GROWTH CURVE—The congregation in Villa Lobos, a Guatemala City suburb, started nearly five years ago with the help of longtime missionaries Dr. Mike and Sandy Kadera. They served in an auxiliary position while keeping up their other outreaches such as dental care and help for the Casa Bernabé orphanage until this year when they took on the task of presiding over the Villa Lobos pastoral team as senior pastors.

God’s Way Is Best
    The Lord and I had an informal agreement—so I thought—that he could send me to Africa or anywhere else in the world but that being a church minister wouldn’t be a part of it.  
    I’ve learned since then that whenever you tell the Lord that you don’t want to do something you will usually end up having to do that very thing.  And that is exactly what my experience has been on the mission field.
    As I look back over more than 30 years of service in Guatemala, I can see how the Lord has prepared my wife, Sandy, and I for the pastoral ministry we now have with the Verbo Villa Lobos church on the southern outskirts of Guatemala City. I am the presiding elder and Sandy is in charge of praise and worship and women’s ministries.  

As Verbo Ministries in Ecuador passes its twenty-fifth anniversary our churches are experiencing accelerating church growth and ministry expansion in the middle of a nation-wide awakening to the Gospel. There are more than 2,000 believers in the Verbo Quito South congregation alone, and it’s only one of four in the capital city.