Interview Dr. Miranda: Vision - León de Judá in 5 years

In 5 years where would we like our church to be? Well, one of the things that I would love to see is that if someone leaves here in Boston and comes back in 5 years, and this is a big dream that I have before the Lord, I would like them to find out where our parking lot is currently in the part of behind our building, you will find a beautiful sanctuary with a large balcony and a very modern façade that speaks of the validity of the church in the modern world and its progressive character, so I am asking you to the Lord to give us the power, the ability to build a temple that can accommodate more people and that can contain a little more than the people that God is helping us to bring with more comfort and more freedom to be able to worship the Lord and stage dramas , and other things on a much broader platform than what we currently have.

Second, I would like to see our church having a greater impact, not only in the Latino community, but also in the English-speaking world. I believe that the Hispanic community in the US has been called to bless this nation, we are not only immigrants who come from Latin America to receive in this country, but I believe that God has also allowed us to bring to this nation a series of cultural values , spiritual and a collective temperament that has immense potential to bless this culture in which we find ourselves. The Hispanic with his love for the family, with his healthy fear of God, with his religious, spiritual background that has him in a basic way of his sensitivity, with his affection, his warm nature, his hospitality, his tendency towards friendship, These are things that the European world here in the US strongly needs, and therefore we have much to bless, through which to bless our community.

Another thing, a greater number of Hispanics, evangelicals, Christians are coming who bring some very powerful spiritual values and a spirituality radically committed to the Kingdom of God, filled with the holy spirit, with an experience of the power of God who needs to receive that 'taught' a large section of the English-speaking, evangelical community. Many Anglo-Saxon churches are dying, drying up spiritually and do not know how to get out of the quagmire in which they find themselves.

Although we Hispanics perhaps don't have many financial resources and we don't have large churches, God has given the Hispanic Christian people a very strong and passionate spirituality, and the Anglo-Saxon world needs to experience and receive that flavor. So I believe that God has also called us to be a blessing here and that is why I believe that our church can also be a blessing to the English-speaking world, and I would like to see our church more involved in the general world by then, not just Latino, but larger, a church that has a greater presence in that sense, perhaps with a greater number of African Americans, Anglo Europeans, Asians, united here in our congregation.

Somehow we've started to see that at an embryonic level but I think God still has a higher level of influence for us as a congregation and when I say as a congregation, I'm not so interested in my congregation having that impact, I'm interested in the values of the Kingdom of God through our congregation can reach the community and reach the church and bless it, and enrich it. So that would be a second element that we'd like to see here as well.

Third, I would love to see our church more involved with the media. I thank the Lord for the ministry of Dr. Ernst Diehl and his wife Esmeralda Diehl, who are helping us to develop ministries in the area of the electronic network and other audiovisual areas. I believe that the border of our church is precisely in that area. God has given us certain resources, He has given us certain elements that I believe can be a blessing to the community, but now we need the means to reach the community and expose it to those things that we have received.

That is why I believe that one of the areas that excites me the most is the idea that in 5 years our church has achieved a much greater capacity to operate in that electronic field of television, radio, the electronic network, the Internet. These are wonderful areas where with one intervention we can potentially reach millions of people.

Here on Sundays we reach a few hundred people, but through these means of communication, the reach can be potentially unlimited, so I ask the Lord in a very powerful way to help us develop in the coming years. coming months and years a greater capacity to effectively navigate the currents of communications.

The world has achieved a lot with communications and why can't the church do the same if we have the resources of the Kingdom of God at our disposal, so God help us also in 3 or 5 years to be a church have a lot more impact not only in this city, but perhaps even nationally and internationally, because the most important thing above all is that the Kingdom of God be manifested through us.

I wish our church would also be much involved in different areas of community service than in reality, I think it has developed into a false dichotomy, a false separation between the communal and the spiritual .

Actually the Gospel is supposed to permeate everything, it is a leaven that is supposed to leaven the whole dough, that includes the educational, the economic, the political, the cultural, the intellectual and obviously also the spiritual, as it is the life of prayer or study of the word of God, morality, ethics.

But all these things, all this is part of what the Kingdom of God has to be impacting, and that idea, that global vision, that integral vision of the Kingdom of God, of the church exercising its 'discipleship' over the nations. When the Lord Jesus Christ told the disciples "go into the whole world preaching the Gospel and make disciples of all nations", ethnic groups, peoples, races.

The idea was that first the church would exercise the lordship that Christ had given to the church, that it would disciple the nations, that it impart to the nations the values of the Kingdom of God and that it would convert the nations into disciples of the church . That is the word, that is the mandate of Jesus Christ, and I believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ commanded something, it is because He was also providing the resources for it to be carried out. Because I always see in the word of God that when the Lord gives a commandment, the capacity and resources are presupposed for that commandment to be fulfilled.

The Lord never commands His children to do something unless He also provides the ability and resources to do it. So I believe that in the very spiritual genetics of the church is not only the commandment, but the ability to disciple nations in all dimensions so that the church impacts the world with its spiritual values, in its cultural values, even in the scientific side, in the way they do business, in politics, in the intellect.

I would love that our church could, over the years, become more and more a source of influence in all dimensions of community life. I would love, for example, to see in 5 years a counseling center for the family serving the entire community, with several psychologists and even a couple of psychiatrists, Christians, professionally gifted but also knowledgeable about the mysteries of the holy spirit, ministering to the family, ministering to individuals, to people with different types of neuroses and emotional needs and healing them with the values and teachings of the Kingdom of God, a counseling center for example would be extraordinary.

That the church is working very hard with young people, reaching young people and transforming their lives, taking a 14, 15 year old boy who is not doing very well in school and starting to 'disciple' him in things as fundamental as the way he dresses, the way he talks, what time he gets up in the morning. A regimen that impacts their entire life, their studies, their social relationships, everything, and that little by little these youngsters were converted into beings who have the values of the Kingdom of God infused in their sensibility. That to me is extremely important. I believe that this area of global, integral involvement of the church seems to me absolutely essential for the future.

Also, may God help us to continue to improve our operating systems, our administrative capacity. I would love for our church to be able to learn more and more each day to be, not only a spiritual place, of healthy spiritual values, of love for the Lord and of being based on the word of God, but also in the way in which we we carry out our institutional life, the administrative systems, the training of leaders, the administration of our finances, the way in which we maintain our physical plant, the resources that we can contribute to missions through the collection of money, all these things I I ask the Lord to help us get better, better, better.

In other words, if someone comes here in 5 years, they will be amazed at how we, as an institution purely from an administrative point of view, have learned to be a church here in the middle of the city.