A
Brief History
- Jan.
'99 www.sepal.nu goes public with 99 pages of youth ministry
resources, 3 columnists, and one part-time employee (an artist).
- July
'99 The site's address changes from sepal.nu to www.sepal.org
after finding out that "nu" means naked in Portuguese
(oops). We now have over 200 pages of resources and hire our
second part-time employee (a programmer).
- Feb.
2001 The youth ministry site has more than a quarter million
page views and over 13,000 youth leaders visiting the site per
month. There are now over 1000 pages of ministry resources and
we have 7 regular columnists and a more than 50 others who contribute
to the site. There are now 5 paid employees and at least 7 dedicated
volunteers in 4 countries.
- July
2001 Our new site, ParaLideres.org, goes public after more than
a year of planning and thousands of hours of design and programming
work… and many late nights. It is the culmination of many
hopes, dreams and prayers. ("ParaLideres" means "For
Leaders").
Benefits
of new site
·
Allows for forums, so youth leaders can ask questions, share answers,
and benefit from relationships with others who work with youth.
· Basically everything is automated so we will save around
40+ hours of administration time per month.
· All registered users can easily collaborate, which allows
the thousands of youth leaders who use the web site to share their
bible studies, games, tips, illustrations etc.
· Hopefully the neutral name "ForLeaders" will
encourage other ministries to collaborate with us since our organization's
name isn't plastered all over the place making it seems as though
it is "our" site alone.
· With this site, we can continue to provide quality, biblical,
interactive ministry training. We can track our "students"
and at the end of each course they receive a personalized course
certificate. This is incredibly significant considering that 87%
of youth leaders in Latin America have no ministry training.
Thought
you'd enjoy this letter, typical of many we receive each month:
May
you receive blessings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ wherever
you are. My name is Alberto Pando and I am assistant pastor in
a small congregation in Northern Mexico.
For various reasons my church has been left without a youth leader
so as associate pastor I was asked to be in charge of the youth
group. I am a student at an evangelical university where I am
studying for my BA in Biblical Studies, but I don't know anything
about youth work and felt totally unprepared for this so I asked
God for the help that I need.
Thanks to God I found your page through a link from another web
site. I have used your studies with my group and although we started
out with only six students two months ago we now have twenty-one.
What a blessing. Please keep up the good work. What you do is
marvelous. I thank God for you.
Under
the Wings of the Almighty,
Alberto Pando
Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico
Thank you for your part in making this possible,
Tim
& Annette
