Meeting with Pastors

07/10/11

Meeting with Pastors

On Monday of this week as I was fasting and praying the Holy Spirit spoke to me to hold a meeting of pastors, leaders, and friends from different churches to share the vision of GGM and see how we could work together to bring GGM to Brazil. Thus, much of this week has been spent getting the contact information of leaders, calling them, and inviting them to this meeting.
Today (Sunday) I visited two very influential churches here in Goiania, Sal da Terra and Videira. The former is very respected for how dynamic, mission-minded, and globally minded they are even though it is a smaller church of some 500 members or so. Videira is respected because it is the fastest growing church in Goiania and perhaps in Brazil. They began around the year 2000 and they’re mother church is around 20,000 members, they several more congregations in Goiania, they have a church in every state capital in Brazil, and they are attempting to plant a church in every city of Brazil.
So this morning I went to Sal da Terra. It was in an upper-class neighborhood where all the homes are mansions and they live in gated communities very similar to the U.S. They had the fanciest free breakfast I have ever seen at a church in my life and the sermon was awesome, full of deep theological concepts. After the service, I met with Pr. Paulo Junior, the senior pastor. I was amazed that he gave me his undivided attention after for about 20-25 minutes. I briefly explained to him the vision of GGM and my desire to bring GGM to Brazil. He gave me great advice about bringing GGM to Brazil.
He told me that, first of all, I need to get connected with Tribal Generation, which is an international network of crazy young leaders based out of Uberlandia, MG, Brazil. They focus on reaching urban cities for Christ and especially urban sub-cultures. He told me about their meetings in Brazil, but also that they have meetings in the U.S. too. I needed to find out where and when these are and go to them. Secondly, they have a one-year school for training church planters. Perfect! Exactly what I want to do in the U.S. and they already have it here. Thus, GGM Brazil will already have a place to send their preachers to after their six-month trip and I could learn from this already existing school and bring the same model to the U.S. Furthermore, he said that there is a DCPI, which is a two to three month course after the one year training where you learn different church planting models and strategies. The one year is more content and the model training is more hands-on. He told me that the model training was brought to Brazil by an American, so I should research it and find it in the U.S.
I didn’t invite Pr. Paulo Junior to the meeting because he is a very busy man and he already helped me so much in our 20-minute conversation.
In the afternoon, I bought some things for Brooke at the Ferra do Sol. It was a lot of fun. I love Brooke so much, I miss her, and I can’t wait to see her!
I went to Videira for their 5 p.m. service at the Praca da Biblia campus. IT was a great service with a super powerful message about Jesus being the cornerstone upon which the church is built. It was soooo good! I was supposed to have talked with the main pastor, but he is on vacation right now, so, instead, I spoke with Pr. Jose Carlos, one of the assistant pastors and also the pastor who preached this service.
Therefore, at the end of the meeting I went up to him and introduced myself. We talked for a bit and he became very interested in getting to know me more and GGM more. He apologized because he couldn’t meet with me another day because he was also going on vacation the next day. However, he connected me with one of his main disciples and I am going to meet with him tomorrow morning at the Videira prayer meeting at 7 a.m.
After the service, God moved on my heart to preach the Gospel to two men at a pit-stop. It turned out that they were both taxi drivers waiting for someone to ask them for a ride. I confidently walked up to them and began our conversation. I directly confronted them with life after death and the Gospel. They both said that they have no idea where they are going to go when they die, but they hoped for Heaven since they prayed and did their part here on earth. They seemed to be deeply thinking about everything I said to them and the Holy Spirit was totally flowing through me. I had no hear at all. It was amazing! They had to leave to keep working, but we ended our conversation with me challenging them to give their lives 100% to Jesus and they agreed that they needed to.