in Paraguay right in Asunsion.  In this past this had been a vibrant church but over time the church had become more and more internally focused.  I believe it may be a cultural thing, but at least some of the Korean leaders in Paraguay were not used to being a part of connected ministry with a Bishop as leader, so... when Bishop Pablo began asking some questions about the fiscal status of the church, some of the leaders did not like it.  And this attitude of "mind your own business" extended not only to Bishop Pablo but prior to that it extended to the governmental agencies that were in touch with the church.  For example, the church had not gotten the correct permits to build the church in the first place and had ignored things like taxes over the years.  The end result was that the government was demanding payment when the church did not have the cash to pay.  So, the government was planning to sell off all the assets of the Korean church, including the church building, a hospital built early, and more.  This would have been a huge loss to the church since only a small fraction of the overall value of the church was needed to pay back the government.  But God provided, and the church was able to pay back the government without having to sell and buildings. 

All this to say that Bishop Pablo received a lot of flack from the Korean church and others for putting some, I think, appropriate pressure on the church to pay back the government.  He was also taking some heat for changing the appointments of many of the Methodist pastors the year before in a way that surprised many people.

So, I found it very interesting Bishop Pablo started off the Assemblea by immediately addressing these criticisms, sharing the challenges he had faced this year, and stressing the need for unity and focus on Jesus Christ.  I thought he handled things well.

By the way, we started off this exceptionally hot day in the sanctuary of the Korean church with two large air conditioning units at work.  It was pretty cool when we started off.

Then we shifted to a time of worship and the lady who sang and played the piano had an incredible voice.  I really enjoyed the music.  Next, the conference secretary began to read through the notes of last year's Assemblea word for word.  After about 20 minutes of reading, Carla, the leader of children's ministries through the Methodist church, asked if every word really needed to be read.  She said out loud what I think many people were feeling.  So the secretary quickly summarized and moved on.  It was kind of a funny experience.

Then many testimonies were shared from leaders in the church and conference wide leaders about what God was doing throughout the churches.  I could follow some of what they were saying, Sue paraphrased some of what they were saying, but a good bit of it was lost to me because of the language (they were speaking in spanish).

Somewhere around this time, the electricity went off in the building.  So the sanctuary quickly got hot.  We opened up a lot of windows and things got even worse.  An interesting thing about power in Paraguay is that you can lose power in one part of a building without it affecting every part.  So we all moved downstairs into their basement were the power was on and we could use the fans and AC down there.  Then we had lunch and the power was turned off downstairs so that the electricity in the whole building could be fixed.  And by now it was getting extremely hot outside which translated to sweltering in the building.  Some Korean youth led us in worship after lunch and you could see that their shirts were drenched in sweat.  We continued some reports when finally the power came back on and so we moved back upstairs.  The problem was that only one of the 2 units started to work again. 

The rest of the afternoon included a detailed accounting of church finances and the preparation of 3 men for ordination as pastors.  I thought it was interesting that Bishop Pablo called someone forward for each man to give a testimony about the calling of God on each man's life.  What a great example for us.

Finally, when dinner time rolled around my brain began to hurt from straining to understand the Spanish.  Sue looked at me and could see my mental fatigue so we left before the Assemblea was complete.  Sue took us out to eat in an air conditioned restaurant and we went to Pizza Hut of all places.  There we found Angelica who had been at the Assemblea and was leaving early to take care of her kids.

It was nice to have air conditioning and yummy food.

I learned from this day that God is at work in mighty ways throughout Paraguay and church politics exist everywhere.  God is always good and God can work through out good and not so good ways of relating to each other.  I believe the Methodist church is growing and passionately following God.  And I believe God is using Bishop Pablo in a powerful way.