Ministry to Business as Mission

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I have not been able to write on this blog in the last five months. Our family has grown and with the growth come new challenges for us! The biggest challenge is managing time and returning to work in the mountains! It has been difficult to keep this blog up to date. The concept of writing doesn't seem like a hard thing to do, but it is! Especially if you are not a writer, like Jari and I. 

Either way, here we are February of 2025! A month has passed already for the year and we still have some strategic planning to do. We also have to update or accounting records and budgets! Afterall, we cant teach financial stewardship classes and not practice what we preach! These are some of some of the behind the scene things that keep our ministry work in operation. We are a small operation, three people dedicated to helping the Nicaraguan Church make disciples in their communities. Sending out marketplace ministers! 

I made a trip to Jinotepe to meet with our Ministerio la Semilla partners. We spent the last three days doing some review of last year's ministry impact and some planning for this year too. It was good to connect again and spend some time as a team, working towards one goal, working in agriculture for the glory of God! 

Ministerio la Semilla

Here in Jinotega, we work out of a storage room in the back of our garage. I turned this room into an office area where we plan our ministry activities and regroup! Every Monday morning we have team Bible devotions. This is a traditional  practice I brought to us since our days at the Nehemiah Center. We even have full bathroom in the garage space! This has been our work home for the last three years. Working out of the garage is great, it allows me to be closer to home and my family. 

As our work is blessed and we continue to expand in our region, and so the garage is not big enough to keep us supplied. It is close to a one stall size in the USA. I need to build a shed, to move some personal items out of the garage so we can have more space for seed and fertilizers for our agricultural ministry. God willing, we will have our property for Finca Avodah soon! We are going to be registering a business soon, and need a license from the agricultural sanitation ministry to be able to sell our seeds and other products. I am excited to get this business formed! We will be completely rooted in the Nicaraguan culture and society. We will experience the same challenges businesses face here. The same bureaucracy, corruption and competition challenges! What will we do when we are being cheated, or even extorted? How will we respond to these new kind of barriers? 

We have had instances of people trying to cheat us before, and we responded in the best way we thought of how to show love, other times to walk away, others to call it out in front of the person and still do business with them hoping to be an influence of the Gospel in their lives. However, these kind of people tend to not respond to our calls or say they cant help us anymore. 

In the first session of our foundational workshop in Discipling Marketplace Leaders we show a slide that says, "The opposite to poverty is not wealth, it is justice." We are participants in bringing God's justice to the world, and specifically in the marketplace. Please pray we are able to be ambassadors of justice! 

2 Corinthians 5:20


Location: Jinotega, Nicaragua

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