Supporting Christian Mission in Chile
Pastor Ronny Pulgar continues in his ministry to the people of Porvenir, Tierra del Fuego, visiting families and taking words of encouragement and prayer.
This requires a considerable commitment of time as the ferry takes about two and a half hours each way across the Straits of Magellan from Punta Arenas where Ronny is based.
We are sad to report that Patricia Ann Page, the wife of Chile for Christ’s founding director Arnold V Page, left this earth on August 12th, 2019, at the age of 77.
It was in August 1970 that Ann and her young Methodist minister husband asked the Lord where he wanted them to serve him next. The Lord replied by showing Ann a series of crystal-clear visions of rural scenes overlooked by snow-capped mountains, followed by a map of South America and then of Chile. A minister friend was praying with them, and the Lord told him to read Isaiah chapter 49. “I have called you to be a light to the nations,” he read, “that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” On the first page of a library book about Chile Arnold read, “The name ‘Chile’ is believed to be derived from a Mapuche word meaning ‘the end of the earth’.”
It took nine years before the Methodist Church was eventually able to station them in Chile, and once there the Chilean church sent Arnold, Ann and their four young children to Punta Arenas, a city at the southernmost tip of South America and truly at the end of the earth. Ann taught English in the British School there, while Arnold assisted a Chilean pastor, José Pulgar.
However in 1981 a serious house fire led the Methodist Church to recall the family to England. Having made many friends in Chile and having learned of their many financial needs, Arnold founded what in 1992 became the registered UK charity Chile for Christ. Thus Ann’s original prophetic vision was not only the key that unlocked the couple’s ministry to the people of Chile but eventually it led to the founding of our charity too.
Ann’s closeness to the Lord provided guidance in a number of other important decisions in the family’s life, and her prayers for individuals brought profound changes to several lives. Someone wrote recently:
Ann’s prayer for me thirty-five years ago totally changed my life and restored my faith in ways I could never have imagined. I do not believe that the light of her life will ever go out.
While Ann’s spirit remained as strong as ever, in recent years she began to find everyday life a struggle, and she finally succumbed to a terminal disease of the liver. Her spirit now rests in Christ awaiting the Day of Resurrection, and what will surely be a great reward from her beloved Lord and Saviour Jesus.
We have just received this report from our contacts in the church in Osorno.
Osorno is in a state of emergency due to contamination of drinking water. From Thursday 11-21 July the city of Osorno remained without a supply of drinking water owing to an accident which originated in the storage plant of water from the Rahue river, where 1100 litres of petrol poured in, which contaminated completely the water network of the town. About 200,000 people were without water.
This situation caused a state of chaos in the town: the supermarkets, restaurants and commercial shops had to close through not being able to rely on a water supply and churches were closed by order of the authorities.
During this time the young people of the church set up a team of response and aid to the community, transporting water from outside Osorno in special containers installed in trucks. With this we could help the inhabitants of different needy sectors of the town and deliver water to the houses of the brothers of the church in order to cover their basic needs. We were involved in this work for five days, when we delivered about 8,500 litres of clean water.
The water supply was restored for a couple of hours in the town, but it is not suitable for drinking – the water shows a blue colour (petrol) and a bad smell. We have to buy bottled water to drink and still there is no definite date for a solution to the problem.
We pray that everything will be restored quickly: to live without water in a town is very difficult, and already many people are beginning to show illnesses such as cholera, typhus and other stomach upsets.
See this news report in Chile Today.
Wonderful news from Gerd and Rosi Bergmann – their School for Transformational Leadership has been officially accepted as part of YWAM’s University of the Nations.
Gerd writes: Our school lives in the faculty of counseling and is open for all who have successfully completed a DTS and have some years of ministry and leadership experience under their belt. What does that mean? We can promote our school now through the global training catalogue of YWAM. We can also multiply this school into other parts of the world through the network of YWAM. We hope to offer future schools in Spanish and English. That would make it accessible to a wider audience. For that we would need a bilingual team. We rejoice in the door that God has opened for us to share the gospel as we train young leaders in the ways of our Lord Jesus Christ and the cross.
Great news indeed! Please continue to pray for Gerd and Rosi as they build up this training ministry in Chile and beyond.
Do you use the PrayerMate app? We now have our own feed which you can subscribe to in order to get the latest prayer requests from Chile for Christ. Find out more here.
If you have a smartphone but don’t yet use PrayerMate, do give it a try. It’s a great way to make sure you pray for all those things you would like to pray for without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task!
We are thrilled to have received two very generous donations in the last few weeks, which have come just as we were praying for more resources to meet current needs in Chile. One of them was from a long term supporter who sold a house and gave a gift to Chile for Christ from the proceeds. The other was a legacy when one of our longest-standing supporters left us a bequest in her will. We are so grateful for these gifts and pray that the Lord will help us to use them wisely in support of His work.
There are so many things going on in the church here. These pictures show:
Rodrigo Pérez Pinela has sent us these pictures of the Youth Camp that took place recently, in a place near a lake. They met to study the Bible and spend a weekend together. It’s really encouraging to see so many young people engaged with the Word and work of God.
