UWM Central America-Caribbean Region, A Blended Family

Latin American Mission (LAM) officially joined United World Mission (UWM) on January 1, 2014.  Previously UWM had about 175 missionaries.  We now have about 350 missionaries. The numbers alone are overwhelming. UWM has missionaries around the world, while LAM focused on Latin America alone.  So the Latin American region has undergone a complete change.  We are now three regions:  Mexico-United States, Central America-Caribbean, and South America.

In May, 2014, we attended our last official UWM Latin America Conference.  It was emotional as we and our kids realized we would not be seeing our South American colleagues regularly in the future.  It was also an opportunity to meet a couple of our new colleagues, LAM missionaries serving in Costa Rica.  We just attended our first Central America-Caribbean Regional Retreat.  This was a long standing annual LAM event in Costa Rica.  We met so many new people and they began to get to know us.  Below are the attendees.  Because some missionaries were in the US and others were not able to come due to their schedules, this group is about 1/3 of the new region.  You may also note that many retired missionaries attended.

LAM has a long, rich history throughout Latin America, but their deepest roots are in Costa Rica.  At the retreat, we honored missionary service anniversaries from 5 years to 50 years.  That´s right, 50 years of service and still working!  Below:  Bob and Nancy Sabean with Paul Pittman (regional leader) and John Bernard (mission president).

We met new leadership from the home office and UWM President, John Bernard, shared a new vision, mission, and values for UWM.  He rightly said, "Whenever a new member joins a team, a completely new team is created."  And we have added over 150 new members, so UWM is a completely new mission.

Chad Hollowell guided us through a some new ways to deeply connect with God and His Word.  This was an introduction to UWM's spiritual formation initiative, designed to encourage personal spiritual growth through our lives.  Missionaries cannot work effectively over time if their own relationship with God is not vital and growing.  We are pleased that UWM is using this process throughout the world and are now introducing it to the "new" UWM missionaries.

We spent precious time with Paul and Dori Pittman, our dear friends and fearless leaders.  Paul has been our regional director since we began with UWM and we are lucky to still have him as our "regional leader" for the future.  When they are not trying to keep us in line, they coordinate the UWM Cuba Partnership Project.

Check out the UWM website at www.uwm.org.  Watch for updates!  Just like UWM is a whole new mission, we will have a whole new website in the near future.