Nashville, Tennessee

April has been a busy month for us. We were invited to attend the Covenant Church´s ¨Church Planter Assessment Center¨ in Nashville, Tennessee as part of our preparation for returning to Colombia to work in the area of church planting and leadership development.

Let me back up! Julio and I have known that our time in the USA would be temporary as we both feel called to live and serve in Latin America. We´ve been in the process of applying to be project missionaries with the Covenant in Colombia, and in March we were officially approved! It´s still a little ways off as Julio will finish school before we leave, but we have a goal of heading back to Colombia in the early fall of 2011. We have made a 5 year commitment to work in the areas of leadership development and church planting. We have developed a project alongside the Colombian Covenant Church that we will be implementing in Colombia.

So, again, as part of our preparation for that we attended this assessment center. It´s a 3-day intense experience of evaluation, interviews, group activities, etc. For people considering planting a new church with the Covenant, they must be recommended by this assessment center. We were there with about 20 other people who were being assessed. While the days and nights were long, and even the preparation leading up to the three days was grueling (different personality tests/inventories, papers describing our call to ministry, preparing a sermon, etc), we really appreciated our time there. We loved meeting the other people and sharing stories and experiences. We loved sharing about Colombia and what great things are happening there. We were actually able to spend some time with friends who were there from Colombia. The times with the counselor and being interviewed by the assessors were insightful and Julio and I feel like we know ourselves better after all the testing we've done in the past couple months, then we ever have before.

It was a really affirming experience for us and we were able to connect with some great people. It renewed our passion and vision for seeing new churches planted and new leaders trained. We'd love to talk more about it with anyone who wants to know more.

With friends from Colombia who were at the assessment center

Julio enjoying some of the sights of Nashville

Katie enjoying the ice cream :)

More friends from the assessment center

While we were in Tennessee, Sam was back in Chicago with Grandma and they had a great three days. We were so grateful to know he was in good hands and enjoy the time we had just as a couple. We were very excited to get back to our little boy after the three days.

Sam in his sailboat - thanks to a creative grandma

Enjoying his icecream - just like his mom