Visiting Barrio Infanta

We had a very enjoyable visit this morning at the Iglesia Evangelica Bautista de Barrio Infanta.  This was a church that we helped plant in our first term of missionary service when we were living in Mendoza.  They weren´t a lot of the old-timers present from those years (more than 20 years ago now), but we did reconnect with several.  The pastor introduced us at the start of the service and then asked me to share a few words of greeting.  I also was asked to pray a prayer of blessing over the church at the conclusion of the service.

They built a school about a year ago that meets on the church property and have about 250 students enrolled, many of whom aren´t Christians so it´s a great outreach opportunity.  They`ve also begun construction of a sanctuary that we had planned to build many years ago and were frustrated by some major hold-ups in getting approval from the city and then by a period of hyper-inflation that saw building materials rise almost 800% in costs in a one year period.  

The biggest blessing of the morning was seeing and visiting with Nancy Sanchez.  She was instrumental in working with the children and youth back in those early days.  Her mother, Doña Ramona and Laura de Rebollo, the widow of the former pastor, were the key prayer warriors who helped initiate home Bible studies that gave birth to the church.  We were thrilled to see her and to be able to spend a few minutes at the end of the service visiting with her.