Going to Guatemala!

Hey everyone,

As many of you know, for the last two years New Denver Church has been developing a partnership with a church in the small Guatemalan village of San Pablo la Laguna (to read more about our decision to work in Guatemala check out the New Denver website). Our strategy is to establish a relationship with this church and their pastor, Antonio Moxnay, in order to contribute to lasting change over a long period of time. We are focusing all our efforts on this one village.

Last year I had the opportunity to take my first trip to San Pablo and was moved both by the heart of pastor Antonio for the people in this village and by the physical and spiritual needs he is trying to address. This June I will be heading back to Guatemala with a few other people from New Denver, including my seven-year-old son Ethan.

Ethan has asked us about going to Guatemala several times, and we always told him he had to wait until he was older. When it became clear that this was going to be a smaller trip, I began to feel like maybe this was the right time to take him. As Kate and I talked about it and prayed about it, we felt like this might be a great opportunity. Our hope is that the experience of experiencing another culture and being exposed to people who have far less materially than we do will leave a lasting impression on Ethan. Click here to read the note Ethan wrote to share about our trip.

There are two projects we want to accomplish on this trip. First, we want to spend time meeting with families in San Pablo and getting to know them and their specific needs. Our hope is that by collecting this data we can begin to get an idea of some of the macro needs of the community and how we can best serve them on future trips. Our plan is also to photograph each family for this database and to have pictures framed as gifts for the family. This may sound silly, but in a poor village most people have few if any family pictures. We think this will be a much-appreciated gift. Our second project is to spend 2-3 afternoons a week with the kids of San Pablo running a soccer camp. This project was what first got me thinking about bringing Ethan. He is excited to help me coach the camp and to get to play soccer with some of the kids from San Pablo. We are extremely grateful to the Colorado Fusion Soccer Club, the club for which Ethan plays and I am a coach, for donating equipment for the camp which we will leave behind as a gift for the children of San Pablo.

We are very excited about this trip and the opportunity to be a part of what God is doing in Guatemala, and we’d like to give you an opportunity to be involved as well. There are two ways you can support what we’re doing:

1. Pray – Though I have traveled extensively, I have to admit some nervousness about taking Ethan to another country. Please pray for my peace of mind and for our protection on the trip. Please also pray for our time in San Pablo and that we would be able to make the most of our time.
2. Give financially – The trip will cost around $1100 each for Ethan and I. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible contribution to our trip expenses, you can do that a few different ways:
1. Just send a check to us made out to New Denver Church (email me for our address).
2. Pay online via eGive, our preferred online solution. Just click here to give to New Denver Church and select the “Global Mission/Guatemala” fund.
3. Lastly, we are set up to use PayPal (though it’s not our preferred option as they take a 2% processing fee). Click here to donate to the Guatemala fund via PayPal.

Thanks for taking the time to read about our trip. We look forward to sharing more as we go and when we return!

Stephen and Ethan