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...

In March 2021, Pep y Silvia participated online along with 25 other couples in the S.O.M. (Seminario de Orientación al Matrimonio), our pre-marriage weekend conference offered to engaged couples and recently married couples throughout Spain. In April of 2022, although they had a previously scheduled commitment, they participated through video by sharing the benefits they received through their experience with the S.O.M. Because of their incredible communication abilities as well as their maturity and love for the Lord, we challenged them to consider giving one of the talks at the most recent S.O.M. What a great decision that was. There were 12 couples this year participating on-site in Barcelona AND simultaneously online. Pep and Silvia were amazing, not only in their talk about Marriage and Society in the 21st Century, but also in their servant hearts, connecting with couples and serving until the very end of the conference and then getting into their car to make the 3-hour drive back...

When I joined the LDHR team (Leadership Development and Human Resources) in 2014, my desire from the very beginning was to help pioneer our "department" of Leadership Development, because at the time, nothing specific and intentional existed to develop leaders here in Agape Spain. As I have waited patiently for an opportunity to contribute to this essential area of any company, especially a discipleship-making ministry, I have poured my energies into similar strategies, including our New Staff Training Program (pictured above with our first class of New Staff and Trainers in Feb 2016) and our Internship Program. And stilll, my desire and commitment to specifically focus on developing LEADERS and raising up NEW LEADERS has not waivered. Finally, after many months of prayer and conversations with our leadership, I will begin to work with Garrick Roegner (pictured far right, back row) this winter and spring to create a new path for development for our current nation...

grow·ing pains   (gr ng)  plural noun 1.  Pains in the limbs and joints of children or adolescents, often attributed to rapid growth but arising from various unrelated causes. 2.  Emotional difficulties that occur during adolescence. 3.  Problems that arise in the initiation or enlargement of an enterprise. Recently several supporters have asked the question about my role in ministry here in Spain. The truth is that it has been slowly evolving for the last 5-6 years. At times it has been difficult to define and even more difficult to pinpoint and share what God has been doing all around me.  I'd like to try now to illustrate what I understand God to be doing in Agape Spain during a season of incredible growth for this ministry. I'd like to do in through a Bible story and some organizational numbers. There is a story from Exodus 18 that illustrates the strain of growing pains and that "a-ha" moment in Moses' life where he realizes that...

image: newparentinfo.com When I arrived in Spain 12 years ago, the Agape staff family was made up of senior staff in their 40´s and 50´s and a new, younger generation of singles and young married couples. In the last 5 years, there has been an explosion of new marriages and a new generation of staff babies being born, which means full-time staff women becoming full-time staff moms. In Agape Spain, there are now more than a dozen staff moms with children between 0-3 years of age! As for any mom, their lives are changing in countless ways. Focus shifts. Sleep deprivation comes. A once-clear vision and solid schedule can be knocked out of whack. A whole new learning curve accompanies this great bundle of joy given by the Lord. These changes also affect ministry and entire ministry teams. How does a young staff mom regain direction and focus for personal life and for ministry while balancing the requirements of being a full-time mom? Agape gives staff moms the freedom to concentr...

My first assignment in Spain was at the University of Granada in the city of Granada. 4 years of prayer walks and planting gospel seeds and investing in the lives of students and participating with the churches there were not for naught. While my contribution was just a drop in the bucket, it is truly the Lord who begins and carries on his work. "After all, what is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants who helped you to believe. Each one had a role given to them by the Lord: I planted, Apollos watered, but God made it grow. Because of this, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anythign, but the only one who is anything is God who makes it grow. The one who plants and the one who waters work together, but each one will receive their own reward for their own labor. We are God´s co-workers, and you are God´s field, God´s building." --1 Corinthians 3:5-9 A very special family stepped in to lead the minsitry in Granada in 2005, carrying on what God start...

June has been a busy month so far. In our free time, we´ve been surviving the summer heat in Spain, searching for a playschool for the fall, visiting with acquaintances from the park....but mostly I´ve been focused on gathering resources and preparing teams and materials for our National Staff Conference which will be held Oct 28-Nov 1, 2011 in Girona, Spain. Last fall our national director asked me if I would consider coordinating this event. I had coordinated the National Staff Conference in 2008 in Valencia and was honored to be asked. One of the special tools we will be using during the conference is a personal "home-made" video created by several staff throughout Spain about how God called them to full-time ministry. I´ve been challenging and coaching Spanish staff and volunteers to present their special stories as a testimony to God´s faithfulness and  as inspiration to others. I´ve included some of my favorites here below. Although they are in Spanish, I think y...

This season of time at home with Aaron is giving me the chance to step back and reflect on life and ministry and gives me a unique perspective on ministry going on around me. Even though I´m limited in my ability to accompany staff in the field, it´s been great to be able to talk through important ministry truths with various staff women from week-to-week. Isabel Fernandez (pictured on the right) came for a visit last week. She´s an amazing woman: a wife, a mother of 3 kids, co-director of Agape´s orphanage in Portugal for 10 years and now Agape Spain´s National Associate Director. She dedicates most of her time to connecting with and developing the Spanish staff women in the country.  However, the last time Isa came to visit, I was still in pajamas, I had slept very little the night before and Aaron would not stop crying. It was nice to have a visitor but a bit humbling in my role as a mom. I was sure that the word "clueless" could be read on my weary face and I...

The phone rang this afternoon. "Hey Jill, have you got a few minutes to talk?" I had just finished eating and Aaron was still sleeping. "Sure," I said, welcoming  the opportunity to visit with a staff friend between bottle feedings. It was an international staff woman needing to process some thoughts, concerns about administrative decisions, uncertainties about the future for ministry in her city. Surfing the cultural differences in a national organization can be a challenge at times. In our ministry here we all have the same heart--to see Spaniards come to know Jesus...but there are situations where the WAY we go about things is different. That can be confusing at times. It´s helpful to have someone to help interpret the situation, a fellow compatriot who has gone before us. Even though I´m not on the frontlines of campus ministry in Spain at the moment, I have logged quite a few years here. Not only have I learned something about the culture, but I´ve also g...

One day last week I was working "on location" on a mountain top. Yes...a literal mountain top. (Sometimes I just marvel at the opportunities I have and often wonder, "How in the world would I put what I do on a resumé?") At the end of May staff leaders from all over the world will come to Spain, actually to Montserrat (about 6 miles from my little pueblo), to an event hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ, Internationl. They are coming to discuss reaching the large cities around the globe with the gospel. "Global Cities Summit" (or something along those lines) is the title of the gathering. Their planning team, based in Orlando needed help with some preparation on the Spain side and somehow this job ended up on my desk. I've helped to facilitate letters of invitation and permission for visas for specific people coming from India and from Ghana. I don´t really mind. Events like these help keep alive my vision for reaching the world. They also help me...

Just a few weeks left and it will be time for our national staff retreat...so my virtual conference team and I are busy working on details. Sometimes it is challenging to get work done when we're spread out all over the country. It can cause any good missionary to dread the cyberspace commute to work. But as is often the case, the "super Holy Spirit vision" can intervene and change the way we look at things, no matter what corner of the globe we're seated in. Today was no exception. One of staff women "skyped" ( Skype is a telephone/chat computer program that makes long-distance communication as easy as pie!) this morning to ask if I'd received in my mailbox the last important mail-out that was sent last week. We'd worked hard on this mail-out: the words were crafted just right, the grammar was reviewed and edited, special maps and directions of how to arrive were pasted together, special paper was used, the mail-out date was very specific..... ...

Did Batman ever have seasons of adjustment in his career? Were there ever moments of confusion? Of course I wouldn't really compare myself to a superhero such as Batman....but my life is similar in that I face challenges every day and in small ways I can make choices to be a super hero or just another face in the crowd. I have been going through a season of re-adjustments. After 3 months of silence, I've jumped into my Bat mobile and am back on the information highway. During these 3 months, I've continued to connect with Spaniards, Christian and non-Christian, to eat together, to address important issues, to drink coffee together, to go on walks together. The day-in, day-out tasks of my work have not changed much. I pray for opportunities to talk to people about Jesus and I offer Him my hands and feet to minister to the people around me. At the same time, I've made a technical shift from being an American employee of Campus Crusade for Christ to being a Spanish ...