Small Steps. Big Faith.

Penny Saunders is a long-term staff woman from Canada who joined Agape Spain during the pandemic, first part-time and later full-time as assistant to our national director in our national office in Valencia. Although Penny has been on staff many years, we decided to go use the New Staff Training material to help her improve her language skills. She and I have been meeting every week to practice speaking on a different topic, using and developing her Spanish vocabulary.  It has taken a while for Penny to feel comfortable in our ministry here in Spain....but over time we have seen her open up and also develop her capacity as a leader.  While she has served faithfully in this role, the large part of her ministry experience has been working as a teacher in Christian schools in Russia, Moldova and Madrid, Spain. Her dream is now to start a new Christian school in Valencia. It is in this context that teachers can teach students a Christian worldview as well as present the gospel wit...

This spring has brought numerous opportunities to interact with our new staff. On this occasion, Donna Cannella (pictured front row, 2nd from right) and I invited 5 new staff, 2 interns and their trainers from a variety of Agape ministries to join us near Barcelona to cast vision for them about the value and purpose of ministry training. In our organization, Ágape prioritizes faith, growth and lasting fruit. The " Capacitación de nuevos coordinadores " (CNC) (or "New Staff Training" (NST)) exists to create a space to develop life change and ministry effectiveness. Our aim is to equip our staff not only in skills (hands), but also with knowledge (head) and attitude (heart).  At the CNC Orientation, we begin this 2-year training process by tackling together the first 3 of 39 topics. Another important component to the training includes an intentional relationship between the trainer (the director or some other senior staff) and trainee (new staff member). During the CN...