Greetings, Saludos, Bendições and Bonjou

Greetings, Saludos, Bendições and Bonjou from Costa Rica. I trust that our loving God will bless you, your families and your ministries in this upcoming year. 

2010 was a fascinating year of changes for many of us. As you can see from the greeting above, although we live in a primarily Spanish-speaking world, we work in four languages in our area alone.

January 12, 2011, marks a year since the devastating earthquake in Haiti that resulted in a new field for our area. In 2010, we witnessed God’s hand and followed His leading in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. In 2011, we expect to see an international team of missionaries come together, committed to seeing healthy churches multiplied in Haiti – a country that has been without hope for so long.

Two veteran missionary families (the Hillis and Oates families) retired from ReachGlobal after many years of service. We rejoice in the testimony they are to God’s faithfulness.

At the same time, we welcomed a few new missionaries to RG LA – the Jenkins family, Melissa Putney, the De Marcos and the Wilsons. Others entered the on-boarding and support team building pipeline – the Ziels and Ashlee Nuest. God has been gracious in planting a vision for LA missions in people’s hearts. 

Roles changed in 2010 as well. A number of our staff have seen their focus move to new arenas and now serve from different places. Through these moves, we’ve extended several relationships with other organizations that share our heart for church multiplication. For example, as the Porters worked with a new partner ministry in the Dominican Republic, their relationship proved fortuitous as we launched into Haiti.

Communications became a new focus for the area. As Melissa Putney stepped into the role of Communications Coordinator for Latin America, she spoke with most of you as well as many supporting churches in the United States in an effort to better understand our communications needs. It was quickly apparent that we need to communicate RG work in LA better with you, our “on the ground” staff. Melissa and I have been strategizing about the best way to accomplish that, and we hope you’ve already seen some improvement. 

This year we plan to communicate with you more frequently, sharing area news and God-sightings. We will use this RGLA Staff Broadcast blog as the primary means of communication. It is important that you follow the updates. [Please visit the blog to set up an RSS feed. For more information on RSS feed and instructions on setting it up, go here.]