In late August I was in Cúcuta Colombia with our Ethné Global Services team. The week had two aims that belong together: training church leaders, and beginning recovery ministry in a city where both are urgently needed.
Cúcuta sits on the Colombian side of the Venezuelan border. People cross looking for work, safety, and a future. Many are stranded. Crime, trafficking, addiction, and poverty are not abstractions there. They are the daily conditions in which churches are trying to preach, gather children, and keep families alive. About half of those we met were Colombian. About half were Venezuelan refugees and immigrants. That mix is the congregation and the classroom.
What we went to do in Cúcuta Colombia
We did not go to plant an American program in another language. We went to see whether local pastors and workers could be gathered, trained, and accompanied so that the work remains theirs.
Two strands ran through the week. The first was pastoral and missionary training. We sat with pastors and emerging leaders who are already preaching, visiting the sick, and trying to hold churches together with very little formal preparation. Some are committed to reaching their own cities in Venezuela. Some are working among indigenous tribes of the Amazon. Four of the new students come from those tribes. The question under the training was the same one we keep asking at HTI Nicaragua and in the work to establish Gateway ADVANCE: can these leaders teach and shepherd faithfully when visiting instructors are no longer in the room? The training path we are building toward is related to Gateway Seminary ADVANCE.
The second was recovery ministry. Cúcuta needs more than another meeting. It needs a durable way to walk with people whose lives have been broken by addiction, exploitation, and displacement. Jerry brought the eye of a physician. I brought the work I already do in recovery discipleship. Allan kept the whole trip aimed at the local church. The people we met who are already serving addicts, the homeless, and neglected children are not waiting for a Western model. They need partners who will help them last.
What the week actually looked like
The work in Cúcuta Colombia will not be a one-week event. The pastors we met need a path they can keep walking after the team leaves. Recovery in Cúcuta Colombia will have to be local, slow, and tied to congregations that already know the streets. I will help direct that work, but the students and workers in the city are the ones who will carry it.
The photographs from the trip tell the truth better than a strategy document. There were crowded sanctuaries and white plastic chairs in a bare room. There were outdoor circles under a tree beside brick buildings. There were children on a hillside and in a small concrete hall. There were pastors who wanted training and men who wanted to get well.
I will be directing the Colombia work as it takes shape. That does not mean importing a campus. It means curriculum, coaching, recovery pathways, and a long obedience beside national leaders. Contextualization is not a theory on a week like this. Form has to serve meaning. The message does not change. The method has to be able to travel across a border, a language, and a life that has been displaced.
Why Cúcuta Colombia matters for the rest of the work
Cúcuta is now one more place where recovery, theological education, and mission have to stay in the same sentence. That is the logic of Recovering the Image: people restored in Christ, leaders equipped from Scripture, communities that can send others. The week did not finish the work. It opened a door that local brothers and sisters were already holding.
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