the Dave and Shawn show: JUCUM Lago

Lake Atitlan: Our soon-to-be new home

Some of you have known that this announcement was coming for a long time. We talked to many of our friends and supporters while we were in Canada over Christmas about our dream of doing ministry at Lake Atitlan. The lake is about three hours from our base here in Antigua, and we have been up there a few times in our year and a half as staff with YWAM.

The lake is beautiful, and is surrounded by a plethora of small towns with populations ranging from a couple hundred, to over 15,000 people. There a few ministries working in the bigger towns, and churches where local pastors reach out to the community. Atitlan is a deeply spiritual place, pulsing with Mayan animism and superstition, as well as being the home of many peoples in search of a higher power. Witchcraft, Buddhist meditation and yoga are also widely practiced in the lakefront towns. The Mormon church has a visible presence, and as well the battle for souls rages on in "non-spiritual settings", such as bars, nightclubs, and brothels.

YWAM has never had a permanent presence there, and we began to talk about the possibility of being the ones to get something started last year. We approached our director and asked him if we could move immediately, but he wisely turned us down. He suggested we spend more time praying about it to discern God's will for our ministry in Guatemala.

So we started a prayer meeting and met with a few other staff members from the base every Tuesday to pray for the lake. We felt called to go, and by the time we went back to Canada for Christmas it seemed certain that we'd be moved by the next summer. We told many of you about our vision of starting a base there and we received a lot of positive feedback.

The plane touched down in Guatemala on January 1, 2015 and we were back at home, but somehow it seemed that six weeks away had changed everything. The plans to "start a base" had fallen apart for the other staff members involved, and also my (Shawn) heart had completely lost the vision somehow. We felt confused and a little scared, to suddenly be back in Guatemala where we felt so sure we are called to be, yet feel divided on our vision, since Dave still wanted to move to the lake. Nevertheless, we decided to lay the "base at the lake" down, and wait for God to show us something else. We agreed we wouldn't move anywhere until we had a unified vision.

We tried to make other plans. We looked into other areas of Guatemala. We talked about just renting a place in Antigua and forgetting the notion of pioneering a new ministry had ever entered our minds. There was no peace. We both knew God was trying to talk to us, but we weren't taking the time to really listen. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, we took two hours and asked God what He wanted us to do. The conversation was pretty straight-forward.

Me: "Okay, God, what do you want to talk about."

God: "I want to talk about the lake..."

Dave was praying in the City, because he was there with the Discipleship Training School students for a week of classes. I called him after the two hours of prayer and asked him what he received from the Lord. He and I started laughing when realized that God had told us the exact same things, yet we hadn't even been together. We had literally gone into that prayer time with a list of questions we wanted to ask the Lord, and He hadn't wanted to talk about any of it. He just wanted to share His excitement about the lake.

We approached our director again, and submitted a proposal for the ministry we thought we could do. YWAM Antigua has wanted to start a Discipleship Training School for Indigenous Guatemalan students, so we thought that could be a way for us to get set-up at Atitlan. We submitted our plan to start a DTS. We were again denied. It was decided that it was more cost-effective to host the Indigenous DTS here at the Antigua base instead of starting is up in a new location.

But, the conversation didn't end there. We expressed to our director how strongly we feel God calling us there and our desire to remain under the covering of YWAM. We shared with him our respect for his leadership, and thanked him for slowing us down in our enthusiasm so we could spend a year praying. He smiled, then he told us that as much as he would miss us here in Antigua, but he wanted us to follow the Lord. He gave us his blessing to move to lake Atitlan and start a permanent ministry site of YWAM Antigua- without the pressure of starting a DTS!

We will be moving this July, along with one or two of the other staff members from our base, and have plans to spend the first few months in focused prayer and integrating into the community... and maybe learning a bit of one of the Mayan dialects to help us when we do ministry in the really small villages. At this point we are thinking that evangelism will be the focus of our site, including kids ministry and street evangelism. We feel that God wants us to spend some time walking the area and praying for different towns to prepare the way for the Holy Spirit. The demons have had a hold on the lake for a very long time, and we will not be able to minister effectively without the Spirit breaking down the strongholds ahead of us.

We are so excited to see this door opening! JUCUM Lago is a GO!!!!

(YWAM Lake, in English)