Intensive Course in Puerto Libertador

This past weekend I traveled to Puerto Libertador, Colombia to teach the second of five modules in a diploma program in Biblical Interpretation. Here’s a not so brief rundown of the experience and the reality of this small Colombian town that I got to know firsthand.

Center of Puerto Libertador. The church I taught at is the white building in the back center-left.

The Church Context

Puerto Libertador is a city of around 15,000 people (according to the pastor) with a number of smaller villages or settlements nearby (which are called veredas in Spanish). There's quite a bit of agriculture in the region, as well as mining (an activity that has caused significant environmental issues, such as sedimentation of the river). The temperature seems to reach the upper 90s most of the time, making for a strong desire to do nearly nothing in the afternoon!

View of the city from my hotel at sunrise.

The denomination with the greatest influence in the region is the AIEC, or Association of Evangelical Churches of the Carribean, a denomination whose origins go back to mission work through Latin America Mission. The course was held at the central church in Puerto Libertador, a church that has been around for 55 years and has planted churches in all of the surrounding areas in the region. Even in the smallest of outlying villages, they have a church in nearly every one. This central church has around 450 regular attenders, a sign of its vitality in a town of its size.

The pastor of the central church, Pastor Olger, is a graduate of the one year online post-graduate program of the Biblical Seminary of Colombia in Ethics and Christian Thought. He has a passion for the Bible and hopes to study in the Master’s program in Biblical Interpretation we are developing here at the seminary once it gets approved by the government, as he really wants to learn Greek and Hebrew and go deeper in biblical study.  

He is also the most organized pastor I have ever met. In the second half of each year he sets aside time to pray about the church’s needs and determine which themes need to be covered in the teaching for the coming year and how he can design series of expositional sermons to address these areas. He then spends a great deal of time studying the passages or books he plans to preach on, prepares sermons for the books as a whole, and prepares a book with all of his sermon outlines for the coming year which each church member brings with them on Sunday. This year, for example, they are spending around two months studying the second coming of Christ and will be studying the book of James, among other themes.

With Pastor Olger and his wife.

He told me that one of his big concerns is that most pastors here in Colombia do not take the time to really study the Bible in depth. One of his goals is to begin doing this annual sermon planning in conjunction with other pastors in the city and region so that all of the churches of the denomination preach about the same topics each year and those with more education can help those who have less. But, he said, there is a big difficulty—a lot of the pastors don’t have sufficient Bible training to be able to participate meaningfully in such planning or be able to understand the results of the work that others do in researching a biblical book. So, for example, if a pastor was given sermon notes that related the historical context of a passage to the message of the passage, the pastor needs to know what to do with that information.

This is where our involvement as a seminary comes into play. Pastor Olger, as a key regional leader, decided it would be a good idea to have a diploma in Biblical Interpretation with the seminary to help the pastors and other ministry leaders in the region learn how to be better readers of the Bible. Many don’t have much educational background, but he has sought to provide practical tools that can help them in learning to faithfully preach and teach from the Bible. The diploma program that the seminary offers really is a supplement to another theological education program that nearly all pastors in the AIEC are involved with called CIPEP, the Corporación Instituto para la Educación Pastoral (Institute Corporation for Pastoral Education). CIPEP is an online program run through the AIEC to bring basic Bible training to the pastors and ministry leaders throughout their denomination. Nonetheless, Pastor Olger saw a need for more training particularly in how to interpret the Bible with a lot of hands-on application applying the concepts to specific texts, so he sought our help.

The Students

For this module of the diploma program there were 45 students in attendance, mostly pastors, but a few other ministry leaders as well. I got to spend time with a couple of the students from the central church outside of the class setting and it was inspiring to hear their stories and the ways they are using their gifts to serve.

Jaime, for example, is 30 years old and serves as a worship leader and a regional coordinator for classes with CIPEP. He grew up very poor, as the youngest of seven children with no father in the picture. But he worked hard to get ahead, taught himself to play the keyboard, and eventually studied a short program in keyboard in the city of Montería. He also built his own house while engaged, got married, and he and his wife are expecting a child.

With Jaime at the church.

José Luis is another student I got to spend time with and is involved preaching occasionally at the central church in Puerto Libertador. He also is very excited to be one of the key local leaders that will work with Compassion International in opening a Center for Holistic Development in one of the underdeveloped neighborhoods just outside of town. They already have 200 kids lined up with sponsors, they just need to build the center later this year and begin ministry. This will be a tremendous blessing to the region considering the serious socioeconomic needs there and the strong Christian presence in the region to provide a solid spiritual support for the sponsored kids.

Eating ice cream with José Luis's family; here pictured is his son Alejo.

The Course

The module I taught covered the interpretation of different literary genres of the Bible. Due to various factors, including the heat, we had to abbreviate the course from 16 hours to about 12 or 13, requiring some last minute modifications. As with any new course, some things worked well and others didn’t click so easily.

Students working on a group activity putting into practice what they learned.

Some activities that worked well:

• Discussions of the impact of the use of similes, metaphors, and parallelism in the psalms, using Ps 102 and Ps 57 as examples. (For example, to see how big a difference parallelism makes in communicating the message, try reading the first line of each verse in Ps 57 without the rest of the lines. The message is basically coherent, but has nothing of the same power. )
• Looking at what we can learn about the problem that provoked the writing of Colossians by studying Col 2:8-23 and then using this information to go back and interpret other aspects of the letter in the light of this historical context.
• The importance of historical context for interpreting prophecies directed toward the people of the prophet’s generation, using Isaiah 1:10-20 as a case study.
• Looking at examples that show that most Proverbs don’t function as absolute promises. For example, what do we do with Prov 14:11: “The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the tent of the upright will flourish”? In a country where over 10% of the population has been internally displaced, it’s essential to see that these are not absolute promises for earthly life, but point to God’s role in bringing about justice, something that will only happen fully when Christ returns, but that sometimes is experienced in the here and now. Likewise, we looked at Prov 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”, a verse that highlights the importance of childhood in character formation, but can often lead to a false sense of guilt when people who did their best to raise their kids to follow God see their children abandon their faith.

Students working on another group activity.

Brainstorming problems that Paul responded to in Colossians 2:8-23.

Some areas where students struggled:

• I was surprised that students had a bit of a tough time with the concept of identifying the structure of biblical narratives, showing the antecedents to the story, the conflict that begins the action of the story, the intensification of the action, the climax, and the resolution.
• Interpretation of prophecies for the distant future (distant from the perspective of the prophet). As was expected with these prophecies, the example we looked at from Micah 5:1-7 raised a lot more questions than we could easily resolve. For example, what do we do with the fact that 5:2 is a Messianic prophecy, but 5:5-6 talks about this king providing protection from the Assyrians, a people that no longer existed as such at Jesus’ first coming? I see this as a symbolic way of talking about how Jesus provides protection against any enemy of the people of God, since the Assyrians were the prime enemy of Israel in Micah’s day. Yet there are a lot of tricky hermeneutical issues involved that obviously couldn’t be addressed in an hour.

Visiting Pastor Moisés and his wife Narcisa at their home in one of the veredas outside Puerto Libertador. He is a seminary graduate who also attended the course and is involved in pastoral training through CIPEP.

Thank you to those who prayed for me throughout the course! The heat didn’t end up being as big an issue for me as expected, and overall it was a very positive experience. I also got to preach at the central church on Sunday, using a sermon I had previously preached at my church in Medellín on what we learn through the book of Jonah about God’s merciful character and how we ought to respond to that character by participating in God's mission.

Sunday worship service at the central church.

One last note: As can be seen by these photos, the airport I flew into was the smallest I have ever seen in my life (it just opened in December). They had no X-ray scanner, scanned my ID but wrote out my boarding pass by hand, and had no flight attendants on the 17 passenger plane. Add to that a harrowing descent into Medellín and it made for quite the unique flying experience.

The entirety of the airport building in the town of Montelíbano, Colombia.

Boarding the tiny plane to fly back to Medellín.