Every month, we get to highlight one of our amazing partners! Learn how God has been working through each of them in our city and all over the world here.
Adam and Alejandra Waterman are currently serving in Santo Domingo with Empowering Action. Part of Adam’s ministry involves teaching inductive Bible study methods to local Dominican and Haitian church leaders.
A member of our church family, Becky Tillman, recently got to visit the Watermans and witness one of these classes firsthand!
Becky shares about the impact Adam and Alejandra have had in the lives of these local church leaders in the Dominican Republic…
God gave us a wonderful gift in February… expiring airline credits allowed us to visit several missionary friends in the Dominican Republic! We were thrilled to spend our last few days there with Adam and Alejandra Waterman and their sons, Ben and Drew. We have known Adam’s family at Pulpit Rock since his childhood, and have been able to follow their ministry journey through newsletters and their summer visits home to Colorado Springs.
Adam works with a truly cross-cultural ministry in Santo Domingo, the capital of the DR. Empowering Action seeks to encourage, equip, and train local churches to accomplish what God has called the church to do in their communities. Their different programs are designed to build capacity in local Dominican and Haitian churches. The program Adam works with, K242, seeks to build servant leaders in the church.
The highlight of our visit was attending a class which teaches inductive Bible study methods to church leaders. The goal is to develop healthy church leaders that can teach directly from God’s word! Each member of the class commits to teach 5 other believers—discipling others in how to study the Bible.
The night we visited, Adam was teaching (in Spanish!) a group of about a dozen believers from a local church. Introductory lessons had explained the steps, and we jumped into a study of Psalm 19. We observed key words and themes, and made a list of principal teachings we discovered about God and about creation. Finally, we each reflected on how to apply those truths to our life, and shared our insights with the group. Our fellow students were very enthusiastic learners, and we enjoyed our evening of fellowship with them. Adam is an excellent teacher!
We are so grateful for the opportunity to experience a little bit of what God is doing through the Watermans’ faithfulness. The power of God is changing lives, churches, and communities to reflect the flourishing of His Kingdom.
– Becky Tillman
Adam shares some more highlights from these inductive Bible Study trainings…
I recently had a neat experience during one of the trainings.
It was our fifth time meeting together, and one of the group members was facilitating the second lesson in a reproducible, IBS tool that they will later reproduce in small groups they will form. There is one group that has been pretty lost so far, so I decided to sit at that table to see how I could help them. One of the especially difficult tasks for this group has been finding the repeated or key words in a passage and listing the information in the verses about that key word.
Pretty quickly I noticed that Marie was lost. Instead of marking references for the Word of God in the text, she was marking just about everything else. I worked with her verse by verse to see if she could find the references and then… it just clicked! She understood. She was so excited and was able to do the rest by herself. She even started correcting her husband who had made a few mistakes.
Empowerment is important. So often here in the DR (and many other Catholic countries), churches indirectly communicate that the Bible can only be understood by a few “professionals.” These messages reinforce inadequacy and dependency, instead of empowerment. Marie, until last night, has been adamant that she can’t do it without help and that she is not capable to help others. But last night was one big step. She began to see that she can do it!
Another highlight was when I took my son Andrew with me to one of the trainings. A youth group leader named Josue facilitated the lesson on John 5:33-47.
The main Biblical principles that came out in the discussion were that the Old Testament points to or gives testimony of Jesus Christ, and there is a big difference between knowing what the Bible says and believing what it says.
I was amazed at how Andrew was able to find the key words in the text, list what the text says about each word and formulate Biblical principles tied to the text! A principle that we learned a few weeks back in 2 Timothy 3 was that Timothy had known the Scriptures from his childhood.
God has certainly given all believers the ability to understand and feed from His Word, even at a young age!
– Adam Waterman
