In the city of San Salvador, El Salvador, the church Redención (Redemption) of the Assemblies of God has always worked to open new Bible study groups, shares Gerbert Ramos. He has been a member of this congregation for some time.

“The vision of the church has always been to evangelize and guide the new believers to maturity,” he shares, “but we also realized that there wasn’t follow up of the work that we did and we didn’t have a goal of planting churches where we had Bible studies.”

When the leadership of the local church sent Gerbert and other church planters to receive training with Multiplication Network Ministries (MNM), Gerbert could see that the small group evangelism and discipleship could have a different purpose than he had thought. Additionally, the vision of having a church in every community reduced the obstacle they had that the families would have to travel to different neighborhoods.

Now Gerbert is in the process of receiving MNM’s church planter training. He is working in Las Colinas, Mejicanos. He confesses that one of the principal obstacles has been the religious legalism of the people of the community, especially because they feel they do not need to know more about God or change their way of life.

Nevertheless, Gerbert did the prayer walk taught in MNM’s training. Afterwards, he shared the gospel and little by little a small discipleship group is forming. For him it has been a blessing to see the support God is giving him and he says, “One of the testimonies came from a person who expressed to us that he was thankful to God for this group because previously there was no house of prayer or worship center to visit where he could learn openly about the Word of God.”

As Gerbert continues his training as a church planter, he plans to finish every module that he has not yet completed while evangelizing and discipling those in his community.