EBM MASA Community, Hilfe für Lateinamerika, Pastor Carlos Waldow

Church partnership

By signing a partnership treaty in Wiesbaden, the Wiesbaden Baptist Church with its 270 members engaged in a partnership across the Atlantic with the Baptist Church in Curahuasi.

Peru (Curahuasi ) ─ Germany (Wiesbaden)

This mission church in the southern Peruvian Andes, which was founded only 2 ½ years ago, is growing by roughly 20% per year. The aim of the partnership, which is coordinated by MASA, is regular contact and sharing of information, prayer for one another and also regular financial support.

This intensive cooperation of the two churches started in the wake of the foundation of the Diospi Suyana  mission hospital, located in Curahuasi as well. This hospital was founded by two former members of the Wiesbaden Baptist Church, who are now in charge of it.

The young church in Curahuasi is experiencing amazing growth. God is definitely at work here! At present, it has 50 members. In 2010 a chapel is to be built so that the church will have a “home” of its own. With MASA support, the plot has already been purchased. There are also plans for a “Samaritans’ House” (as they call it in Curahuasi), so as to provide accommodation to the hospital patients’ relatives, most of whom are very poor and cannot afford staying in a guesthouse. In this way, the church wants to make a big diaconal contribution.

The Church in Curahuasi is part of a church-planting project among the Quechua of this region, which has now come to comprise 30 mission churches. Our MASA missionary, Adrián Campero (Abancay) has been working there for many years. At the most recent baptism alone, which was held by three mission stations in this region, there were 74 converts, 15 of whom were from Curahuasi. In 2009, altogether 150 brothers and sisters were baptized.

In all of this work of God’s, the Church in Wiesbaden takes a live interest. It is a source of enrichment and opens their eyes time and again for the wonderful ways in which God is at work in this world, reaching also to the remote regions of Peru. Likewise, the Church in Curahuasi is being blessed, knowing that in faraway Germany there are brothers and sisters praying for them, sharing their problems and concerns and supporting them in their mission work.

Could this example possibly be a first step, motivating further churches to partner with others? This would be a blessing, indeed!

Pastor Carlos Waldow

---