A blessed 2009

Gracias, Señor, por un bendecido 2009 from Fernando Soto-Dupuy on Vimeo.

Three wonderful weekends.

Oct. 4, we had our best attendance ever: 153. Every week the worship team is doing an excellent job in helping us come before the Lord in praise. We had five baptisms: Geo, an 11 year old sweet little girl, the youngest child of a couple we met 8 years ago. The whole family came to know the Lord thanks to Marriage Encounter in 2002. It was touching to see her parents in the water baptizing her. Leticia, whose son (a rock band player) became a Christian a couple of years ago. He and I were in the water burying her. Jorge, a "vallenato musician" (typical Colombian music) who came to the Lord after a series of relationship failures. Marisela, Jorge's girlfriend, from El Salvador, who after some years of confusion finally saw the light. And finally, Maribel, whose husband Alec helped me baptize her. She was very pregnant. Six days later she gave birth to her third daughter.

We are delighted with our new house, Anaheim First Christian Church, the baptistry, the changing rooms, the warm water, the people, the 10 to 10.30am fellowship time between the congregations. We thank the Lord for this blessed stability we, as a congregation, are enjoying.

Oct. 11, we ended our Marriage Encounter weekend witnessing two couples giving their lives to Christ. It was a marvelous weekend sharing with couples and serving them with the love of Christ.

Oct. 18, I started preaching a Craig Groeschel's series of sermons entitled "Truish". Today I preached on "What is Truth". Four people surrendered to the Truth, among them a Guatemalan young couple new at church from Marriage Encounter.

Did I tell you about our good worship time? It is so inspiring to see this very white guy with very English names (Sean Grace) leading our very Spanish congregation in praise, followed by the band, a very big Mexican at his side who worships with such a passion with his guitar, three beautiful girls who praise God with devotion, one of them plays the base, and two other guys in guitar and drums.

In summary: happiness in serving the King of kings with such a great group of people.

My grandaughter getting ready for the Worship band.

Rin learning her first song with Grandma. from Fernando Soto-Dupuy on Vimeo.

Our first Agape-Anaheim united celebration

Dear Friends:

We had a wonderful first service today. 50 of them and 80 of us (remember it is a long weekend and some people are still on vacation). From now on, it is no longer them plus us, it will be Agape-Anaheim. We had two challenges, 1) be a united Hispanic church, and 2) be also one church with the English Speaking congregation. For that we had a common entrance into the building as well as name tags, refreshments and greetings between 10 and 10.30am. English service people went to the left into the worship center, and Hispanics walked to the right into the fellowship hall to become one church worshiping in two languages. Everything went very well. I preached on the first sentence of our church purpose "Love God". At the end of the sermon I made an altar call. I saw more than 20 people praying up front. At the end of the Lord's supper, when we were praying and reflecting on Jesus' love for us, more than 100 people from the English speaking service came into our service, surrounded us and sang a welcoming song in Spanish. It was hard to hold the tears.

Our offering was the highest in our history ($ 2,500.00) which, according to Hispanic standards is high. I know it is still low compared with the English speaking churches, but for us is a WOW!

Here I forward a note I got from our AFCC bilingual office manager:

"Fernando, WOW! It was such a blessing to have become one church today! The greeters were fabulous! Please share that with them. The music was great! Everything finally seemed like one church. I know we have a long way to go but today was VERY, VERY encouraging to me. Please pass this positive feedback with your congregation. God is good! AMEN!!"

Thanks for your prayers and support.

World Wide Holy Communion

This video made me think about the Great

Communion celebration that will be held

October 4, 2009. We are brothers and

sisters in Christ, no matter in which

corner of the world we live. The churches

who have roots in the 19th Century Stone-

Campbell Movement will be celebrating

that day a World wide Lord's Supper

remembering 200 years since Thomas

Campbell and his son Alexander started

to proclaim this idea of practicing a

Christianism without "last names".

For more information go to

http://www.greatcommunion.org/getting_started/default.htm

Billy Mays and Our Daily Bread.

I think this is going to be the introduction to my fifth sermon on the series: A New Way of Praying Our Father. “Gives us this day our daily bread”:

On our flight from Los Angeles to San Antonio I took the American Airlines magazine and read the article Million Dollar Bill: Infomercial guru extraordinaire and pitchmen star Billy Mays has made a fortune hawking household cleaners and cooking supplies. What’s next for this one-man brand? The article ends telling us that Billy Mays latest adventure was selling Health Insurance. Let me quote you what he said: “It was a big step to cross over from dicers and cleaning products to people trusting me with their health… I don’t think OxiClean has ever saved someone’s life. Maybe it has saved someone’s butt because they had a stain on the carpet, but not their life… I have a lot to give and a lot to do yet in my life. I think there is a bigger platform out there for me now.”

I read the article on a Friday. Sunday morning at church the preacher mentioned that Billy Mays was found dead in his bed. The autopsy showed he died of a heart attack. His arteries were not in good condition. How ironic! He was making millions selling heath insurance, and he died young because of bad health.

“Give us this day our daily bread” is a very dangerous prayer to pray in our hiper-caloric North American daily diet. Billy Mays is just one example of how bad most of us are treating our bodies, temples of the Holy Spirit. So, in my sermon I will mention four “intakes” that are ruining our bodies: food, alcohol, drugs and smoke (tobacco or marihuana).

Send me ideas or testimonies.

Beautiful Mexican-Northamerican wedding.

Mariachis at Kurt and Nadia's wedding. from Fernando Soto-Dupuy on Vimeo.

Mariachi singing in English at our niece's wedding.

Mariachi in English, "I love you baby". from Fernando Soto-Dupuy on Vimeo.

Karlo singing with Agape Band a translated song.

De mi corazón te doy el control. Karlo Soto from Fernando Soto-Dupuy on Vimeo.

A new way of praying our Lord's Prayer.

The new way refers to using different parts of our body.

Our Father in heaven, HEAD.
   hallowed be your name, MOUTH.
your kingdom come, SHOULDERS, ARMS AND HANDS.
   your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. HEART.
Give us today our daily bread. STOMACH.
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. BACK.
And lead us not into temptation, HIPS AND GENITAL AREA.
   but deliver us from the evil one. LEGS AND FEET.
For about eight week I will be preaching on each one of these petitions.  I started Sunday talking about the head.  Our Father who is in heaven connects with us through our head, our mind, imagination, understanding.

We "hallow" His name using our mouth.  There is so much to teach about the way we talk and encourage people to bring glory to His name through our way of speaking.

The only way God will use us to bring His kingdom among us is through the work of our hands.  We will show the world how it is to live in God's kingdom.

His will ought to dominate our hearts so in every single heart beat and blood flow, His will should flood every single millimeter of our bodies.

When the time comes to teach about our daily bread, I will not only talk about the stomach but about everything that nurtures or destroys the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Our debts or the offenses that we have committed are like a big burden on our backs.

We will center our thinking on the genital and private area of our bodies.  We will not only talk about sexual temptation, but we will reflect also on the middle part of our bodies where men have pockets and women hang their purses.  In them we keep keys to our possessions (car, house, office, etc.) which are sources of temptations. We keep our cell phones which sometimes we misuse and fall into temptation.  We also keep our wallets, symbols of our income.

Finally, the only way God will deliver us from the evil one, will be through our own legs and feet.  We need to flee from the bad ways.

I guarantee you that this will be a powerful teaching for our congregation.  You can listen to the Spanish sermon on our website, or at least recommend it to your Latino friends. 

Sometime in the future God will allow us to teach it in English, or Italian, or....

Anglo-Hispanic Christianity?

Sometimes my brain goes too fast.  It happened to me this morning as Rachel Oblon was leading devotions at Parkcrest staff meeting.  She was talking about Acts 11.  I hardly could pay attention at what she was telling, for my mind was doing "ultra fast exegesis".

⁵Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, ²⁶and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

Barnabas was a Jew born in Cyprus, Tarsus was a city in today's Turkey, Saul (Hebrew name) later called Paulus (Latin name), was brought to Antioch (city named after a Greek general).  The church there was not Jewish, neither was it totally Gentile.  It was there that the name CHRISTIAN was first used.

Can you notice the cross-cultural approach, Cyprian, Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Latin all in two verses?

We are doing ministry in L.A. cross culturally.  We believe the church needs to cross cultural barriers.  A couple of months ago I realized that Iglesia Ágape is indeed a multicultural church.  We have within our community of faith Anglo-white people, a black African, a Chinese single mom, European-Argentineans, Mexicans from Spanish and Indian background, Ecuadorian-Qechuans, Central and South Americans, and Caribbean-Portorricans.  It is amazing to notice the different Spanish accents of all these people, different cultural customs, and variety of foods.  Add to the picture African British English and Chinese politeness.  So, don't call us a mono ethnic church for using Spanish as a primary language.  In fact, we have translation into English too, and we are seriously thinking on starting a second service in English. We are a multi-ethnic community of faith.

I don't know many Anglo churches with this "crossculturality."  The equivalent, in English, would be a church with members from England, Scotland, Ireland, African English speakers, Canadians, Jamaicans, Belizeans, Australians, Hawaiians, Falkland Islanders, etc.

The Antiochian church was a cross-cultural one.  In fact, the name Christian is a mixture of Greek and Latin: Christos (being the translation of the Hebrew  word “Messiah” into Greek) and IANVS (a Latin suffix).

This morning, at the staff meeting, I was thinking about this and looked at the senior pastor Mike Goldsworthy, and I couldn't think of a most English last name as his.  I imagine myself, a Hispanic-Latino becoming a fanatic of this leader and what if I decide to call myself a Goldworthista (English noun with a Spanish suffix). Or, on the other hand, what if he would become a Fernando's fan, then call himself a Fernandist or a Fernandian (Spanish name with an English ending).

Oh, I am amazed at the power of the Kingdom’s Gospel that irrupted to change all our paradigms!

I wonder if we are ready, here on the left coast, to become Christianos, or Cristians for the sake of the kingdom.

Iglesia Agape

Agape Church was planted in 2005.  After meeting in Plaza Mexico and Montebello Hotel, we moved in 2007 to Parkcrest Christian Church, Lakewood Campus.  We met at the Activity Center until September 2008, when we moved to the Worship Center.  

We have an attendance of 130 now.  We praise the Lord for the progress of Agape.  We have our own Worship team who is being led by Sean Grace, a very talented young man.  He has empowered our youth in this important ministry.

At the beggining of the year I gave the church our vision of ministry.  The book "Simple Church" helped a lot to simplify our vision.  Agape exists so people can Love God, Love Others,

 and Serve the World.  We love God in our Sunday worship service, (God's house living-room). We love others in our eight small groups (Grupos Levaduras- Yeast groups, which is God's house dinning-room).  And we serve the world in our outreach ministries: Marriage Encounter, missionary trips to Rosarito, food bank, etc. (God's house kitchen).

We are facing a challenging year: by September we will need to find our own worship facilities in order to become and independent church, and by January 2010 we, the Sotos, will no longer be a part of CMF International.  After working with them for 12 years, the time have come to transition from missionary to local pastor.  It will be a great step for Agape Church as well as for us.  We are trusting the Lord, and we count on your prayers.