(Annie Culp and her husband Jim are the Directors of Iglesias del Oeste and serve missionally throughout Latin America. Just Jump Ministries, Inc. is thankful for a longlasting and meaningful mission partnership and friendship with the Culp family and Iglesias del Oeste.)
1 John 4:7-12
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
This is a story about love. Love for family. Love for God. Love for people. It’s about how the convergence of these three types of love led to the launching of a new ministry in a new country.
Jenipher and Stephanie are sisters who are helping their parents, Juan and Ingrid, plant a church in the city of Higuey (/ee-gway/) in the Dominican Republic. Their story doesn’t begin here, though. Eleven years ago, Juan and Ingrid, intent on providing a better life for their three children--oldest son, Christopher, and daughters Jenipher, and Stephanie---, moved to Malaga, Spain to work in the hotel industry. It meant uprooting all three kids from their home, their grandparents, schools, and friends. At the young ages of 9 and 10, Jenipher and Stephanie had to learn to adapt and adjust to a new way of life in a new and different country.
Over the next several years, the family grew in faith and in number (in 2016 Juan and Ingrid welcomed surprise baby Elisabeth!). The entire family was active in church life, and the kids became more comfortable in Spain than they did in the DR. They had adjusted well, and as Christopher went off to college and started his own family there in Malaga, Jenipher and Stephanie assumed they would do the same. For them, the Dominican Republic had become a place to visit and spend time with extended family. They never expected to live there permanently again.. They were very content in Spain.
In February of 2021, however, Juan and Ingrid felt God’s call to return to the DR to plant a church. Jenipher and Stephanie had difficult decisions to make. Were they going to leave Spain, their universities, their friends, their brother to go back and live on the small, third world island of the Dominican Republic? Were they going to support their parents in the work God had called them to? Or were they going to stay in Spain--saying goodbye to their parents and little sister Elisabeth?
In the end, love won out. For Jenipher the decision was obvious and fairly easy. She felt God’s call as well as her parents to plant the new church. But for younger sister Stephanie, the choice was not so easy. She was active in her Spanish church, but also relished her freedom in Spain, and the opportunities that were in front of her. She yielded to the move, though, out of love. Her love for her family, and her love for the Lord were so strong she couldn’t deny it. So she agreed to go.
Now, the family has their church and Jenipher and Stephanie are essential members and helpers for Juan and Ingrid. The girls both agree that they made the right decision, and both testify that it is the love that God has for them and His people that gives them joy and strength each day.
May we all look beyond ourselves and our own desires to see God’s bigger picture, and to recognize the greatness of his sacrificial love for us and the world. May we yield to him and his call, knowing that even though it may be difficult to do so, it will be no less than anything God has ever done for us because he loves us so much--so much that he sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
