The following is a testimonial from Pastor Felipe Trujillo in Medellín, Colombia.
I was a pastor in a Pentecostal church. A year-and-a-half ago, we made a decision as a church to focus on being more entirely Bible-centered. This has been a process that’s taken many years, relationships, and resources.
I believe it was at the university where I first got to know Poiema. The Poiema team would go to talks and seminars, and they started to bring their books. In 2017, I was given the book What Is a Healthy Church?, and I started to read it with some of the brothers in my church. The topic of a healthy church really struck me. So, I began to read more, and I thought, “I want to have a healthy church; I want to be a leader of a healthy church.”
Still part of our old group of churches, we began to invite guest speakers to preach in our church. One of these pastors invited me to his church to learn more about how a healthy church works.
Then came the pandemic, and it was hard to do anything. But two years later, my friend Juan Sánchez, who had preached at our church before, came to preach again. David Adams came that day, too, and set up the Poiema bookstand in our church.
The women of the church found a book called The Gospel-Centered Life. My wife showed me the book, and I found it in the library and read it. “Ah!” I thought, “This is a great book for people new to the church.” We knew we needed this kind of material, but what we had tried before didn’t fit with the context of our community. So this was great! Now, we’ve used this book for a year and read it with those who want to be baptized and with people who come to our church from other churches.
Through Poiema we’ve also seen the gift of Bibles and other literature for the church.
The latest thing we’re doing is focusing on gospel-centered marriage. On the last Sunday of each month, we meet with married couples and couples with the intention of marriage. We’re reading a book together, and each meeting I give an introduction, then we break into small groups with mentor couples, and they discuss the questions from the book. We’ve seen great fruit from this. We had about fifty-five couples attend last month!
So for us, in many ways in the life of our church over the last few years, Poiema has been a great blessing. I recently told the church, “We are a biblical church, and a biblical church is a church that reads. This is no longer optional.”
I’m a seminary student, and most of the books I have time to read these days are for my studies. I’m trying really hard to learn English because many of the books required for my program are only available in English. My daughters speak English, and sometimes they help me. But there’s a real need for more academic resources in Spanish. I pray that God opens doors for Poiema.
