It's All About Family
Working together to build a unified, extended-family network in the Latin American civilization and around the world.
Author’s Note:
These stories do not represent an exhaustive account of all the conversations and experiences I had at the 2025 Latin American civilization symposium (quite the fancy name for a bunch of church network leaders eating, laughing, and talking together for five days. What can I say, we like to have fun while we contemplate the serious stuff.); nor is it an exhaustive accounting of all the leaders I encountered there, or their situations. Instead, these essays are a smattering of some those things, mostly based on my own intuition and interest. (It’s my prerogative. After all, I am the author.)
I have organized my original essay into seven short stories about various people, situations, and circumstances I encountered.
Ready Player Juan
Butch and Sundance
Medical Missions
A Quiet Man
The Honeymooners
Street Cred
Stop Wait… Wait… Waiting… Start Becoming Faithful Leaders
I have also recorded an audio version of this post. (Which some of you are listening to right now.) With the audio recording I can add emphasis and inflection that is difficult to communicate in writing and with the written piece I can organize my thoughts and share images. Sometimes two are better than one. This is one of those times. If you hear me pause, it’s because I wanted a little dead air in between each section, not because I’m getting old and find myself falling asleep at odd times. I edited all of those out.
Introduction
Last week, in the Dallas area, I participated in a four-day gathering of leaders from church networks from across the Latin American civilization, along with leaders who are planting churches among diaspora communities in North America. James Riley, from BILD International was there to provide some training in how to use the BILD resources to shape churches and train leaders. And Mario and Amuy Monroy were there shaping the entire time into a fruitful dialogue with strategic planning, resulting in a unified network. In addition to James and the ethnic leaders, there were several of us who function as coworkers with the BILD team, basically as an extension of their team, but who fund ourselves from our own self-enterprising work and are supported by our local church communities. We joined this gathering to encourage these leaders; to reinforce the teaching and conversations that were happening; to better understand our own role in developing a global network of churches; and to deepen our relationships with one another as we work together across this network for the purpose of shaping our own church communities around the patterns and principles from the book of Acts.
What I had not anticipated, was that I would be getting a two-for-one deal. (Cue ABBA’s The Visitors, track 7.) As it happened, we created a mini-North American summit nested, as an intermittent road trip, within the Latin American summit. The quartet of us from the North American churches found ourselves engaged in a series of side conversations about our own church situations and lives, as well as in an oddly satisfying combination of screwball fun (think hanging out with your best friends in college, minus the beer pong) which together resulted in a remarkable, deepening affection for one another.
Through all of this, each of us were strengthened and built up.