EIVW Steve's Blog: Sunday, July 19th - Our last day in Bogota. PART ONE

On Sunday morning, we got up and, after breakfast, took the TransMilenio rapid transit bus to the Iglesia Wesleyana del Norte for the 9:30 service. We walked from the bus stop on a bridge across the highway to the church.

This is the largest Wesleyan Church in the world. They have six services every weekend.

The worship service was great. We were treated as honored guests, sitting on the front row with our friends from the Bible Institute. Their music was very good, contemporary like ours, and we all really enjoyed that part of the worship service.

July 20th is the Colombian Independance day, so the church honored some of it's veterans.

Then they called our team up on stage. Rick West spoke briefly, introducing us, and Steve presented greetings from FCWC and a devotional. Then we led a song, "Open the Eyes of My Heart", which everyone sang, each in their own language...really cool. Nancy has a short, rather rough video clip of this which may appear on her Facebook page at some point.

Pastor Jose' Quintero, our host and friend, was the guest speaker for this service and he delivered a very dynamic message on the subjects of freedom and independance. In particular, he spoke about what it means to experience for eternity the freedom that we have from sin through the resurrection of Jesus. He is an excellent communicator and we were all transfixed by his message. The language barrier could not withstand his passion or the Holy Spirit's power to draw us in.

After the message, prayers, and benedictions, we exited out to a sunny open courtyard which featured...Coffee Wesley!!!

Here we made several new friends. Everyone was so friendly and welcomed us warmly.

Rick encounter some old friends, and these little guys want to make new friends.

After church, we were taken by car and van to a different and very large shopping mall. While there some of us purchased enough Colombian coffee beans to start a small export business. You can speculate as to who it is that might have done that.

Then we went to lunch at one of Pastor Luz Angela's favorite restaurants, The Crepe and Waffle. Okay, so that's not very South American sounding, we all get that, but the food was delicious and we had a great time of fellowship.