Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My name is Mario Vazquez. I have served with Compassion International as the National Office Director for about 20 years. The idea of providing people with Christ-centered and Bible-centered values in Bolivia is my life motivation.
Compassion Bolivia partners with the local evangelical church to help children. In this task, one of the main problems we faced was finding partners who have a vision and passion to work with and for children. As Compassion Bolivia, we would invest from three to five years planting the vision and passion in our partners. This is not an easy task since most churches are usually founded by adults with different motivations, which rarely include children.
The second problem we faced was ending a partnership mainly because the area is no longer a place of poverty. Generally, we faced this issue after 18-20 years of work with certain partners.
The third problem we faced is that we found out that evangelical churches didn’t have a plan of growth that would involve an infrastructure with appropriate conditions to work with and for children.
By the grace of God, we found a solution to these challenges — church planting. What does this mean? It means that those partners that, due to logistical issues could no longer continue working with Compassion, were encouraged by us to plant a church in impoverished areas, where there were no evangelical churches.
The great thing about this process is that these churches are established under the motivation of working with and for children. These churches, called Mothers Churches, are responsible for sharing the passion and instilling the vision in the new church, known as the Daughter Church. The church in general is motivated because it gets to fulfill its mission of expanding the kingdom through the planting of new churches, and so the most vulnerable populations can be supported by this partnership.
Your participation as a supporting church in this ministry is crucial and important because, thanks to your participation, the process of planting a church is drastically accelerated.
Thanks to this system there has been a growth in the last three years regarding church planting — more than the evangelical church as a whole used to have here.
It is my desire that God would give me the grace to oversee for the next 10 years the churches planted, under this motivation of working with children.
I thank God for the life of each one of you — who are builders of the kingdom of God for His glory and honor.
Mario Vazquez
National Office Director, Compassion Bolivia
